An Addendum to the Defence Speech
You can send a petition to the justice‑loving Democrats in the following vein. I am ill, so write it in whatever way you deem appropriate.
The letter we received yesterday from our lawyer states that in a way that conforms with no law, they have made a pretext of one single word out of thousands and with the idea of vindictively preventing the spread of the Risale‑i Nur, said it constitutes an offence and have not returned that treatise. Although according to the decision of the Appeal Court which totally quashed their decision, what they showed to be an offence was not against us, and although we proved decisively the eighty errors in the public prosecutor's indictment and his malice, now with the same malice they have stated that a few lines about Islamic dress and inheritance in the four-hundred-page Zülfikar Collection that were written thirty or forty years ago, about which a hundred thousand Qur'anic commentaries have said the same things, constitute an offence and they have confiscated the work and refuse to return it. Is there any law in the world that would permit this?
Also, with the exception of two short pieces about repetition in the Qur'an and the angels, all the works held by Afyon Court have been acquitted by both Denizli Court and Ankara Criminal Court, having been investigated for two years, and the same works were all returned to their owners by the Isparta authorities after having been seized at some time. Then Zülfikar and The Staff of Moses were confiscated and held for four years on the pretext that they were published in the old script without permission, and all one hundred and seventy copies of the collections were returned to us with no losses because they could find nothing reprehensible in them. And what they showed to be our most serious offence, our objecting in the name of truth to some of the leaders of the former party, are now being reiterated a hundred times more violently in the official newspapers and religious journals. Whereas, a confidential piece of the Risale‑i Nur proved when expounding a truth that specifically pinpointed the present, that it was “a dead leader.”
Although that is the truth, the judges' panel in Afyon Court stated at the end of its decision, which was also written in the old script, not in the name of justice but out of bigoted love of that dead man and chiefly due to the prosecutor's malice:
“Said and his friends called Mustafa Kemal a wrecker of religion and the Sufyan, and they have tried to destroy the people's love for him. That's why we're convicting them.”
Could there be a public trial for such a criticism of a person who is dead and gone, even if it were a thousand times stronger. To give such a judgement in a court of justice surely means that there is some other matter at hand.
Although the books of the Risale‑i Nur that such people are holding have four times been acquitted, and the present Interior Minister and former Justice Minister have three times ruled for their acquittal and stated that they contain nothing reprehensible, and that with the quashing of the Afyon decision to convict us, they contain nothing constituting an offence, now at the time the whole nation awaits justice, compassion, and service of religion from the Democrat government, to leave the Risale-i Nur to the abitrary whims of the evil-intentioned due to the machinations of the former despots, is grievous treachery towards the Democrat government and destroys the nation's hopes of consolation.
My deputy in Ankara is Mustafa Sungur. He 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. So although the just Justice Minister has three times acquitted them and now according to Sungur's letter, orders have been given for their return, Afyon Court is collecting all the slanderous reports and denunciations of sixteen years as well as the records of the Denizli and Eskişehir trials, and with the announcement of the amnesty and the court acquittals, is mixing up those blessed works and those reports and records in order to refute them, and is depositing them all in its store. The affairs of the Risale-i Nur should not be left to the devices of those persons who have deceived us this last three years. I am presenting this most important matter for the attention of the Prime Minister, Minister of Education, and Interior Minister.
Saîd Nursî