given up the world, he suffers serious discomfort, because things concerning it are trivial and a waste of time. And if it is concerning the service and publication of the Risale-i Nur, it is sufficient for them to meet with his true, self-sacrificing students who serve him, his spiritual sons and brothers, in his place. He says that no need remains for him. [^102]

[^102]:Ibid., 183.

In a letter Bediuzzaman himself wrote, even, he interprets his thirty years or so of exile, imprisonment and oppression as continual Divine warnings not to make his service to religion the means to personal benefits of any kind, and so preserve this absolute sincerity. The oppression and tyranny he suffered due to the entirely false and unjust accusations of "exploiting religion for political ends" acted as a sort of "obstacle" preventing him from succumbing to "the great danger in the service of belief in this egotistical age", which was to make that service the means to his own spiritual progress and advancement, and to salvation from Hell and earning Paradise. Bediuzzaman had been aware that something had prevented him and it was only now that he understood the real cause. For although to work for these things was perfectly licit, at the present time in the face of the collective personality of misguidance and irreligion, the truths of the Qur'an and belief had to be taught in an effective and convincing way in order to refute and smash unbelief. And that was through such teaching being the tool of nothing. "So that those needy for belief would understand that it is only truth and reality which speaks, and the doubts of the soul and wiles of Satan would be silenced."

Bediuzzaman wrote that the secret of the Risale-i Nur's success in halting and defeating absolute unbelief in those difficult conditions in Turkey at that time where others had failed lay in this fact. He himself was perfectly resigned at all the torments and oppression he had suffered, forgiving those who had perpetrated them, If he had not sacrificed everything, this extraordinary power of the Risale-i Nur would have been lost whereby the belief of some people had been saved by only a single of its pages. [^103]

[^103]:Ibid., 102-4.

It was through this sincerity that the collective personality of the Risale-i Nur was formed, which Bediuzzaman described as a sort of Renewer or Regenerator of Religion (mujaddid). For just as a Renewer was sent each century who would serve religion and belief in exactly the required way, in the present age of the assaults of secret organizations and the collective personality of misguidance, the Renewer of Religion has to be in the form of a collective personality. Just such a collective personality was that of the