Page 89 - The School of Yusuf (as)

Bediuzzaman Said Nursi: The Great Scholar Of Islam Who Learned
And Taught In The School Of Yusuf
ished with one month solitary confinement, and was exposed to
many other cruel practices, some of which are related by various
sources as follows:

Said Nursi was in the Eskishehir prison with 120 of his followers
where he was taken into solitary confinement and he and his
students were subjected to various forms of cruelty and torture.
One of his students, Zubeyir Gunduzalp states that they were
not given food for 12 days. 29

They were looking at us as if we had already been sentenced to
the death penalty. No visitors were allowed, saying that anyone
who spoke to us would be sentenced to death as well and at
night it was not possible to find sleep because of the filth, cock-
roaches and bedbugs. 30

When Bediuzzaman was released from the Eskishehir prison, he
was held under house arrest, in a house opposite the police station
in Kastamonu. Eight years later, the Denizli court sentenced him to
20 months in prison, and he was then exiled to Emirdag.
Throughout this period, he was subjected to countless instances
of torture and cruelty, and poisoned more than once. Bediuzzaman,
who was by then suffering from old age and ill-health, was deliber-

ately kept in cold, damp and poorly ventilated cells. Said Nursi re-
lates his prison days as follows:
Then they arrested me during the most intensely cold days of
winter on some trite pretext, and put me into solitary confine-
ment in prison in a large and extremely cold ward, leaving me
two days without a stove. Having been accustomed to light my
stove several times a day in my small room, always having live

coals in the brazier, with my illness and weakness I was only

87