with politics was not contrary to the law, and exposed to the Court the plot that had been laid against him because of this service. To involve the legal system in this conspiracy, and attempt to achieve its aims in the name of the law, was a grave error and brought the law and legal system into disrepute. He was quite undaunted by the manifest purpose of the Court, his execution. He was after all the Bediuzzaman who had faced the Court Martial set up after the 3l st March Incident in 1909, and won his acquittal. He was also the practised preacher and fine orator who had addressed thousands in Aya Sophia the same year, and thousands in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus in 191l. Thus, Bediuzzaman started off his defence with a skillful move which turned the tables on those judging him. He was answering the main charge of "making a tool of religion with the idea of political reaction, with the intention of undertaking an enterprise which might damage public security":
"God forbid a hundred thousand times that the sciences of belief with which we are occupied should be a tool for anything apart from Divine pleasure! For sure, just as the sun cannot be a satellite of the moon and follow it, so too belief in God, which is the luminous and sacred key to etemal happiness and a sun of the life of the hereafter, cannot be the tool of social life. There is no matter in the universe more important than the mystery of belief, the greatest question and greatest riddle of the creation of this world , so that belief can be made the tool of it.
"Judges of the Court! If this tortuous imprisonment of mine concerned only myself and my life in this world, you can be sure that I would remain silent like I have for these last ten years. But since it concerns the etemal life of many, and the Risale-i Nur, which reveals and explains the mighty talisman of creation, if I had a hundred heads and each day one was cut off, I would not give up this mighty mystery. And even if I am delivered from your hands, I cannot be saved from the clutches of the appointed hour. I am old and at the door of the grave. And so, consider only this mystery of belief concerning the appointed hour and the grave, which will come to everyone, one of the hundreds of matters the Risale-i Nur reveals...
"Can all the most weighty political questions of the world loom larger than death for someone who is certain of death, so that he can make it the tool of those questions. For the time of its coming is not