encing from the wounds caused by the surgical operation of the experts’ report, which had been given me that evening, and from my pitiful difficulties at having no contact with others and having to write myself with my wretched pen. Yes, I received that evening the report from the Directorate of Religious Affairs, on which I had placed most trust during my eight months of distress in solitary confinement, and had expected would come to our assistance. This morning I understood that with the most trivial matters they had helped not me but the public prosecutor. I saw that they said: “Said said that the last four earthquakes were instances of the Risale-i Nur’s wonder-working.” Then, when intending to write, as I had written in the table of errors: “Like acceptable alms-giving, the Risale-i Nur is a means of calamities being repulsed. Whenever it is attacked, calamities seize the opportunity and occur. Sometimes too the earth rages,” two severe earthquakes1 occurred here, which made me give up writing the piece, so I am leaving it and passing on to the third Point.
Third Point: Exacting, veracious, and fair-minded scholars of the experts’ committee! A long-standing and acceptable practice among scholars is their writing eulogies and praises, sometimes exaggerated, sometimes the opposite, at the ends of fine works written by others, and publishing them, and the authors in question being grateful and pleased at the writers of such eulogies, and their rivals also not accusing them of boasting. So I have been unable to equate it with careful study, precise knowledge, kind assistance, and fairness, that you should have considered it self-advertisement that I did not altogether reject the eulogies written by some special and sincere students of the Risale-i Nur in the style of the late Hasan Feyzi and the martyr Hafiz Ali, which they wrote with the idea of assisting me in my helplessness, weakness, aloneness, and exile in the face of so many unfair people attacking and objecting to me savagely, and to encourage the needy to embrace the Risale-i Nur. I was sorry at this. Those pure-hearted friends of mine never thought of politics, but verified by mathematical reckoning said: “One aspect and minor meaning of the Hadith’s universal allusive meaning at this time is the Risale-i Nur,” which cannot be said to be wrong. For time is proving it right. In any event, even if it was very exaggerated or even wrong, it would still only be a scholarly mistake. And everyone can write his own opinions. You know how many various views and opinions are written in the works of the twelve schools of the Shari‘a, and particularly in the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi‘i, and Hanbali Schools, and of the nearly seventy authori
These two earthquakes coincided with Friday, 18.9.1948, in the morning.
Signed in the name of the Risale-i Nur students being held in Afyon Prison, Halil Mustafa Mehmed Feyzi Husrev