vindictive treatment and harassment he received. He was approaching seventy years of age when he arrived and suffered perpetual ill-health, largely due to his periods in prison, the frequent times he had been poisoned, and his long years of exile and deprivation.
The aim on the one hand was to keep him under a cloud of suspicion and guilt so as to destroy his influence over the people. The isolation in which he was held and constant and oppressive surveillance were to this end, in addition to numerous incidents intended to belittle him in the eyes of the people. Arid when after Bediuzzaman had been in Emirdag a short time, he started to draw the people to him like in Denizli - in his words: "With the same situation starting here as in Denizli where on account of the Risale-i Nur, the people showed me regard far greater than was my due"i9 - they increased the pressure on him and used official influence to conduct a propaganda campaign against him, so as to frighten the people off and keep them away from him.

Secondly, "the dissemblers" employed various plans and stratagems in order to provoke "an incident", so that Bediuzzaman could be accused nf
"causing a disturtiance and harming public order" and the aulhorities could be made to come down on him with excessive force. The constant pressure under which he was held. the assaults on his person, in particular on the pretext of his dress, and the raids on his house were to this end. In essence, these methods were no different to previously, just they again failed, what was different in Emirdag was their frequency and severity.

The underlying reasons for the intensifcation of Bediuzzaman's stniggle against irreligion and the increase in the attempts to silence him and halt the

spread of the Risale-i Nur may be found again in Bediuzzaman's letters, and from looking at his life.
In 1945, probably after the acquittals had been ratified and the confiscated copies of the Risale-i Nur returned, and before the duplicating machines were obtained, efforts were made to have printed, like The Supreme Sign, further parts of the Risale-i Nur. The debate was now over the alphabet to be used, the old or the new. In consultation with his students in Isparta, Bediuzzaman decided to