Question: What is the essential duty of those who seek to ensure that humanity and faith can be properly represented once again?

Many current problems Muslims are facing can be related to their own approach to faith, which does not go beyond practicing ostensibly, which fails to internalize it properly, and lacks purity of intention (ikhlas) and God-consciousness (ihsan). Their acts and behaviors that go against the criteria prescribed by Islam as well as their failure to observe the bounds of lawful and unlawful undermines the clean name of Islam and Muslims. The primary duty that must be fulfilled by devoted souls – the cavalry of revival – is to revive the values of the life of the spirit and heart, and ensure that these values become part of our very nature with their full vivacity. Saving humanity from formalist and superficial practice of Islam depends on this. Purity of intention is one of the most important of these values.

By analogy, if the content of Islam is a poem, purity of intention is its rhyme. Purity of intention is to perform with a profound consciousness of servitude to God; it is to do all we do in a way that they are eventually connected to Him. As is known, purity of intention is when we do things simply because they are commanded by God, and only in order to attain His pleasure. As noted by Bediüzzaman Said Nursi at the beginning of his First Word, purity of intention means that a person should do anything for the sake of God, begin anything for the sake of God, meet anyone for the sake of God, and act within the framework of seeking God’s pleasure. It is to do all our deeds and errands in order to attain His pleasure. We should ask for His good pleasure and purity of intention every time we raise our hands in supplication. This is such an important point that it would not be too much if we said incessantly, “O My Lord, I am asking for purity of intention and Your good pleasure,” repeating it all through the day. Indeed, it is the highest goal, centered upon the very reason of creation, for a believer to spurn all worldly considerations in order to attain a pure and clear consciousness of servitude to God. In this regard, our quest for peaking in servitude to God should not be made contingent upon even otherworldly expectations, let alone worldly ones, but should be carried out only to earn God’s contentment.

Yet, we should remember that it is not easy to reach that horizon. There are so many things that attack, eat into and gnaw on one’s purity of intention. Human desires, search for ease and comfort, wish for fame, unworthy and tawdry feelings, worldly interests, etc., drive us away from purity of intention and sincerity, preventing us from sailing out to otherworldly and metaphysical domains, and having us deprived of the greatest attainments. Even those people who are walking on the straight path may suffer from breakdowns in purity of intention over time due to lowly feelings and insignificant expediencies if they fail to be cautious in the way they live; and they may be subject to falls even if they assume to be walking in God’s cause, and they may lose while they seem to be winning.

It is not a virtue to fulfill many tasks, undertake great works, and devise grand schemes. The true merit is to be able to make everything done coupled with His good pleasure. Indeed, there is no loftier errand than to seek adherence to deeds that would be pleasing to God. If you fail to attain purity of intention in your deeds and services, you will lose yourself even though you change the color of the world. Even if you seem to be winning, you will end up in the category of unfortunate losers in the eyes of God. The things you think you have achieved will not be long-lived. They will soon fade away. So in everything you do, you should try to attain purity of intention and unremittingly maintain your inner struggle to this end.

The more profound one’s knowledge of God, the more that person will succeed in attaining purity of intention. It is essential that knowledge of God govern the entire self-identity of a person so that s/he can attain true purity of intention. Such people will not forget, not even for a moment, that they are in the presence of God as they open up their mouths, speak, blink, or move their hands or feet. Their looks have inner depth, their attitudes sobriety, their stances dignity, and their words mannerliness… All their acts and attitudes are guided with faith in, knowledge of, and awe of God. They never engage in any unseemly act or attitude. If human identity is embraced and governed with knowledge of God at such a level, that person can attain the profundity in his/her faith and purity of intention in his/her deeds.

The essential duty that must be undertaken by those who seek to ensure that humanity and Islam can be properly represented once again through a novel revival movement is to revive this consciousness of servitude to God. Thus, it is not about encouraging people to fulfill the duty of daily prayers, but it is about making them, as it were, “crazy for prayers.” The task is to make them so obsessed with daily prayers that they would leave their hearts at the mosque after performing one prayer and start to wait for the next prayer impatiently, as described in a noble saying of the Prophet. They should be so concentrated on worship that, immediately after they fulfill the noon prayer, they would complain about the muezzin’s not making the call for the afternoon prayer right away so that they could stand at once at the court of God in respect and admiration, ready for worship, and acknowledge His greatness vis-à-vis their inferiority while in prostration. They should be like that not only for daily prayers, but also for other worships, including fasting and spending in charity or good causes. They should be steadfast in performing all worships with purity of intention and consciousness.

The opposite of such a sincerity-filled awareness of being God’s servants is to perform religious rituals in a casual manner with a consideration to get rid of them quickly. It is the form of indolently performed worshiping where heedless people fail to make their hearts quiver, feel in the neurons of their brains their prayers, and realize the identity of the One before whom they stand. People should at least nurture the intention and endeavor for performing their religious rituals with a conscious manner. Initially, it may not be possible to feel everything with due profundity as this calls for serious and continuous endeavors and efforts. Junayd al-Baghdadi expressed that he attained the horizon of worship and knowledge of God he had desired to achieve only after the age of sixty. Bediüzzaman noted that only towards the end of his life did he start to glorify God in the same manner the favorite great figures would do and hear as if the entire creation said, “Glory be to God,” in his company. Therefore, what matters is that we should have the will to attain such a horizon and work to achieve it at all times.

