twisted meanings and slander and lies. They did not permit me to speak. If they had permitted me, I would have said:
Although as required by freedom of thought and freedom of conscience, you do not interfere with Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, and particularly now with anarchists, apostates, and dissemblers, hiding behind the screen of communism, who both deny your religion, and insult your forefathers accusing them of misguidance, and accept neither your Prophet (PBUH) nor the laws of the Qur’an; and although through the Qur’an’s instruction millions of Muslims in the lands and under the rule of an imperious, bigoted Christian state like Britain, reject all the false beliefs and infidel rules of the English, their courts do not interfere with them; and although opponents of all governments openly publish their ideas without those governments bothering them; and although both the Isparta authorities, and Denizli Court, and Ankara Criminal Court, and the Directorate of Religious Affairs, and the Appeal Court twice, no, three times, have all scrutinized these forty years of my life, and my one hundred and thirty treatises, and my most private treatises and letters, and they had in their possession for two or three years all the copies of the Risale-i Nur, confidential and otherwise, yet they could not show a single matter necessitating the smallest penalty; and although despite the fact I am extremely weak, oppressed, defeated, and am enduring the harshest conditions, our innocence has been proved by the Risale-i Nur collections you hold as well as our four-hundred-page defence, which have been shown to be a most powerful, sound, and veracious guide for two hundred thousand true and devoted students benefiting this country, nation, and public security; — in spite of all these, under which law, what conscience, what good, what crime do you convict us, contemptuously giving us the harshest sentences and severest solitary confinement? Certainly you shall be questioned about this at the Last Judgement.
The Second: One reason they put forward for punishing me was my expounding the Qur’an’s explicit verses about veiling, inheritance, recitation of the Divine Names, and polygamy, written to silence those who object to them in the name of civilization.
Fifteen years ago I wrote the following piece to Eskişehir Court and the Appeal Court, which was also included in the court’s decision. I repeat the piece as a complaint to the Supreme Tribunal at the Last Judgement, and as a warning to the enlightened teachers of the future, and together with Elhüccetü’z-Zehrâ (The Shining Proof) as a sort of addition to my petition to the Appeal Court, which twice has acted fairly in acquitting me and has listened to my cry for justice, and to the committee of