What I Said This Time in My Short Defence
The compasssion, reality, and truth of the Risale‑i Nur prevents us from involvement in politics. For innocents are afflicted with calamities and we would have been unjust towards to them. Some people wanted an explanation of this, and I told them:
In the present stormy century, the egotism and racialism proceeding from cruel civilization, and the military dictatorships resulting from the Great War, and the pitilessness arising from misguidance have led to such extreme tyranny and excessive despotisms that if the people of truth defend their rights through physical force, or through severe tyranny, numerous unfortunates will be scorched on the pretext of partisanship, and in that situation, they too will be excessively tyrannical and will be defeated. For those who act and attack out of the above feelings, on some petty pretext, strike at twenty to thirty people because of the mistakes of one or two, and destroy them.
If on the way of truth and justice, the people of truth strike only at the one who struck, they win only one in the face of thirty losses, and are then in a position of defeat.
If, in accordance with the unjust rule of responding in kind, the people of truth also crush twenty to thirty people due to the errors of one or two, they will then perpetrate a ghastly injustice in the name of right.
This then is the true reason for our having strenuously avoided politics and interfering in government, and for our aversion towards it. For the power of truth we have at our disposal is such that we could have defended our rights completely.
But since everything is transitory and passing, and death does not die, and the door of the grave does not close, and if one suffers hardship, it is transformed into mercy; we shall surely place our trust in Allah the Most High in patience and gratitude, and be silent. To forcibly and harmfully break our silence is totally opposed and contrary to justice, fairness, and patriotic zeal and endeavour.
To Conclude: The members of the government, the politicians, the administrators, the police, and the judiciary have nothing at all over which to struggle with us. At the most, through the bigotry of absolute unbelief, which no government in the world can defend and no one in their senses likes, and the bigotry of atheism, which arises from materialism and is a fearsome plague afflicting humanity, and through their evil, certain covert atheists deceive a number of government officials, excite their suspicions, and incite them against us.
And we say: if they incited not a few suspicious people like that but the whole world against us, through the strength of the Qur’an and divine grace, we would not flee; we would not lay down our arms before that apostasizing absolute disbelief and that atheism!
Said Nursi