New Said, and the facts concerning my person, and testified to by the fair-minded people and friends who have met with me with serious intention, I state this: As far as I have been able I have tried to restrain my evil-commanding soul from indulging in self-advertisement, fame-seeking, and pride, and perhaps a hundred times I have wounded the feelings of the Risale-i Nur students who have excessively good opinions of me. As is confirmed by both my close friends and my brothers, and the signs they have observed, I told them: “I possess nothing, I am the wretched herald of the jeweller’s shop of the Qur’an.” It is not winning worldly rank for myself and high position and fame, even supposing I was given high spiritual rank, being frightened of the possibility of my soul taking a share in the service I perform and spoiling my sincerity and pure intention, I decided to sacrifice those ranks and positions for my service. Yet despite my acting in this way, and my not accepting the gratitude of some of my brothers for their benefiting from the Risale-i Nur —which has been presented in your high court as though it was some political matter of great moment— you have made their respect for me, which is greater than that of a son for his father, the subject of interrogation. You have driven some of them to deny it. You have made us listen in astonishment. Can it be imagined a crime for some unfortunate to be praised although he himself is not happy at this and does not consider himself worthy?

Fifthly: I tell you certainly that to accuse the Risale-i Nur students of belonging to a political society and of political involvement when they have absolutely no connection with any society, association, or political movement, is knowingly or unknowingly to struggle against us on account of a secret atheistic organization which for forty years has been working directly against Islam and belief, or in the name of a sort of communism which produces anarchy in this country. For three courts of law have acquitted in that respect all the Risale-i Nur students and the treatises of the Risale-i Nur. Only, Eskishehir Court gave me one year, and out of one hundred and twenty others, fifteen of my friends six months each because of a single matter in a short treatise about the veiling of women, or perhaps because of the sentence: “According to what I have heard, in the centre of government a shoe-shiner behaved impudently towards the semi-naked wife of an important person, and his astonishing unmannerliness dealt a slap in