judges who did not permit me to speak and due to the malicious indictment which I proved contained eighty errors, convicted me to two year’s hard labour and solitary confinement together with two year’s further exile elsewhere under close surveillance:
I say this that if there is any justice on the face of the earth, the Appeal Court will quash this decision which convicts someone who expounded Qur’anic verses which in each century for one thousand three hundred and fifty years have acted as sacred, true Divine principles in the social life of three hundred and fifty million Muslims, and expounded them relying on the consensus and affirmation of three hundred and fifty thousand Qur’anic commentaries and following the beliefs of our forefathers for one thousand three hundred years. Is it not a denial of Islam and a betrayal of our millions of religious and heroic forefathers to convict, because he expounded those verses, someone who according to reason and learning does not accept certain European laws applied temporarily due to certain requirements of the times and who has given up politics and withdrawn from social life, and is it not to insult millions of Qur’anic commentaries?
The Third: One reason they cited for our conviction was breaching security and disturbing public order. Putting forward the remotest possibility, one in a hundred or even a thousand, in place of actual events, and putting the wrong meanings on forty to fifty words from some confidential treatises and private letters out of the hundred thousand words and sentences of the Risale-i Nur, they present these as evidence, and accusing us want to have us punished.
Calling to witness those who have known my life these thirty to forty years and the thousands of ‘special’ (has)1 students of the Risale-i Nur, I say: to accuse of disturbing public order someone who, —at a time the commander of the British occupation forces in Istanbul was sowing discord among Muslims, even deceiving the Shaykh al-Islam and some leading men of religion and inciting the Committee of Union and Progress and the Freedom and Accord Party to struggle against each other, thus paving the way for the Greek victory and defeat of the National Movement,— foiled that insidious plan of the commander by printing and publishing through the efforts of Eshref Edib his work Hutuvat-i Sitte (The Six Steps) against the British and Greeks, not retreating even in the face of threat of execution; who did not flee to Ankara even when summoned
In his writings, Bediuzzaman mentions ‘has’ (special) by which he probably meant those that loyally and devotedly served the Risale-i Nur, and ‘erkan’ (leading; lit. ‘pillars’), those who in addition to their devoted service played a more organizing role. [Tr.]