tions and if I was capable of it, to go to the Hijaz and Damascus, and your applying to the present government for me:

Firstly: If I had been in Mecca, I would have had to come here in order to save belief and serve the Qur'an. For the need is greatest here, If I had a thousand spirits and suffered from a thousand sickness and was afflicted with that many difficulties, I would again decide due to the lessons I have received from the Qur'an, to stay here to serve this nation's belief and happiness, and I have so decided.

Secondly: Concerning being treated with respect rather than insultingly, you say in your letter: If you had been in Egypt or America, you would have been cited in the histories with honour and esteem.

My dear, attentive brother!

In accordance with our way, we are strongly averse to respect and reverence, and acclaim, gifts, and tributes for my person. Especially the desire for fame, which is extraordinary hypocrisy, and to be mentioned in histories and to appear fine to people, which is alluring self-advertisement, are the opposite of sincerity, which is a basic principle of the Risale-i Nur and its way, and are opposed to it. I seek none of these things; indeed, I flee from them. But since the Risale-i Nur proceeds from the abounding light of the Qur'an, and is a flash of its miraculousness, and expounds its truths and discloses its mysteries, we want the Risale-i Nur to be sought after, and for everyone to feel the need for it and to appreciate its high value, and to make known its perfectly clear wonder-working, and that it has defeated the irreligion of the atheists in respect of belief and that it will continue to do so, and we await this from divine mercy,

As a postscript, I am adding a trifling and unimportant paragraph about my person:

Receb Bey and Kara Kâzım are friends of yours and I reckon they had some relations with the Old Said; I don't want any favours from them, but like their predecessors they shouldn't permit the meaningless, unnecessary persecution and ill-treatment of my person. I can't abide the physical and spiritual atmosphere here. My distress is excessive. I lock the place I stay on both the outside and the inside. I am completely alone. I have no neighbours really, and pass my life in an oppressive room, all alone and ill. Sometimes one day's anguish here is greater than a month of travails in Denizli prison. Enough now of these twenty years of infringements on my liberty and the terrible distress. In any event, with the two-year scrutinies of two courts and the failure of the dissemblers' plots against me, it has become absolutely clear that they can no longer deceive anyone with the groundless suspicious allegations that I and the Risale-i Nur cause harm to