In His Name, be He glorified!
Some Notes Our Master Dictated, and We Wrote Down
The underlying reason for the two trials this year need to be explained. The reason for the trial here was this:
Fifty years ago, I interpreted a Hadith about the Sufyan and the brimmed hat. Then much later the courts said that this was an attack on a commander. One reason for the severity of the sentence handed down to me by Afyon Court was shown to be that attack. But it had not been written at that time and the commander was not alive. Although the hundred million Muslims living under British rule repudiated both it and its religion, this was not held to be an offence. And the newspapers now strike at least twenty times more severely than I did with that Hadith at that commander, at those former leaders and commanders, yet they are not charged with offences and are free to do so. Fifty years ago I cast the stone of a Hadith and twenty years later it struck the head of a commander and broke it. He is now dead and gone and his relations with the government and this world are severed. Whereas now the assaults on the leaders of the former party (RPP) as deputies or officials and although they are connected with the government, are perhaps a hundred times greater than the slap the Risale‑i Nur dealt, but the newspapers are free to publish them.
The truth about the books being seized is this: only one or two pages of a single book out of the one hundred and thirty‑three books of the Risale-i Nur mentioned that slap. So to seize all the books because of it is a cruel injustice like punishing one hundred and thirty-three men because of one man's error. The books of anti-patriotic, anti-religious atheists, heretics, and communists being found in bookshops and libraries and people reading them, even the thoroughly anti-Islamic book of Dr. Dozy, demonstrates that this seizure of the Risale-i Nur is an unjustifiable, wrongful injustice.
No religious scholar or philosopher has objected to or criticized the Risale‑i Nur these past twenty-eight years although it has been distributed in the main centres of the Islamic world and in this country. The courts and politicians have objected to only two matters; one, about Islamic dress, the other about a commander at the end of time wearing a brimmed hat and forcibly making others wear it. Subsequently, four or five courts acquitted all the books including those two matters. So now to seize the Risale-i Nur with its twenty thousand pages due to those one or two pages, as though convicting it, resembles this:
if a man attacks another, not unfairly but fairly, but others do not deem this an offence nor do five courts of law count it a crime, to seize twenty thousand pages of the Risale‑i Nur because of two pages and imprison them in Afyon for four and a half years, like convicting twenty thousand men due to an imaginary offence, is an error and crime a hundred times greater than that attack, and an assault against this country.
Saîd Nursî