► (030) ◄

My Dear, Loyal Brothers,

As a result of the Old Said's tendency to dwell on worldly matters, and affected by an incident in the east, the scribe who assists me describing excitedly, at the beginning of Ramadan, the signs of the festival at its end, and so that he should not waste the valuable time of Ramadan listening to trivia on the radio, I several times received an inner warning to explain briefly the harms of a lengthy, confused truth which is included in the Fourth Topic of The Fruits of Belief. So I am explaining it with the intention of moderating the Risale-i Nur students' curiosity. But because it is very extensive and I have little time and I am in a wretched situation, you may have difficulty understanding it, so I am relying on your perspicacity,

In the Fourth Topic of The Fruits, it is said: The reason I evince no interest in world politics is that although one has few and insignificant obligations in that extensive sphere, it preoccupies the curious because of its attractions and makes them forget their true, onerous obligations, or at least makes them perform them deficiently. In any event, it engenders in them feelings of partisanship so that they condone the wrongdoing of tyrants and so participate in it.

Now I say this: You unfortunates who are gratified by the curiosity and drunken heedlessness caused by preoccupation with the events of the outside world! If you say that the curiosity and fellow-feeling that are intrinsic to human nature drive you to be interested in those conflicts and events to the detriment of your essential, obligatory duties, and that it is natural and an inner need, then I say the following:

Know certainly that some people do not notice or are not curious about the miraculous creation of the human being, yet if they see someone with two heads or three legs they gaze at him, transfixed by curiosity; and if you disregard mankind's far-reaching, temporary, transitory, destructive events this century, and take a look at just the bee nation and grape species in the springtime, out of the hundred thousand nations and species on the face of the earth, which like the human species manifest innumerable wondrous happenings, you will see events that give rise to spiritual, non-material, pleasures and are a hundred times more curiosity-arousing than those events among mankind. To disregard those true pleasures and to become attached with such abounding curiosity and gratification to mankind's harmful, evil, temporary affairs might be possible if one were going to remain permanently in this world and everyone was going to reap some harm or benefit from those events and the people who were the apparent cause of them were the true agents and cause. But they are ephemeral, like atmospheric conditions. The actual effects of those who apparently cause