FIFTEENTH HOPE19

One time when I was in compulsory residence in Emirdağ,20 in what was virtually solitary confinement, I became wearied of life due to the torments they inflicted on me with their surveillance and arbitrary treatment, which I found hard to bear, and I  regretted having been released from prison. I longed for Denizli Prison with all my spirit, and wanted to enter the grave. But while thinking, prison and the grave are preferable to such a life, and deciding to enter one or the other, divine grace came to my assistance: it bestowed on the students of the Medresetü’z-Zehra,21 whose pens were like duplicating machines, one of the machines, which had just appeared. All at once, five hundred copies each of the valuable collections of the Risale-i Nur appeared  from  a  single  pen.  Their  presaging  new  victories  made  me  love  that distressing life, and caused me to offer unending thanks.

A while later, unable to endure the Risale-i Nur’s victories, its covert enemies prompted the government to act against us. Again life became difficult for me. Then suddenly dominical grace was manifested: the officials connected with the case, who were those most in need of  the Risale-i Nur, studied the confiscated copies in the course of their duties most curiously and carefully, and its treatises gave their hearts a sense of bias towards it. As they began to  appreciate it rather than criticize it, the Risale-i Nur’s circle of study greatly expanded. It produced profits a hundred times greater than our material losses, reducing to nothing our anxiety and distress.

Then, secret, hostile dissemblers directed the government’s attention towards my person.  They recalled my former political activities. They aroused suspicions about me in both the judiciary, and the education authorities, and the police, and the Home Affairs Office. These spread at the hand of the different parties and the incitement of concealed  communist  anarchists.  They  started  to  pressure  us  and  arrest  us,  and confiscate the parts of the Risale-i Nur that fell into their hands. The activities of the Risale-i  Nur  students  came  to  a  standstill.  A  number  of  officials  made  false accusations which no one at all could believe.  They tried to spread around the most extraordinary slander, but they could make no one believe it.

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19 This Fifteenth Hope was written by a Nurju to complete in the future the Treatise for the Elderly, and as a source for its composition, since the period of the Risale-i Nur’s writing had come to an end three years’ previously.

20 The small town in central Anatolia where Bediuzzaman was exiled in 1944, following his release from Denizli Prison. He remained in compulsory residence here until 1951, with a break of

twenty months in Afyon Prison, from January 1948 to September 1949. (Tr.)

21 The name of the university Bediuzzaman strove throughout his life to found in eastern Anatolia, where the religious sciences would be taught together with the modern sciences.  He received funds from Sultan Reşad and laid the foundations on the shores of Lake Van in 1911, but it was not

completed due to the outbreak of World War I. With the spread of the Risale-i Nur in the first decades of the republic, Risale-i Nur Medreses, or places where the Risale-i Nur was studied or copies of it were written, opened throughout Turkey. Bediuzzaman then called the Risale-i Nur students, students of the Medresetü’z-Zehra. (Tr.)