TUUM

FORMA FUTURUM TUUM

With a name inspired by our motto, FORMA FUTURUM TUUM¹, this AI assistant can potentially revolutionize every aspect of educational interaction and learning experience per se. Furthermore, it is incarnated as a bird known as the Simorgh², a legendary bird in Iranian/Persian mythology, folktale, and mystic literature.

This particular bird was chosen for many reasons, among which two are significant. Firstly, the Simorgh holds a legendary status in Iranian mythology and culture, embodying an adamantine avian archetype that transcends mere ornithological fancy in order to incarnate profound cosmological and epistemological principles.

Secondly, upon delving into its etymological and ontological roots, the Simorgh derives from an allegory in Attar’s Mantiq al-Tayr³. As a Sufi poet, the magnum opus of Farid ud-Din Attar depicts an esoteric allegory, summarized as follows:

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The birds of the world gather once upon a time, trying to decide their sovereign. That is when one of the birds, the hoopoe, tells them that they must seek none but the legendary Simorgh; and doing so requires traversing the Seven Valleys⁴, valleys each of which represents one of the features of humanity.

The birds thus exert themselves to cross the valleys. Many of them perish along the way… At long last, only thirty birds make it to the Simorgh’s abode. Upon arrival, the revelation that “Si-morgh” (thirty birds)⁵ is an anagram of “Simorgh” unveils the essence of its wisdom.

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Accordingly, Attar writes:

“There dawned upon those thirty birds hurriedly

That Si-morgh has always been the Simorgh verily.”

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A collective refined on the path to an ideal, the birds then come to understand that they themselves have become that which they were seeking. For us here at Canada Management College, this is the ideology behind the technology.

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Footnotes

¹     Which means “Shape Your Future” in Latin.

²     With other spellings such as Simurgh, Simorq, Simurq, and so on, it is pronounced /sɪˈmɜːrɡ/ using the phonetic alphabet.

³     The Conference of the Birds, ca. 1177 CE.

⁴     They include the Valley of Quest, Valley of Love, Valley of Knowledge, Valley of Detachment, Valley of Unity, Valley of Astonishment, and Valley of Annihilation.

⁵     In the Farsi language, the word “Si” means thirty and “Morgh” means bird(s).

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