Ingenious Puns

 

Safir-i Simurgh, "The Whistling of the Simurgh"

This epic is the most perfect poetic introduction to the mystical path, with its seven valleys, in which are described all the difficulties the soul will encounter on the road.

The thirty birds who have undertaken the painful journey in search of the Simurgh, the king of birds, realize finally that they themselves—being si murgh, "thirty birds"—are the Simurgh.

This is the most ingenious pun in Persian literature, expressing so marvelously the experience of the identity of the soul with the divine essence.

Excerpted from: Anne Marie Schimmel Mystical Dimension of Islam, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1975

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