Aging & Wisdom Quote by Saadi

It reads like a line from a travel log, but Saadi is rarely just doing natural history. By pointing out that “most of the birds of the Old World can be found here,” he turns Oman into more than a waypoint on a map: it becomes a metaphor for how the world actually works in his writing - porous, in motion, threaded by routes older than any border. The phrase “strategic route” is quietly modern in feel, but the underlying idea is medieval and sharp: geography is destiny, and destiny is traffic.

Saadi’s deeper move is to smuggle human politics into bird migration without naming rulers, wars, or sects. Birds don’t need passports; they obey wind, season, and survival. That contrast lets him imply a critique: humans love to mythologize permanence - empires, identities, “homelands” - while the most reliable pattern in nature is transit. Oman’s “strategic” position isn’t just good for birdwatching; it’s a reminder that power accrues to places that sit at crossroads, whether the travelers are wings, caravans, or ideas.

Context matters: Saadi wrote in a Persianate world linked by trade, pilgrimage, and scholarship, while also shadowed by upheaval in the era of Mongol expansion. In that setting, migration is both beauty and warning. The subtext is Saadi’s favorite moral realism: you can pretend you’re the center, but the world is a corridor, and everyone - bird or human - is passing through.