This paper examines how first readers of the Risale-i Nur texts in Early Republican Turkey worked constructively to reshape the radical Kemalist secularism and to revise Turkish identity formation for a more tolerant secular regime and a more Muslim component in the newly constructed Turkish national identity. In the face of an authoritarian reformist period, Risale-i Nur readers initiated a network of Republic of Letters in the provinces through which they contended indirectly with the cultural experimentations of the Early Republic that tended to suppress "unauthorized knowledge of Islam" and impose Super-Westernization. Nur students individually transformed themselves to gain spirituality. They resisted some of the Kemalist reforms, such as "Turkified Islam," in their daily lives using "weapons of the weak." Still, they also worked collectively in the democratic opening period to fully seek their civil and human rights during the transition into multiparty politics in 1945-1950. I explain the foundational teachings and principles of the Risale-i Nur that made this astonishingly peaceful social transformation possible in response to the enlightened despotism of the Turkish Republic. I utilize subaltern theory to analyze state-religion relations regarding the discursive contestation of the commonfolk with the "internalized Orientalism" of Kemalist ideology. Instead of focusing on institutions, I look into actual relations between the state and religious people, and so I develop a relational approach to investigate socio-political change.