Emirdağ Letters Ii — 258. An Addendum to 'a Complaint to the Supreme Tribunal,' and a Defence — Emirdag Letters

In His Name, be He glorified! And there is nothing but it glorifies Him with praise

Peace be upon you and God's mercy and blessings!

An Addendum to 'A Complaint to the Supreme Tribunal,' and a Defence

My Dear, Loyal Brothers!

You may send a petition to the justice‑loving Democrats saying that I am ill and that they should do whatever they think is best. Our lawyer told us in the letter we received from him the day before yesterday that they are trying to differentiate between the books that contain indictable material and those that do not. They are making a pretext of one word out of thousands in one treatise and showing it to be an offence. Their malicious intention is to prevent the spread of the Risale-i Nur by not returning that treatise in a way that conforms with no law — just as they have always done upto the present. Also, although what they show to be an indictable offence in their decision, which has anyway been quashed by the Court of Appeal, is not against us, and although we have proved decisively the malice and with a table of true and false — the eighty errors in the public prosecutor's indictment, with the same antipathy they have made allegations against the four-hundred-page Zülfikar Collection due to a few lines about Islamic dress and inheritance that were written thirty to forty years ago and only mention what is written in one hundred thousand Qur'anic commentaries. What law in the world would permit them to seize that weighty collection and not return it to us?

Also, with the exception of two short pieces about repetition in the Qur'an and the angels, both Denizli Court and Ankara Criminal Court gave the decision to acquit and return to us all the works held for two years by Afyon Court since they could find nothing reprehensible in them. Then although the Isparta authorities at one time confiscated all the works, they returned all of them to their owners, Then they seized The Staff of Moses and Zülfikar on the pretext that they were being published in the old script without permission and held them for four years, but then because they could find nothing indictable in them returned all the one hundred and seventy volumes to us without any loss. And although the religious publications and official newspapers now express the same objections a hundred times more violently that we did in the name of right, towards some of the leaders of the former party, they showed this to be our most serious crime. … … …

Thus, while the truth of the matter is this, Afyon Court stated at the end of its decision, which was also printed in the old letters, not in the name of justice but out of bigoted love of that person who is dead and gone, in order to convict us and due mostly to the prosecutor's malice, that “Said and his friends call Mustafa Kemal anti‑religious and an anti-christ and they try to destroy the people's love for him, that's why we're convicting them!”

Surely, even if such objections towards a dead person were a thousand times greater, it would only constitute a personal case. There is something strange in this and there must be some other matter in it so that a court of justice has made such a ruling. Now that all the parts of the Risale‑i Nur which those people hold have been acquitted four times and the present Minister of Justice has decided, on the quashing of the Afyon Court decision which convicted us, that the Risale-i Nur contains nothing constituting an offence and that it has been acquitted three times, now in this era of the Democrat government, from which the whole nation awaits justice, compassion, and religion, if, due to the cunning schemes of the former tyrants, the Risale-i Nur is left to the abitrary devices of the ill-intentioned, it will be serious treachery against the Democrat government and will dash the nation's hopes of consolation.

My deputy in Ankara, Mustafa Sungur, gave the good news in the telegraph he sent on 17.11.1950 that the decision had been taken to return all the parts of the Risale‑i Nur to us, and that the just Justice Minister had endorsed the three acquittals. According to Sungur's subsequent letter, orders had been given for their return. Despite this, and despite his saying that he would verify this by telephone, Afyon Court is meaninglessly collecting all the files of both Eskişehir and Denizli Courts, and with the announcement of the amnesty and the courts' acquittals, it is mixing up those blessed works with those files and sixteen years of slanders and denunciations in order to refute them and throw them into their depository, The affairs of the Risale-i Nur should not be left to those persons who have deceived us for the past three years.

We wish to draw this most important matter to the attention of the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice.

Saîd Nursî

Note: An extraordinary incident which is one of many examples opposed to justice and religion: We many times requested the return of our Qur'an, which they had confiscated three years ago and which shows the visible miracle of the 2,800 instances of the name of Allah written in gold, but they failed to do so and they did not give it to us. Now the lawyer says that we should send a petition to the Head of the Directorate of Religious Affairs requesting its return. There are hundreds of such examples showing that plots are hatched against us due solely to malice and foreign intrigue. The Democrats, who so please us and the Islamic world, should be prudent, and they should save the Risale‑i Nur and us from these torments.