A Conversation with the Minister of Justice and the Judges Concerned with the Risale‑i Nur
An Addendum to the Conversation with Myself
Sirs! Why are you concerning yourselves with me and with the Risale‑i Nur? I tell you certainly that it is outside my duty and that of the Risale-i Nur even to think of you, let alone struggle against you. For the Risale-i Nur and its genuine students are striving to perform a service of the great- est importance for the generations of fifty years hence, and to save them and this nation and country from grave danger. Those who are now struggling against us will then be dust in their graves. If to suppose the impossible that striving for well-being and happiness had been oppositional struggle, it would in any case have been futile to bother with those doomed to be dust in the grave.
Just as the laxity in social morality, religion, and the national character displayed by the libertarians [of the Second Constitutional Period] has resulted now twenty to thirty years later in the present state of religion and morality; so you may surely understand what the state fifty years hence will be of this religious, honourable, and heroic nation's sons in regard to religion and social morality. Although this self‑sacrificing nation has for a thousand years displayed matchless heroism in the service of the Qur'an, the coming generations will besmirch its shining past; indeed, will destroy it. We therefore know it to be a national and patriotic duty of paramount importance to convey a truth like the Risale-i Nur to some of those people of the future in order to save them from such a ghastly decline, and so we think of them and not of the people now.
Sirs! It is true that the Risale‑i Nur looks only to the hereafter and it's aim is God's pleasure and to save the belief of people, and its students strive to save themselves and others from eternal non-being and everlasting incarceration, but it also performs a vital service of secondary importance that concerns this world, which is to save this nation and country from the danger of anarchy and the wretched members of coming generations from absolute misguidance. For Muslims do not resemble other people; one who renounces his religion and loses his Islamic character falls into absolute misguidance and becomes an anarchist who can no longer be controlled.
Fifty per cent of people now received the old Islamic upbringing and fifty per cent are unconcerned with national and Islamic traditions, but in fifty years' time ninety per cent will follow only their own whims and desires and lead the nation and country into anarchy. The thought of this calamitous possibility and the search for a solution drove me twenty years ago to give up politics and prevented me entirely from struggling with the people of this century. So too it prevented the Risale‑i Nur and its students from evincing any interest in current events; they neither engage in any struggle nor are involved in any way.
Since the truth is this, the courts should consider it their primary duty to protect the Risale‑i Nur and its students, not to incriminate me and them. For they are defending a primary right of this nation and country, and in opposition to them, this nation and country's real enemies attack the Risale-i Nur and confuse the courts, driving them to perpetrate a ghastly injustice. Here I shall describe one or two examples:
For Example: Because of a letter that conveyed the greetings of my friends in prison and was sent to a man here so that ten liras, which was the price of an Arabic treatise of mine, should be given to a person in Isparta who held those copies and had paid for the printing costs, both the judiciary and the government harassed me, and they searched the man who was the go‑between. It surely does not befit the high standing of the judiciary to blow up to this extent a commonplace letter of no importance, the only correspondence in a period of six months.
Second Example: It is hardly in keeping with the government of this province to scare with an official campaign of propaganda everyone, even his helpers, away from an elderly, ailing guest like myself, who is a stranger and has been acquitted of all charges, and to make him utterly wretched. With its sound judgement, it surely should not stoop to making a mountain out of a molehill in this unprecedented way and causing everyone consternation by asking: “Who does he meet with? Who goes around with him?” There are numerous other such examples that cause astonishment to those who know about them.
Sirs! It is easy to dispel misguidance and misconduct if they arise from ignorance, but if they arise from science and knowledge, they are extremely difficult to eliminate. Since at the present time misguidance arises from science and learning, a work like the Risale‑i Nur that is in every way perfect is needed to save those of the coming generations who fall into misguidance, so that they may resist it.
Evidence that the Risale‑i Nur can do this is that not one of my many, fierce opponents or the men of learning who have received its blows has been able to refute or counter it; nor have three courts of law or the experts' committee appointed by the central government been able to find in nine months a single matter in the hundred books of which the Risale-i Nur consists to indict us. Furthermore, the treatises entitled The Qur'anic Signs and The Predictions of Imam 'Ali and Gawth al-A'zam (İhbarat-ı Gaybiye-i Aleviye ve Gavsiye), which have induced complete certainty in the rigorous Risale-i Nur students, have put their signatures to the importance of the Risale-i Nur this age, and to its acceptability.
It is the duty of the courts to defend rights and to halt the aggression of the lawless, It has been established that the hundred parts of the Risale‑i Nur have for the last twenty years served the well-being of a hundred thousand people, and in ten years two courts, the central government, and the police of several provinces — and in connection with Denizli Court, nine months of scrutiny — have found nothing harmful for the nation and country or indictable in any of my papers and writings, both private and otherwise. Most certainly, therefore, the Risale-i Nur possesses universal, powerful rights in this country. So I remind you that it in no way befits the nature of the judiciary or the reality of justice to disregard such important rights and to ignore by confiscating it as though it were mere scraps of paper, the great injustice towards the nation and the unfortunates who are in need of having their faith strengthened, while attaching considerable importance to the minor rights of some inferior wretch.
We are fearful that it may may attract divine wrath if the Risale‑i Nur is attacked while the works of atheists like Dr. Dozy are not interfered with. May Almighty God grant you fair-mindedness and compassion, and us patience and fortitude. Amen.
Said Nursi,who is being held unofficially in total isolation