Tales of the Dervishes by Idries Shah: Teaching Stories from the Sufi Tradition

The Book

Tales of the Dervishes was published in 1967, three years after The Sufis, and quickly became one of the most widely read Sufi books in the English-speaking world. Where The Sufis argued a thesis (Sufi influence on Western civilization), Tales of the Dervishes provides the primary material: the stories themselves, drawn from the rich narrative tradition of Sufism.

The collection contains over 80 stories, ranging from a few lines to several pages, drawn from the works of Rumi, Attar, Saadi, Jami, and the oral traditions of the Naqshbandi, Chishti, Qadiri, and Suhrawardi orders. Each story is accompanied by Shah's brief commentary identifying its source, its traditional use in Sufi teaching, and (sometimes) the psychological principle it activates.

The book's structure is deceptively simple. The stories appear to be folk tales, jokes, parables, and anecdotes. Many are funny. Many are puzzling. Some seem trivial. But Shah insists that their apparent simplicity conceals a sophisticated technology of consciousness: each story is designed to operate on the reader's mind in ways that rational instruction cannot accomplish.

How Teaching Stories Work

Shah's most distinctive contribution is his theory of how teaching stories function. He argues they are not allegories (where each element stands for something else), not fables (where a moral lesson is illustrated through narrative), and not parables (where a spiritual truth is communicated through analogy). They are something more precise: psychological tools designed to activate specific cognitive and perceptual processes.

A teaching story works by creating a pattern in the listener's mind that disrupts habitual processing. The rational mind tries to "understand" the story (extract its meaning, decode its symbolism, apply its lesson), but the story resists this reduction. It has multiple valid interpretations, and the attempt to fix a single interpretation prevents the story from doing its work.

The work the story does is not conceptual but structural: it rearranges the listener's cognitive patterns, creating new connections and possibilities that were not available before the story was heard. This is why the same story can be told repeatedly and produce different effects each time: the listener's cognitive state has changed, and the story interacts differently with the new state.

This theory is unusual and not universally accepted. But it has found support in cognitive psychology (Robert Ornstein's work on hemispheric specialization and narrative processing), in educational theory (the use of narrative as a learning tool that bypasses defensive resistance), and in psychotherapy (the use of metaphor and story in Ericksonian hypnotherapy and narrative therapy).

The Sources

Shah draws from several major Sufi literary traditions:

Rumi (1207-1273): The Masnavi (Spiritual Couplets) is the richest single source of Sufi teaching stories. Rumi's tales combine narrative skill, emotional intensity, and spiritual depth in ways that have made them beloved across cultures for eight centuries.

Attar (c. 1145-1221): The Conference of the Birds and other works contain hundreds of embedded stories that illustrate the stations of the Sufi path. Attar's stories tend to be more compressed and more pointed than Rumi's.

Saadi (c. 1210-1292): The Gulistan (Rose Garden) and Bustan (Orchard) are collections of stories and poems mixing practical wisdom with spiritual teaching. Saadi is the most accessible of the Persian Sufi poets and the one most frequently quoted in the Islamic world.

Jami (1414-1492): The last great classical Persian Sufi poet, whose Haft Awrang (Seven Thrones) contains narrative poems exploring love, service, and the relationship between the human and the divine.

The Nasrudin Cycle: Stories of the wise fool Mulla Nasrudin, which circulate orally across the Islamic world from Turkey to Afghanistan. These stories are the most widely told and the most immediately funny of the Sufi tales.

Oral traditions: Stories transmitted within specific Sufi orders (tariqas) as part of their teaching methods. These are often the least known and the most powerful, having been refined through centuries of use in actual spiritual training.

Famous Stories in the Collection

A few examples suggest the range and variety of the collection:

"The Man Who Walked on Water": A dervish spends twenty years learning to walk on water. He demonstrates his ability to a ferryman, who says: "I can take you across for a penny. Is twenty years of effort worth a penny?" The story questions the value of miraculous powers pursued for their own sake, rather than for genuine spiritual development.

