The Thirteenth Flash — Seeking Refuge from Satan

The Thirteenth Flash unfolds, in thirteen “Indications,” the short prayer every believer knows — “I seek refuge with God from Satan the accursed” — and uses it to face the hard questions evil raises.

The first is the one a thoughtful person actually feels: if truth is beautiful and God takes the side of the people of truth, why does the party of evil so often seem to win? Nursî’s answer turns on a homely fact — destruction is easy. Good is constructive and positive; it takes twenty people twenty days to raise a building one person can pull down in a day. So a weak, negative force can inflict real damage, and the people of misguidance sometimes overcome the strong people of truth with very little — yet the harm is temporary, “and the end is for the righteous,” and the loss is repaid many times over. A second question is graver still: why create Satan at all, if many will be ruined through him? Here Nursî argues that without a contest there can be no ascent. It is precisely the struggle against evil that lets a human being develop, through effort and choice, into something higher than the angels — just as refusing that struggle lets him sink lower than any animal. The existence of evil is the price of a creature who can rise.

From there the Flash turns practical. Belief, the Shari’a and the Prophet’s Sunna form a stronghold so secure that, once a person takes refuge inside it, the enemy cannot reach him. And much of Satan’s work, Nursî shows, is mere whispering (vesvese) — the involuntary suggestion that flits through the mind and which the anxious mistake for their own belief. To recognise the whisper as not one’s own, and simply to deny it attention, is already to defeat it. In Nursî’s own words the Indications are by turns consoling and sharply argued; the full text is linked above.