Once upon a time there lived a sultan. Everything that he was taught from childhood and that he believed in was the undoubted truth for him. But he himself was a limited and narrow-minded person, although in many ways he was fair.
He had three daughters.
One day he called them to him and said:
“Everything I own belongs or will belong to you.” From me you received life. Your future, and therefore your destiny, depends only on me.
The two eldest daughters, full of gratitude and trust in his words, agreed with him.
But the third daughter, the youngest, said:
“Although duty obliges me to obey you, I still cannot believe that my fate should always depend on your will.”
“We will check this,” said the Sultan and immediately ordered the girl to be imprisoned in a small cell. The princess spent several years in her prison, while her obedient sisters lived in freedom and enjoyed the wealth that could have belonged to her.
Having imprisoned his daughter, the Sultan said to himself: “My daughter is languishing in the cell by my will, and not by her own. This fully proves to any sane mind that her fate depends not on her, but on me.”
The inhabitants of that country, having heard about what happened to the princess, said to each other: “We all know our ruler, and we did not notice anything bad about him. If he treated his own daughter, who is his flesh and blood, this way, it means she said or did something very bad.”
They sincerely thought so because they had not reached the level of discussing the Sultan’s claims to be absolutely right always and in everything.
From time to time the Sultan visited his daughter. Each time he found her more and more weak and exhausted. But nothing could break her.
Finally, the Sultan lost patience:
“Your persistent disobedience,” he told her one day, “only irritates me and may weaken my authority.” I can kill you, but I have a good heart, so I decided to expel you from my kingdom into the wild desert, where only animals and madmen like you live, who could not get along in our reasonable society. There you will soon understand whether you can exist without your family, and if you can, whether you will prefer this way of life to ours.
His decree was immediately carried out, and the princess was driven out of the Sultan’s possessions. She found herself free, in the wild, in an environment that was not at all similar to the one she had been accustomed to since childhood. But soon the princess realized that the cave could become a home, that nuts and fruits picked from the tree were as tasty as those served on golden plates, that the warmth came from the sun. This area had its own climate and lived its own life. Gradually the girl adapted to the new conditions. She took water from a stream, looked for vegetables on the ground, and made fire from smoldering wood.
“Here,” she once said to herself, “all the elements of life are in harmony with each other, forming a completeness that is neither entirely nor in particular subject to the will of my father the Sultan.”
And then one day a lost traveler, who turned out to be a rich and enterprising man, met the princess. He fell in love with her, took her to his country, and there they got married. After some time, they returned to that wilderness again and built there a huge prosperous city that fully embodied their wisdom, resourcefulness and faith. The "Madmen" and other exiles who inhabited the wild desert, many of whom were considered crazy, were able to exist in complete harmony with everything around them. The fame of this city spread throughout the world. His power and beauty eclipsed the beauty and power of the state ruled by the princess’s father. At the request of all the inhabitants, the princess and her husband became the rulers of this new and ideal kingdom.
In the end, the old Sultan decided to visit a mysterious and wonderful city that arose in the desert and was inhabited, as he heard, by those whom he and his kind despised.
So he arrived in the city. Bowing low, the Sultan approached the foot of the throne on which the young couple sat, and, raising his eyes to see those whose justice, wealth and understanding surpassed his own, he heard the quiet voice of his daughter:
- You see, father, every person has his own destiny and the opportunity to choose.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru