by the Risale-i Nur1 2at Mustafa Kemal, and they did not bother about it and acquitted us, returning all our books to us including the Fifth Ray. Moreover, his bad deeds were pointed out in order to preserve the army’s worth. One person was disliked in order to affectionately praise the army.
The Third: “He encourages the breaching of public security.” This extraordinary accusation is refuted by the facts that over a period of twenty years six courts and the police of ten provinces have not recorded a single instance when any of the hundred thousand Nurju’s and hundred thousand copies of parts of the Risale-i Nur breached public security or disturbed public order, and they have not found any such thing. It is meaningless to reply to a few unimportant matters in this new indictment, for three courts of law have acquitted us on these very points and they have been replied to repeatedly. Since charging us with these matters is the equivalent of charging Ankara Criminal Court and the Courts of Denizli and Eskişehir, which acquitted us concerning them, I leave it to them to reply. But there are two or three further matters.
The First: Although it was studied for two years in the closest detail by Denizli and Ankara Criminal Courts and they acquitted us and returned the book, this Indictment applies one or two matters in the Fifth Ray to a commander who is dead and gone and shows them to be indictable offences. So we say: absolutely no law can deem it an offence to make a fair, general criticism which might be made applicable to a person who dead and gone and has no connection with the Government.
Manipulating the facts, the prosecution has taken one aspect of that general interpretation and applied it to that commander. No law can consider it a crime if one hundredth of a meaning which may be understood as referring to someone is found in a confidential and private treatise. Moreover, the treatise expounds allegorical Hadiths in wondrous fashion.
The wrong meaning has been given in the Indictment, for it has deemed an offence some instances of the Risale-i Nur’s ‘wonder-working’ (kerâmet) which took the form of ‘slaps’. As though disasters like the earthquakes that occur when the Risale-i Nur is attacked are blows dealt by the Risale-i Nur. God forbid! We never said such a thing, nor wrote it. What we said in many places supported by proof was that like acceptable almsgiving, the Risale-i Nur is a means of repulsing disasters. Whenever it is attacked, it hides itself; then calamities seize the opportunity and assault us. Yes, confirmed by thousands of Risale-i Nur students and what they have observed, supported by hundreds of incidents and events and their ‘coincidences’,20 which in no way could have been attributed to chance, as well as numerous indications and ‘coincidences’ of the Qur’an, some of which were even pointed out in court, I have formed the certain conviction that those ‘coincidences’ are a Divine bestowal indicating the Risale-i Nur’s acceptability and are a sort of wonder of the Risale-i Nur on account of the Qur’an.
‘Coincidences’ (tevâfukat): the unintentional correspondence of words or letters in lines or patterns on one or several pages, or the ‘coinciding’ of apparently unrelated events. [Tr.]