{"id":5,"date":"2019-09-12T19:00:28","date_gmt":"2019-09-12T23:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/conferenceofthebirds\/conference-of-the-birds-cc220\/"},"modified":"2019-12-05T00:28:48","modified_gmt":"2019-12-05T05:28:48","slug":"conference-of-the-birds-cc220","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/conferenceofthebirds\/","title":{"rendered":"CC220 Fall 2019: The Conference of the Birds"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Conference of the Birds<\/em><\/strong> is an allegory of the soul\u2019s journey to the divine. Written in the 12th<\/sup> century by the Persian Sufi mystic and poet, Farid ud-Din Attar, the poem tells the story of the birds of the world who gather to inquire about their unknown king. They are met by a hoopoe who proceeds to tell them about their rightful king, the Simorgh, who resides at the peak of mount Kaf, and urges them to journey to his court. Initially, the birds bring up excuses as to why they can\u2019t go on the journey and the hoopoe responds to their hesitations. The birds commit to the journey and ask the hoopoe about its length who describes the seven valleys the birds must traverse in order to reach their destination. A flock of thousands sets off on the journey but ultimately only 30 birds arrive at the court of the Simorgh. The finale of the story rests on a pun: In Persian, Simorgh (Si-morgh) literally means 30 (Si) birds (morgh). The 30 birds (si morgh), gaze into the Simorgh and see a reflection of themselves. This is when we realize the birds\u2019 journey to the Simorgh\u2014the soul\u2019s journey to the divine\u2014had been an internal journey from the beginning.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"many<\/a><\/p>\n

The valley of love<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The flock of birds on this journey:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We would like to dedicate this multimodal journey to Dick Davis, whose beautiful English translation of Attar’s\u00a0The Conference of the Birds<\/em> allowed us to explore this wonderful and mysterious poem.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Conference of the Birds is an allegory of the soul\u2019s journey to the divine. Written in the 12th century by the Persian Sufi mystic and poet, Farid ud-Din Attar, the poem tells the story of the birds of the world who gather to inquire about their unknown king. They are met by a hoopoe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14473,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/conferenceofthebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/conferenceofthebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/conferenceofthebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/conferenceofthebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14473"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/conferenceofthebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/conferenceofthebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":602,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/conferenceofthebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5\/revisions\/602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/conferenceofthebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}