At the Vanguard of Contemporary Muslim Thought: Reading Said Nursi into the Islamic Tradition

Mustafa Tuna (Ph.D. 2009, Princeton University) is an associate professor at the Departments of Slavic and Eurasian Studies & History at Duke University and is affiliated with the Duke Islamic Studies Center. His research focuses on Islam and modernity. In his earlier works he examined the often-intertwined roles of Islam, social networks, state or elite interventions, infrastructural changes, and the globalization of European modernity in transforming Muslim communities, especially in Russia, Central Asia, and Turkey. His first book, Imperial Russia's Muslims: Islam, Empire, and European Modernity, 1788-1917, is published by Cambridge University Press in the "Critical Perspectives on Empire Series." His current project explores encounters between the Sunni Islamic and European secular intellectual traditions, focusing on the ontological, epistemological, and spiritual implications of this encounter for Muslims since the early-twentieth century. His second book project, titled Knowing God in the Secular Age: Existence, Knowledge, and Striving for Excellence in the Works of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (1878-1960), studies these implications in the case of the endeavors of Said Nursi (1878-1960), a Kurdish scholar of Islam from Turkey, to negotiate the changing modern world's challenges for Islam and Muslims. Relatedly, he prepared a translation from Arabic into English and critical edition of one of Nursi's major works, Mathnawi al-Arabi al-Nuri (Luminous Couplets), and coauthored a glossary of Islamic terms in English that is based on Nursi’s works. He is currently working on a monograph, tentatively titled Concrete Modernity in Kazan: Urbanization and Social Change in Central Anatolia since the 1960s, in which he examines the rapid transformation within the past four decades of a cluster of cob-house villages outside of Turkey’s capital, Ankara, into a bustling town of about sixty thousand residents. Dr. Tuna is married and has two sons.