hopes and precautions, and our concealing it, and our enemies belittling it, and outside our wills, the Risale-i Nur teaches its truths openly to friend and foe alike. It unhesitatingly divulges its most private secrets to the most distant stranger. Since the truth is this, we should consider our trifling difficulties to be a bitter medicine like quinine, and offering thanks in patience, say: “This too will pass, God willing.”

Secondly: I wrote this to the supervisor of this School of Joseph: just as when I was a prisoner-of-war in Russia, the Bolshevik storm first erupted in the prisons, so the French Revolution first began in the prisons and with the prisoners known in the histories as “vagabonds.” Because of this, in both Eskishehir and Denizli we Risale-i Nur students tried to reform the other prisoners as far as we possibly could. In both prisons it was extremely successful. Here it will be even more useful, for as a result of the Risale-i Nur’s instuction at this sensitive time, the squall76 that blew up was only a hundredth of what it would have been. Otherwise the harmful outside currents which take advantage of conflict and such incidents, and await such opportunities, would have ignited the gunpowder and caused a conflagration.

S a i d N u r s i

***

In His Name, be He glorified!

My Dear, Loyal, Unshakeable Brothers, who do not become dispirited at difficulties and abandon us!

Due to some physical and spiritual tribulation, my evil-commanding soul was feeling sad on your account when this was imparted to me: if you had suffered these difficulties ten times over in order to meet with all your brothers here at close quarters it still would have been cheap. It appears necessary that like in former times the people of reality used to gather together and meet at least once or twice a year, the Risale-i Nur students gather together every few years in the School of Joseph. In keeping with the God-fearing