all their strength and conviction, and secure public order and security, they do not disturb it ...

Yes, we are a community, and our aim and programme is to save firstly ourselves and then our nation from eternal extinction and everlasting solitary confinement in the intermediate realm, and to protect our compatriots from anarchy and lawlessness, and to protect ourselves with the firm truths of the Risale-i Nur against atheism, which is a means of destroying our lives in this world and in the next. [^328]

[^328]:Nursi, Şualar, 305 (Eng. tr.: Rays, 387).

Bediuzzaman frequently stressed in his defence speeches that the nature of their service to the Qur' an prohibited them from participating in politics; it was those opposed to the positive and constructive social results of this service who repeatedly accused them of political involvement:

We Students of the Risale-i Nur do not make the Risale-i Nur a tool for worldly [political] currents, not even for the whole universe. Furthermore, the Qur'an severely prohibits us from politics. For the Risale-i Nur's function is to serve the Qur'an through the truths of belief and through extremely powerful and decisive proofs, which in the face of absolute unbelief which destroys eternal life and also transforms the life of this world into a ghastly poison, bring even the most obdurate atheist philosophers to belief. Therefore we may not make the Risale-i Nur a tool for anything.

Firstly: We are prohibited from politics lest we give the false idea of political propaganda so reducing to mere glass in the view of the heedless the diamond-like truths of the Qur'an.

Secondly: Compassion, truth and right, and conscience, which are fundamental to the Risale-i Nur's way, prohibit us sternly from politics and interfering with government. For dependent on one or two irreligious people fallen into absolute unbelief and deserving of slaps and calamities are seven or eight innocents — children, the sick and the elderly. If slaps and calamities are visited on the one or two, those unfortunates suffer also. The result being thus doubtful, we have been severely prohibited from interfering through politics in social life, which would be detrimental to government and public order.

Thirdly: Five principles are necessary and essential at this strange time in order to save the social life of this country and nation from anarchy: respect, compassion, refraining from what is prohibited (haram), security, the giving up of lawlessness and obedience to authority. Evidence that when the Risale-i Nur looks to social life it establishes and strengthens these five principles in a powerful and sacred fashion and preserves the foundation-stone of public order, is that over the last twenty years it has