Old Age: Consoling Hopes

An example of this is Denizli Prison. After the Risale-i Nur and the Treatise on the Fruits, written for those prisoners, entered the prison, more than two hundred inmates underwent such an extraordinary transformation in their conduct within three or four months, becoming so obedient and devout, that even a man who had killed three or four people would shrink from killing a woodlouse.

They began to become truly compassionate, harmless, and useful members of society. Even the prison officials regarded this transformation with astonishment and admiration.

Moreover, before any sentences had been pronounced, some young men declared:

“If the Nur students remain in prison, we shall try to have ourselves convicted and sentenced, so that we may attend their lessons, become like them, and reform ourselves through their teachings.”

Therefore, those who accuse the students of the Risale-i Nur of disturbing public order must either be gravely mistaken, have been deceived, or be deliberately or unwittingly misleading the government in the service of anarchy, seeking to crush us through persecution.

To them we say:

“Since death cannot be abolished, the grave cannot be closed, and the travellers in this worldly guesthouse are hastening, with great speed and urgency, caravan after caravan, beneath the earth and disappearing from sight, we shall surely soon be parted from one another. You will suffer a terrible punishment for your injustice.

You will mount the gallows of eternal execution represented by death, which, for oppressed believers, is merely a certificate of discharge. And the fleeting pleasures you have enjoyed in this world, under the illusion that they would last forever, will turn into enduring and painful torments.”

Alas, our hidden, hypocritical enemies sometimes label the truth of Islam — which was won and preserved through the blood and swords of hundreds of thousands of heroic veterans and shahīds who attained the rank of awliyā — as a tarīqah.

They thus portray the tarīqah, which is but a single ray of the sun of Islam, as though it were the sun itself.

By labelling the Nur students, who labour effectively in the service of the truths of the Qur’an and īmān, as “followers of a tarīqah” or “members of a political society,” they seek to deceive certain inattentive government officials and incite them against us.

To them, and to those who listen to their accusations against us, we say, as we declared before the just court of Denizli:

“May our heads, too, be sacrificed for a sacred truth for which hundreds of millions have sacrificed theirs! Even if you were to turn the whole world into a fire upon our heads, those who have sacrificed their lives for the truth of the Qur’an would never surrender their arms to godlessness, nor would they ever abandon their sacred duty, inshāAllah!”