This story, one of the enormous body of Mulla Nasrudin folk-stories, is taken from The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, by the late Sufi writer and teacher Idries Shah.
Nasrudin found a weary falcon sitting one day on his windowsill. He had never seen a bird of this kind before.
“You poor thing, ” he said, “however were you allowed to get into this state?”
He clipped the falcon’s talons and cut its beak straight, and trimmed its feathers.
“Now you look more like a bird,” said Nasrudin.
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So Nasrudin molded a bird from an eagle according to his idea of ‘bird’. I wonder whether Nasrudin fell in love with the bird as Professor Higgins to Eliza Doolittle.
We often do the same thing with ideas we haven’t encountered before.