because of the above service by the leaders there; who attached no importance when a prisoner-of-war to the Russian Commander-in-Chief’s order for his execution; who with a speech during the Thirty-First of March Incident induced eight regiments to obey their officers;1 and in the Military Court, disregarding the threat of execution said in reply to the presiding pashas’ questions of: “You too are a reactionary, you too wanted the Shari‘a?”, “If constitutionalism consists of one party’s despotism, then let all men and jinn witness that I am a reactionary and ready to sacrifice my very soul for a single matter of the Shari‘a,” causing those high-ranking officers to appreciate and admire him, and while expecting his execution, they decided on his acquittal, then on being released, he did not thank them but went on his way shouting: “Long live Hell for all tyrants!”; and as is written in the decision of Afyon Court, when Mustafa Kemal angrily said to him in the office of the Speaker of the Assembly:2 “We summoned you here so you would tell us of your elevated ideas, but you came and wrote some things about the five daily prayers and sowed conflict among us,” he replied: “After belief, the obligatory prayers are the most elevated question. Those who do not perform the prayers are traitors, and the pronouncements of traitors are to be rejected;” who said this in the presence of forty to fifty deputies, and forced that fearsome commander to swallow his anger and make a sort of apology; and in connection with whom not one matter has been recorded by the police and authorities of six provinces connected with the disturbance of public order; and among whose hundreds of thousands of students not the smallest incident has been witnessed (apart from one insignificant incident concerning a rightful defence in which one unimportant student was involved); in connection with none of whose students any crime has been heard; and whichever prison he has been sent to has there reformed the other prisoners; and as testified to by these twenty-three years of his life and three provincial authorities and three courts acquitting him and a hundred thousand of his students, who know the value of the Risale-i Nur, affirming it verbally and by action, despite hundreds of thousands of copies of it being distributed throughout the country, the Risale-i Nur has produced only benefits and caused no harm; and who is a recluse, single, a stranger, elderly, poor, and sees himself at the door of the grave; and who with all his strength has given up transitory things, and has sought ways of atoning for his former sins and making his life eternal, and attaches not the slightest importance to worldly rank, and who, so that no harm will come to the
See page 384, fn. 10.
Before finally going there sometime in the final months of 1922, Bediuzzaman was on several occasions secretly summoned to Ankara by Mustafa Kemal during the Independence Struggle, in recognition of his effective struggle against the occupying forces. [Tr.]