Ceramic plate with peacocks, from Iznik, Turkey (c. 1550), in the musée du Louvre, Paris (Photograph © RMN Jean-Gilles Berizzi)
Date: Saturday, 18 April 2026
Time: 4:30 – 6 PM (GST) | 6 – 7:30 PM (IST)
Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82229373762
Open to the public. No pre-registration required.
Spaces limited and subject to availability.
Excerpts of the text can be downloaded HERE.
Ishara Art Foundation presents an online reading circle on The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar, in collaboration with novelist Sonali Prasad. Moderated by Prasad and Dr Bilal Orfali, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi, the session invites collective and interactive engagement with the 12th-century Sufi masterpiece, through a cross-disciplinary lens that encompasses artistic, literary and scholarly interpretations.
Offering a sustained encounter with Eastern thought against the grain of Western frameworks favoured by contemporary discourse, the programme explores the themes and motifs of the text in the context of wider Sufi literary traditions. A key focus is the afterlife of the text and how readers infuse it with new meanings, particularly as the preservation of cultural heritage becomes increasingly urgent.
The programme forms a conversation with Ali Kazim’s Hudhud (Conference of the Birds), a large-scale watercolour drawing that depicts a scene from Attar’s text. The work is presented in the exhibition Urdu Worlds, on view at the Ishara Art Foundation from 16 January – 8 June 2026.
Indian writer and artist Sonali Prasad‘s current compositions examine social, scientific, and environmental conditions through artistic mediums and related language use. She experiments with form and has used traditional and creative media practices, including longform reporting, poetry, data, documentary, installations, and visual art. Her journalism has appeared in publications such as The Guardian, The Washington Post, Hakai Magazine, Mongabay, Quartz, and Esquire Singapore. She has been awarded a Pulitzer Travelling Fellowship, Global TED Fellowship and an MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship, among other grants and honours. Her debut novel, Glass Bottom, was published by Picador India (2024) as their ‘literary debut of the year’. It was listed in The Telegraph India’s ‘The page turners of 2024: Fiction’ and shortlisted for the Kalinga Literary Festival Book Award in the category ‘Debut (English)’ and the Blue and Green Climate Lit Fest Award in the category ‘Blue Book of the Year 2025’.
Dr Bilal Orfali is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi. His research spans Arabic literature, Qurʾānic studies, and Sufism, with particular attention to classical anthologies, adab traditions, and the intersections of poetry and mysticism. Orfali plays a leading role in scholarly publishing in Arabic and Islamic studies. In addition to his editorial work, Orfali has served on the juries of some of the Arab world’s most prestigious literary and scholarly prizes. He is also the co-founder of the World Arabic Literary Salon, a platform for dialogue and exchange among writers, scholars, and readers of Arabic literature. The author and editor of more than twenty books, Orfali’s recent publications include Poetry and Spiritual Insight (AUB Press, 2025), Radiant Lights (Brill, 2022), The Maqāmāt of Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī: Authorship, Texts, and Contexts (Reichert, 2022), and Mysticism and Ethics in Islam (AUB Press, 2022).