Nur innocent of anything legally reprehensible, this time the committee set up the Directorate of Religious Affairs contained a number of negative points, also probably due to external pressure, which the prosecution in Afyon was able to utilize against Bediuzzaman and his students.

#### Life in Afyon Prison

Life in Afyon Prison

Bediuzzaman was in Afyon Prison for twenty months, and his students for periods varying from a few days to eighteen months; the majority were there six months, one group before the court passed sentence, and others after it. Although summer months intervened in this time, many of the accounts speak of the intense cold.

As in Emirdağ, so now in the trial and in the prison, it was Bediuzzaman's person that was focussed on and made the object of attack, And again unwittingly his enemies engineered their own defeat. For his sincerity and qualities were such that he willingly endured the extreme conditions and appalling distress he suffered for the sake of the Risale-i Nur and its Students. He not only survived the conditions, he conquered them. Over seventy years of age, petrified from cold, weakened from lack of food, on several occasions on the point of death from poison, alone, untended, suffering distress it is difficult to imagine, Bediuzzaman continued to write for the guidance of his students and the other prisoners, spend his nights in prayer and contemplation, and compose not only his own defence, but direct a publicizing campaign of his and his students' defences, in order to make known the reality of the case and defend the Risale-i Nur against this latest attack. With his indomitable spirit, he defeated his enemies utterly.

The prison consisted of six wards or dormitories. On arrival Bediuzzaman was put in solitary confinement in a seventy-person ward on an upper floor which was in an advanced state of decay. It had forty small windows of which only fifteen had intact glass. Ill with fever, he was left entirely alone in this huge, draughty room in sub-zero temperatures with no stove or heating. [^307] Later, if he was given a stove, we learn from one of his defence speeches that after three and a half months in total isolation, the public prosecutor had still not permitted his books to be given to him. [^308]

[^307]:Nursi, Lem'alar, 246-7 (Eng. tr.: Flashes, 327).

[^308]:Nursi, Şualar, 322 (Eng. tr.: Rays, 405).

It was the prosecutor and the governor of the prison, whom Selahaddin Çelebi described a Gestapo chief that prohibited Bediuzzaman's students visiting him, [^309] even penalizing warders that were slack. Nevertheless, his

[^309]:Selahaddin Çelebi, in Son Şahitler, i, 148.