"The Grammarian and the Dervish": A grammarian in a boat lectures a dervish about the importance of correct grammar. The dervish asks: "Can you swim?" The grammarian says no. The dervish says: "We're sinking." Academic knowledge without practical competence is worthless when reality intrudes.

"The Indian Bird": A man keeps a bird from India in a cage. On a trip to India, he asks if anyone has a message for the bird. A wild bird hears, falls from its branch, and appears to die. The man reports this to his caged bird, who immediately falls from its perch and appears to die. The man opens the cage to remove the "dead" bird, which flies away. The wild bird's message was not information but a method: play dead, and the cage opens.

"The Blind Ones and the Matter of the Elephant": The classic parable of the blind men and the elephant, retold as a Sufi teaching about partial knowledge. Each blind man describes the part of the elephant he touches, and each description is accurate but incomplete. The elephant is reality. The blind men are specialists. No single perspective captures the whole.

What Is a Dervish?

The word "dervish" (from the Persian darwish, meaning "poor one" or "threshold dweller") refers to a Sufi practitioner who has renounced worldly wealth and status in pursuit of spiritual realization. The whirling dervishes of the Mevlevi order (founded by Rumi's followers) are the most famous, but the term applies broadly to any Sufi who follows the path of faqr (spiritual poverty).

In Shah's stories, dervishes appear in many guises: as ragged wanderers, as disguised kings, as fools, as merchants, as beggars. Their defining characteristic is not their appearance but their function: they are bearers of a knowledge that the ordinary world does not recognize. They teach not through lectures but through actions, stories, and the example of their being. They are the Sufi tradition's equivalent of Zen masters: figures who communicate truth through indirection, surprise, and the disruption of expectations.

Teaching Story vs. Fable: A Important Distinction

Shah is insistent that teaching stories are not fables. The distinction matters:

A fable has a fixed moral. "The Tortoise and the Hare" teaches "slow and steady wins the race." The moral can be extracted from the story and stated independently. Once you know the moral, the story is dispensable.

A teaching story has no fixed moral. It has multiple levels of meaning that reveal themselves differently depending on the listener's state of consciousness. The same story may communicate patience to one listener, courage to another, humility to a third, and something entirely beyond words to a fourth. The story cannot be reduced to its "meaning" because its meaning changes with each hearing.

This is why Sufi teachers tell the same stories repeatedly over years: the story does not change, but the listener does, and each hearing of the story interacts with the listener's current state to produce new effects. A fable is a message. A teaching story is a relationship.

The Psychology of Teaching Stories

Shah's claim that stories function as psychological tools has been explored by several researchers:

• Robert Ornstein (The Psychology of Consciousness, 1972): Used Nasrudin stories in research on cognitive flexibility and the shifting between analytical and holistic processing modes
• Milton Erickson: The founder of Ericksonian hypnotherapy used teaching stories (often drawn from his own experience) to bypass the patient's conscious resistance and communicate directly with the unconscious. The technique parallels Shah's description of how Sufi stories work
• Gregory Bateson: The anthropologist's work on the "double bind" and on levels of learning has been connected to the Sufi teaching story's ability to communicate on multiple levels simultaneously
• Narrative therapy (Michael White, David Epston): The therapeutic use of stories to restructure the client's self-narrative draws on principles similar to those Shah describes

Using the Stories

Who Should Read It

Anyone. This is one of those rare books that has no prerequisites. You do not need to know anything about Sufism, Islam, or mysticism to benefit from these stories. They work on anyone who reads them with an open mind and a willingness to be surprised.

Teachers, therapists, parents, and anyone who communicates for a living. The teaching story is one of the most powerful tools for communicating complex ideas to resistant audiences.

Readers who have read The Sufis and want to experience the stories Shah describes as the tradition's primary teaching tools.

Where to Buy

Buy Tales of the Dervishes on Amazon

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