This is the summary of an instructive incident which is described in A Guide For Youth. One time, I was sitting by my window in Eskişehir Prison during the 'Republic Festival.' Opposite me, the older girls of the High School were laughing and dancing in the schoolyard. Suddenly their condition fifty years hence appeared to me, as though on a cinema screen. I saw that of those fifty to sixty girl students, forty to fifty had become earth in their graves, and were suffering torments. While ten were ugly seventy to eighty-year-olds who were despised where they might have expected love because they did not preserve their chastity when young. This I observed with complete certainty and I wept at their piteable states. Some of my friends in the prison heard my weeping, and came and asked me about it. I (old them: "Leave me alone for now, I want to be alone."
Yes, what I saw was reality, not imagination. Just as the summer and autumn are followed by winter, so the summer of youth and autumn of old age are followed by the winter of the grave and Intermediate Realm. If there was a cinema which showed the events of fifty years in the future, the same as those of fifty years ago are shown in the present, and the people of misguidance and vice were to be shown their circumstances of fifty or sixty years hence, they would weep in horror and disgust at their unlawful pleasures and those things at which they now laugh.
When preoccupied with these observations in Eskişehir Prison, a collective personality which spreads vice and misguidance was embodied before me like a human satan. It said:
"We want to experience all the pleasures and joys of life, and to make others experience them; don't interfere with us!"
I replied: Since you do not recall death and plunge yourself into vice and misguidance for pleasure and enjoyment, you should certainly know that due to your misguidance, all the past is dead and non-existent; it is a desolate graveyard full of rotted bodies. The suffering arising from those innumerable separations and the eternal deaths of those numberless friends inflicted on your head through the concern of your humanity and your misguidance, and on your heart if you have one and it is not dead, will soon destroy your insignificant drunken pleasure of the present. The future too,due to your unbelief, is a non-existent, black, dead, and desolate wasteland. And since the heads of the unfortunates who appear from there, sticking them out into existence while stopping by in the present, are struck off by the executioner's sword of the appointed hour and thrown into nonexistence, due to the concern of your intellect, it continuously rains down grievous worries on your unbelieving head, completely overturning your petty, dissolute pleasure.
If you give up vice and misguidance and enter the sphere of certain, verified belief4 and righteousness, you will see through the light of belief that the past is not non-existent and a graveyard that rots everything, but an existent, light-filled world which is transformed into the future and into a waiting-room for the immortal spirits who will enter palaces of bliss in the future. Since it appears thus, it affords not pain, but according to the strength of belief, a sort of paradaisical pleasure. The future, too, appears to the eye of belief not as a dark wasteland, but where banquets and exhibitions of gifts have been set up in palaces of everlasting bliss by the Most Merciful and Compassionate One of Glory and Bestowal, Whose mercy and munificence are infinite and Who makes the spring and summer into tables laden with bounties. Since, knowing he will be despatched there, a person observes this on the cinema screen of belief, he may experience in a way the pleasures of the eternal realm. All may do this according to their degree. That is to say, true, painfree pleasure is found only in belief in God, and is possible only through belief.
Being related to our discussion, we shall explain here by means of a comparison, which is included in A Guide For Youth as a footnote, only a singie benefit and pleasure out of the thousands that belief produces in this world too. It is as follows:
For example, your beloved only child is suffering the pangs of death and you are thinking despairingly of your being eternally parted from him. Then suddenly a doctor like Khidr or Luqman the Wise arrives with a wondrous medicine. Your lovely and lovable child opens his eyes, delivered from death. You can understand what joy and happiness it would give you.
--------------------------------------------------
4. According to Bediuzzaman, the aim of the Risale-i Nur is to gain for its readers 'certain, verified belief (ітапч tahkiki). This has been defined as: "To acquire certain knowledge of all questions related to belief through close investigation, and to live that belief... Firm, unshakeable belief." See, Abdullah Yeğin, Yeni Lugai (3rd. edn.) (Istanbul: 1975), 271.