struck down by a mysterious illness and died. Another called Safvet in the time of Mithat Altiok also came to a sorry end. Bediuzzaman wished them no ill; as he told Hafiz Nuri's family who came to plead for him, they received these blows from the Qur’an.
Another of Bediuzzaman's students was Tasköprülü Sadik Bey, the local aga or lord. The grandson of Sadik Pasa, one of the heroes of Plevne and educated in the Military Academy in Istanbul, he cast aside his rank and position and devoted himself to serving Bediuzzaman and the Risale-i Nur. His village of Tasköprü became a centre for the writing out of the Risale-i Nur, as did the town of Inebolu. The Risale-i Nur was introduced into Inebolu by two other important students of Bediuzzaman's, Nazif and Selahaddin Çelebi, who were father and son. Selahaddin recounted this while describing his first visit to Bediuzzaman, when he took to be corrected a copy of the Fourth Ray which his father had written:
"....I climbed the mountain.... under a tree a person dressed in white was performing the prayers. `This must be him', I said to myself. After finishing them, he motioned with his head for me to sit. I knelt down and said `Amen' to his supplications; in a touching voice he was beseeching Almighty God for the peace and happiness in this world and the next of humanity and the Islamic world. Finally I gave him the book I had brought. `Welcome, my brother', he said. `Let's correct it.' It took half an hour. I studied the Hoca Efendi carefully, whom I was seeing for the first time. He was correcting it with great attention, even correcting wrong points and letters in the words. He asked me: `Do you know this [Ottoman] writing?', and got me to write a sentence.
"`Ma'shallah! You write very well', he said. `Will you write out a treatise if I give you one?' When I said I would with pleasure, he gave me around nine of the Short Words. And he gave me the Eleventh and Twelfth Words for my father. `They must be written out exactly', he said. I asked his permission, and left him.
"The Risale-i Nur was introduced into Inebolu in this way. Subsequently, hundreds of hands started to write it out....for five