If you are a candidate for setting sail to vastness and depth in your worships and attain the horizon of purity of intention and God-consciousness of restraint, you will attain your goal sooner or later. Then, you should move on to help others feel the things you have felt. This is the responsibility of those who aspire to take part in this revival. As noted earlier, this is the responsibility for saving people from being Muslims in form, helping them become Muslims in essence, and guiding them to the life of the spirit and heart. As a matter of fact, many people in our time need to strengthen their relationship to God with the help of this spiritual movement so that they can ward off pressures of daily politics.

Human beings are by nature prone to errors; everyone can make mistakes. Still, those people who have attained such maturity will be subject to fewer lapses. And whenever they find themselves in aberration, they will quickly turn to God, pour out their hearts, and ask forgiveness for their errors and sins, getting rid of their stains and purifying themselves. If the people who have attained this level of maturity in any place can come together, they can serve as a core example for other people who will adopt their acts and attitudes.

In our time, such a revival is desperately needed. People who will feel and practice the religion in the same way with Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali (may God be pleased with them) are needed. And we should focus on these lofty ideals, try to attain them and repeatedly pray for God’s help in this quest. All other things are nonessential matters for us.

The Ottoman treasury had a surplus of revenue coming in from the booty of wars, as well as from taxes collected from Muslims and non-Muslims. This revenue was disbursed in expenditure on large and extensive public works on local amenities such as inns, hospitals, schools and places of worship, and on infrastructural projects such as bridges, roads, canals, and so on, in the conquered territories. The Ottomans aim was not to expropriate the wealth of these lands in the form of raw materials or slave labour, as the Western powers did in the lands they conquered. Rather, their aim was to spread Islam and thereby spread civilization and justice. There are a considerable number of historical buildings, bridges, inns, schools, etc., in Europe, Asia and Africa, which date from this period, some of them still in use even now. Thus, the milieu in which Sinan was born and grew to manhood was conducive to the discovery and development of his extraordinary genius. Today the works of Sinan the Architect can be found, and are admired, on three continents. The son of one Abdulmennan Efendi, Sinan was born in a small village called Agirnas in Kayseri in 1490, where he spent his childhood. In 1512 he was selected and brought to Istanbul as a recruit to the Janissary division. His life changed completely as a result of this move, new horizons opened up before him. He took part with the army in the Chaldiran campaign in 1514. Two years later, he again campaigned with the Ottoman army in Egypt under the leadership of Yavuz Sultan Selim during the years 1516-1520. During these campaigns, he saw and studied the arts of Anatolia, Persia and Egypt. In 1520 he joined the service of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and began his university education the same year. He served as a zemberekcibasi in the battles of Rhodes, Belgrade and Mohac. Here too his mind was busy, now picking up the styles and techniques peculiar to Western architecture. He went even to Baghdad and Persia during the campaigns there, in 1529 and 1536 respectively.

In that last campaign the army had to take Van Castle situated on the shore of Van Lake, the biggest in Turkey. Sinan was commissioned to design and build three galleys which the Army needed in order to conquer the Castle. He completed this task so successfully that he was given command of the galleys. On his return to Istanbul, he became the haseki or personal bodyguard of the Sultan. In 1537, he prepared the navy for a jihad to Italy. After two years, he was appointed super-intendent of police.

As the reader will have gathered, already at the age of 49, Sinan had yet to embark upon the career that was to make him world-famous. The duties given to Sinan so far had nothing directly to do with architecture. However, when in 1539 he was put in charge of the Ministry of Public Works his life and work changed dramatically. From 1539 until he passed away, he worked continuously constructing a seemingly endless series of the most remarkable and magnificent monuments from Bosnia to Makka.

Beginning in the West, according to historical documents, Sinan organized and supervised the construction of some public building on behalf of Sokullu Mehmet Pasha in Bosnia. The most important work of Sinan’s, in what is now misnamed Yugoslavia, is the 180-metre long Sokullu Mehmet Pasha Bridge on the Drina river. In Greece too there is a Sinan-designed mosque, built for Osman Pasha. In Budin, the capital city of Hungary at the time, Sinan built another mosque, this one financed by Sokullu Mustafa Pasha.

In the Eastern part of the Empire, there is a mosque and tekke (lodge) named the Qanuni Sultan Suleiman Mosque in Syria which was built by Sinan. The second of his major works was the Husrev Pasha Mosque in Halep. We can see another of his mosques in the Crimea built on behalf of Devlet Giray Khan I of Crimea. In Makka, the House of Allah was enlarged by Sinan: first of all the pillars were put in place and later minarets. In the city centre, there were a number of buildings, including Turkish baths and a university, attributed to Sinan. However, today, none of these have been conserved because of misguided Saudi hostility towards their Ottoman heritage.

