penalties are given. If there is nothing in the laws of the Government of the Republic to necessitate the heaviest penalty for myself and my friends, we should be given our complete freedom, as well as recompense and appreciation and an apology. For if my important service of the Qur’an, which is clear and open, is against the Government, I should receive not a year’s sentence in this way and a number of my friends, six months each, I should be given the death sentence or a hundred and one year’s imprisonment and those earnestly attached to me and my work should be given the heaviest penalties. But if our service is not against the Government, we should receive not penalties, charges and imprisonment, but appreciation and recompense. For it is service the nature of which may be understood through its one hundred and twenty treatises, and its challenging the great philosophers of Europe and overthrowing their principles. Certainly, such effective service will either produce ghastly results inside the country, or it will yield most advantageous, elevated, and scholarly fruits. In which case, I cannot be given a year’s sentence for playing a childish game of hoodwinking, and deceiving public opinion, and concealing the intrigues of tyrants and their lies about us. Those like me either receive capital punishment, proudly climbing the gallows, or they remain free in the position of which they are worthy.
Yes, a clever thief can steal diamonds worth thousands, so he would not sentence himself to the same penalty for stealing a fragment of glass worth virtually nothing. No thief would do that, indeed, no conscious creature. Such a thief is cunning, not utterly stupid in that way.
Sirs! According to your delusions, I am like that thief. Rather than living in seclusion in a poor village in one of the districts of Isparta for nine years and putting in danger myself and my treatises which are the aim of my life by turning against the Government the ideas of five to ten ingenuous unfortunates, who have been given very light sentences along with me, I could have held a high position in either Ankara or Istanbul like formerly and manipulated thousands of people towards the aim I was following. Then I would not have been convicted so abjectly, but would have been involved in the world with the pride and dignity befitting my way and duty.
I do not say this out of pride or to boast, but ashamedly, to point out the errors of those who, recalling some of my old self-advertisement and hypocrisy, want to abase me so that the position I hold lacks all importance and cannot be profited from. So I say to them:
As someone who, as confirmed by his old defence, which was published under the name of The Testimony of Two Schools of Misfortune,