[This is written to thank the experts’ committee of the Directorate of Religious Affairs. I shall explain three ‘Points’ in order to assist in amending their minor criticisms, the answer of which is clear.]
The First: I thank those scholars in three ways. For myself I am grateful to them.
Firstly: Apart from the Fifth Ray, their summarizing appreciatively the other thirteen parts of The Illuminating Lamp Collection.
Secondly: Their refuting the allegations made against us of founding a sufi order, setting up a political society, and breaching security.
Thirdly: Their corroborating my case in court. That is, I told the court: If there is any fault, it is mine. The Risale-i Nur students are sincere and innocent, and work at the Risale-i Nur for their faith. Thus, their committee of experts also exonerates the Risale-i Nur students, and ascribes all the fault to me. So I say to its members: May God be pleased with you! Only, they made partners in my crime the late Hasan Feyzi and the late Hafiz Ali, and two or three others who are the heirs of those two blessed martyrs and work according to their system. But they were wrong in one way. For they were ahead of me not in faults but in the service of belief, and were given to me by Divine grace as assistants, out of mercy for my weakness, and were free of my faults.
Second Point: The committee of experts said that some of the narrations in the Fifth Ray are ‘dubious’ and others are ‘false,’ and that some were misinterpreted. This was written in the same way as the indictment in Afyon, which was against us. But I proved in a table fifteen pages long that it contained eighty-one mistakes. The respected committee of experts should see the table. An example of one of the mistakes is as follows:
The prosecutor said: “All the interpretations are wrong, and the narrations are either false (mawdu’) or dubious.”
And I say: To interpret a Hadith means saying that such-and-such a meaning is possibly or probably intended by the Hadith. According to logic, it is possible to refute the possibility of that meaning only by proving its impossibility. But just as the meaning has been seen this century and has been realized, so one aspect of the universality of the Hadith’s