Tales of the Dervishes: Teaching-Stories of the Sufi Masters over the Past Thousand Years
About This Book
A collection of classic Sufi teaching stories — gathered from the oral and written traditions of Sufi masters spanning a thousand years of Islamic mysticism. The stories range from brief paradoxical vignettes in the manner of Zen koans to extended narratives with richly developed characters and situations, all of them designed not merely to entertain or moralize but to produce specific shifts in the reader's perception when encountered in the appropriate state of mind.
What You'll Learn
Sufi teaching stories are not allegories with fixed meanings to be decoded but multi-layered vehicles for transmission — their "meaning" varies with the state of the reader and the particular question or challenge the reader is currently facing. The Sufi masters designed their stories to function differently on different occasions of reading — a story that seems to be about one thing on first reading reveals itself to be about something entirely different when re-encountered years later with more experience and self-knowledge. The dervishes — wandering Sufi teachers who appear throughout these stories as beggars, fools, and madmen — represent the figure of the realized teacher who operates outside the conventions of polite society in order to convey teachings that cannot be received through conventional channels.
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