of my life. The restrictions on my freedom and my being held in oppressive circumstances due to baseless suspicions, have completely blighted life for me. I would prefer incarceration in prison, or even in the grave, to this situation. But my patience and fortitude are strengthened since the recompense for serving religious belief increases proportionately to the hardships suffered. These kind persons are not seeking to oppress me, so in the first place they should not restrict my licit freedom. I can live without bread, but not without freedom!
Certainly, someone who through practising severe economy and frugality has lived on a mere two hundred lira in the nineteen years of his exile and in order to preserve his freedom and the honour of the learned profession, has never exhibited any need nor become indebted to anyone nor accepted charity, alms, a salary or gifts — such a person needs his freedom within the bounds of justice rather than a pension. I am suffering oppression to an unparalleled degree, and here describe a couple of examples:
The First: In great consternation I was hiding The Fruits of Belief and defence speeches so that they should not be seized, although they had been accepted by the court as a scholarly defence of the Risale-i Nur and had been sent to seven departments of government in Ankara and to the President and had consequently been a reason for our acquittal and had been recommended by the Ankara experts' committee, and several copies of which had been written out by our fellow-prisoners as a memento for me, and the Denizli police had seen them and had not bothered with them and they had been openly left for a night in Afyon police station and with the police here. I was extremely anxious and worried that they would carry out a search and that I would be unable to tell them to put them somewhere safe since in my banishment here I wouldn't know them.
The Second: Someone from Istanbul obtained the Treatise for the Elderly from someone here and took it to Istanbul. Denizli Court had found nothing objectionable in it and Eskişehir Court objected to a single word which was replied to with a single letter. Somehow or other it fell into the hands of an irreligious person who was hostile to me. He made ten mountains out of one molehill and threw the provincial police into confusion, who then started to question who I was meeting with and who was with me and to pressurize me. There have been so many distressing incidents like this. The most meaningless, however, was their scaring everyone away from me except for a child and a sick man, to prevent my explaining the matter. So I say this:
In place of ten men who stay away from me, tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Muslims continue to read the Risale-i Nur paying no atten-