They also wrote that “a person is guilty of political reaction if he calls innovation, misguidance, and atheism, the reforms, such as the closure of the sufi tekkes and zaviyes and the religious schools; the acceptance of secularism; the establishment of nationalist principles instead of Islam; the wearing of the brimmed hat; the banning of Islamic dress for women; the enforced use of the Latin alphabet in place of the Qur’anic alphabet; the ezan and iqama being recited in Turkish; the prohibition of religious instruction in schools; the recognition of equal rights for women and in inheritance; and the abolition of polygamy.

Unfair committee! The Qur’an of Miraculous Exposition has every century been the sacred, heavenly guide of three hundred and fifty million people, the programme of all their happiness, and the sacred treasury of the life of this world and the next. If it is possible to deny numerous of its explicit verses, which do not bear interpretation, about the veiling of women, inheritance, polygamy, the recollection of God, instruction in religious knowledge and its dissemination, and the preservation of the marks of religion, and to make guilty of crimes all the authoritative Islamic interpreters of the law and all the Shaykh al-Islam’s, and if you can annul the passage of time, quash the numerous court acquittals, and the legal pardons, and abolish confidentiality and the private side of things, and freedom of conscience and freedom of thought, and intellectual and scholarly opposition, and remove them from this country and its governments, you can make me guilty of these things. Otherwise in the court of truth, reality, and justice you will be awesomely guilty!

S a i d N u r s i

***

[Although it is against them, a piece the court astonishingly showed to be against us.]

I say in this court of law that if there is any justice on the face of the earth, it will reject the unjust decision to convict a man who, basing it on the agreement and confirmation of three hundred and fifty thousand Qur’anic commentaries and following the beliefs of our forefathers for one thousand, three hundred and fifty years, expounded a Divine rule that has been considered most sacred and genuine in the social life of three hundred and fifty million Muslims