Khutbah Syamiyah (The Damascus Sermon)

This sermon was delivered by the esteemed Bediuzzaman Said Nursi at the age of thirty-five, in the Umayyad Mosque (Jami‘ al-Umawi) in Damascus, upon the persistent request of the scholars of Damascus. Due to its immense importance, it was printed twice within a single week in Damascus at that time. Later on, the author, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, himself published its translation.

“My dear, sincere brothers!

Forty years ago, in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, at the insistence of the scholars of Damascus, this Arabic treatise—which was delivered to a vast congregation of nearly ten thousand people, including a hundred religious scholars—was a lesson comprising truths that the Old Said sensed with a kind of premonition (hiss-i kable’l-vuku‘), giving glad tidings with full certainty.

However, two world wars and a twenty-five-year period of absolute despotism delayed the fulfillment of that sense for forty to fifty years. Now, the signs of the truths that were mentioned back then are beginning to be manifest in the Islamic world.

Therefore, this extremely significant discourse is not a bygone sermon of the past, but rather, instead of 1327 [1909], it should now be regarded as a fresh and truthful social and Islamic lesson delivered in 1371 [1951], not in the Umayyad Mosque alone, but in the mosque of the Islamic world to an audience of 370 million. Hence, I believe the time has come to publish its translation.”

“In this time and place, I have studied in the school of human social life and have realized the following: The reason why the Europeans, despite their advancement and soaring toward the future, have left us behind in material progress and why we have remained in the Middle Ages is due to six dire sicknesses:

First: The revival and spread of despair (ye’s) within us.

Second: The death of truthfulness (sidq) in social and political life.

Third: Love for enmity.

Fourth: Ignorance of the luminous bonds that unite the believers.

Fifth: The despotism that spreads like contagious diseases.

Sixth: Confining all concern and ambition to one’s personal interests.

And I proclaim with certainty that the cure for these six dreadful diseases is found in the Qur’anic pharmacy and consists of six words that I have learned from it as if from a Faculty of Medicine for social life.”