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?1 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, which can be the tool of nothing nor follow anything and holds the mystery of sincerity, would not have come into being. I even told my respected brothers in prison: if those who have condemned me to be executed 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, there certainly 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.”
See page 381-2, footnote 9.