I have a request of the greatest importance to present to the Cabinet.
I request the Cabinet that the fifteen-page Fifth Ray, which was originally written years ago, and was later included at the end of the more than three-hundred-page collection called The Illuminating Lamp (Siracü’n-Nur), and was the reason for the collection being collected up by the Cabinet, be removed from The Illuminating Lamp. For it has been established that the work is in many ways useful for the disaster-stricken, the elderly, and those who have fallen into doubt concerning their faith. I request that the piece which is imagined to be harmful is banned, but permission is given for the remaining three hundred pages to be published, so that the calamity-stricken and the elderly can receive solace from it and the needy can profit from the truths of belief that it contains.
Moreover, in the four-hundred-page Zülfikâr, two pages written thirty years ago expounding two verses about inheritance and the veiling of women in reply to the philosophers of Europe, and one line about banks in Signs of Miraculousness (Isharat al-I‘jaz ), published thirty years ago, about the verse But God has permitted trade and forbidden usury,1 and approximately a line written thirty years ago while I was in the Darü’l-Hikmet, among the six questions asked of the Shaykh al-Islam’s Office by the head cleric of the Anglican Church — I request that these passages are excised and the Zülfikâr collection, which has been confiscated on the pretext of those two pages and one line —because they are not in conformity with the present Civil Code— is returned. For it has been highly praised by the Islamic world and its benefits have been seen in fact, and it proves wonderfully three of the pillars of belief. This is what we request and it is our right. Just as if five words of a letter are censored, the remainder are permitted, so we are seeking this important legal right of ours. We demand that together with the Qur’an and the lovers of faith who through the Risale-i Nur serve the nation, country and public security, we are delivered from the oppression of those who make mountains out of molehills concerning us. Also, I have not seen a copy of The Six Attacks for eighteen years, which I wrote when full of anger at the severe repression I was suffering at that time; saying it was confidential I did not give permission for it to be published. Anyway it came into the hands of three or four courts, and they returned it to its owners.
Qur’an, 2:275.