From Ashes to Awakening

From Ashes to Awakening   -   in Persian  از خاکستر تا بیداری 

By: John Kazerooni

Once upon a time, in a land that knew peace, a child was born who would change the course of the world. He grew, spoke with certainty, and declared himself a messenger of God. Many believed him. Faith gathered around his words, and devotion soon turned into worship.

With belief came power. With power came conquest. Cities fell, borders dissolved, and victory was written in blood. Those captured—men and women alike—were declared property. Their homes, their wealth, their bodies were taken. Violence was explained as destiny. Cruelty was renamed obedience. 

Toward his followers, he showed kindness; toward those who doubted, he showed none. Mercy became selective, and truth learned to wear armor.

Centuries passed. Time softened memories, and his storytellers chose which parts to remember. Writers, scholars, and beneficiaries of this legacy brushed ashes over the past. Crimes were hidden. Suffering was edited out. Questioning that portrait became forbidden. To speak against the figure was to speak against God, and the punishment was death. Many honest voices were silenced and many honest people were killed in the name of holiness. 

His historians tried to cover his crimes. What remained was a polished portrait of generosity, framed carefully for believers. 

As generations rolled on, people remembered the painted mercy and forgot the buried wounds.

One day, in a distant century, a nation grew weary. Its people were unhappy, disappointed by a king who had failed them. They looked backward, not forward, searching for justice in an imagined past. To them, the old stories promised kindness, order, and moral clarity. So they took the crown from the king and placed power into the hands of a religious leader they trusted deeply.

At first, he spoke gently. He promised peace and justice. He promised freedom—and more than that, comfort: free electricity, education, water, and gas. His words were sweet, and hope is always eager to believe.

But power reveals what words conceal.

Once his rule was secure, promises faded. Freedom disappeared. Fear returned. The leader, a devoted student of ancient doctrine, ruled exactly as his founder had taught. He punished dissent, rewarded loyalty, and used violence as a tool of order. Prisons filled. Voices were crushed. Women were raped, humiliated and violated so thoroughly that silence seemed safer than truth.

And once again, intellectuals rushed in—not to stop the cruelty, but to excuse it. “It was the custom of the time,” they said. “This is tradition. ”They covered fresh crimes with old ashes, protecting not justice, but identity.

This time, however, something changed.

The people did not accept the excuses. They asked a simple, honest question: If this man claimed to speak for God, and if such crimes were wrong even to us now, then should not God have known better then? If divinity cannot condemn rape, slavery, theft, and murder, what kind of divinity is that?

They began to trust their conscience again.

They united—not around fear, but around judgment. Not around blind belief, but around awareness. They uncovered what had long been hidden and chose education over obedience, questioning over worship. They declared that no authority stands above human dignity, and no belief is sacred enough to excuse cruelty.

In that awakening, they found something greater than the promises of rulers: responsibility.

And so, freed from the ashes of false memory and inherited fear, the people learned to live by honesty, compassion, and conscious choice. They built a future not on myths of perfection, but on the courage to see clearly.

And in that clarity, they lived—not under fear—but in peace.

Questions Beneath the Ashes

How long can lies be buried beneath ashes before they poison everything built upon them?

Who benefits when false histories are preserved, and who pays the price for their silence?

How many generations must be sacrificed to protect comforting myths from inconvenient truths?

How many communities must continue to suffer, bleed, and fracture under histories deliberately distorted to justify power?

Is the misrepresentation of the past not one of the greatest dangers to the world we live in—fueling hatred, legitimizing violence, and repeating the very crimes it conceals?

At what moment does silence cease to be survival and become betrayal?

Who is more dangerous: the one who commits injustice openly, or the one who sanctifies it with tradition and scholarship?

Can any belief claim holiness when it requires the erosion of human dignity to survive?

Is conscience truly the enemy of faith—or the final refuge of morality when faith is weaponized?

Should those who disturb false peace by speaking the truth be protected, or should they be punished or killed by those desperate to keep injustice buried beneath the ashes?

And if authority trembles before truth, does that not expose authority itself as fragile, fearful, and undeserving of obedience?

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