who had faced the Court Martial set up after the 31st March Incident in 1909, and won his acquittal. He was also the practised preacher and fine orator who had addressed thousands in Aya Sophia the same year, and thousands in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus in 1911. Thus, he started off his defence with a skilful move which turned the tables on those judging him. He was answering the main charge of "making a tool of religion with the idea of political reaction, with the intention of undertaking an enterprise which might disturb public order":
God forbid a hundred thousand times that the sciences of belief with which we are occupied should be a tool for anything apart from Divine pleasure! For sure, just as the sun cannot be a satellite of the moon and follow it, so belief in God, which is the luminous and sacred key to eternal happiness and a sun of the life of the hereafter, cannot be the tool of social life. There is no matter in the universe more important than the mystery of belief, the greatest question and greatest riddle of the creation of this world, that belief can be made the tool of it.
Judges of the Court! If this torturous imprisonment of mine concerned only myself and my life in this world, you can be sure that I would remain silent like I have these last ten years. But since it concerns the eternal life of many, and the Risale-i Nur, which reveals and explains the mighty talisman of creation, if I had a hundred heads and each day one were cut off, I would not give up this mighty mystery. Even if I am delivered from your hands, I cannot be saved from the clutches of the appointed hour. I am old and at the door of the grave. Consider only this mystery of belief concerning the appointed hour and the grave, which will come to everyone, one of the hundreds of matters the Risale-i Nur discloses...
Can all the weighty political questions of the world loom larger than death for someone who is certain of death, so that he can make it the tool of those questions. For the time of its coming is not known. The appointed hour, which may come at any time to cut off your head, may be either eternal extinction or the despatch papers to go to a better world. The ever-open grave is either the door to a pit of non-being and eternal darkness, or the gate onto a world more permanent and full of light than this world. ...
Thus, Respected Sirs, is it at all fair, is it at all reasonable, to consider the Risale-i Nur, which uncovers and explains hundreds of questions of belief like this, to be a harmful, biased work that exploits political currents? What law requires this? ... Also, since the secular republic remains impartial according to the principle of secularism and does not interfere with those without religion, of course it also should not interfere with religious people on whatever pretext. [^119]
[^119]:Tarihçe, 194-5.