gratify them. Anyway, one or two people had been interested in them, and had gathered them together in a book so they should not get lost. In the searches it fell into the hands of the police. Is there any need to put forward absurd suppositions about such letters, make them the subject of interrogation, and try to relate them to politics? Is it not like being blind to the terrible dragons assaulting the Qur’an, and not even looking at them, and trying to combat pestilential mosquitoes?
Does it not infer by ignoring Saraçoglu, who calls religion and the training of Muhammad “poison”, and by disputing The Illuminating Lamp, which demonstrates the Qur’anic reality as clearly as the sun and proves it to be the perfect cure for mankind’s wounds, assisting in the confiscation of that collection? We await from persons like yourselves balm for our wounds, and your insight and assistance, and we are not offended at your minor criticisms.
Prisoner,
* * *
[This forms the introduction to the pieces that follow it.]
With the idea of helping a little to refute with true, fair evidences Afyon Court’s decision against us and turn the Appeal Court in our favour, and in order to indicate briefly some of the errors in the indictment, we have written exactly the pieces from the confidential treatises which they mentioned as being offences; pointing out the errors, we show those who are convicting us to be guilty of an offence.
For instance: In order to have me sentenced to the heaviest penalty, they wrote at the end of the indictment as an index of all my crimes: “The matters Said Nursi rejects: One: the abolition of the Empire and Caliphate.” This is both wrong and an oversight. For fifteen years ago in Eskişehir Court I replied to a question about my writing in the Twenty-Sixth Flash, the Treatise For the Elderly: “I was grieved at the passing of the sovereignty of the caliphate,” and my reply silenced the court. Anyone who considers to be a crime an unimportant memory, faded with time, which was covered by the pardon and has been acquitted, is himself guilty.
As documentary evidence for this imaginary crime, they showed a Hadith from one of the Flashes, which is also found in The Miracles of