In His Name, be He glorified!

I say this to Afyon Court and the Chief Criminal Judge:

Because since my early youth I could not endure to be dominated, I severed my relations with the world. Now life has become a great burden for me with this meaningless, unnecessary oppression. I do not have the power to endure the persecution of thousands of officials outside. I am fed up with this sort of life. With all my strength I am requesting of you that you sentence me. To enter the grave is not within my power, and I have to remain in prison. You too know that the unsubstantiated crimes the prosecution accuses me of are non-existent. I cannot be convicted because of them. However, I have serious faults before my true duties, for which I can in effect be convicted. If it is appropriate to ask, I shall reply to your question. Yes, my only crime out of my serious faults is this: it occurred to me here in Afyon Prison that in the view of reality it was an unforgiveable fault that, because I had not looked to the world, I had not performed the weighty duty with which I had been charged in the name of the country, nation, and religion, and my not knowing this did not excuse me.

The fact that three courts have acquitted us in this respect shows just how far from truth and justice those have fallen who give the name of a worldly, political society to the Risale-i Nur students’ disinterested attachment to the Risale-i Nur and its interpreter, which looks purely to the hereafter, and try to show that they are guilty of a criminal offence. We too say:

The basis and foundation of human society and particularly the Islamic nation are the sincere bonds between relatives, and the concerned attachment between tribes and groups, and due to Islamic nationhood the spiritual brotherhood and mutual assistance between believers, and the devotion to one’s nation, and unshakeable attachment to and partiality for the truths of the Qur’an and those who propagate them. It is only by denying these bonds, which ensure the life of society, and by accepting the ‘red peril’ —which scatters the terrible seed of anarchy from the North, which ruins the younger generation and nationhood, and drawing to itself everyone’s children, destroys kinship and nationhood, and opens up the way to