of the nation. The officials were astonished at this situation and looked on in appreciation. Some youths even said before receiving their sentences: “If the Nurjus remain in prison, we shall try to have ourselves convicted so that we can be taught by them and become like them. We shall reform ourselves through their instruction.”
So those who accuse the Risale-i Nur students, who are thus, of disturbing public order are surely seriously deceived, or have been fooled, or knowingly or unknowingly are deceiving the government on account of anarchy, and try to crush and repress us. We say this to them:
Since death is not to be killed, and the grave is not to be closed, and the travellers in this guesthouse of the world, convoy after convoy enter the earth with great speed and ado, and vanish; for sure we shall part from one another very soon. You shall receive the penalty for your tyranny in awful fashion. At the very least you shall mount the gallows of death and eternal extinction, which form the discharge papers of the oppressed people of belief. The fleeting pleasures you have received in this world imagining them to be everlasting, will be transformed into everlasting, grievous pains.
Regretfully, our secret dissembling enemies sometimes attach the name of Sufism to the reality of Islam, which has been gained and preserved through the swords and blood of the hundred million martyrs at the rank of saints, and heroic war veterans of this religious nation. While the way of Sufism is only a single ray of that sun, they show it to be the sun and deceive certain lax government officials. Calling the Risale-i Nur students “Sufis” and “members of a political society” – because they work effectively for the truths of the Qur’an and belief – they want to incite them against us. We say to them, and to those who listen to them against us, what we told the just court at Denizli:
“Let us too be sacrificed for this sacred truth for which hundreds of millions of people have been sacrificed! Even if you set fire to the world around us, we who sacrifice ourselves for the truths of the Qur’an will not lay down our arms before atheism; we shall not abandon our sacred duty, God willing!”
Thanks to the sacred solace arising from belief and the Qur’an for the pains and despair at the adventures of my old age, I would not exchange this most distressing year of my old age for ten of the happiest years of my youth – especially since for those who repent and perform the obligatory prayers each hour in prison is the equivalent of ten hours’ worship, and with respect to merit, each transient day spent in illness and under oppression gains ten days of perpetual life. I thus understood from those warnings just how deserving of thanks are these days for someone like me awaiting his