endorsed by one hundred and sixty-three out of two hundred deputies, one hundred and fifty thousand liras were allotted for the Medresetü’z-Zehra, my university in the East, the foundations of which I had laid in Van, and this was accepted. However, since I saw that the predictions of the original of the Fifth Ray were in part realized in a person there, I was compelled to forgo those most important duties. Telling myself that the person could not be opposed or confronted, I gave up the world, and politics, and the life of society, and dedicated all my time to saving religious belief. However, a number of tyrannical and unjust officials forced me to write two or three treatises which looked to the world.

Later, in connection with some questions asked by some persons about allegorical Hadiths which give news of the events at the end of time, I rearranged that old treatise. It received the name of the Fifth Ray. The Risale-i Nur is not numbered chronologically. For example, the Thirty-Third Letter was written before the First Letter, and the original of the Fifth Ray and some other parts were written previously to the Risale-i Nur itself. Anyway... the illegal, unnecessary, and inaccurate objections and questions of a public prosecutor, asked out of bigoted love of Mustafa Kemal, forced me to provide these explanations outside the subject. I am giving here as an example some of the entirely personal and unlawful things he said in the name of the law. He said:

“Aren’t you sincerely sorry that you insulted him in the Fifth Ray with expressions like ‘swilling down raki and wine like a water pump’?” I say in reply to the completely meaningless and mistaken bigotry arising from his love: “The victory and honour of the heroic army cannot be ascribed to him; he can have only a share of it. Like it would be tyrannical and an awesome injustice if the booty, possessions, and rations of an army were all given to its commander. Yes, just as he accused me of not loving that unjust and extremely faulty man, quite simply accusing me of being a traitor, so I accuse him of not loving the army, for he ascribes all its honour and moral booty to the man he loves, depriving the army of all glory. The reality is that positive things, and instances of good and virtue, should be distributed among the community and army, and the negative things, destruction, and faults ascribed to the chief. For the existence of ssomething is dependent on the existence of all its conditions and elements, and the commander is only one of the