About the “Birds”

Here you can learn a little more about the feathery faces that led this project. We also encourage you to check out the Acknowledgements page, because it couldn’t have been completed without their help!

Bruce Hallgren (CAS 2022)

The Hoopoe Tells the Birds About their king, the Simorgh | Nightingale | Their Souls Rose Free

When I first entered this course, I was extremely nervous. I was a big fan of the book when I read it in CC102, but I felt intimidated by the caliber of artists in our group. I came to realize that the rest of the class was incredibly supportive of each other, and really helped me grow as an artist. We were always on the lookout for each other, and the projects we undertook incorporated all of our unique styles seamlessly. I really looked forward to convening every Thursday, and I’m really going to miss it moving forward. Overall I’m extremely proud of what we’ve done, and I’m overjoyed to have been part of the flock.

Rania Shohatee (CAS 2023)

Parrot | The Hoopoe Tells The Birds Of The Seven Valleys | The Birds Meet The Simorgh

I signed up for this class on accident. I didn’t know it was for kids who already took Core classes, I just read the description and was immediately intrigued. Thankfully, Professor Tabatabai let me stay in the class because he believed that I could contribute to the class. He also thought he could use this class to persuade me to take more Core classes. He wasn’t wrong. This class felt like just the kind of welcoming community I needed my freshman year, showing me just how close knit community the Core Curriculum is. Professor Tabatabai has been my favorite professor this year, it’s hard for him not to be with all of his enthusiasm, knowledge, and passion. It also was the highlight of my day every time he would run into me in public, exclaim “Parrot!”, then disappear as fast as he appeared, leaving me to explain to a number of confused faces why I traded in my human identity in favor of an avian one. Not to mention, the people that make up this class have been guiding lights in a pretty confusing time. This class allowed me to collaborate with people I never would have met previously, it allowed me to take and give criticism and allowed me to learn from myself and others and evolve. We started off with separate assignments and separate scenes, but in the end even the individual assignments were never truly done independently. The amount of collaboration I have witnessed in this class has surpassed anything I have ever been a part of. It was the perfect environment to encourage conversation and to cultivate the future scholars I believe we all are. I had the opportunity to put my own spin on a book I truly enjoyed reading, and it has all been so interesting. I had access to multiple different views and interpretations from my peers that allowed me to develop a deeper understanding of this book and literature as a whole. I also got to practice any art skills I thought I had, which was fun in and of itself. Throughout the semester, I had a community of kindhearted, supportive people to fall back on, to ask questions, to help my transition and to teach me. I found my own BU family in this class and I will never forget any one of them.

Shilpi Dey (CAS 2022)

Peacock | Valley of Unity |Thirty Birds Arrive at the Court of the Simorgh

The true essence of the Core community was what I felt the most in this class as our team collaborated and created together to set up this beautiful website on the ancient text, The Conference of The Birds, which we had the opportunity to first encounter in CC 101. This class helped me work harmoniously with others as part of a team through group projects in the way of revisions and encouragement from other team members. Being able to learn how to use multiple media formats was also an extremely useful addition to my toolkit. This class has helped me work better with my peers and further understand the importance of listening and being listened to. Seeing the key lesson in the text reflected in real life, I could see that working as a team to bring each other up and help one another is what made our class a successful one, along with the excellent guidance of our hoopoe, Professor Tabatabai, whose enthusiasm was infectious.

Sammie Casas (CAS 2022)

Partridge| Valley of Insight into Mystery | Their Souls Rose Free

Being able to express art through a text that I really enjoyed was a shocking experience for me. The community that was built through this class reminded me why I love being in the Core community so much. My confidence in artistry and expressing myself was not particularly high in September. However, through the patience, support, and advice of Professor Tabatabai and my peers, I felt my confidence grow every week.  Each week I became more excited to come to class until eventually, it became my favorite.  As a class, our deep  dive into The Conference of the Birds artistically was a challenging task that I really enjoyed. This class taught us more about the book but it also gave us skills in Adobe audition and other programs. I was really glad to be a bird this semester and learn together as a group. Being a part of the small flock made the experience more entertaining as we learned, and guided each other through our own valleys. Each day brought new lessons with Professor Tabatabai as our hoopoe and there could never be a better one.

Mackenzie Finocchiaro (CAS 2022)

Duck | Valley of Bewilderment |The Birds Meet The Simorgh

The first time I read Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, I was absolutely astounded by the poetry of the piece.  Attar so cleverly related something so divine and unreachable of God Himself to something so reachable such as normal birds on a journey.  It was a beautiful piece through and through, and its words have shaped my life and spiritual journey.  This was just the mere words of the poetry.  This did not include any visuals, any group work, or any beautiful music and audio to help these words come alive.  All this sublime piece had going for it was its words.  Come CC 220, this all changed.  All of a sudden, the birds that toiled and strived for God came alive in vivid color and artistry, their stories were able to be heard audibly through our recordings, all while magnificent music played in the background.  With the help of all of my classmates, I was able to place myself in this deeply spiritual journey that the birds experienced and experience the true wonder of their spiritual quest firsthand.  This class was truly marvelous in every single way, and I thank Bruce, Jacky, Shipli, Rania, Faisal, Sophia, Rivkah, and Sammie immensely for being there on this breathtaking journey with me to make this quest by these birds come to vivid life.  I also thank Professor Tabatabai for being the one who guided us all through it, and, through all of his energy and enthusiasm, led us to create something absolutely astounding.  I could not be more grateful that I was able to share this experience with everyone here.  I think I can safely say that, through our efforts, we all found our own version of the Simorgh together.

