A Thousand and One Arabian Nights originated with the Sufis. There are many other wonderful books hardly known to us in the West. The Sufis say that it took eight hundred years of hard and often dangerous work to get Islam to accept the Sufi claim. This storyteller must confess that the Sufi use of tale and anecdote and poems and jokes has been and is a most intense delight. This body of literary material, described by them as the most valuable of the treasures in the human heritage is too varied to be described here.
Some tales go back thousands of years.
Idries Shah's Tales of the Dervishes offers samples of this richness. Others are new-coined. Shah has created some. It takes time to even begin to appreciate what a range and depth is there. Their insistence that the inculcation of a simple morality of an ethic is a very low-level stage of instruction begins to explain something of their scope.