harm in this situation. Otherwise, both our unity would have been destroyed, and it would have caused both differences in ideas which would have reduced the value of four alifs – which through solidarity is one thousand one hunded and eleven – to four, and mutual antipathy, which would have reduced our strength to nothing.
The author of the Gulistan, Shaykh Sa‘di Shirazi, relates: “I saw one of the people of the heart in a tekke while occupied with his spiritual journeying. Several days later I saw him among students in the medrese. I asked him why he had left the effulgent tekke and come to the religious school. He replied that there everyone could save themselves, if they were successful, whereas here in the religious school persons of high aspiration were trying to save many others besides themselves. Nobility and high endeavour were theirs; virtue and exertion were theirs; that was why he went there.
Shaykh Sa‘di wrote a summary of this in his Gulistan.
So if the small matter of students parsing verbs is superior to the recitations in the tekkes, since the Risale-i Nur teaches in the clearest and most certain manner the sacred truths of belief of the confession of faith: “I believe in God, and His angels, and His Books, and His prophets, and in the Last Day” and silences the most obdurate atheists and obstinate philosophers, to abandon it, or cause its activities to come to a standstill, or not to be content with it, and desiring the Sufi way to enter the dissolved Sufi tekkes without asking permission of the Risale-i Nur, is entirely wrong and shows how much we deserve this blow of divine compassion.
S a i d N u r s i
* * *
A Warning
[Two short stories]
T h e F i r s t : Fifteen years ago when a prisoner-of-war in the north of Russia I was being held together with ninety other officers in a large factory. Numerous arguments and disturbances arose due to the discomfort and oppressive conditions. I used to pacify them, since they all had great respect for me. I appointed four or five officers to keep the peace, telling them: “Whenever you hear an uproar, go there and help whichever side is in the wrong.” It is a fact that with this precaution a stop was put to the noise. They asked me why I helped those who were in the wrong. In reply I told them:
People in the wrong are unfair. They do not give up a single benefit for