the others had performed some personal services for me for God’s sake, they sent them to prison, together with the three brothers and three or four others they found in Emirdag, who had assisted me for three and a half years. If I had done what that superficial report stated, I would have deceived not five or ten people but five hundred or perhaps five thousand, or even five hundred thousand. As in Denizli Court I pointed out the many errors in the police reports, so too here I am pointing out one or two examples:

They accused us of “corrupting religion” because, following an Islamic custom practised since the age of the Prophet, I had compiled a Hizb al-Qur’ani like a large An‘am13 out of the hundreds of well-known verses which form the sources of the Risale-i Nur.

Also, they want to incriminate us by showing that the Treatise On Islamic Dress (Tesettür Risalesi) was written and published this year, whereas I have already served a year’s sentence for it, and I treated it as confidential, and as noted in the police report, it was pulled out from under piles of firewood. Also, although the well-known person did not respond and was silent in the face of the objections and harsh words I said to him in the Speaker’s Office in the Assembly in Ankara, with gross exaggeration the prosecution applied to him literally the natural, necessary, general, and confidential criticisms in my explanations of forty years previously concerning a Hadith which describes his errors, after his death, making it into an indictable offence for us. Can there be any comparison between the sake or memory of someone who is dead and gone and who no longer has any connection with the Government, and Almighty God’s laws of justice, which are a manifestation of His sovereignty?

Also, freedom of conscience which, of the principles adopted by the Government of the Republic, is the one we have most relied on and defended ourselves with, has been made something we have transgressed against, as though we are opposed to it.

Also, because I criticised the evils and faults of civilization,