with the world and work only for the grave should give up spending the remainder of their lives within the bounds taught by the Qur’an, on the way our forefathers followed for one thousand three hundred and fifty years, in a way permitted by the rules sanctified at all times by three hundred and fifty million believers, — that we should give up that way, and being coerced by our enemies and their subterfuges, merely for this brief and fleeting worldly life, support the savage laws and principles of an immoral, dissolute civilization, indeed, of a sort of communism, and adopt them as our way? No law anywhere, and no one the tiniest bit fair, would force us to accept them. We only say to those who oppose us: Don’t bother us and we won’t bother you!

It is due to this fact that I support neither intellectually nor on scholarly grounds the arbitrary commands of a commander, called laws, which have made Aya Sophia into a house of idols and the Shaykh al-Islam’s Office into a girls’ high school. And for myself I do not act in accordance with them. But although for twenty years I have been severely oppressed during my tortuous captivity, I have not become involved in politics, nor provoked the authorities, nor disturbed public order. Although I have hundreds of thousands of Risale-i Nur friends, not a single incident has been recorded involving the disturbance of the peace. I am fed up with life due to the utterly humiliating and unjust treatment directed at my person here in my exile in the last period of my life, such as I have never before suffered and which has galled me. I feel disgust at freedom even, under this oppression. I have written you a petition saying that contrary to everyone else, I want not my acquittal but to be convicted and given not a light sentence, I want the heaviest penalty. For in order to be saved from this unparalleled, extraordinarily tyrannical treatment, there is no solution for me other than entering either the grave or prison. But since suicide is not permitted, and the appointed hour of death is unknown and outside my power, I am resigned to the imprisonment I now suffer in absolute solitary confinement.25 However, I am not presenting this petition for the present, for the sake of my innocent companions.

Fourthly: Confirmed by all that I have written in the Risale-i Nur these thirty years of my life, the period I have called that of the