calamities, physical and non-physical, and in their hearts, spirits, and minds. Compared with theirs, our calamity is both extremely light, and profitable. There are pleasures for the heart and spirit, springing from belief, good health, and well-being.
Thirdly: If we had not entered here amid these storms, due to our contact with suspicious officials, this slight calamity would have been even severer, and there would have been the calamity of having to toady to them and flatter them.
Fourthly: Seeing with very little expense true friends more compassionate than brothers, and brothers of the hereafter like spiritual guides, here in the workless, compounded physical and spiritual winter of this School of Joseph, which is a department of the Medresetü’-Zehra; and visiting them, profiting from their personal qualities, and receiving strength from their fine characteristics, which like light are diffused through transparent objects, and from their spiritual assistance, joy, and consolation; all changes the form of this calamity, making it a sort of veil to Divine grace. Yes, a subtle facet of this hidden grace is that all the Risale-i Nur students here are called “Hoja;” they are spoken of respectfully as “the hojas... the hojas.” There is a further subtle allusion in this, that just as this prison has turned into a medrese (religious school), so the Risale-i Nur students have all become teachers, and thanks to these hojas the other prisons will also all become schools, God willing.
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My Brothers!
If the short letters written before to console you, like this one, are read and studied together with the last parts of The Fruits of Belief, and any matters of the Risale-i Nur that occur to you are discussed, God willing it will gain for you the honour of being ‘students of the religious sciences.’ Pre-eminent figures like Imam Shafi‘i (May his mystery be sanctified) attached the greatest importance to this, saying “the sleep even of students of the sciences is counted as worship.” If at this time of no religious schools, a hundred difficulties are suffered in these places of torment due to being such elevated students, no importance should be given to them, or else, saying “The best matters are the most difficult,” we should smile happily at those hardships. As for the families of our needy friends and their having enough to live on, in consequence of the rule of the Qur’an, belief, and the Risale-i Nur, which is to look at those worse hit by disaster than oneself and at those in greater deprivation, they are better off than eighty per cent of people. They have no right to complain; their right,