An Addendum to the Addition to My Written Objections to the Indictment Presented to Afyon Court
Firstly: I tell the court that since the new indictment is based on the old indictments of Denizli and Eskişehir Courts, and on the superficial investigations of the superficial ‘committees of experts,’ who were opposed to us, I claim in your court that if I cannot prove one hundred errors in this indictment, I shall be happy with a hundred‑year sentence. Now I have proved my case; if you wish I can present you with the table of more than a hundred errors.
Secondly: When during the Denizli trial, our books and papers had been sent to Ankara and I was full of anxiety and despair that the judgement would be given against us, I wrote to my friends the following piece, which has been added at the end of some of my defence speeches: “If the officers of the law who are studying the Risale‑i Nur with the idea of criticizing it strengthen or save their belief through it, bear witness that I forgive them. For we are here to serve. The Risale‑i Nur’s function is to strengthen and save belief. We are charged with serving belief without differentiating between friend and foe, and without taking sides.”
Judges of the Court! In consequence of this truth, the powerful, irrefutable proofs of the Risale‑i Nur have directed the hearts of the people of the court towards itself; whatever you do against me, I forgive you; I will harbour no grudge. It is because of this that although I have been riled by the extreme tyranny and repression I have suffered, and the contemptuous treatment and defamation of my person, which have been to an extent I have never previously experienced, I have endured it and have not even spoken ill of those involved. The collections of the Risale‑i Nur, which you have in your possession, form my irrefutable, incontestable defence and my objections to all the charges made against us and the crimes of which we are accused.
It is astonishing that although the leading scholars of Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, Medina and Mecca, and the exacting scholars of the Directorate of Religious Affairs have studied the Risale‑i Nur collections minutely, and offering no criticisms have praised and applauded them, the clever persons who compiled the indictment against us showed through an extraordinary and obvious error – stating that the Qur’an contains forty suras – just how superficially they considered the matter. Despite hundreds of thousands of the people of reality affirming the Risale‑i Nur, under these severe conditions, and myself in exile, alone and wretched and the object of fearsome attacks, that prosecutor, who does not even know how many suras there are in the Qur’an, said: “Although the Risale‑i Nur attempts to expound the Qur’an and interpret Hadiths, it has no scholarly substance or value in teaching its readers in a part of it…” It is understood just how far his criticisms are from the law, reality, justice and equity.
I also make this complaint to you, that although for two hours you made us listen to the entire forty‑page indictment, which contains hundreds of errors and wounds our hearts, despite my insistence you did not allow me two minutes to read one and a half pages in reply, which were the complete truth. In the name of justice I therefore request that you permit me to read my entire list of objections.
Thirdly: Every government has opponents, but so long as they do not disturb public order, they may not be touched legally. Is it at all possible then that myself and those like me who are disenchanted with the world and work only for the grave should give up spending the remainder of their lives within the bounds taught by the Qur’an, on the way our forefathers followed for one thousand three hundred and fifty years, in a way permitted by the rules sanctified at all times by three hundred and fifty million believers, – that we should give up that way, and being coerced by our enemies and their subterfuges, merely for this brief and fleeting worldly life, support the savage laws and principles of an immoral, dissolute civilization, indeed, of a sort of communism, and adopt them as our way? No law anywhere, and no one the tiniest bit fair, would force us to accept them. We only say to those who oppose us: Don’t bother us and we won’t bother you!
