The Correct Answer to an Important Question
Several high‑ranking officials asked me: “Why did you not accept Mustafa Kemal’s offer of a three-hundred-lira salary and the post of general preacher in Kurdistan and the Eastern Provinces in place of Shaykh Sanusi? If you had accepted it, you would have been instrumental in saving the lives of the hundred thousand people who were slaughtered because of the revolution.”
I told them in reply: the Risale‑i Nur, which has been the means of gaining for hundreds of thousands of our fellow‑countrymen millions of years of life in the hereafter, has performed that task a thousand times over, in place of twenty or thirty years of worldly life I was unable to save for those people.
If I had accepted the offer, the Risale‑i Nur would not have come into being, which can be the tool of nothing nor follow anything and holds the mystery of sincerity. I even told my respected brothers in prison: if those who have sought my execution because of the heavy blows of the Risale‑i Nur, which was sent to Ankara, save their belief through the Risale‑i Nur and are delivered from eternal annihilation, you bear witness that I forgive them with all my life and soul!
I told those who were pestering me with their surveillance in Denizli after our acquittal, and the high‑ranking officials and police chief and inspectors: It is an undeniable wonder of the Risale‑i Nur that in nine months of close investigations no document has been found or connection of any kind with any movement, association, or society here or abroad, in the twenty years of my life of oppression, or in the hundreds of my treatises and letters, or among my thousands of students. Could this extraordinary situation have been achieved by the power of thought or through some arrangement? If the private concerns of one person over a number of years are brought to light, certainly there would be twenty matters to embarass or convict him.
Since the fact is this, you will say either that some brilliant undefeatable genius is organizing the matter, or that it is a truly munificent divine preservation. It would surely be an error to contest such a genius. It would cause great harm to the country and people. While to oppose such divine preservation and dominical grace would be pharaoh‑like obduracy.
If you say: “If we release you and do not keep you under surveillance, you may contaminate the life of our society with your teachings and obstruse mysteries.”
I reply: All my teachings without exception have been seen by the government and judicial authorities, and no matter has been found requiring even one day’s penalty. Forty to fifty thousand copies of those teachings have been passed from hand to hand, being studied attentively and with curiosity, yet the readers have only benefited, no one has suffered any harm. Also, since both the former court and the present court could find no indictable offences, it is an ugly and meaningless injustice for you to interfere with our acquittal granted unanimously by the new court, and with me and the Risale‑i Nur, as is proved decisively by the former court only being able to give sentences of six months each to fifteen out of one hundred and twenty of my brothers who were being held in prison, only arbitrarily and on the pretext of five or ten words out of one hundred and thirty treatises, for the sake of an important personage in the eyes of the world. Moreover, I have no new teachings and none of my secrets have remained hidden so that you should try to modify them through supervision.
I am now very much in need of my freedom. Enough now of the unnecessary, unjust, and meaningless surveillance to which I have been subjected these twenty years. My patience is exhausted. There is the possibility that due to old age I shall utter the curses that up to now I have refrained from uttering. “The sighs of the oppressed rise to the divine throne” is a powerful truth.
Then those tyrannical wretches who occupy high places in the eyes of the world said: “Not once in twenty years have you worn our headgear; you have not uncovered your head in the presence of either the former court or the present courts; you have presented yourself in the former attire. Whereas seventeen million have taken to modern dress.”
So I replied: rather than wearing through a dispensation of the Shari‘a and under the constraint of the law, the dress, not of seventeen million or even seven million, but with their own consent and sincere acceptance of seven thousand European‑smitten drunkards, I prefer to wear, in conformity with the Shari‘a and fear of Allah the Most High, the dress of seven thousand million. It may not be said of someone like me who for twenty-five years has withdrawn from social life “he obstinately opposes us.” Even if it was obstinacy, since Mustafa Kemal could not break it, and two courts could not break it, and the authorities of three provinces could not smash it, who are you to struggle pointlessly to break that obstinacy to the harm of both the nation and the government! Even if he was a political opponent, since as you have confirmed, he has severed all his connections with the world these last twenty years and has in effect been dead, he would not be again raised to life, meaninglessly become involved in political life causing himself considerable harm, and struggle against you; it is therefore lunacy to have groundless fears about his opposing you. Since it is a lunacy to even speak seriously with lunatics, I am giving up speaking with people like you. I said: “Whatever you do, I won’t feel obliged to you!”, which both angered them, and silenced them. My final word is: For us Allah suffices, and He is the Best of Disposer of Affairs. ❋ Allah suffices me, There is no god but He; in Him do I place my trust – He the Sustainer of the Throne [of Glory] Supreme!