[A letter written by our Master to the Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, who approves of and appreciates the services rendered by the Risale‑i Nur to the country, nation, and Islam.]
In His Name, be He glorified!
I would have liked to speak with a champion of Islam like Adnan Menderes, but my circumstances do not allow it, for I am very ill and not concerned with politics. I have therefore written this letter to speak in my place, instead of a face‑to-face conversation.
I am going to elucidate a few very brief principles for Adnan Menderes, the champion of Islam:
The First Is One of Islam's Many Fundamental Laws
and is a true meaning of the verse, No bearer of burdens can bear the burden of another It is as follows: No one, neither friends nor relations, can be held responsible for another's crime. Whereas the partisanship of present party politics causes people to acquiesce in and consent to numerous innocents suffering harm on account of a single criminal. Due to a single criminal's crime, the supporters and relatives of the innocent are also maligned and humiliated; and because this multiplies the crime a hundredfold, it gives rise to terrible hatred and enmity; and breeding malice and rancour, it forces retaliation in kind. This a poison that completely overturns the life of society and prepares the ground for the intervention of external enemies. It is understood that the events and crises experienced in Iran and Egypt arose from action of this kind. But the situation with them is not the situation here; with us, it is comparatively less severe, only one per cent. God protect us! If it had been like that here, it would have been terrible indeed.
The sole solution for this danger is to make Islamic brotherhood and primary Islamic nationhood the foundation of that force, for the protection of innocent people and to ensure that the crimes of criminals remain restricted to themselves.
The above fundamental law is also the foundation of public peace and security.
For example, true justice and the fundamental law of public order and security demands that if one innocent person and ten criminals are found in a house or on a ship, the house or ship should not be attacked so that the innocent person may be saved and no harm comes to him. But when he is saved …
Thus, according to this Qur'anic fundamental law, the disturbance of internal order and violation of security thus casting into danger ninety innocents on account of ten criminals, is a means of attracting divine wrath. Since in these uncertain times, Almighty God has paved the way for a number of truly religious people to come to power, present circumstances warn that they should take this fundamental law of the Qur'an as a basis of action for themselves, to shield themselves against their malicious enemies.
Islam's Second Fundamental Law is the Hadith,
A people's ruler is its servant, which means that officialdom is service and should not lead to oppression and egotistical domination. But at the present time egotism has burgeoned due to the absence of Islamic training and deficient worship. And because officialdom has been made into ranks for the practice of arbitrary domination rather than service, justice cannot be administered and is in essence corrupted, like performing the prayers in any direction without the ablutions. And the people's rights are totally violated. The people's rights (hukuk‑u ibad) do not become hukukullah (that is, they are not sanctioned), that they may be rights. On the contrary, they are the cause of selfish injustices.
Adnan Menderes has now said that they are going to enact whatever is required by the religion of Islam. But there is a strong possibility that in absolute opposition to the two above‑mentioned fundamental laws, two awesome currents will go on the offensive in order to deceive the people with substantial bribes and will pave the way for foreign intervention.
The First Assault: In opposition to the first fundamental law, this has slaughtered forty innocent people due to one criminal and set fire to a village. Such absolute despotism bribes officials, granting them power and control and gratifying their souls, while religious lovers of freedom are persecuted.
The Second Assault: This is apparently a sort of nationalism which renounces the sacred nationhood of Islam, and like the previous one is able to trample the rights of a hundred innocents due to one criminal, but in reality, with its streak of racialism, strives against both the religious, freedom‑loving Democrats, and the members of other races who constitute seventy per cent of this country's population, and the wretched Turks, and the policies followed by the Democrats, producing only a racist brotherhood as an inauspiciously pleasurable bribe for good-for-nothing egotists. Out of their drunkenness they do not perceive the extraordinary danger of turning into enmity the true brotherhood which is a thousand times more beneficial than the thrills they get from that racist comradeship.
For example, racialism causes to be lost for the trivial worldly benefits of four hundred useless loafers, the moral and spiritual assistance received every day from the universal prayer, O God! Forgive all believing men and women, which is recited by four hundred million true brothers with a sense of Islamic nationhood. This is a grave danger for both this country, and the government, and the religious Democrats, and the Turks, and those who pursue it are not true Turks. The noble Turks avoid such errors.
It is quite clear from their actions that these two groups are attempting to take advantage of everything and to overturn the religious Democrats, and they are being made to do so. The sole solution in the face of these opponents and the internal and external enemies and their destruction, which absolutely has to be implemented, is to rely on the unshakeable power of the Qur'anic reality, with which forty Companions of the Prophet (UWBP) challenged and prevailed over forty states and which for one thousand four hundred years has had three or four million students, and to depend on the worldly pleasures and pleasures of everlasting happiness in the hereafter yielded by that reality. Otherwise those pitiless internal and external enemies of yours will magnify one error you commit, and adding to it the crimes committed by the supporters of the former regime, will load them all on you, just as they did to others before you. This constitutes a danger for both you and the country and nation the harms of which would be irreparable.
In return for your services and your accepting these facts, I myself and our Nurju brothers will pray to Almighty God for your success in your works for the good of Islam and for your preservation from the above‑mentioned dangers.
The Third: Another fundamental law related to the social life of Islam is the Hadith, The believers are like a well‑built structure with one firmly supporting the other. That is, to forget internal hostilities in the face of the aggression of external enemies and to support one another. Even the most primitive tribes have understood the advantages of this fundamental law, for when attacked by an enemy from outside, they desist from fighting against one another until the enemy is repulsed, even if the member of one tribe has killed the father or brother of someone belonging to another tribe, and they support one another. So it is with a thousand regrets that we say that incidents occur in which, as a consequence of the partisanship that arises from egotism, self‑advertisement, arrogance, and cruel politics, people shower blessings on Satan if he assists their side, and curse angels if they help the opposing side. In fact, I saw one righteous religious scholar speak so badly about another righteous scholar as to accuse him of disbelief, while enthusiastically praising an atheist who was inimical to Islam yet held the same ideas as himself and supported him. It was because of this that I have given up politics this last thirty-five years, as though fleeing from the Devil.
Furthermore, now it appears that when someone perpetrated a serious misdemeanour towards both Ramadan, and the marks of Islam, and this religious nation, his opponents were pleased at the situation. Whereas, just as consenting to disbelief is disbelief, so agreeing with misguidance, vice, and wrongdoing is misguidance, vice, and wrongdoing. I understood from this extraordinary situation that with the idea of exonerating themselves from their crimes in the nation's eyes, they want to show their opponents to be more irreligious and guilty than themselves and to see them thus. Awesome injustices of this sort both have perilous consequences, and overturning social morality, resemble a serious conspiracy against this country and nation and Islamic supremacy.
I was going to write more but for now I am sufficing with explaining these three essential points for the religious promoters of liberty.
Saîd Nursî