An Addendum to the Addition to My Written Objections
to the Indictment Presented to Afyon Court
Firstly: I tell the court that since the new indictment is based on the old indictments of Denizli and Eskişehir Courts, and on the superficial investigations of the superficial ‘committees of experts,’ who were opposed to us, I claim in your court that if I cannot prove one hundred errors in this indictment, I shall be happy with a hundred-year sentence. Now I have proved my case; if you wish I can present you with the table of more than a hundred errors.
Secondly: When during the Denizli trial, our books and papers had been sent to Ankara and I was full of anxiety and despair that the judgement would be given against us, I wrote to my friends the following piece, which has been added to the end of some of my defence speeches: “If the officers of the law who are studying the Risale-i Nur with the idea of criticizing it strengthen or save their belief through it, bear witness that I forgive them. For we are here to serve. The Risale-i Nur’s function is to strengthen and save belief. We are charged with serving belief without differentiating between friend and foe, and without taking sides.”
Judges of the Court! In consequence of this truth, the powerful, irrefutable proofs of the Risale-i Nur have directed the hearts of the people of the court towards itself; whatever you do against me, I forgive you; I will harbour no grudge. It is because of this that although I have been riled by the extreme tyranny and repression I have suffered, and the contemptuous treatment and defamation of my person, which have been to an extent I have never previously experienced, I have endured it and have not even spoken ill of those involved. The collections of the Risale-i Nur, which you have in your possession, form my irrefutable, incontestable defence and my objections to all the charges made against us and the crimes of which we are accused.
It is astonishing that although the leading scholars of Cairo, Damascus, Aleppo, Medina and Mecca, and the exacting scholars of the Directorate of Religious Affairs have studied the Risale-i Nur collections minutely, and offering no criticisms have praised and applauded them, the ‘clever’ persons who compiled the indictment against us showed through an extraordinary and obvious error —stating that the Qur’an contains forty Suras— just how superficially they considered the matter. Despite hundreds of thousands of the people of reality affirming the Risale-i Nur, under these severe conditions, and myself in exile, alone