Tales
When the concept fails, the tale passes through.
When the argument hardens, the parable opens.
This anthology slowly gathers the storytellers of wisdom — figures of Sufi humour such as Nasr Eddin Hodja, great poets who thought in stories (Rūmī, ʿAṭṭār, Saʿdī), saints whose very lives became tales, and modern transmitters who carried these traditions to the West. Each author will become a developed entry — for now, most are awaiting their sources.
Flagship figures
Nasr Eddin Hodja
The wise fool of the Turkish-Arab tradition — humour as a mirror, the absurd as revelation.
coming soonRūmī
The Mathnawī weaves more than a hundred tales — the merchant and the parrot, the elephant in the dark, the reed that weeps.
coming soonʿAṭṭār
The great allegorical story of the journey of the soul — seven valleys, thirty birds, a single Presence.
coming soonSaʿdī
The Rose Garden and the Orchard — Persian wisdom in brief anecdotes, chiselled like miniatures.
coming soonSanāʾī
The master who opened the way of the mystical mathnawī before Rūmī — Ḥadīqat al-ḥaqīqa.
coming soonJāmī
The last of the great Persian classics — Yūsuf and Zulaykhā, Salāmān and Absāl, Bahāristān.
Classical collections
Kalila wa Dimna
The fables of the Pañcatantra, passed through the Persian of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ — political wisdom in parable.
coming soonThe Thousand and One Nights
The great river — Scheherazade, Sindbad, the fisherman and the genie. A thousand drawers and a single voice that saves.
coming soonQiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ
Adam, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Jesus, Muḥammad — the tradition reread as a great spiritual narrative.
coming soonMaqāmāt
The Arab art of the assembly — verbal virtuosity, the cunning of the eloquent vagabond, wisdom hidden beneath the picturesque.
coming soonLuqmān
Words attributed to the sage Luqmān — proverbs, counsels to his son, fragments of a pre-Islamic wisdom received by Revelation.
Saints and figures
Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya
To burn paradise, to quench hell — so as to love God for Himself. The words that founded mystical love in Islam.
coming soonBāyazīd Bistāmī
“Glory be to me” — the shaṭaḥāt, those words of ecstasy that make language tremble.
coming soonJunayd of Baghdad
The master of sobriety — set against the intoxications of Ḥallāj and Bistāmī, the teaching that returns to measure.
coming soonal-Ḥallāj
“Anā-l-Ḥaqq” — I am the Truth. The martyr of love, whose death founds a tale that never ends.
coming soonʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī
The great patron of Sunni Sufism — the Qādiriyya and its hagiographic tales that water the whole Muslim world.
coming soonShams of Tabriz
The stranger who appears, transforms, disappears — the encounter that gave birth to the Mathnawī.
Cultural areas
Yunus Emre
The poet-storyteller of the Anatolian soul — short tales, burning words in popular Turkish.
coming soonBulleh Shah
The great Sufi of the Punjab — songs and tales that still make the streets of Lahore vibrate.
coming soonSultan Bahu
The poetry-tale of the mystical Punjab — Alif Allāh, a single letter is enough.
coming soonAmīr Khusrow
The poet-musician-storyteller who invented a language to speak the love of Niẓām ad-Dīn Awliyāʾ.
coming soonTales of dervishes
The tales the orders transmit among themselves — Mevlevi, Qādirī, Naqshbandī, Khalwatī, Tijānī.
coming soonBektashi tales
Humour, sacred transgression, the glass of wine and the secret — the popular path of the Balkans and Anatolia.
Modern transmitters
Idries Shah
The one who introduced the Sufi tale to the West — The Sufis, Tales of the Dervishes, and a whole school of transmission.
coming soonJean-Louis Maunoury
The great French transmitter of Nasr Eddin Hodja — Phébus editions, lively and faithful translations.
coming soonHenri Gougaud
The art of telling the tales of the East in contemporary French — L'arbre aux trésors, Contes du Maghreb.
coming soonJihad Darwiche
The living voice of the Arab oral tradition in France — Sufi tales told on stage, transmitted without intermediary.