adorn and honour some of your special, sincere students with the decorations of the saints and purified scholars. Moreover, your treatises have not entered the courts as a criminal or suspect, but as a teacher, instructor, and guide. In every session of justice you have displayed splendidly, brilliantly, your power and forcefulness, your greatness and pride. You laved them with the water of belief and the Qur’an.”

“O Ustad, the Risale-i Nur’s Servant and Interpreter! Ustad, God’s servant, spiritual son of Imam ‘Ali (May God be pleased with him), and disciple of Gawth al-A‘zam (May his mystery be sanctified)! Raise me to the elevated degree of your knowledge!” “Only a month’s worth of provisions, around a kilo, wrapped in paper and hanging from a nail. He attains to an inexhaustible existence within his deprivation. He abstains from accepting gifts. If he had accepted alms and charity, he would have been a millionaire today.”

[They questioned only one of the reasons for the naming of the Risale-i Nur. They said that they saw no one with the name of Nur among his close students. As it says in the reply in the footnote, Nuri Benli and Küreli Nuri the Clockmaker are now distinguished in their service of the Risale-i Nur. That is to say, they cannot criticize it, so are compelled to base their allegations on the most trivial matters.]

The reason that in the Twenty-Sixth Word, the thirty-three Words, thirty-three Letters, thirty-one Flashes, and thirteen Rays are called the Risale-i Nur is this: throughout my life the word ‘Nur’ (light) has everywhere confronted me. For instance, my village was Nurs, my late mother’s name was Nuriye, my Naqshi master was Sayyid Nur Muhammad, one of my Qadiri masters was Nuruddin, one of my Qur’an masters was Nuri, and of my students those most attached to me have been those with Nur in their names. (But how strange it is that there is no one among the important Risale-i Nur students with the name Nuri.)34 And what elucidates and illumines my books most are the comparisons about light. And what has solved most of my difficulties related to the Divine truths is the luminous