and Islam was deemed a crime, and entirely contrary to truth and right I was punished.
2. While studying in Kastamonu Gölköy Institute, I myself witnessed the irreligion taught us by some teachers. They said, God forbid, that the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) had written the Qur’an, Islam was now abrogated, civilization had advanced, and that it was a great error and backwardness to follow the Qur’an this century. One day even, a teacher said that because Muslims performed the obligatory prayers and thought of the hereafter, they suffered constant distress and passed their lives unhappily; and that in the mosques of Islam there was a deathly atmosphere, while the Christian churches were always happy and full of life, and that with their musical instruments and other amusements, they enjoyed life and passed their time happily. They tried to break the bonds with Islam and belief in our hearts, and instil denial and disbelief in their place.
Then if through reading several treatises from a peerless light of the Qur’an like the Risale-i Nur —which pours out from the Qur’an’s effulgence, and proves with brilliant evidences and arguments the truths of belief and Islam, and that the religion of Islam is a never-dying inextinguishable sun and means whereby humanity may attain happiness and well-being— a wretch in whom had been instilled the above poisonous ideas and whose spirituality they had wanted to kill with their noxious irreligious lessons, and had even been carried away by them and (God forbid) believing in those ideas had begun to disseminate them — if he had come to believe in the Qur’an, would not his offering the endless joy and happiness he felt to the compassionate, loyal, and true hero Ustad Bediuzzaman, who had gained these for him through the blessed Risale-i Nur he had written; would not his telling the Revered Master, who had been charged with the burdensome duty of writing the Risale-i Nur, how it had saved him from his former life of heedlessness and misguidance, leading him to belief and light, and how it was a sun of guidance and means of happiness for all humanity, and a Divine favour for all men and particularly for believers; and would not his calling “the destruction and corruption of a covert organization of the Sufyan,” those who with their terrible aggressive assaults on the Qur’an and Islam, as described above, were urging the sons of this heroic Muslim nation to embrace irreligion, and trying to raze the sacred, Divine foundations of Islam, to whom millions of people are bound and destroy their eternal happiness and feeling compounded regret and disgust at the lunatics who applaud them and their base, aggressive, tyrannical destruction; and would not his saying to his former fellow students, who had fallen into doubt concerning their faith: “Come, let’s give up following the lusts and whims of our souls;