Tales of the Dervishes by Idries Shah

‘For every decade we live, we will find another meaning in each story.’

– Desmond Morris, BBC – The World of Books

Available worldwide in all formats – including ebook and audio – on Amazon worldwide. In the USA go to Amazon.com, in the UK Amazon.co.uk, in India Amazon.in. You can also order Tales of the Dervishes in paperback and hardback from your local bookstore — and in the UK and USA we also recommend bookshop.org; and in Australia and New Zealand Booktopia. ISF also publishes an edition in Limited Edition, Dari, Farsi.

Although enormously attractive as sheer entertainment, Dervish tales were never presented merely on the level of a fable, legend or folklore. They stand in 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 terms exist to describe them. The material in Tales of the Dervishes is the result of a thousand years of development, during which Dervish masters used these and other teaching stories to instruct their disciples. The tales are held to convey powers of increasing perception unknown to the ordinary man.