FIRST POINT 

   Since one of the most basic principles of the Risale-i Nur is compassion and women are champions of compassion, they are by nature more closely connected with the Risale-i Nur than others. Praise be to God, this natural sympathy is felt in many places. The self-sacrifice within this compassion wants nothing in return and expresses true sincerity, and so is of the greatest importance at this time.

   Yes, the fact that wanting nothing in return, a mother will sacrifice her life to save her young from danger, as the demand of her nature and with true sincerity, shows that women are capable of great heroism. Through developing this heroism, they may save their lives both in this world and in the Hereafter by means of it. However, this important attribute does not unfold under the influence of certain bad currents of thought. Or else it is exploited. A small example out of hundreds is as follows:

   A compassionate mother undertakes every sort of self-sacrifice so that her child should not fall into danger in this worldly life and should rreceive every sort of benefit and advantage; she brings him up with this in view. Thinking, "My son is going to be a Pasha," she gives him all her property, takes him from the Qur'an school and sends him to Europe. But it does not occur to her that her child's eternal life has fallen into danger. She tries to save him from prison in this world, and does not take into consideration his being sentenced to the prison of Hell. And as the complete opposite of innate compassion, she makes her innocent child a claimant against her in the Hereafter, while he should be her intercessor. He will complain to her saying: "Why did you not strengthen my belief and so cause me to be lost?" And in this world too, since he did not receive a proper Islamic upbringing, he cannot respond to his mother's wondrous compassion in the way it deserves; in fact he does so very deficiently.

   If, not misdirecting her true compassion, she works to save her unhappy child from the everlasting incarceration of Hell and from dying while in misguidance, which is to go to eternal extinction, the equivalent of each of the child's good works will pass to the book of good deeds of his mother, and just as after her death he will continuously send lights to her spirit with his good works, so too in the Hereafter, he will be not a claimant, but with all his spirit and life an intercessor for her, and a blessed child of her's for all eternity.

   Yes, man's first master and most influential teacher is his mother. In connection with this, I shall explain the following to you, which I have always felt strongly in my own self:

   I am eighty years old and have received lessons from eighty thousand people. Yet I swear that the truest and most unshakeable lessons I have received are those inculcated in me by my late mother, which have always remained fresh for me. They have been planted in my nature as though they were seeds planted in my physical being. I observe that other instruction I have received has been constructed on those seeds. That is to say, the lessons instilled in my nature and spirit by my mother when I was one year old I now see at the age of eighty to be each fundamental seeds amid great truths.

   For instance, I consider it certain that I learnt to be compassionate, which is the most important of the four principles of my way, and to be kind and clement, which is the greatest truth of the Risale-i Nur, from the compassionate behaviour and acts of my mother and from her teaching. Yes, the compassion of motherhood bears true sincerity and true self-sacrifice, but not thinking of the Hereafter-a treasury of diamonds for her innocent child-and to turn his face towards this world, which is like temporary, transient fragments of glass, and to be kind to him in that way, is to misuse that compassion.    A proof of this heroism of women in regard to compassion, which wants absolutely no recompense and nothing in return, and of their sacrificing their very spirits, which bears no meaning of personal benefit and no show, is that a hen, which bears a tiny sample of that compassion, will attack a lion and sacrifice its life for its chicks.

   Now, the most valuable and most essential principle in Islamic training and deeds pertaining to the Hereafter, is sincerity. Such true sincerity is to be found in the heroism of this kind of compassion. If these two points begin to develop among women, it will be the means to considerable happiness within the World of Islam. When it comes to the heroism of men, it can never be for nothing; they always want recompense in perhaps a hundred ways. At the very least they want glory and renown. But regretably, unfortunate women practise hypocrisy in another form in order to be saved from the evil and oppression of tyrannical men; this sort arises from weakness 

Bediuzzaman Said Nursi / Risale-i Nur Collection / The Flashes

#mothersday #child #compassion #love