A poorly dressed dervish came to Baba Farid who gave him something and permitted him to depart. The dervish remained standing and asked the shaykh to give him the comb, which he had taken out from its cover and placed on the prayer-carpet. As the comb was not worth anything and had been long used by the shaykh, he did not reply to the request. The dervish began to shout loudly: “If the shaykh gives me this comb, he will receive plenty of blessings.” “Be off”, Baba Farid replied, “and do not disturb me any more. I throw you and your blessings into the river.”

In a restaurant in the West people objected to the presence of some Japanese. A certain man – he was called Laurens van der Post – then strongly objected to this racist behaviour and said to the owner of the restaurant that if the Japanese had to go that he would never visit the restaurant again and he would tell his friends to do the same. It not only worked, but because of talking to these Japanese visitors he got interested in the Japanese culture and even learned the Japanese language. This saved his life years later. He became a prisoner in a Japanese camp in Indonesia and because of his speaking Japanese he could survive as a much needed…

A governor of Isfahan, after a rich meal, went to take his rest on the cool balcony of his palace. He gave himself up to meditation, for he felt in low spirits. As he reclined on his couch, he was disturbed by a Chishti dervish at his gate who recited in a loud voice the following poem: When you long for union, so your heart is a garden in flower, Dedicate yourself to the searching of the One Who is your Lover. Take this as your compass, guiding you in the right direction: To show you Reality, only the Divine Light has the power. The governor rose in an irritable mood and looked down upon the dervish, who now serenely…

You may know that in the Middle Ages the Turkish armies have stood in front of the gates of Vienna. A sardar of one of these armies happened to meet a European merchant just after concluding a certain battle. For some reason or other he did not kill this merchant. To his surprise it was possible for them to communicate, as the merchant was able to speak fluent Turkish. It so happened that the merchant had spent some years in Smyrna as a friend of Hodja Hasan, who was a Sufi shaykh as well as a successful merchant. This Hodja Hasan had introduced the European merchant to a dervish, Baba Tahir, who had been so kind to accept the European…