Tales of the Dervishes

Although enormously attractive as sheer entertainment, dervish tales are never presented merely on the level of fable, legend or folklore. They stand comparison in wit, construction and piquancy with the finest stories of any culture, yet their true function as Sufi teaching-stories is so little known in the modern world that no technical or popular term exists to describe them. For centuries, dervish masters have instructed their disciples by means of these tales, which are held to contain powers of increasing perception unknown to the ordinary man. Some tales are meant to be told only to people who have received a certain mystical preparation; some are deliberately restricted in their currency to people of certain cultural traditions. Idries Shah spent many years travelling three continents to collect and compare oral versions of these remarkable stories. In one form or another, many of them have found their way into the literary traditions of both East and West. His anthology, presented in the dervish manner, contains stories drawn from the repertoires of dervish masters over a period of more than a thousand years.