Adam Oh's Blog :D

For my sixth blog post, I decided to illustrate the scene of Ayaz’s sickness from “The Conference of Birds” by Farid Attar, where the king is sitting by the bedside of his love. The story carries a lot of symbolic meaning which can be translated to relate to the major themes of the Islam. In the poem, we see that Ayaz, the servant, is “afflicted with the Evil Eye”. The idea of the evil eye can serve as a symbol of the devil’s temptation which would define Ayaz as the people or as Adam from the Garden of Eden which in turn defines the king as God and the messenger as an angel of God. The interpretation is justified by the action of the king in the poem where he tells the messenger to deliver the message “what tears of sympathy I daily shed…that I endure his suffering…and hardly comprehend I am the king” These words symbolize the idea of God’s undying love for his children which is why God endures the consequence of men’s sin. Later in the poem, it is seen in the poem that the king arrives faster than the messenger to Ayaz which also symbolizes the omnipresence of God as well as his love for the people. To demonstrate this idea through a blog post, I depicted the scene of the king bent over the bed of Ayaz, obsessing over him while the messenger is crouching because he is apologetic due to his lateness. I also included some elements such as a shadowed face on Ayaz to show his afflicted sin and light on the king to symbolize “good” of the king.