powerful and decisive proofs, which in the face of absolute unbelief —which destroys eternal life and also transforms the life of this world into a ghastly poison— induce even the most obdurate atheist philosophers to believe. Therefore we may not make the Risale-i Nur a tool of anything.
Firstly: In order not to reduce to the value of fragments of glass in the view of the heedless, the diamond-like truths of the Qur’an by giving the false idea of political propaganda, and not to betray those precious truths.
Secondly: Compassion, truth and right, and conscience, the fundamental way of the Risale-i Nur, severely prohibit us from politics and from interfering in government. For dependent on one or two irreligious people fallen into absolute unbelief and deserving of slaps and calamities are seven or eight innocents — children, the sick and the elderly. If slaps and calamities are visited on the one or two, those unfortunates suffer also. Therefore, since the result is doubtful, we have been severely prohibited from interfering in the life of society by way of politics, to the harm of government and public order.
Thirdly: Five principles are necessary, essential, at this strange time in order to save the social life of this country and nation from anarchy: respect, compassion, refraining from what is prohibited (haram), security, the giving up of lawlessness and being obedient to authority. The evidence that when the Risale-i Nur looks to the life of society it establishes and strengthens these five principles in a powerful and sacred fashion and preserves the foundation-stone of public order, is that over the last twenty years the Risale-i Nur has made one hundred thousand people into harmless, beneficial members of this nation and country. The provinces of Isparta and Kastamonu testify to this. This means that knowingly or unknowingly the great majority of those who try to hamper the Risale-i Nur are betraying the country and nation and dominance of Islam on account of anarchy. The great good and benefit for this country of the one hundred and thirty treatises of the Risale-i Nur cannot be refuted by the imaginary harms of two or three of its parts, which are fancied to be harmful in the superficial view of the deluded heedless. Anyone who refutes the former with the latter is an exceedingly unfair and tyrannical.
As for my own unimportant personal faults, I am unwillingly obliged to say, this: I am someone who has lived alone and in solitude in an exile resembling solitary confinement. During that time I have not gone once of my own will to the market and well-attended mosques. Despite suffering much persecution and distress, I have not once applied to the Government for my own comfort, unlike all my fellow exiles. In twenty years have not read a single newspaper, nor listened to one, nor been curious