this nation and its thousand-year history and its traditions and laws, and the sacred truths of Islam and teachings of the Qur'an, which are the cause of its pride, and of its noble forefathers, who embracing those sacred truths proclaimed Islamic civilization in all its glory to the world; and with their trampling their honour and rights, Only by condoning this serious moral crime, can the crime the so-called experts' committee impute to A Guide for Youth be deemed a crime. Only in that way can its author be convicted and his students who published it be condemned. For the principles of legal justice and freedom of thought and of conscience would not permit their conviction and trial. Such a course of action is not conformable with the laws of the republican government ensuring democracy, for it implements the principles of freedom of thought and of conscience in the broadest sense.

If the accusation is made that the religious instruction given with the publication of A Guide for Youth is contrary to secularism, what is the meaning of secularism? We ask this. Is secularism hostility to Islam? Is secularism the freedom of irreligion to attack the religion of those who embrace a religion? Is secularism the absolute despotism which fastens locks on the mouths of those who pronounce religious truths and disseminate the truths of belief, and snap handcuffs on their wrists?

Since secularism is freedom of conscience and thought, can the irreligious and enemies of religion make every sort of assault on Islam, and on the pretext of those freedoms publish their anarchic ideas, while a scholar of Islam who teaches religion in accordance with those principles within a nation which for a thousand years has been a commander of Islam and following its traditions and laws, for its happiness and on the way of preserving its morality and honour — can such a scholar be shown to be guilty of a crime because to do so is opposed to secularism? Can he be defamed and accused of wanting to make the laws of the land conform to religious beliefs? We do not consider it possible that such an impossibility be possible. We know without doubting that justice would not permit such a thing.

A Guide for Youth is one part of the one hundred and thirty parts of the Risale-i Nur which courts of law have acquitted and returned to their owners in their entirety, and is in truth the chief means whereby this country and nation may win happiness. Hundreds of Nur students have told the courts how they have read these works and through its lessons have been saved from the pitfalls of vice and misguidance. Thousands of Turkish youths have proved through their lives and the services they have performed that through these works they have become useful members of the country and nation. So we, those youths, throw back their baseless accusations in those slanderers' faces.