Naturally, Sinan paid special attention to Istanbul as the Imperial capital. He solved its drinking water and transportation problems, as well as designing the city’s sewage system. He constructed roads and bridges; he established its navy and navy buildings; he also restored or renovated castles; he built public watertraps, dykes and waterways; and he built inns, schools, hospitals, dormitories, and so on. He restored the Aya Sophia Mosque and deserved, in every respect that his name be inscribed on the golden pages of Ottoman history and Islamic civilization. It was by his help that Constantinople, the centre of the Eastern Roman Empire, was converted into a great Islamic city, Istanbul, and the capital and centre of Islam.

Three of his monumental works are generally accepted as representing the three stages of his work. The first, the Shehzadbasi Mosque, is referred to as his apprentice work. The second, the splendid Suleymaniye Mosque is described as his master-craftsman work. Finally the Selimiye Mosque is said to be Sinan’s supreme masterpiece, the most sublime of his extraordinary achievements.

Among the fascinating innovative features of these mosques are, in the Suleymaniye mosque, 64 large earthenware jars, 50cm in length placed upside-down, which function superbly as resonating chambers for the recitation of the imam. There is also a small chamber just above the main entrance which accumulates the soot emanating from the huge candles and oil filters. The soot is carried through by means of a very soft breeze circulating inside the mosque. The black powder collected in the chamber was the best raw material available at the time to make the fine inks used during the Ottoman Empire. The mosque is situated in a compound of 700,000 square metres, housing, as well as the mosque itself, four schools, a faculty of medicine, a library, an inn, a primary school, private premises for those studying the sciences of hadith and kalam, a big bazaar and, finally accommodation facilities for the staff. The construction took seven years during which 164 account books were kept to certify where each of the 996,300 gold coins allocated to the whole project were spent.

As for the Selimiye mosque, the great man himself judged it to be his masterpiece and believed that with the construction of this mosque, Islamic sacred architecture gained an unequivocal victory over Christian sacred architecture. He himself wrote of the Selimiye:’I concentrated the whole of my powers on the Selimiye mosque. I meant to put on show the whole of my talent [so that] even if all architects and construction engineers were to come together and do their best, they would not be able to build such a masterpiece of art.’ The two minarets of the mosque are utterly stunning: although there are three winding stairways leading to each landing (sherefe), a person climbing up to any of the landings cannot, from any point during his ascent, see anyone else climbing the other. The stairways are so delicately twisted that mathematicians with very powerful modern computers have difficulty calculating the linear formulas needed. The subtlety of Sinan’s use of colour to match and vary the lines of the stairways will be clear from the photograph.

Sinan built the dome of such awesome dimensions deliberately to exceed those of the Aya Sophia: it is roughly 5 metres higher and 3.5 metres deeper. The simple reason for this rivalry was that some arrogant architects among the Christians had claimed that a dome could not be raised in the Islamic world as large as the one they had put up in the Aya Sophia. They were proud of what they had achieved to the point of claiming that such a dome would be virtually impossible to build again. In the end, Sinan more than matched what had been achieved before him: he exceeded it by a substantial margin in both engineering and artistic terms: The radius of the dome of the Selimiye mosque is 31.5 metres, while its weight is 2,000 tons.

By the time the Selimiye was completed, 400 master craftsmen and 14,000 workers had laboured on it day and night for seven years. In all, 28,000 purses of gold were spent on the project. The famous German architect and historian Professor Ernst Dier said of it: ‘…the Selimiye is above all architectural monuments in the world from the point of view of size, height, unity and brightness.’ Another European commentator expressed his admiration in these words: ‘This is not a man-made building rather it is a place for divine worship descended from heaven.’

Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the best-known architects of our time wrote in his book: ‘Two architects have come on earth. The first one is the Ottoman architect Sinan and the other one is myself. Sinan was a contemporary of both Italian Michelangelo and British Christopher Wren. While the cracks on the dome.., built by Michelangelo are being repaired by iron hoops by the blacksmiths of Rome. Sinan’s temples will stand until Doomsday.’

Sinan served four Sultans and was profoundly admired and appreciated by all of them. He had 77 properties, 40 of which were shops, inns, Turkish baths. Before he died, he established and funded a waqf (charity trust) and specified in his will that the house he resided in be made into a school, with six akche a day (old currency) to be allocated for the teachers of that school, and that orphans and widows be given clothes, and wood and coal for heating. Only a small percentage of the income of the trust was given to his family in accordance with the will. He also wished that one-thirtieth of the Qur’an be recited for his soul’s sake and one akche be given for this. As we learn from the biographies written of him, he was a very generous man. Every day and evening, some twenty to thirty people used to come and eat at his expense.

We should also record that he gave away not only his personal wealth for charitable purposes for the benefit of his fellow-men, he also passed on all his knowledge to hundreds of architects and thousands of master-craftsmen.