teachers at this time, he has persisted in medrese teaching and endured every calamity. But then, because they did not understand my Master’s extraordinary situation, the politicians attempted to link him with a sort of politics, with which he has no connection, even throwing him into prison. But later Almighty God made his passion for knowledge into a key to the Qur’an’s truths, and the Risale-i Nur emerged, which has left all scholars and philosophers in amazement. Around that time, as a Divine favour I found close by in Kastamonu the Master I had been searching for all my life, whose nature was similar to mine but infinitely more elevated. I shall offer thanks for this to the end of my days.

Just as since early days, in order to preserve the dignity of learning my Master never accepted such things as charity and gifts, so he did not allow his students to accept them. He would bow before no one. In fact, not condescending to crouch down in the trenches in the front lines in the War, or even to enter them, he preserved the dignity of learning. Similarly, heroically preserving the honour of scholarship and teaching in the face of three awesome commanders, he was completely unmoved at their anger and silenced them. I therefore accepted him as my true Master, since I knew that he was someone who had sacrificed everything to preserve the high honour of this nation and country and the Turkish learned establishment. Even, if to suppose the impossible a Master so truly devoted to his country and nation had a hundred faults, they should be looked on tolerantly and not objected to.

A example showing that this country’s patriots in the Second Constitutional Period and the nationalists and patriots under the Republic appreciated in the name of the country and nation our Master’s extraordinary service to learning was that the Committee of Union and Progress government gave nineteen thousand gold liras for his university in the east called the Medresetü’z-Zehra. This was to be organized along the same lines of al-Azhar University. Its foundations were laid in Van Province, but it remained unbuilt due to the First World War. Then the first government of the Republic twenty-four years ago allotted one hundred and fifty thousand liras on the agreement of one hundred and sixty-three deputies. Our Master’s nearly succeeding on his own in founding a large university similar to al-Azhar, which was brought into being only through the enterprise of thousands of teachers, shows that all patriots and lovers