visit him from far off. Ever since his youth, it has been characteristic of our Master Said Nursi to be solitary and not to meet with people unnecessarily. He did not even invite his only surviving brother to visit him, although he lived in a nearby town and he had not seen him for thirty years. The people who attend to his needs even cannot enter his room from evening to morning unless there is some compelling need. Due to his severe illness and his being unable to endure meeting with people, he has wounded many of his friends who have come from distant places by refusing to see them. Since all of our Master's extraordinary contributions with the Risale-i Nur to maintaining civil order are known to the police, who for thirty years have displayed a friendly attitude towards him and everything about him has been scrutinized by them and by the courts, it is their duty as the defenders of the public's rights not to spoil their favourable view of him which is based on observation, due to the fabrications of a few atheists and enemies of religion.

3. Our Master is ill and cannot attend the Friday prayers even. Sometimes he feels an overpowering need for fresh air. He goes to Barla — but only rarely — where he lived for ten years and where he as a room and he stays for some time. Sometimes in the summer he visits places that are far from habitation and there is no one. He remains for a few hours, then returns. He travels by car due to his advanced years, inability to walk, and indisposition, and so that the people's adulation does not discomfort him. He goes nowhere apart from this, to no village or inhabited place, and for the above-mentioned reasons does not even visit places where his friends of thirty years are found.

These, then, are his circumstances, and this is his true situation [^64].

[^64]:[A statement which has been widely spread and shows the falsity of the public prosecutor's accusations of causing popular unrest, and which has been given to the police headquarters in Ankara. The Nur Students are Preservers of Public Order Decisive evidence that the six hundred thousand Nur students preserve public order is the fact that in twenty-eight years, the six police forces of six provinces have not recorded any incident involving them, despite their suffering unjust treatment. In fact, our Master asked the Afyon prosecutor when he made such accusations: "Have you been able to show any one such incident this last twenty-eight years? Since you haven't been able to do so, how can you make such accusations? Apart from a very minor incident involving a young student, six hundred thousand students have been involved in none, which proves that the Nur students preserve public order." He said this to the Afyon prosecutor, and silenced him. [Authors]

Those in attendance on him,

Tahirî, Zübeyir ∗∗∗