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My Dear, Loyal Brothers !

I have now to tell you about a state of mind I have so that you are not offended for the wrong reason. It is this:

I suffer from a severe, chronic indisposition resulting from the oppression I have suffered these last twenty years. I have anway suffered from its symptoms for a long time. It is unsociability; that is, aloofness from people and avoiding having contact with them and being upset at being in touch with them. Now, even, my spirit cannot abide meeting with even the most sensitive of my brothers and students if it is not about the Risale-i Nur's service. People looking at me in a friendly way also affects me badly. One cause of this meaningful condition is the tyranny and persecution people have subjected me to, but it is also a chief means of divine grace being manifested and the justice of divine determining, and of preserving sincerity in our serving belief, which reduce to nothing the tyranny and human cruelty and make me love the sickness, and induce in me patience and forbearance. Due to their baseless suspicions, people constantly prevented me from having contact with others, producing a nervous condition. So through His grace, Almighty God gave me this illness so that sincerity in our work for belief should not be damaged, and so that I should not be forced to adopt an artificial, self-advertising stance, or to be insincere or pretentious towards those who think excessively well of me, and to save me from the love and regard for my person which affects me very badly at this time, and from having to show myself as enjoying a spiritual rank, which would be detrimental to our service, and not to reduce to the value of pieces of glass by ascribing them to myself, the diamond-like truths of the Risale-i Nur, which proceed from the Qur'an. So I offer thanks to Almighty God. And for your part, you should not be offended, but pleased. But still I need your prayers so that I may endure the completely natural distress.

My dear brothers! I had a look at some of the books that were handed over to us, the large collections with the gilded covers, and I saw that the treatises written out by the diamond pens of the Light and Rose Factories and some of those collections containing fifteen or twenty treatises between the gilded covers, were each like diamond swords defending themselves against their enemies in the high courts and in high positions. I have no doubt that it was a great instance of divine favour, because for absolutely no reason we suddenly started putting the treatises of the Risale-i Nur into collections five months before we were sent to prison, and we understood the reason for the scientists' defeat. For especially when on the defensive, the power born of coming together and co-operating is far greater than the power of the individual parts.