where this and his other proposals would be put into practice. In 1907 his endeavours in this field took him to Istanbul where he presented a petition at the court of Sultan Abdülhamid. Although subsequently he twice received funds for the construction of his university and its foundations were laid in 1913, it was never completed due to war and the vicissitudes of the times.

Contrary to the practice of religious scholars at that time, Bediuzzaman himself studied and mastered almost all the physical and mathematical sciences and later studied philosophy, for he believed that it was only in this way that Islamic theology (kalām) could be renewed and successfully answer the attacks to which the Qur'an and Islam were then subject.

In the course of time, the physical sciences had been dropped from medrese education, which had contributed directly to the Ottoman decline relatively to the advance of the West, Now, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Europe had gained dominance over the Islamic world and in efforts to extend its dominance, was attacking the Qur'an and Islam in the name of science and progress in particular, falsely claiming them to be incompatible. Within the Empire too was a small minority which favoured adopting Western philosophy and civilization. Thus, all Bediuzzaman's endeavour was to prove and demonstrate the falseness of these accusations, and that far from being incompatible with science and progress, the Qur'an was the source of true progress and civilization, and in addition, since this was the case, Islam would dominate the future, despite its relative decline and regression at that time.

The years up to the end of the First World War were the final decades of the Ottoman Empire and were, in the words of Bediuzzaman, the period of the Old Said. In addition to his endeavours in the field of learning, he served the cause of the Empire and Islam through active involvement in social life and the public domain. In the War, he commanded a militia force on the Caucasian Front against the invading Russians, for which he was later awarded a War Medal. To maintain the morale of his men he himself disdained to enter the trenches inspite of the constant shelling, and it was while withstanding the overwhelming assaults of the enemy that he wrote his celebrated Qur'anic commentary, Signs of Miraculousness, dictating to a scribe while on horseback. Stating that the Qur'an encompasses the sciences which make known the physical world, the commentary is an original and important work which he hoped would serve as a model for future commentaries, as he was unable to complete it at that time. He was taken prisoner in March 1916 and held in Russia for two years before escaping in early 1918, and returning to Istanbul via Warsaw, Berlin, and Vienna.