The Baghdad newspaper ad-Difâ' asked the following about the Risale-i Nur students:
Is there any connection between the Risale-i Nur students in Turkey and the Muslim Brothers? Do they have any relations? And what are the differences between them? Are the Risale-i Nur students in Turkey an independent group or society like the groups called the Muslim Brothers working for Islamic unity in Egypt and other Arab countries? Are they attached to those groups or to any one of them? My reply is this:
The aim of both the Nur students and the Muslim Brothers is to serve the truths of Qur'an and belief and to work with the overall aim of securing Islamic unity and the happiness of Muslims in this world and the next. However, the Nur students differ from the Muslim Brothers in five or six respects:
First Difference: The Nur students are not involved in politics; they avoid theme If they are obliged to concern themselves with politics, they make them a tool of religion, so that they may demonstrate the sacredness of religion in the face of those who exploit politics for irreligion. They are
in no way a political society. Due to the situations in their countries, the Muslim Brothers, however, are involved in politics, in order to support religion, and they are a political society.
Second Difference: The Nur students do not meet with their Master and they are not obliged to do so. They do not feel themselves compelled to meet with him. They do not consider it necessary to be together with him in order to receive instruction. Rather, the whole country is like a place of instruction; on their obtaining the books, they are taught by them instead of by their Master. The treatises are each like a Said.
Moreover, as far as they possibly can, the Nur students write the treatises out for no wage and distribute them free of charge to the needy, so that they may read them and listen to them. In this way the whole country has become a vast place of learning.
The Muslim Brothers, however, meet with their guides and leaders in general centres, and go to visit them in order to receive instruction and orders. They also meet in the branches of that general society with their supreme Master and those who are the equivalent of his deputies and successors, and receive instruction and orders. And they obtain for the required price the newspapers and books produced in the centres, and receive instruction from them too.
Third Difference: Just like the students of an elevated medrese (religious school) or university, the Nur students learn through scholarly exchanges. A large province becomes like a medrese. They teach each other and learn together although they do not see one another or know each other, and although they far apart.
However, due to the circumstances of their countries, the Muslim Brothers produce books and magazines and distribute them everywhere; they come to know each other through them, and receive instruction.
Fourth Difference: The Nur students have now spread to most of the Islamic countries, and they are numerous. In spreading in this way, they are present in various countries but they do not need to obtain permission from the governments to meet together and do their work. For their way is not a political way and they are not a political society, so they do not consider themselves obliged to obtain permission.
However, due to their circumstances, the Muslim Brothers are involved in politics and need to organize a society and open centres and branches, and are therefore obliged to obtain permission from the authorities
wherever they are found. And they are not unknown like the Nur students. In this way they have opened numerous branches in their general centres, including Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Sudan, the Maghrib, and Baghdad.
Fifth Difference: There are numerous different levels among the Nur students, from seven or eight-year-old children who are learning the Arabic alphabet in mosques to learn the Qur'an, to elderly men and women of seventy to ninety years old; and from villagers and porters to prominent members of the National Assembly; and from private soldiers to high-ranking officers. The sole aim of all these many levels of Nur students is to become illuminated by the guidance of the Noble Qur'an and truths of belief. All their endeavour is to spread knowledge, learning and the truths of belief. They are known for not being involved with anything else. The fearsome trials these last twenty-eight years and their cunning and jealous opponents have been unable to discover any aim apart from this sacred service, and have therefore been unable to convict them and rout them. The Nur students do not feel themselves compelled to search for customers and sup- porters; they say: "Our duty is to serve. We do not seek customers; let them come and seek us out and find us." They attach no importance to quantity. They prefer one person who is truly sincere, to a hundred others.
For sure, like the Nur students, the Muslim Brothers encourage and urge others to adhere to the sciences and learning of Islam and the truths of belief, but due to their situations and countries and their involvement with politics, they attach importance to quantity and increasing their numbers, and they seek supporters.
Sixth Difference: Just as true, sincere Nur students attach no importance to material benefits, so some of them, with their maximum frugality and contentment and poverty, and fortitude and independence, they abstain in some respects with true sincerity and devotion in serving the Qur'an from the advantages of society. This is so that they will not be defeated in the face of the numerous, violent people of misguidance, nor give rise to doubts when calling the needy to the truth and to sincerity, nor make that sacred service the tool of anything other than divine pleasure.
Although essentially the Muslim Brothers follow the same aim, due to place and circumstances and other causes, they cannot give up the world like the Nur students. They do not consider themselves obliged to make that supreme self-sacrifice.