It is due to this fact that I support neither intellectually nor on scholarly grounds the arbitrary commands of a commander, called laws, which have made Aya Sophia into a house of idols and the Şeyhülislam’s Office into a girls’ high school. And for myself I do not act in accordance with them. But although for twenty years I have been severely oppressed during my torturous captivity, I have not become involved in politics, nor provoked the authorities, nor disturbed public order. Although I have hundreds of thousands of Risale‑i Nur friends, not a single incident has been recorded involving the disturbance of the peace. I am fed up with life due to the utterly humiliating and unjust treatment directed at my person here in my exile in the last period of my life, such as I have never before suffered and which has galled me. I feel disgust at freedom even, under this oppression. I have written you a petition saying that contrary to everyone else, I want not my acquittal but to be convicted and given not a light sentence, I want the heaviest penalty. For in order to be saved from this unparalleled, extraordinarily tyrannical treatment, there is no solution for me other than entering either the grave or prison. But since suicide is not permitted, and the appointed hour of death is unknown and outside my power, I am resigned to the imprisonment I now suffer in absolute solitary confinement. However, I am not presenting this petition for the present, for the sake of my innocent companions.
Fourthly: Confirmed by all that I have written in the Risale‑i Nur these thirty years of my life, the period I have called that of the New Said, and the facts concerning my person, and testified to by the fair‑minded people and friends who have met with me with serious intention, I state this: As far as I have been able I have tried to restrain my evil-commanding soul from indulging in self-advertisement, fame-seeking, and pride, and perhaps a hundred times I have wounded the feelings of the Risale‑i Nur students who have excessively good opinions of me. As is confirmed by both my close friends and my brothers, and the signs they have observed, I told them: “I possess nothing, I am the wretched herald of the jeweller’s shop of the Qur’an.” Let alone winning worldly rank for myself and high position and fame, even supposing I was given high spiritual rank, being frightened of the possibility of my soul taking a share in the service I perform and spoiling my sincerity and pure intention, I decided to sacrifice those ranks and positions for my service. Yet despite my acting in this way, and my not accepting the gratitude of some of my brothers for their benefiting from the Risale‑i Nur – which has been presented in your high court as though it were some political matter of great moment – you have made their respect for me, which is greater than that of a son for his father, the subject of interrogation. You have driven some of them to deny it. You have made us listen in astonishment. Can it be imagined a crime for some unfortunate to be praised although he himself is not happy at this and does not consider himself worthy?
Fifthly: I tell you certainly that to accuse the Risale‑i Nur students of belonging to a political society and of political involvement when they have absolutely no connection with any society, association, or political movement, is knowingly or unknowingly to struggle against us on account of a secret atheistic organization which for forty years has been working directly against Islam and belief, or in the name of a sort of communism which produces anarchy in this country. For three courts of law have acquitted in that respect all the Risale‑i Nur students and the treatises of the Risale‑i Nur. Only, Eskişehir Court gave me one year, and out of one hundred and twenty others, fifteen of my friends six months each because of a single matter in a short treatise about the veiling of women, or perhaps because of the sentence: “According to what I have heard, in the centre of government a shoe‑shiner behaved impudently towards the semi-naked wife of an important person, and his astonishing unmannerliness dealt a slap in the shameless face of someone opposed to the veiling of women,” which was written long ago. That means, to accuse the Risale‑i Nur and its students now is to charge and convict three courts, and to be contemptuous of them.
Sixthly: The Risale‑i Nur cannot be combated. All the Islamic scholars who have seen it have confirmed that it is a veracious commentary on the Qur’an, that is, it consists of powerful proofs of its truths. It is a miracle of the Qur’an this century, and a firm barrier for this nation and country against the perils from the North. I have understood therefore that it is a duty of your court not to scare off its students, but with regard to public rights, to encourage them, and I await this from you. Thanks to freedom of scholarship, the books and journals of the irreligious and some political atheists, who are harmful for the nation, country, and public security, are not interfered with, so it surely is not a crime to be a student of the Risale‑i Nur and save the belief of the innocent, needy youth and preserve them from immorality; indeed, the government and Ministry of Education should applaud and encourage it.
My last word: May Allah the Most High allow the judges to execute the law with true justice. Amen. For us Allah suffices and He is the Best Disposer of Affairs. ❋ The best of lords and the Best of Helpers. All praise be to Allah, the Sustainer of All the Worlds.
Said Nursi