In His Name, be He glorified!

[This forms the introduction to the pieces that follow it.]

With the idea of helping a little to refute with true, fair evidences Afyon Court’s decision against us and turn the Appeal Court in our favour, and in order to indicate briefly some of the errors in the indictment, we have written exactly the pieces from the confidential treatises which they mentioned as being offences; pointing out the errors, we show those who are convicting us to be guilty of an offence.

For instance: In order to have me sentenced to the heaviest penalty, they wrote at the end of the indictment as an index of all my crimes: “The matters Said Nursi rejects: One: the abolition of the Empire and Caliphate.” This is both wrong and an oversight. For fifteen years ago in Eskishehir Court I replied to a question about my writing in the Twenty-Sixth Flash, the Treatise For the Elderly: “I was grieved at the passing of the sovereignty of the caliphate,” and my reply silenced the court. Anyone who considers to be a crime an unimportant memory, faded with time, which was covered by the pardon and has been acquitted, is himself guilty.

As documentary evidence for this imaginary crime, they showed a Hadith from one of the Flashes, which is also found in The Miracles of Muhammad (PBUH): “After me the caliphate will last thirty years, then it will be rapacious monarchy, then corruption and tyranny.”33 That is, after the four Rightly-Guided Caliphs there will be corruption. I wrote in one of my old treatises that this Hadith contained three miraculous prophecies. Then in the indictment, it gave as my crime: “In one of his treatises Said says: ‘After the caliphate will be tryanny and corruption.’” You superficial committee! Anyone who considers it a crime to explain the miraculous prediction of a Hadith which foretells the widespread spiritual and material corruption among mankind of the present and an event that will cause chaos on the earth, is himself guilty both spiritually and materially.