My Last Word

I say this to the Judges of the Court:

I have understood from both the indictment and from my long solitary confinement that in this matter it is mostly my person that is under consideration, and it has been seen fit to destroy my character. As though my person was harmful to the government, public security, and the country, and making religion a screen, I harboured worldly aims, and was pursuing some sort of politics. In the face of this, I tell you the following with complete certitude:

Because of these unfounded suspicions, do not injure the Risale-i Nur students by means of slandering my person, for they are devoted to the Risale-i Nur and to this country and nation, and are of great value for them. For if you do, it could open up the way to much immaterial harm for this country and nation, indeed, to their being exposed to danger. I tell you this certainly too: whatever is visited on my person in the way of insult, humiliating treatment, slander, torture, and prison sentences, on account of the way I now follow I have decided to accept it — on condition no harm comes to the Risale-i Nur and its students because of me. There is also reward in this for me in the hereafter. While weeping, I am also pleased since in this way I may be saved from the sins of my evil-commanding soul. If these wretched innocent people had not been sent to prison along with me, I would have spoken out with great vehemence in your court. You have seen too that the person who wrote the indictment wants to destroy my character with his misrepresentations and exaggerations, and partly misinterpreting what is written, by showing that all my books and letters, confidential and otherwise, written over these twenty to thirty years of my life were written this year, and had never been seen by any court, or been pardoned, or been subject to the passage of time. I have said a hundred times that my person is faulty, and the reason that although they have defamed me on every occasion it has had no effect on public regard for me, which is enough to perturb the politicians, is this: there is an intense and overwhelming need here at this time for a number of people to teach religion and strengthen belief, people who will sacrifice the truth for nothing, make it a tool of nothing, and take no share for their own souls. Only in this way may what they teach about faith be