Rivkah Fuhrmann (CAS 2022)

Homa | Heron | Valley of Love | Their Souls Rose Free

Poetry and language aid us in communicating our lives, our thoughts, our deepest fears and desires. They seek to express the world and the divine, crafting metaphors and weaving together imagery to achieve ideas otherwise incommunicable and intangible. Yet, without the hard work of translators like Dick Davis, we wouldn’t be able to read the vast majority of works like The Conference of the Birds. This project has been humbling and awe-inspiring for me. Sitting at our workshop table, I’ve felt simultaneously like a trailblazer and a follower, a speaker and a listener, a peer and a friend. As much as we’ve designed pieces of this project as fragments of ourselves, we’ve also assembled the pieces into a complete whole, and into a stronger team relationship. What was our main tool? Words. This endeavor illustrated to me the sheer power of words–the emotions they invoke, the ideas they speak into existence, the friendships they build. Working on this website has allowed me, for the first time in months, to express both my artistic sensibilities and my whimsical interpretations, and to collaborate with others to make it so much more than I could on my own. Thank you to everyone involved for this amazing experience.

 Sophia Scaglioni (CAS 2022)

Hawk  | Valley of the Quest |Thirty Birds Arrive at the Court of the Simorgh

Being a part of this class has been the highlight of my week each time it is able to meet. The ability to analyze such an intricate and symbolic text in such a curious community has been such an interesting experience. By assigning each student separate aspects of the poem (such as birds and valleys) to explore individually, the class may seem structured in a way that supports individual learning, or a lack of communication and feedback from peers. However, the weekly discussions fostered such productive and constructive discussion on each individual representation that I really cannot think of a single part of this project that “belongs” or “was made by” one hand or one mind alone. The very process of this course parallels its subject: the Conference of the Birds, individual entities joining together and bettering each other as they strive for a goal higher than themselves. This, perhaps accidental, mirroring is quite touching and I am very grateful for having been part of the birds of CC220. Personally, I feel that this course has made me both a better leader and a better team-member, as I have learned that it is not only acceptable but beneficial, to voice my input when the collective could benefit from it. The collaborative nature of the class has also meant that the reverse is true: I have become a better team-member because this class has taught me to accept feedback in an empowering, rather than debilitating, manner. I would absolutely take this course again.

Jacky Lin (CAS 2022)

Owl | Valley of Detachment | The Birds Meet the Simorgh

As an outsider to to the Core Curriculum, I initially found the class to be a little bit daunting: a group project about creating a website with artworks of a poem that I admittedly hadn’t read about coming in. However, the extra work that I had to do to catch up was not a large amount and there was plenty of class discussion regarding the current scenes we were working on, so I wasn’t falling behind on the assignments that we got to do. I got to experience the fun aspect of the class. In collaborating with my fellow peers, I was able to provide a new reader’s perspective and I was able to have my voice heard. I learned that even when we worked on our own individual entries, we were always there to give each other feedback throughout the process, and take each other’s suggestion into consideration. I have come to understand why students want to take on the Core Curriculum. I would definitely take this course again.

Faisal Halabeya (CAS 2022)

Finch | Valley of Poverty & Nothingness | Thirty Birds Arrive at the Court of the Simorgh

For me this class was both a personal as well as an academic endeavor. From an academic perspective, I do not think I’ve ever dived into a text as deeply or for as long as I did into Attar’s beautiful poem this semester. As I uncovered the layers of the birds’ journey I began to do a lot of my own reflecting on what it means to be on a journey together with others. The birds express their doubts, much as we did ours. In September, I was nervous about how we could put together this project when I felt so technologically out of my depth, not to mention needing to reread the text itself more carefully. But Professor Tabatabai and all the others who were our guides—our Hoopoes, if you will—were there to reassure us, to push us, and to cheer us on to this final product. I will take away a wealth of knowledge about how to use technology to reinterpret literature, and I know that will serve me well. But I am most thankful for the spiritual journey that I have embarked on this semester in our CC220 class. Our class has become a team, a unit, and a celebration of what it means to be a BU student and a Core Curriculum student. We’ve had difficult conversations, we’ve laughed, we’ve cried, we’ve complained about the heating—seriously, why is our classroom a sauna?!—and we’ve made it through our individual and collective “valleys”. Now as the semester nears its close, we see ourselves reflected in this project just like the birds do in the Simorgh. This class was often the highpoint of my week, it challenged me to grow, and it is a perfect example of the kind of work that a liberal arts education should inspire and reward. More than anything I’m grateful to Professor Tabatabai and to the Core for letting us all be a part of something grand, something that we will be able to look back on, share, and remember for the rest of our lives.

Sassan Tabatabai (CAS 1988)

I am thrilled and honored that this wonderful flock of birds has cast me in the role of the hoopoe.  In The Conference of the Birds, the hoopoe gives the birds advice and answers questions, but he does not tell them what to do. He simply encourages them to access the spirituality that is already within them. Similarly, I have added my two cents, when appropriate, to this multimodal journey, and have tried to bring out the talents that already reside in this group.  These birds owe only their own creativity and hard work for what they have accomplished.