My written objections, which form a supplement and addition
to my defence, and were sent to six departments of government in
Ankara, and presented to Afyon Criminal Court
I say this to Afyon Court: Enough now! My patience is exhausted! It is a cruel and unprecedented wrong that in addition to having harassed me for twenty-two years without reason by holding me under constant surveillance in exile in total isolation and solitary confinement, to have illegally imprisoned the Risale-i Nur students three times and caused us loss of hundreds of thousands of liras because of unfounded suspicions and utilizing ‘possibilities’ instead of facts. And this, in spite of the fact that other than two or three matters six courts have been unable to find anything contrary to the law in the hundred parts of the Risale-i Nur. The future and its generations will curse the tyrants who have been responsible for it. Up to now I have found consolation since it is my conviction that they will condemn them and cast them down to the depths of Hell at the Last Judgement, and holding my silence I have endured it. Otherwise, we could have defended our rights to the full.
Six courts over fifteen years have scrutinized the Risale-i Nur and our correspondence, and five of them in effect acquitted us on all points. Only Eskişehir Court made a pretext of five or ten words in the short treatise about the veiling of women, a single matter, and gave a light sentence under a ‘flexible’ law. When they did this, I wrote the following in the correction which after the Appeal Court I sent officially to Ankara as the sole example of illegality:
A long time ago, following the consensus and rulings of three hundred and fifty thousand Qur’anic commentaries, I expounded the Qur’anic verses about the veiling of women, which for one thousand three hundred and fifty years have taught and enjoined a powerful, perpetual Islamic practice and sacred principle of three hundred and fifty million people, in order to defend them against an atheist’s objections and his criticisms of Qur’anic civilization. If there is any justice in the world, the Court will surely quash the conviction of someone and the sentence passed on him for expounding the verses, since he was following the way taken by our forefathers for one thousand three hundred and fifty years; it will surely remove this extraordinary stain from the legal establishment of this Islamic State.
I wrote this in the addendum containing my corrections and showed it