should be applied remains unresolved to this day. Thus, Bediuzzaman argued that the Risale-i Nur was a scholarly work - and as such should be unrestricted under the secular republic - which silenced materialism and naturalism and the philosophers of Europe and their attacks on the Qur'an; for more than thirty years his attention had been directed towards their attacks. The Internal problems of the country, he saw as resulting from their corrupting influence. The Risale-i Nur dealt "powerful blows" at them and at the atheists who furthered their interests and plots in the country under the cover of secularization. It was these "intriguers" and "their irreligious committees" that Bediuzzaman opposed, not the Government. Bediuzzaman differentiated between the Government and these committees or secret societies working for the cause of irreligion, and warned about their infiltrating the Government and deceiving it. It was they who raised the outcries of "political reaction" and "exploiting religion for political ends."
These accusations levelled at people who supported religion were not new, of course. Much use had been made of them after the Constitutional Revolution of l909, when the debate between those who favoured secularization and total westernization and those who did not was often most virulent, as was described in an earlier chapter. At that time, Bediuzzaman told the court martial set up after the 3l st March Incident: "Certain people who make politics the tool of irreligion accuse others of political reaction and exploiting religion for the sake of politics in order to conceal their own misdeeds." And in the Republic, these slogans were used for the same ends: to blacken the names of Muslims and reduce their standing in the eyes of the population, and so by frightening the people away from Islam, to pave the way for the spreading of irreligious ideas. The Menemen Incident was a classic example, and part of the charge against Bediuzzaman was that he had attempted "to imitate" that revolt. It had been a minor incident which occurred in response to provocation, and amid great storms in the press had been suppressed brutally as a "reactionary movement". Thirty-three