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In His Name, be He glorified!

May God's peace be upon you, and His mercy and blessings!

My Dear, Loyal Brothers and the Young Heroes Among the Nur Students !

At the end of some copies of The Staff of Moses, there is the answer I gave to a question asked by one of our brothers, Küçük Ali, who is small in name but great in spirit. Read it, for some critics said to him, in an effort to belittle the Risale-i Nur, "Everyone knows God; the common man believes in God just like the saint." They wished in this way to present the exalted, valuable, and most essential discussions contained in the Risale-i Nur as superfluous. Now too in Istanbul, with a still more sinister intention, some hypocrites of anarchist persuasion who have fallen prey to utter unbelief wish cunningly to deprive everyone of the truths of belief that are contained in the Risale-i Nur and are as essential to man as bread and water. They say: "Every nation and every individual knows God; we have no great need for new instruction in this matter."

To know God, however, means to have certain belief in His dominicality encompassing all beings, and in all things, particular and universal, from the atoms to the stars, being in the grasp of His power, action, and will; it means believing in the truths of the sacred words, "There is no god but God," and assenting to them with one's heart.

For simply to say, "God exists," and then to divide His sovereignty among causes and nature and attribute it to them; to recognize causes as sources of authority, as if — God forbid — they were partners to God; to fail to perceive His will and knowledge as present with all things; to refuse to recognize His strict commands and to reject His attributes and the messengers and prophets He has sent — this has nothing to do with the reality of belief in God. The person who does all this, then says "God exists," does so only in order to find some relief from the torment he suffers in the world after his unbelief has made it a hell for him. Not to deny is one thing; to believe is something completely different.

No being endowed with consciousness, in the whole universe, can indeed deny the All-Glorious Creator to whom every particle of existence bears witness. Or if he does make such a denial, he will be rebuffed by all of creation, and hence become silent and diffident.

But believing in Him is, as the Qur'an of Mighty Stature informs us, to assent in one's heart to the Creator with all of His attributes and names,