My Dear, Loyal Brothers!
Today I took a look at a large gilded and bound collection containing the pieces sent to me as a memento by the innocent children and community of unlettered elderly, which was one of the books handed over to me by the court after two years' investigation. It occurred to me to send you a short piece included at the beginning of the collection, which I had written for Kastamonu. Perhaps a copy was sent to you before. I felt certain that this collection written with innocent sincerity by the children and unlettered had played an important part in defeating the philosophers and the obdurate; it had broken their obduracy and caused the unjust to be fair‑minded. We had gathered together in three volumes the pieces sent to me by the unlettered, and I am sending you the piece that I saw had been written at the beginning.
I am sending together with this, a collection composed of eight pieces indicating the Risale‑i Nur's acceptance, and a piece that deserves to be written at the beginning of the collection, which in addition to The Wonders of the Gawth al-A'zam, The Wonders of Imam 'Ali, and The Qur'anic Signs, has had added to it three or four pieces consisting of additional letters and so on.
I send my greetings to my brothers and especially to the innocents and the unlettered, and I pray for them and await their prayers. And I ask God to bless them. Whoever sees their writings, applauds them delightedly.
They sent me the copies written by fifty to sixty innocent young students, and I have collected them together in three volumes.
Below are some of them as an example:
| Ömer | 15 years old | Mustafa | 13 | Hâfız Nebi | 14 | Hicret | 15 | Hüseyin | 11 | Ahmed Zeki | 13 | Ayşe | 11 | Hâfız Ahmed | 12 | Mustafa | 14 | Bekir | 9 | Ali | 12 | Ayşe | 11 |
The treatises in this collection are just some that the innocent children have written and taken lessons from, from the Risale‑i Nur. Their serious efforts at this time shows that the Risale-i Nur provides greater pleasure, joy, and zeal than all the amusements and incentives they have thought up in the secular schools to encourage the children to study. This shows that the Risale-i Nur is taking root. God willing, nothing will be able to root it out and it will continue down forthcoming generations.
Just like these innocent young students, the illiterate elderly who enter the inviting fold of the Risale‑i Nur learn to read and write after the age of forty or fifty for the Risale-i Nur's sake. The forty or fifty pieces they have written are included in two or three collections. The way these elderly untaught people and some shepherds and mountain folk are working for the Risale-i Nur in preference to anything in the extraordinary conditions of the times, shows that the need for it is greater than the need for bread, and that the harvesters, farmers, shepherds, and foresters consider the truths of the Risale-i Nur to be a need more essential than other essential needs.
I had the greatest difficulty correcting what the innocents and elderly untaught people had written in this and the other six volumes; I did not have the time. But then it occurred to me and I was as though told: Don't get fed up! Since what they have written can't be read quickly, hasty people have to read it slowly, and the intellect, and the heart, and the spirit, and the soul, and the emotions may receive their share of the Risale‑i Nur's truths, which are like food and sustenance. Otherwise, only the intellect receives a partial share and the other faculties remain without sustenance.
The Risale‑i Nur should not be read like other books and sciences, for the sciences of certain affirmative belief (îmân-ı tahkikî ilimleri) that it contains do not resemble other sorts of knowledge. They are the sustenance and light of numerous subtle human faculties besides the reason.
In Short: There are two advantages in the deficient writings of innocent children and the illiterate elderly:
The First is that they force one to read slowly and carefully.
The Second is listening from their innocent, sincere, sweet tongues the glorious, profound matters of the Risale‑i Nur and taking lessons from them,
The Enduring One, He is the Enduring One!Your brother,Saîd Nursî