to condemn him, although he could have been legally charged due to the calumnies of covert atheists; and whose treatises have been praised and commended by scholars of religion and science, and who speaks on account of those treatises.

I begin. Truth and right are with us! May Almighty God not compel us to seek our rights by force or in any other way. Amen!

These twenty years, hundreds of experiences have shown that divine providence has protected us and saved us from ghastly oppression; we should therefore feel quite certain that it will save us from this new, completely illegal and cruel injustice. We nourish powerful hopes from divine mercy that even if we suffer some minor difficulties, troubles, and harms, we shall receive divine mercy and grace and rewards far greater than the troubles, which will be transformed into another form of the sacred service of saving the wretched believers' belief.

I declare that the incident in question was illegal in ten ways:

The First: For two years the Risale-i Nur was in the possession of the judiciary, and was scrutinized and investigated by three courts and three committees of experts, and was passed around seven government offices in Ankara; and all the treatises of the Risale-i Nur were unanimously and without objection acquitted together with Said and his seventy-five friends, with not even a single day's penalty being given; so anyone the tiniest bit fair-minded would know just how contrary to the law it is to again seize them as though they were dangerous documents.

The Second: Accusing him of involvement in politics, detectives smashed the lock on the door of a man who, after his acquittal has lived for three and a half years as a recluse and stranger in Emirdağ, with his door locked on both the outside and the inside, who has received only one person in a hundred to perform his necessary tasks, and has even given up composing works, which he had previously done for twenty years, but they could find nothing except a poster with some words about belief. Surely anyone with even a grain of intelligence would understand how contrary to the law this torment was.

The Third: To raid a man's house as though he were a monstrous politician or political conspirator, although as testified to by seventy witnesses in court he has neither known about the World War, nor asked about it or been curious about it — and now the same situation has continued for ten years, and for twenty years has neither read a newspaper nor listened to one being read, and for thirty years, exclaiming "I seek refuge with God from Satan and politics," has fled from politics with all his might, and despite suffering torturous distress has not applied once to the government