After receiving this answer, they asked me: “Won’t those who wear it be infidels?” I said: “They will be made to wear the brimmed hat and be forbidden to prostrate in prayer. But the belief in the heads of those wearing the brimmed hat will make the hat prostrate, and God willing, will make it Muslim.”

They then said: “This person will drink water and his hand will be pierced, and it will be known through this that he is the Sufyan.” I said to them in reply: “It is commonly said about someone who is very extravagant that he has a hole in his hand. That is, he cannot hold onto anything; it flows from him and is lost. Thus, this fearsome man will be addicted to raki, it will make him ill, he will become excessively extravagant and accustom others to being the same.”

Then someone asked: “When he dies, Satan will proclaim loudly to the world from ‘Dikili Ta_’ in Istanbul that so-and-so has died.” So I said: “The news will be broadcast by telegraph.” However, I heard shortly afterwards that the radio had been invented, and I realized that my answer had not been completely accurate. Eight years later while in the Darü’l-Hikmet, I said: “Satan will broadcast it to the world by radio.”

They then asked me questions about the Barrier of Dhu’l-Qarnayn, Gog and Magog, the Beast (Dabbat al-Ard), the Antichrist (Dajjal), and the second coming of Jesus (Peace be upon him), and I replied to them. In fact the answers are written in part in my old treatises. Some time later, Mustafa Kemal twice summoned me to Ankara8 by code by means of the former governor of the province of Van, my old friend, Tahsin Bey, in recognition of my published work The Six Steps (Hutuvât-i Sitte). I went. Since Shaykh Sanusi9 did not know Kurdish, it was proposed I should take his place as ‘general preacher’ of the Eastern Provinces on a salary of three hundred liras. I was also offered a position as a deputy, and my former post together with the other members of the Darü’l-Hikmet within the Directorate of Religious Affairs. Moreover, being