['Isa 'Abd al-Qadir, a writer on the political newspaper, ad-Difâ', which is published in Baghdad, says the following:]
Readers of ad-Difâ' are asking me about Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, the guide of the Nur students. They ask for information about him and the Nur students in Turkey. So I am replying to them briefly. For the Master, the Risale-i Nur, and the Nur students are concerned with the Arabs, and the Arabs are taking a serious interest in them, for as the main grouping of Islam, they have begun to see great benefits from the Risale-i Nur.
With the Risale-i Nur, the Nur students form an effective barrier against communism, both in Turkey and in the Arab world.
... ... ...
This article was written considering conditions previous to the coming to power of the Democrats when according to the public prosecutor, the Nur students numbered five hundred thousand. But now there are now millions of them in Turkey, and every day they increase in number,
... ... ...
As for the Risale-i Nur, it is spreading to such an extent that it is being sought eagerly not only in Turkey and the Islamic lands, but also in Europe and the West. Nothing can destroy the Nur students' enthusiasm. The Democrat government is to be highly commended for permitting the considerable services the students have performed for the Qur'an with the Risale-i Nur, so that the Islamic movement in the blessed Islamic world meets them with applause and appreciation. All the Muslim peoples of Iraq - the Arabs, Kurds, Turks, and Persians - have greeted this sacred, Islamic service and endeavour joyfully, and they hold the view that their brothers in Turkey are resisting the harmful effects of Westernization.
[A letter written by our Master to the Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, who approves of and appreciates the services rendered by the Risale-i Nur to the country, nation, and Islam.]
In His Name, be He glorified!
I would have liked to speak with a champion of Islam like Adnan Menderes, but my circumstances do not allow it, for I am very ill and not concerned with politics. I have therefore written this letter to speak in my place, instead of a face-to-face conversation.
I am going to elucidate a few very brief principles for Adnan Menderes, the champion of Islam:
The First is one of Islam's many fundamental laws and is a true meaning of the verse, «No bearer of burdens can bear the burden of another» (Q 6:164 etc.). It is as follows:
No one, neither friends nor relations, can be held responsible for another's crime. Whereas the partisanship of present party politics causes people to acquiesce in and consent to numerous innocents suffering harm on account of a single criminal. Due to a single criminal's crime, the supporters and relatives of the innocent are also maligned and humiliated; and because this multiplies the crime a hundredfold, it gives rise to terrible hatred and enmity; and breeding malice and rancour, it forces retaliation in kind. This a poison that completely overturns the life of society and prepares the ground for the intervention of external enemies. It is understood that the events and crises experienced in Iran and Egypt arose from action of this kind. But the situation with them is not the situation here; with us, it is comparatively less severe, only one per cent. God protect us! If it had been like that here, it would have been terrible indeed.
The sole solution for this danger is to make Islamic brotherhood and primary Islamic nationhood the foundation of that force, for the protection of innocent people and to ensure that the crimes of criminals remain restricted to themselves.
The above fundamental law is also the foundation of public peace and security. For example, true justice and the fundamental law of public order and security demands that if one innocent person and ten criminals are found in a house or on a ship, the house or ship should not be attacked so that the innocent person may be saved and no harm comes to him. But when he is saved ...
Thus, according to this Qur'anic fundamental law, the disturbance of
internal order and violation of security thus casting into danger ninety innocents on account of ten criminals, is a means of attracting divine wrath. Since in these uncertain times, Almighty God has paved the way for a number of truly religious people to come to power, present circumstances warn that they should take this fundamental law of the Qur'an as a basis of action for themselves, to shield themselves against their malicious enemies.
Islam's Second Fundamental Law is the Hadith, "A people's ruler is its servant," which means that officialdom is service and should not lead to oppression and egotistical domination. But at the present time egotism has burgeoned due to the absence of Islamic training and deficient worship. And because officialdom has been made into ranks for the practice of arbitrary domination rather than service, justice cannot be administered and is in essence corrupted, like performing the prayers in any direction without the ablutions. And the people's rights are totally violated. The people's rights (hukuk-u ibad) do not become hukukullah (that is, they are not sanctioned), that they may be rights. On the contrary, they are the cause of selfish injustices.
Adnan Menderes has now said that they are going to enact whatever is required by the religion of Islam. But there is a strong possibility that in absolute opposition to the two above-mentioned fundamental laws, two awesome currents will go on the offensive in order to deceive the people with substantial bribes and will pave the way for foreign intervention.
