► (083) ◄
My Dear, Loyal Brothers and Friends on the Way of Truth!
Don't feel offended that this time I'm answering your five or six blessed letters with a single confused one.
Firstly: Although according to our way one should not accept the extraordinary qualities that Halil İbrahim's letter accords to me, two meaningful coincidences (tevâfuk) both made me accept his letter, and include it in The Additional Letters. However, I left out some parts about myself, and in other places I overwrote them with the phrase, the Risale-i Nur; this replied to their questions about the terms.
First Coincidence: At the time, indeed at the very hour, a captain was insulting me contemptuously in a way that was illegal five times over in order to destroy public regard for me, a brother who is one of the pillars of the Risale-i Nur and is more important in the eyes of the people of reality than a hundred such captains, wrote this new letter which esteeming me far beyond my due completely nullified those insults. Four other persons who are leading pillars of the students also put their signatures to it. For the sake of this strange coincidence, I accepted that letter of praise, and modifying it, put in The Additional Letters, and have sent you a rough copy of it.
Second Coincidence: One night I was thinking about the people who were writing out The Staff of Moses and I searched for references to this in the newly arrived letters. Thinking that the severe winter conditions and the occasional harassment of dissemblers might cause them to be slack and that they might need encouragement, I searched for something to motivate them, just as the two poetic pieces by Hasan Feyzi and Halil İbrahim describing the Risale-i Nur prompted and encouraged numerous people to write out copies. Then out of the blue the following morning I received the letter mentioning my death, which frightened the students and drove them to work harder and more speedily at writing. I exclaimed: Halil İbrahim's loyalty has risen to the degree of wonder-working.
Secondly: Feyzi and Emin's letter dispelled many of my anxieties. The loyalty, services, and devotion to the Risale-i Nur of these two brothers is of the very greatest importance. And the continuing work for the Risale-i Nur mentioned in Feyzi and Emin's letter of all my brothers in the region with whom I am closely connected made me weep for joy, brothers such as Hilmi, Sadık, and İhsan, who in nine months in prison performed the services of nine years, and elderly Tahsin known as Beşkardeş, who worked so hard for the Risale-i Nur with his pen.
My blood brother Abdülmecid is very worried about me and has tried to
