more extensive than working for a thousand million people's transient worldly life and civilization, With his premonition resembling a true dream, the Old Said envisaged the narrow field embracing all the Ottoman lands. God willing, with the seeds sown by the Risale-i Nur sprouting in a hundred years time, the broad field will be the Risale-i Nur's and his former view will show that his misinterpretation of it was in fact correct.

The Second Truth: Forty years ago, as written in the Old Said's works and in the Statement of Purpose at the beginning of Signs of Miraculousness, Said used to say to his students insistently and repeatedly that there was going to be a tremendous upheaval in both society and humanity that would be both material and moral and spiritual. He would say that his giving up the world and going into seclusion and remaining unmarried would be envied. In fact, when Shaykh Bakhit, [^24] one of the leading ulema of al-Azhar University, came to Istanbul in the first year of the Second Constitutional Period, he asked the Old Said:

[^24]:Muḥammad Bakhīt al-Muṭī'ī al-Ḥanafī (1271/1854-1354/1935) was educated at al-Azhar, 1865-1875. He was an authority on jurisprudence (fiqh), held numerous posts, and was Grand Mufti of Egypt, 1914-1921. [Tr.]

"What have you got to say about the Ottoman constitutional government and European civilization?"

Said replied: "The Ottomans are pregnant with a European state and will give birth to it one day, while Europe is pregnant with Islam and one day will give birth to an Islamic state."

The learned Shaykh Bakhit concurred with this and said to the scholars accompanying him: "I can't argue with this man and defeat him!"

We have witnessed the first birth with our own eyes; in a quarter of a century Turkey is further from religion than Europe. God willing, the second birth with occur in twenty to thirty years. There are numerous signs in both East and West that an Islamic state will emerge in Europe.

The Third Truth: The Old Said repeatedly predicted due to the premonition both he and the New Said had, that there would be a momentous event, both material and spiritual, and a huge, vastly destructive upheaval in the Ottoman lands. But contrarily to the matter of the Risale-i Nur, he saw the extremely broad field to be narrow. As time and the Second World War confirm, he interpreted as follows the broad field he saw in the Ottoman lands:

It is a fact that the destruction wrought on humanity by the Second World War was enormous, but, since it concerned worldly life and transitory civilization, it was less than that wrought on the Ottomans. Since the