be a most powerful, sound, and veracious guide for two hundred thousand true and devoted students benefiting this country, nation, and public security; — in spite of all these, under which law, what conscience, what good, what crime do you convict us, contemptuously giving us the harshest sentences and severest solitary confinement? Certainly you shall be questioned about this at the Last Judgement.

The Second: One reason they put forward for punishing me was my expounding the Qur’an’s explicit verses about veiling, inheritance, recitation of the Divine Names, and polygamy, written to silence those who object to them in the name of civilization.

Fifteen years ago I wrote the following piece to Eskishehir Court and the Appeal Court, which was also included in the court’s decision. I repeat the piece as a complaint to the Supreme Tribunal at the Last Judgement, and as a warning to the enlightened teachers of the future, and together with Elhüccetü’z-Zehrâ (The Shining Proof) as a sort of addition to my petition to the Appeal Court, which twice has acted fairly in acquitting me and has listened to my cry for justice, and to the committee of judges who did not permit me to speak and due to the malicious indictment which I proved contained eighty errors, convicted me to two year’s hard labour and solitary confinement together with two year’s further exile elsewhere under close surveillance:

I say this that if there is any justice on the face of the earth, the Appeal Court will quash this decision which convicts someone who expounded Qur’anic verses which in each century for one thousand three hundred and fifty years have acted as sacred, true Divine principles in the social life of three hundred and fifty million Muslims, and expounded them relying on the consensus and affirmation of three hundred and fifty thousand Qur’anic commentaries and following the beliefs of our forefathers for one thousand three hundred years. Is it not a denial of Islam and a betrayal of our millions of religious and heroic forefathers to convict, because he expounded those verses, someone who according to reason and learning does not accept certain European laws applied temporarily due to certain requirements of the times and who has given up politics and withdrawn from social life, and is it not to insult millions of Qur’anic commentaries?