in effect share in his crime."
Bediuzzaman often also insists that politics should be avoided since the truths of belief and the Qur'an can be made a tool for nothing:
"The three supreme matters in the worlds of humanity and Islam are belief, the Seriat, and life. Since the truths of belief are the greatest of these, the Risale-i Nur's select and loyal students avoid politics with abhorrence so that they should not be made the tool to other currents and subject to other forces, and those diamond-like Qur'anic truths not reduced to fragments of glass in the view of those who sell or exploit religion for the world, and so that they can carry out to the letter the duty of saving belief, the greatest duty."
And in regard to the Second World War, Bediuzzaman wrote that the feelings of partisanship that the War gave rise to were an important reason for his students not concerning themselves with it, because "just as consent to unbelief is unbelief, so too consent to tyranny is tyranny. In this duel, tyranny and destruction so ghastly are occurring that they make the heavens weep.... it has given rise to tyranny so fearsome that in its barbarism its likes never occurred in previous centuries..." It was inappropriate for those occupied with the truths of the Qur'an to follow those events unnecessarily as though applauding the destruction of those tyrants .
The War years in Turkey saw a worsening of economic conditions, which had in any case been severe throughout the 1930’s, and there were serious shortages in many basic essentials. Together with this there had been a decline in moral standards during the years of the Republic as the regime chipped away at the Islamic cement bonding society. These severe conditions are reflected in various contexts in Bediuzzaman's letters. On the one hand, they were exploited by the authorities to try to distance from religion those who were not well-off, like the majority of the Risale-i Nur Students, through their struggles to secure a livelihood, and on the other, to sow discord among the Students and so break their