The First Assault: In opposition to the first fundamental law, this has slaughtered forty innocent people due to one criminal and set fire to a village. Such absolute despotism bribes officials, granting them power and control and gratifying their souls, while religious lovers of freedom are persecuted.
The Second Assault: This is apparently a sort of nationalism which renounces the sacred nationhood of Islam, and like the previous one is able to trample the rights of a hundred innocents due to one criminal, but in reality, with its streak of racialism, strives against both the religious, freedom-loving Democrats, and the members of other races who constitute seventy per cent of this country's population, and the wretched Turks, and the policies followed by the Democrats, producing only a racist brotherhood as an inauspiciously pleasurable bribe for good-for-nothing egotists. Out of their drunkenness they do not perceive the extraordinary danger of
turning into enmity the true brotherhood which is a thousand times more beneficial than the thrills they get from that racist comradeship. For example, racialism causes to be lost for the trivial worldly benefits of four hundred useless loafers, the moral and spiritual assistance received every day from the universal prayer, "O God! Forgive all believing men and women," which is recited by four hundred million true brothers with a sense of Islamic nationhood. This is a grave danger for both this country, and the government, and the religious Democrats, and the Turks, and those who pursue it are not true Turks. The noble Turks avoid such errors. It is quite clear from their actions that these two groups are attempting to take advantage of everything and to overturn the religious Democrats, and they are being made to do so. The sole solution in the face of these opponents and the internal and external enemies and their destruction, which absolutely has to be implemented, is to rely on the unshakeable power of the Qur'anic reality, with which forty Companions of the Prophet (UWBP) challenged and prevailed over forty states and which for one thousand four hundred years has had three or four million students, and to depend on the worldly pleasures and pleasures of everlasting happiness in the hereafter yielded by that reality. Otherwise those pitiless internal and external enemies of yours will magnify one error you commit, and adding to it the crimes committed by the supporters of the former regime, will load them all on you, just as they did to others before you.
This constitutes a danger for both you and the country and nation the harms of which would be irreparable. In return for your services and your accepting these facts, I myself and our Nurju brothers will pray to Almighty God for your success in your works for the good of Islam and for your preservation from the above-mentioned dangers.
The Third: Another fundamental law related to the social life of Islam is the Hadith, "The believers are like a well-built structure with one firmly supporting the other." That is, to forget internal hostilities in the face of the aggression of external enemies and to support one another. Even the most primitive tribes have understood the advantages of this fundamental law, for when attacked by an enemy from outside, they desist from fighting against one another until the enemy is repulsed, even if the member of one tribe has killed the father or brother of someone belonging to another tribe, and they support one another. So it is with a thousand regrets that we say that incidents occur in which, as a consequence of the partisanship that
arises from egotism, self-advertisement, arrogance, and cruel politics, people shower blessings on Satan if he assists their side, and curse angels if they help the opposing side. In fact, I saw one righteous religious scholar speak so badly about another righteous scholar as to accuse him of disbelief, while enthusiastically praising an atheist who was inimical to Islam yet held the same ideas as himself and supported him. It was because of this that I have given up politics this last thirty-five years, as though fleeing from the Devil.
Furthermore, now it appears that when someone perpetrated a serious misdemeanour towards both Ramadan, and the marks of Islam, and this religious nation, his opponents were pleased at the situation. Whereas, just as consenting to disbelief is disbelief, so agreeing with misguidance, vice, and wrongdoing is misguidance, vice, and wrongdoing. I understood from this extraordinary situation that with the idea of exonerating themselves from their crimes in the nation's eyes, they want to show their opponents to be more irreligious and guilty than themselves and to see them thus. Awesome injustices of this sort both have perilous consequences, and overturning social morality, resemble a serious conspiracy against this country and nation and Islamic supremacy.
I was going to write more but for now I am sufficing with explaining these three essential points for the religious promoters of liberty.
[We present an addendum to some facts we wrote previously about the life of our society with the intention of sending it to Adnan Menderes.]
