Although enormously attractive as sheer entertainment, Dervish tales were never presented merely on the level of a 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 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. "Challenges our intellectual assumptions at almost every point." —The Observer "For every decade we live, we will find another meaning in each story." —Desmond Morris, BBC The World of Books "... full of wit, sophistication, irony and common sense ... completely absorbing." —Northern Dispatch "Beautifully translated . . equips men and women to make good use of their lives." —The Nation "These teaching-tales could become a permanent part of the reader's experience ..." —Country Life "A collection of diamonds ... likely to endure in the manner of the Koran and the Bible." —Robert E. Ornstein, Psychology Today "... equal, and sometimes surpass, in relevance, piquancy and humour the best of the spiritual and ethical teachers of the West." —Kirkus Review "An astonishingly generous and liberating book ... strikingly appropriate for our time and situation ... a jewel flung in the market-place." —Sunday Times