tomed, was in order to make me carry out this duty to serve the Qur’an directly and in purely sincere fashion. I am of the opinion that the ill-treatment was very often visited on me by a hand of favour under the veil of unjust oppression, compassionately, in order to focus my thought on the mysteries of the Qur’an and restrict it and not allow my mind to be distracted. And being prevented from studying all other books, despite formerly having great desire to study, I felt an aloofness towards them in my spirit. I understood that I had been made to give up studying, which would have been a solace and familiar in my exile, so that the verses of the Qur’an should be my absolute master directly.
Furthermore, the great majority of the works that have been written, the treatises, have been bestowed instantaneously and suddenly in consequence of some need arising from my spirit, not from any outside cause. Then when afterwards I have shown them to friends, they have said that they are the remedy for the wounds of the present time. And having been disseminated, I have understood from most of my brothers that they meet the needs of the times exactly and are like a cure for every ill.
I have no doubt therefore that the above-mentioned points and the course of my life and my involuntarily studying fields of learning opposed to normal practice, outside my own will and awareness, were a powerful divine favour and dominical bounty bestowed to yield sacred results such as these.
SEVENTH SIGN
In the course of our work over the past five to six years, without exaggeration we have seen with our own eyes a hundred instances of divine bestowal and dominical favour and wonders of the Qur’an. We have pointed out some of them in the Sixteenth Letter, and others we have described in the various matters of the Fourth Topic of the Twenty-Sixth Letter, and in the Third Matter of the Twenty-Eighth Letter. My close friends know these, and Süleyman Efendi, my constant friend, knows many of them. We experience an extraordinary and wondrous ease in spreading the Words in particular and other treatises, and in correcting them, and putting them in order, and in the rough and final drafts. I have no doubt that this is a wonder of the Qur’an. There have been hundreds of instances of it.
Furthermore, we are nurtured with great tenderness in our daily lives with the Gracious One who employs us bestowing on us the least desires of our hearts in ways entirely outside the ordinary in order to gratify us. And so on. This situation is a truly powerful sign from the Unseen that we are