The worldly are exceptionally and excessively suspicious of me; quite simply, they are frightened of me. Imagining about me non-existent things that even if they did exist would not constitute a political crime and could not be the cause of accusation, like being a shaikh, or having high rank or belonging to a powerful family, or being a tribal leader and influential and having numerous followers, or meeting with people from my native region, or being involved in the affairs of the world, or even entering politics or the opposition; imagining such things about me, they have been carried away by groundless fears. At a time they are discussing pardoning those in prison and outside, that is, those that according to them cannot be pardoned, they have quite simply barred me from everything. A bad and ephemeral person wrote the following good and enduring words:

If tyranny has cannon, shot, and forts,

Right has an untwistable arm, a constant face. And I say:

If the worldly have rule, power, and strength,

Through the Qur’an’s effulgence, its servant

Has unfaltering knowledge, an unsilenceable voice;

He has an unerring heart, an unquenchable light.

Many friends, as well as a military commander under whose surveillance I was, repeatedly  asked:  “Why  don’t  you  apply  for  the  release  papers  and  present  a petition?”

T h e  A n s w e r : I do not apply and I cannot apply for five or six reasons:

The First: I did not interfere in the worldly’s world that I should have been convicted and so apply to them. I was convicted by divine determining; my faults are before it, and I apply to it.

The Second: I believe and have certain knowledge that this world is a swiftly changing guesthouse. It is not the true homeland and everywhere is the same. Since I will not remain permanently in my home region, it is pointless to struggle for it; it is not worth going there. Since everywhere is a guesthouse, if the mercy of the guesthouse’s Owner befriends one, everyone is a friend and everywhere is familiar. Whereas if it does not befriend one, everywhere is a load on the heart and everyone is hostile.

The Third: Application should be within the framework of the law, but the way I have been treated these six years has been arbitrary and outside the law. The Exiles’ Law was not applied to me. They looked on me as being stripped of all the rights of civilization and even of all worldly rights. It is meaningless to apply in the name of the law to those whose treatment of me has been thus outside the law.