From the Author’s Preface:

“For five years we have been working to reflect upon the divine gift of chapter Ya-Sin through the commentaries of perfect human beings who are without doubt heirs to the Messenger and through the interpretations of scholars who devoted their lives to understanding the Gracious Quran.

“This effort, which opened incredibly vast horizons in our hearts and minds, drawing our study group from the realm of density to the realm of subtlety and conveying us from the unseen world to the here and now, moved us to share our work with you, beyond our capacity though it may be.

“We worked with the hope that, in Hazret Mevlana’s phrase, the Mighty Quran would raise its veil for us like a bride if we paid the price for that vision out of our own selves. I want to say that we experienced the most vibrant time of our lives during these happy years when we struggled to transform what we learned into a spiritual state. The concept of time that consists of the present moment, the concept of time that is “Kun fayakūn,” became comprehensible only by tasting the pleasure of the Quran.”

From the Introduction, by Omid Safi:

“Cemalnur’s popularity in Turkey easily ranks her as the most prominent female religious figure in contemporary Turkey, one that is frequently and accurately compared with that of Oprah in the recent American landscape. She is increasingly being featured on the global scene of leading Sufi teachers. There is little doubt that if her writings had been in Arabic (or English!) rather than Turkish, we would have already had many dissertations on her. All of us are indebted to Fons Vitae for sharing the luminous insights of this powerful and original transmission. And thanks to Victoria Holbrook who has done the almost impossible of weaving together the often ornate expression of texts from the thousand years’ network of the modern and Ottoman Turkish, Persian and Arabic Islamic tradition.

“Let us come back to Cemalnur. Her Qur’anic commentary is so extraordinarily voluminous and ever-flowing that it is a reminder of how this is not a work of authorship in the mere human sense, but an opening up of the heart, emptying the ego, and standing back as the al-Qahhar overwhelms and opens up the floodgates. Her commentary is so powerful that it is bound to be of interest to all students of the Qur’an, of women’s spirituality, of contemporary Islamic thought, and of Sufism.

Within the Sufi tradition, names are a bridge to the inner reality. Rarely has a Sufi master been more properly named that Cemalnur: Jamal-Nur. Beauty and Light. Read this book, and take in the Beauty of the one Divine Beloved who is the Source of All beauty, and who loves Beauty; the One who is the Source of Light, and is above all the Light of the Heavens and the Earth.”