he repeatedly delayed the proceedings, like, for example, holding up the sending of all the documents of the case to the Appeal Court for three months.
After the preliminary proceedings, the hearings of the case began some four months after their arrest and continued for six and a half months. Thirty of the Students were tried not under arrest, and a fluctuating number, nineteen at one point including Bediuzzaman were inside the prison. The decision reached by the Court finding Bediuzzaman guilty on some of the charges in the face of all the evidence showed clearly its purpose. Just as, although the previous `committee of experts' had declared the Risale-i Nur clear of anything legally reprehensible, this time the committee set up the Directorate of Religious Affairs contained certain negative points, also probably due to external pressure, which the prosecution in Afyon was able to utilize against Bediuzzaman and his students.

• Life in Afyon Prison

Bediuzzaman was in Afyon Prison for twenty months, and his students for periods varying from a few days to eighteen months; the majority were there six months, one group before the court passed sentence, and others after it. Although summer months intervened in this time, many of the accounts speak of the intense cold, associated with this latest assault on Bediuzzaman and the Risale-i Nur.
As is Emirdag, so now in the trial and in the prison, it was Bediuzzaman’s person that was focused on and made the object of attack. And again unwittingly Bediuzzaman's enemies engineered their own defeat. For Bediuzzaman's sincerity and qualities were such that he willingly endured the extreme conditions and appalling distress he suffered for the sake of the Risale-i Nur and its Students. He not only survived the conditions, he conquered them. Over seventy years of age, petrified from cold, weakened from lack of food, on several occasions on the point of death from poison, alone, untended, suffering distress it is difficult to imagine, Bediuzzaman continued to write for the guidance of his students and the other prisoners, spend his nights in prayer and contemplation, and compose not only his own defence, but direct `a publicizing campaign' of his and his students' defences, in order to make known the reality of the case and defend the Risale-i Nur against this latest attack. With his indomitable spirit, he defeated his enemies utterly.