[Again they did not permit me to speak in the session held to discuss the possible quashing by the Appeal Court of Afyon Court’s unjust decision concerning us. They made us listen to a third severe indictment. They also did not allow anyone to come to help me with writing. Despite my poor handwriting and my being ill, I am presenting this complaint to your Court —which has acted justly towards us twice previously— as a supplement to my petition concerning the appeal.]
A petition to the Supreme Tribunal of the Resurrection; and a complaint to the Divine Court; the Appeal Court of the present should also listen as well as coming generations and the enlightened future teachers and students of the universities. Of the hundreds of torments and calamities I have suffered these twenty-three years, I am setting ten before the court of justice of the All-Glorious Sovereign together with my complaints.
The First: Despite my faults, I have dedicated my life to this nation’s happiness and the saving of its religious belief. Saying, let my head too be sacrificed for a truth, that is, the truth of the Qur’an, for which millions of heroic heads have been sacrificed, I worked with the Risale-i Nur with all my strength. Through Divine assistance, I persisted in the face of all the cruel torments. I did not withdraw.
For example: One instance of the exceedingly cruel treatment I have received during my trial and imprisonment in Afyon: although three times, and every time for nearly two hours, they forced myself and the innocent Risale-i Nur students, who were awaiting solace from justice, to listen to the slanderous, malicious indictments, they did not allow us more than one or two minutes to defend our rights, despite my repeated requests for five or ten minutes.
I have been kept for twenty months in total isolation, with only one or two of my friends being permitted to visit me for three or four hours. For only a small part of my defence speeches did I have anyone to help me with the writing. Then they were forbidden as well, and punished exceedingly brutally. They compelled us to listen to the prosecutor’s biased indictment, which was like water gathered from a thousand streams, and which I proved contained eighty-one errors in fifteen pages arising from