This paper explores the reading practices of a key religious text within the Suffa foundation, a branch of the Nur movement in Istanbul. Inspired by the message of Islamic scholar Said Nursi (1887-1960), this revivalist Islamic community has distanced itself from classical patterns of Islamic learning by deemphasizing masters’ authority and stressing shared brother-to-brother pedagogies centered on reading Nursi’s masterpiece, the Risale-i Nur. A simplified form of Quranic commentary (tefsir) written in the vernacular language and drenched in the Sufi and Islamicate cultural repertoires of Anatolia, the Risale is today collectively read in Nur circles and provides guidance for a large public of ordinary Turkish Muslims. Reading the Risale occupies a central place in the Nur pedagogical path and is expected to engender a specific reflective state (tefekkür) in the reader that, to some extent, converges with modern ideas of knowledge as achieved through intellectual efforts. Drawing on ethnographic material from within the community, the paper highlights lines of both continuity and rupture between the reading-related intellectual exercise of tefekkür and the Islamic pedagogical tradition. I will argue that my interlocutors’ semantic and practical redefinition of tefekkür as a reason-based exercise represents an attempt to come to terms with modern epistemological and hermeneutical discourses. I will argue that their redefinition of reading as a technique for keeping in pace with the times should be understood in a similar way. However, I will also show that Nur reflective exercises still rely on a specific “sensitivity of the heart” that matches with the ethical sensibility of Islamic tradition. Although recent anthropological studies of Islam often stress a dichotomy between religious-embodied practices and secular-intellectual practices, I argue that Nur reflective exercises cannot be easily accommodated within such a framework. While acknowledging that embodiment processes have an important place in religious education, the paper uses the Nur case to suggest that more attention to reading and other reflection-based techniques can enrich our understanding of religious formation and ethical thinking within the Islamic tradition and beyond.