weapons which up to now we have used against them — those satans, pharaohs, and anarchists.

Prisoner

S a i d N u r s i

* * *

Sirs!

With your permission I shall address a few words, in your presence and apparently to you, but in fact to the secret revolutionary committee bent on corruption, which has taken on many forms, and with the idea of depraving this nation in the name of disbelief and atheism and on account of foreigners, has for thirty or forty years employed every means to attack the Qur’an and truths of belief; and to the inhuman, thoughtless officials whom they have made a screen to themselves in this matter; and their propagandists in the guise of Muslims who have confused this court.

(The decision to acquit us on the second day made this fiery speech superfluous.)

S a i d N u r s i ,

in total isolation and solitary confinement

The Correct Answer to an Important Question

Several high-ranking officials asked me: “Why did you not accept Mustafa Kemal’s offer of a three-hundred-lira salary and the post of general preacher in Kurdistan and the Eastern Provinces in place of Shaykh Sanusi?15 If you had accepted it, you would have been instrumental in saving the lives of the hundred thousand people who were slaughtered because of the revolution.”