am bound by conscience to warn against making those predictions and meanings official due to bigoted friendship for him, and further publicizing it by reprimanding us.
* * *
To the Afyon Public Prosecutor and the Chairman
and Members of the Court
[I am presenting to you in order to protect my rights, exactly the same nine ‘Principles’ which I presented to the Denizli judicial authorities.]
Twenty years ago I abandoned social life, and especially official, refined, political life such as this. I do not know what position should be taken in such situations, and I do not think of it, and to think of it causes me acute distress. But I am compelled to present this disorganized defence and petition, which is the conclusion and summary of the answers I gave to the numerous, repetitious, and haphazard questions of an unfair member of another court of law. Perhaps it lacks order and contains irrelevant and unnecessary repetitions, vehement expressions which may act against me, and sentences opposed to the new laws, which I do not know. But since it proceeds on the truth, for the sake of the truth the faults should be disregarded. This petition and defence speech is based on nine ‘Principles’.
The First: Since in accordance with the Republic’s principle of freedom of conscience, the Government of the Republic does not interfere with the irreligious and dissipated, it certainly should not interfere with the religious and righteous; and since no irreligious nation can continue in existence, and with regard to religion Asia does not conform to Europe, and an irreligious Muslim does not resemble any other person without religion; and since no sort of progress or civilization can take the place of religion, or righteousness, or the learning of the truths of belief in particular, which are the innate need of the people of this country, who for a thousand years have illumined the world with their religion and heroically preserved their firmness of faith in the face of the assaults of the whole world, and cannot be made to forget that need; surely no government of this nation in this country can intervene in the Risale-i Nur in respect of justice and the law and public order.