This Petition was Sent to Three Departments of Government
A Source of Reference for my Brothers There
I want you to listen to the complaints of someone who for twenty years has suffered patiently in silence.
The Republican government allows the widest possible freedom, yet I am deprived of every liberty and my enemies freely persecute me in every way. Since the government guarantees freedom of conscience and freedom of thought and scholarship, it should either offer me full protection and silence my ill‑intentioned, suspicious enemies, or allow me the freedom to write like my enemies and not forbid my defence, For secret official orders have evidently been given to the post offices to obstruct all my correspondence, And now, just when no one other than the single child who brings me bread and water is permitted to meet with me and I was awaiting our acquittal by the Court of Appeal and expecting the return of my books which the experts' committee appointed by the court had applauded, my opponents of many years have seized the opportunity and passed one or two of my confidential treatises that are nothing to do with me to one or two members of the [new] experts' committee who due to their profession are opposed to me and have now drawn up a derogatory report against me. My patience and endurance are exhausted, So I proclaim to the members of the Republican government, and to the whole world even:
By virtue of the mystery of the All‑Wise Qur'an's truth and of its mirac- ulous inimitability, the programme of myself and of the Risale-i Nur and our way and its fruits which we have striven for and seen, and our objective and goal, is through certain, affirmative belief (îmân-ı tahkikî) to save unfortunates from the eternal nothingness of death and to protect this blessed nation from every sort of anarchy.
The last twenty years of my life and the one hundred and thirty parts of the Risale‑i Nur furnish incontrovertible proof that the Risale-i Nur, which has been scrutinized by three experts' committees and three courts of law, includes nothing that intentionally infringes any worldly matters or government or public security. As I have stated in the courts and as is affirmed by all my friends with whom I am in touch, this wretched, oppressed Said has never in twenty years applied to the government and for the last ten years, with one or two exceptions, has not known the members of the government, and for the last four years has neither been informed about nor curious about the world war and its events. Is it at all possible that I should contend with politicians, interfere with government, or want to disturb public order? If I had had the slightest inclination to do those things, I would have tried to discover potential opponents, and what was going on in the world, and who would assist me. I would have been curious and meddlesome, and would have tried with trickery to ingratiate myself with the powerful.
A minor but most upsetting incident was as follows: I wrote a secret letter to my friends, telling them to find some pretext to have me sent to prison so that I could be saved from my total isolation, deprived of all correspondence, and I could be delivered from this torment. I sent the letter by hand in the hope that I would be close to my books from the Risale‑i Nur that were in the court at Denizli and are my life's capital and result and are decorated in the finest manner, and I could try to have them returned. But regretably just one member of the experts' committee there who was hostile to me saw the letter although he was defending me and was compelled to judge against my being sent to prison.
Another of the pretexts of my enemies who had me cast into prison was Sufism, of which I had been acquitted by that court. However, in the Risale‑i Nur I said: “The present is not the time for Sufism; it's the time to save belief. For many people go to Paradise without Sufism, but none go there without belief,” and I have worked with all my strength for the cause of belief. I am a teacher, I am not a shaykh. I have no house anywhere, so where could I have a tekke? This twenty years not one single person has appeared who said that I have given him instruction in Sufism, and no court or police has found anyone. There is the treatise called The Nine Allusion (Telvihat‑ı Tis'a), which I wrote long ago and is a scholarly expo- sition of the truths the Sufi orders teach, but it is instruction in reality (hakikat) and is factual (ilmî); it is not instruction in the Sufi way.
Surely it is an important duty of the Republican government, since it has taken freedom of conscience as a fundamental principle, to defend a truth to which the spirits of this nation's millions of forebears were devoted and in the cause of which they challenged the world, and a work that proves certain affirmative belief against the prevailing philosophy, and to protect that truth's servants. The principles of such a republic would not bind up the hands of that weak servant and permit those numerous enemies of his to attack him. Thinking that the Republic would heed me I wrote this complaint. Indeed, I say: For us God suffices, and He is the best Disposer of Affairs .