Then they arrested me during the coldest days of winter on some trite pretext, and put me into solitary confinement in prison in a large and extremely cold ward,  leaving me two  days without a stove. I was accustomed to light my stove several times a day in my small room and always had live coals in the brazier, so with my illness and weakness  I could endure it only with difficulty. While struggling in this situation suffering from both a fever and the cold, and dreadful distress and anger, a truth unfolded in my heart through divine grace. It uttered the following warning to my spirit:

“You called prison the Medrese-i Yûsufiye – the School of the Prophet Joseph, and while in Denizli, things like relief a thousand times greater than your distress, and spiritual  profit,  and  the  other  prisoners  benefiting  from  the  Risale-i Nur, and  its widespread triumphs, all made you offer endless thanks instead of complaining. They made  each hour of  your imprisonment  and  hardship  the equivalent of ten hours’ worship, and made those passing hours eternal. God willing, the calamity-stricken in this third School of Joseph benefiting from the Risale-i Nur and finding consolation will heat this cold, severe distress of yours and transform it into joy. If the people you are angry at are being deceived and are ill-treating you without realizing it, they are not worth being angry at. And if they are tormenting you and causing you suffering knowingly, out of spite and on account of misguidance, they will in a short time enter the solitary confinement of the grave due to the eternal execution of death, to suffer everlasting torment and torture. Their oppression is  earning for you both merit and spiritual pleasures,  and  is  making transient  hours  eternal,  and  is allowing  you  to perform scholarly and religious duties with sincerity.”

With all my strength I exclaimed: “All praise be to God!” Out of humanity, I pitied  those tyrants and prayed: “O my Sustainer, reform them!” As I wrote in my statement to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in this new incident the truly guilty are those tyrants who in ten respects act unlawfully in the name of the law. They found extraordinary  pretexts  showing   to   anyone  fair-minded  with  their  slanders  and fabrications, which would have made those who heard them laugh and lovers of the truth weep, that they can find no way to attack the  Risale-i Nur and its students in respect of the law and right, so deviate into lunacy.

For  instance,  the  officials  who  spied  on  us  for  a  month  could  find  nothing incriminating, so they wrote out a memorandum saying: “Said’s servants bought rak› from a shop and took it to him.” They could find no one to sign the memo, but finally arrested a drunken stranger and got him to sign it under threat. Even he said: “God forgive us! Who would sign this extraordinary lie?” So they were compelled to tear it up.