Emirdağ Letters Ii — 340. A Reply to the Fabricated News That Our Master Was Touring the Villages — Emirdag Letters

A reply to the fabricated news that our Master was touring the villages; it is nothing to worry about.

A statement we presented to the police in Isparta, where our Master Said Nursi has been staying as a guest for the last two years.

1. Our Master Said Nursi has considered himself to be a guest of the police in all the provinces and towns of Anatolia in which he has stayed over the past thirty years, and the members of those police forces have always treated him kindly and protectively. Our Master began to compose the Risale‑i Nur, a genuine, brilliant commentary on the Qur'an, thirty years ago in Isparta, and initiated a truly effective way of serving the truths of belief. One benefit of this service, which is turned to the hereafter, is its instilling in the heart by reason of belief, a permanent sense that restrains from evil. It is due to this that it is a means of maintaining public order.

He also disseminated everywhere the Qur'anic principle which ensures true justice and is derived from the verse, No bearer of burdens can bear the burden of another , meaning that no one is answerable for another's errors. According to this and the principle that the rights of one innocent person may not be sacrificed for even a hundred wrongdoers, it is completely opposed to the Qur'an's injunctions to cause harm to ninety innocents because of ten criminals. And despite the injustices visited on himself, he stated that for the good of the Islamic nation he would sacrifice his life in the hereafter, let alone his life in this world, and he does say this.

As affirmed by those patriotic persons who are concerned with social tranquillity, by reason of both the Risale‑i Nur's instruction in the truths of belief and the Qur'anic truths in his court defences which resulted in acquittals, our Master, who teaches those truths — which guide society to happiness in this world and the next — is the chief means of preserving public order and ensuring general security. He has been scrutinized in every respect by numerous investigations these last thirty years, yet absolutely nothing pertaining to him has been found to be indictable. Indeed, following the acquittals and his works being granted complete freedom, the works are spreading everywhere and meeting with approval and applause in Anatolia and in the centres of the Islamic world and some places in the West.

In the face of such aggressive, corrupting currents as communism, which opposing religion, morality, and tradition, have overrun with their destruction half Europe and China and which threaten the whole world and force governments to take preventative measures, and faced too by covert, criminal societies which strive to create anarchy, our Master Said Nursi's works, the Risale‑i Nur, have performed a disinterested, effective, and widespread service. Holding up as witnesses the good conduct of its readers, which with the spread of its hundreds of thousands of copies, have reached similar numbers, and citing the fact that, as affirmed by the police, not one of the Nur students has disturbed public order, we say that the Risale-i Nur is a Qur'anic barrier which will halt those destructive currents. Fair-minded members of the police attest to this.

Let alone the benefits of service to belief that look to the hereafter, at one time our Master explained as follows a vital benefit for the nation, and time has shown just how right he was.

He said then that there were two awesome currents that were threatening the happiness of this country and nation in respect of both this life and the afterlife.

The First was the irreligious current that had appeared to the north and was threatening to overrun this country; it had to be countered with the Qur'an's truths and the lights of belief, For since its destruction was moral and spiritual, the struggle against it had to be conducted by moral and spiritual means. The Risale‑i Nur, which consists of flashes from the Qur'an's truths, could oppose that current of misguidance as a repairer of the force of an atom bomb, and it did oppose it.

Secondly: In order to dispel the Islamic world's hostility towards the Turkish nation, which for a thousand years was the standard‑bearer and heroic army of Islam, it is to re-establish the idea of the Turks being its standard-bearer, as they were in former times. It is to perform a crucially important service for this nation's happiness by in this way winning for it four hundred million true brothers. By disseminating the truths of belief in this country, the Risale-i Nur has demonstrated this tremendous benefit in fact.

A Risale‑i Nur student halted the Russians' propaganda in the eastern border regions with the treatises of the Risale-i Nur and the homilies he derived from them. In this way, a single student performed the services of an army for the country, nation, and public order. Since the aims and purposes of the Risale-i Nur look only to the hereafter and serve belief seeking divine pleasure alone, it is also most beneficial for the life of society by reason of the worldly benefits it reaps.

2. The following facts leave no need to say anything further: due to the thirty to forty years of isolation, solitude, illness, and imprisonment he has suffered, our Master cannot endure to meet with people unnecessarily and from the evening to the following morning does not allow even his assistants to approach him, and so has offended his friends who have come to visit him from far off. Ever since his youth, it has been characteristic of our Master Said Nursi to be solitary and not to meet with people unnecessarily. He did not even invite his only surviving brother to visit him, although he lived in a nearby town and he had not seen him for thirty years. The people who attend to his needs even cannot enter his room from evening to morning unless there is some compelling need. Due to his severe illness and his being unable to endure meeting with people, he has wounded many of his friends who have come from distant places by refusing to see them. Since all of our Master's extraordinary contributions with the Risale‑i Nur to maintaining civil order are known to the police, who for thirty years have displayed a friendly attitude towards him and everything about him has been scrutinized by them and by the courts, it is their duty as the defenders of the public's rights not to spoil their favourable view of him which is based on observation, due to the fabrications of a few atheists and enemies of religion.

3. Our Master is ill and cannot attend the Friday prayers even. Sometimes he feels an overpowering need for fresh air. He goes to Barla — but only rarely — where he lived for ten years and where he as a room and he stays for some time. Sometimes in the summer he visits places that are far from habitation and there is no one. He remains for a few hours, then returns. He travels by car due to his advanced years, inability to walk, and indisposition, and so that the people's adulation does not discomfort him. He goes nowhere apart from this, to no village or inhabited place, and for the above‑mentioned reasons does not even visit places where his friends of thirty years are found. These, then, are his circumstances, and this is his true situation .