Islam, Consciousness and Early Cinema: Said Nursî and the Cinema of God

Abstract

The early 20th century works of Kurdish Islamic thinker Said Nursî explore how cinema can provide access to the divine. Yet, considering the periods of Nursî’s life that were spent in prison, or in exile in remote locations, it is likely that the cinema he was discussing was, very specifically, the early silent cinema of attractions. Thus the distinctive format of this cinema can be uncovered in, and seen to structure, Nursî’s formulation of ‘God's cinema’. With this proposition in mind, this article indicates something of the potential that an engagement with Nursî’s cinematic writing offers for reconsidering topics already much discussed in film-philosophy, such as that of time in the works of Gilles Deleuze.

Keywords

• Said Nursî
• Islamic philosophy
• early cinema
• religion
• Deleuze
• Turkey