576-578
THIS IS A PETITION SENT TO ALL MINISTRIES, THE DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS AFFAIRS, AND THE COURT OF APPEALS.
[Once again, I was not permitted to speak during the session regarding our appeal against the unjust judgment issued by the Afyon Court. They forced us to listen to the third oppressive indictment against us. They also did not allow anyone to come to assist me with writing. Now, despite my poor handwriting, I present this complaint, which I wrote while unwell, as a petition for appeal to your Court, which has previously shown me complete justice on two occasions.]
بِاسْمِهِ سُبْحَانَهُ
[This is a petition to the Supreme Court on the day of the rising from the dead and assembling for judgment and a complaint to the Court of Allah. Let the Court of Appeal, as well as the future generations and the enlightened teachers and students at universities, listen. Here, I am presenting ten of the hundred torturous calamities over the twenty-three years to the just Court of Al-‘Âdil, Who is Hâkim Zuljalâl, along with my complaints.]
The First: Despite all my flaws, I have dedicated my life to the happiness of this nation and the salvation of its îmân. And I worked for it with all my strength through the Risale-i Nur, saying, "May my head too be sacrificed for a haqiqah, the haqiqah of the Qur'an, for which millions of heroic heads have been sacrificed." I endured all the cruel torments through the assistance of Allah and did not retreat.
For example: One instance of the terribly cruel treatments I experienced during my trial and imprisonment in Afyon: although they forced me and the innocent Risale-i Nur students, who were awaiting solace from justice, to listen to their malicious and slanderous indictments against us three times, each session lasting nearly two hours, they refused to allow us to speak, despite my repeated requests to defend our rights for five or ten minutes. They did not allow me to speak for more than a couple of minutes.
Although I was kept in absolute isolation for twenty months, only one or two of my friends were permitted to visit me for three or four hours; they helped me a little bit in writing my defence. Then they were forbidden as well and punished with exceedingly brutal treatments. They forced us to listen to the indictment against us, which was malicious and based on misinterpretations, false accusations and slanders, as if they were trying to collect water from a thousand different sources, and in which I proved eighty-one errors on its fifteen pages. They did not allow me to speak. If they had allowed me, I would have said:
by what law, by what conscience, by what interest, and for what crime are you condemning us to heavy sentences, very severe betrayals and confinement? Indeed, you will be questioned about this at the Supreme Court on the day of the rising from the dead and assembling for judgment.
The Second: The reason they proposed for my punishment was my tafsir written as a response to the objections of civilisation to the sarîh âyahs of the Qur'an about tasattur, inheritance, the dhikr of Allah and polygamy that would silence them.
I am repeating the following paragraph, which I wrote fifteen years ago to the Eskişehir Court and the Ankara Court of Appeal, and which they included in the court's decision against me. As a complaint to the Supreme Court on the day of the rising from the dead and assembling for judgment, and as a warning to the enlightened teachers of the future, and together with Al-Hujjat Az-Zahrâ4 as a sort of addition to my petition to the Court of Appeal, which justly and fairly listened to our cries and judged with our two acquittals, I repeat this paragraph verbatim to the committee of judges who prevented me from speaking and sentenced me to two years of heavy imprisonment, absolute solitary confinement and two years of exile elsewhere and house arrest under close surveillance with the malicious indictment that we proved to have eighty errors.
Thus, I say to the Court of Appeal:
“I exclaim that if there is any justice on the face of the earth, it will indeed reject and abolish this wrong judgment that convicts a man who — by relying on the consensus and affirmation of three hundred and fifty thousand tafsirs and by following our ancestors’ beliefs they had for one thousand three hundred and fifty years — made the tafsir of a sacred and haqq principle of Allah, which, in each century, for one thousand three hundred and fifty years, was applied in the social life of three hundred and fifty million Muslims. The deaf ears of this century, too, should hear!”
I wonder, wouldn't it be a denial of Islam and a betrayal of our one billion devout and heroic ancestors, and wouldn't it lead to the accusation of millions of tafsirs to convict a man — because of the tafsir of those âyahs — who intellectually and scientifically rejects some European laws that are accepted temporarily due to the requirement of certain compulsions of this time and who has abandoned politics and withdrawn from social life?
...