Addendum: In my view, the sole way of preventing the Ticanî question being loaded on the religious Democrats, which resulted from the unnecessary, arbitrary laws of the former regime, indeed, due to their provocations, and so that they do not lose face in the sight of the Islamic world; is to restore Aya Sophia to its sacred function of five hundred years, just as they were strengthened tenfold by restoring the Arabic call to prayer, and to announce the Risale-i Nur's freedom officially. For at present the Risale-i Nur is yielding very favourable results in the Islamic world and
has won its good opinion for the people of this country, and five courts have acquitted it, and twenty-eight years of court cases have found nothing harmful in it. The religious Democrats should apply a salve to this wound. Then they will both win the good opinion of the world of Islam, and the injustices and errors of others will not be ascribed to them. For the sake of the religious Democrats and especially such persons as Adnan Menderes, I have dwelt on political matters for an hour or two despite having renounced them for the past thirty-five years, and have written this.
In His Name, be He glorified!
A summons arrived from Samsun Criminal Court which stated that the examining magistrate and prosecutor had opened a case against me in connection with a complaint I had written which was published in the newspaper, Büyük Cihad. They read it to me and I saw that it contained only four points that were worthy of consideration.
The First: The editor of Büyük Cihad had evidently told the public prosecutor: "Said Nursi sent me the article so I published it,"
The fact of the matter is this: when I was ill in Emirdağ, my brothers there came to visit me and we spoke about an unpleasant and inhumane incident that had occurred involving me. I was both ill and angry and said a few things complaining about Ankara. The person who assists me was with me and he wrote them down, With the approval of the Nur students, he sent the note to one or two students in Ankara for them to show to some religious deputies so that, seeing that I was ill, difficulties should not be inflicted on me. It was sent and some deputies saw it. It pleased a person we are not acquainted with and he evidently sent it to the editor of Büyük Cihad. But I swear that neither then did I know who sent it nor do I now. A copy was sent here after it was published and someone read it to me since I do not know the new letters. I was pleased and called down God's blessings on the publishers. It's true that I have given up politics for thirty-five years, but for the sake of religion I was grateful to the owner and writers of Büyük Cihad, a newspaper which serves religion sincerely. "May God be pleased with them!" I exclaimed. After that, the blessed paper was then sent to me regularly, but without my knowledge and without it being paid for.
The Second Point is about my being sent to the Criminal Court in Samsun.
Concerning this point, I say with all certainty that I would have liked to go to Samsun to visit my brothers of the hereafter who are linked to the Büyük Cihad and the Nur students in the region, but as stated by the doctor's report, my infirmity is so advanced that for one and a half years I have been unable to attend for five minutes even the court that was holding the trial, although it had summoned me, The public prosecutor and examining magistrate who was acting as judge were compelled to come to me. They brought with them the newspaper that was the subject of their questioning. The paper had mixed in some of its own words with mine. I gave them the necessary replies. If the Criminal Court attaches so much importance to this case, it should allow my trial to be transferred to Eskişehir, for there I can appear in person since I have a two-month report from the health committee stating that I am severely ill from poison. It is otherwise quite impossible.
Third Point: Basing it on Article 163 of the Criminal Code, the prosecutor and examining magistrate accuse Said Nursi of exploiting religion for politics and disturbing public order. The truth about this point is that five or six courts over the past twenty-nine years and the police of five or six provinces have found nothing indictable apart from two matters in the one hundred and thirty-three parts of my books and all my thousands of letters which they had seized, despite the provocations of some irreligious secret societies and their deceiving certain naive officials. Evidence for this are the facts that Denizli Criminal Court and Ankara Criminal Court and the Court of Appeal all agreed on my acquittal and the return of all my books, and in five or six provinces only one court wanted to impose a light sentence on the pretext of my expounding a Qur'anic verse about Islamic dress. In the face of my decisive and powerful reply, they were obliged to alter the verdict into one of discretion, That is to say, they could find nothing to convict me of either. For further elucidation of this point, I am sending you also the petition I sent to the chairman of Afyon Court.
In Short: The same palaver was repeated in five or six courts yet they could find nothing that constitutes an offence, Now the Samsun prosecutor and examining magistrate are repeating the same palaver of twenty-eight years: "He is conducting campaigns of propaganda to secure personal influence and is exploiting religion for political ends," I refer them to my unrefuted defence speeches of four hundred or so pages which I have delivered during five trials. Let them take a look at them rather than making me speak.
In His Name, be He glorified!
Having received a summons from Samsun, I am presenting my brief reply to its panel of judges:
First: I did not send the article. All my friends here know that.
Second: By reason of my severe illness due to being poisoned, which was an assassination attempt by my covert enemies, I have been able to attend only once the mosque next to me here. I therefore tender the legal request to have the trial transferred from Samsun Court to Eskişehir, which is near here.