11; Ahmed Zeki, 13; Ayşe, Il; Hâfız Ahmed, 12; Mustafa, 14; Bekir, 9; Ali, 12; Ayşe, 11.

The treatises in this collection are just some that the innocent children have written and taken lessons from, from the Risale-i Nur. Their serious efforts at this time shows that the Risale-i Nur provides greater pleasure, joy, and zeal than all the amusements and incentives they have thought up in the secular schools to encourage the children to study. This shows that the Risale-i Nur is taking root. God willing, nothing will be able to root it out and it will continue down forthcoming generations.

Just like these innocent young students, the illiterate elderly who enter the inviting fold of the Risale-i Nur learn to read and write after the age of forty or fifty for the Risale-i Nur's sake. The forty or fifty pieces they have written are included in two or three collections. The way these elderly untaught people and some shepherds and mountain folk are working for the Risale-i Nur in preference to anything in the extraordinary conditions of the times, shows that the need for it is greater than the need for bread, and that the harvesters, farmers, shepherds, and foresters consider the truths of the Risale-i Nur to be a need more essential than other essential needs.

I had the greatest difficulty correcting what the innocents and elderly untaught people had written in this and the other six volumes; I did not have the time. But then it occurred to me and I was as though told: Don't get fed up! Since what they have written can't be read quickly, hasty people have to read it slowly, and the intellect, and the heart, and the spirit, and the soul, and the emotions may receive their share of the Risale-i Nur's truths, which are like food and sustenance. Otherwise, only the intellect receives a partial share and the other faculties remain without sustenance.

The Risale-i Nur should not be read like other books and sciences, for the sciences of certain affirmative belief (îmân-ı tahkikî ilimleri) that it contains do not resemble other sorts of knowledge. They are the sustenance and light of numerous subtle human faculties besides the reason.

In Short: There are two advantages in the deficient writings of innocent children and the illiterate elderly:

The First is that they force one to read slowly and carefully.

The Second is listening from their innocent, sincere, sweet tongues the glorious, profound matters of the Risale-i Nur and taking lessons from them,

The Enduring One, He is the Enduring One!

Your brother,

S a i d   N u r s i ∗∗∗