The Anthologies: Teaching Stories: The Anthologies

By Tahir Shah

During a career of thirty years, Tahir Shah has published dozens of books on travel, exploration, topography, and research, as well as a large body of fiction.

 

Through this extraordinary series of Anthologies, selections from the corpus are arranged by theme, allowing the reader to follow certain threads that are of profound interest to Shah.

 

Spanning a number of distinct genres - in both fiction and non-fiction work - the collections incorporate a wealth of unpublished material. Prefaced by an original introduction, each Anthology provides a lens into a realm that has shaped Shah's own outlook as a bestselling author.

 

Regarded as one of the most prolific and original writers working today, Tahir Shah has a worldwide following. Published in hundreds of editions and in more than thirty languages, his books turn the world back to front and inside out. Seeking to make sense of the hidden underbelly, he illuminates facets of life most writers hardly even realize exist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Secretum Mundi Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781914960840

Book preview

This book is for my dear friends

who built the magical

ship RV Heraclitus,

and who have sailed her on voyages

of utter wonder and imagination.

The Anthologies:

Africa

Ceremony

Childhood

City

Danger

East

Expedition

Frontier

Hinterland

India

Jinns

Jungle

Magic

Morocco

Nasrudin

People

Quest

South

Taboo

Teaching Stories

By Tahir Shah:

Travel

Trail of Feathers

Travels With Myself

Beyond the Devil’s Teeth

In Search of King Solomon’s Mines

House of the Tiger King

In Arabian Nights

The Caliph’s House

Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Journey Through Namibia

Novels

Jinn Hunter: Book One – The Prism

Jinn Hunter: Book Two – The Jinnslayer

Jinn Hunter: Book Three – The Perplexity

Hannibal Fogg and the Supreme Secret of Man

Hannibal Fogg and the Codex Cartographica

Casablanca Blues

Eye Spy

Godman

Paris Syndrome

Timbuctoo

Midas

Zigzagzone

Nasrudin

Travels With Nasrudin

The Misadventures of the Mystifying Nasrudin

The Peregrinations of the Perplexing Nasrudin

The Voyages and Vicissitudes of Nasrudin

Nasrudin in the Land of Fools

Teaching Stories

The Arabian Nights Adventures

Scorpion Soup

Tales Told to a Melon

The Afghan Notebook

The Caravanserai Stories

Ghoul Brothers

Hourglass

Imaginist

Jinn’s Treasure

Jinnlore

Mellified Man

Skeleton Island

Wellspring

When the Sun Forgot to Rise

Outrunning the Reaper

The Cap of Invisibility

On Backgammon Time

The Wondrous Seed

The Paradise Tree

Mouse House

The Hoopoe’s Flight

The Old Wind

A Treasury of Tales

Daydreams of an Octopus & Other Stories

Miscellaneous

The Reason to Write

Zigzag Think

Being Myself

Research

Cultural Research

The Middle East Bedside Book

Three Essays

Anthologies

The Anthologies

The Clockmaker’s Box

The Tahir Shah Fiction Reader

The Tahir Shah Travel Reader

Edited by

Congress With a Crocodile

A Son of a Son, Volume I

A Son of a Son, Volume II

Screenplays

Casablanca Blues: The Screenplay

Timbuctoo: The Screenplay

Secretum Mundi Publishing Ltd

Kemp House

City Road

London

EC1V 2NX

United Kingdom

www.secretum-mundi.com

[e-mail]

First published by Secretum Mundi Publishing Ltd, 2022

THE ANTHOLOGIES: TEACHING STORIES

© TAHIR SHAH

Tahir Shah asserts the right to be identified as the Author of the Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Visit the author’s website at: www.TahirShah.com

ISBN 978-1-914960-84-0

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Contents

Introduction

The Fox, the Dog, and the River’s Soul

The Old Wind

Mellified Man

The Tale of the Rusty Nail

Mouse House

Skeleton Island

The Shop That Sold Truth

When the Sun Forgot to Rise

Hourglass

Frogland

On Backgammon Time

The Pastèque Kingdom

The Man Whose Arms Grew Branches

The Square Melon

Introduction

Last week I

found myself sitting in a classroom, watching a teacher trying to pass on a series of ideas about safety to a group of children – children with little interest in the subject.

When I say it was a ‘classroom’, I’m actually stretching the truth.

There were no walls, ceiling, or floor; the kids were sitting outside in the open. The teacher’s board was propped up against a sprawling acacia tree. We were in the Karoo, the magical semi-desert of South Africa – a landscape that is way beyond inspiring.

The teacher was trying to explain to her class that scorpions were all around, and that being stung was likely to put the fragile life of a child at risk.

I had been invited to tell stories to the class.

Before I did so, I listened to what the teacher had to say. With great care and equal passion, she explained the threat of scorpions, making it clear that a single scorpion sting could affect the entire community.

A mixture of ages, the kids were between six and ten years old. Most of them were squirming about, excited to have a visitor sitting with them under the acacia tree. When the teacher had finished highlighting the woes of scorpion bites, I asked her if the kids paid better attention when there wasn’t a visitor present.

She shook her head.

‘They never listen,’ she shot back.

I leaned in and whispered:

‘Why not?’

‘Because they want to go out and play football.’

It was at this point I stood up, introduced myself, and told them that I wasn’t there to teach them anything.

All at once the children grinned.

‘I’m going to tell you a story,’ I said.

‘What story?’ a little girl in a pink dress at the back called out.

‘A story about a naughty little scorpion called Francis,’ I replied.

Thinking on my feet, I spun a tale with a rather jerky plot about naughty Francis who was unloved… because his sting didn’t work as it should.

The scorpion story may not have been the finest tale ever to have passed my lips, but it contained the same message of safety and danger the teacher had done her best to impart in a more conventional way.

When it was over, I began to tell the children that I’d made a teaching story with the information.

But, of course, they didn’t listen.

So, I furled the idea of teaching stories up into a story – The Tale of an Angry Ant.

For many years now, I’ve packed ideas and information up in anecdotes and stories, so as to have them be received in a way I wanted them to be received.

The spinning of stories is a skill – one that’s learned and honed.

Like any other skill, the more you do it, and the more you examine the work you have created, the more profound the effect on others.

My father used to say that stories are like an instruction manual to the world, and that by telling tales we harness an ancient psychological mechanism as complex and profound as any other in existence.

My sisters and I received this information from him as children, through stories.

As any storyteller worth their salt will attest, there’s no better way to package anything than in the shape of a tale.

But there’s something that confuses me. It’s this:

Given that stories have been used to pass on ideas and information since humans were living in caves and clustered around campfires, why is the idea of ‘teaching stories’ such a recent one to the Occidental world?

If you google ‘teaching story’, you’ll find that my father, my aunt Amina, and other members of my family are credited with having been at the vanguard of introducing teaching stories to the West.

That’s nonsense of course.

For teaching stories have been in use in both West and East and at all points of the compass for millennia. The role of my family has been simply to explain that the stories all around us work in a certain way. And that, by grasping how they work, we can shape their usage, and harness them for the good of all humanity.

Teaching stories are all around us, often hidden in plain sight.

Thinking about it reminds me of Swedish marrows…

When I was nine years old, we spent part of the summer in Scandinavia. It was one of those sublime adventures with long, hot days peppered with strange new experiences. We travelled to the vast forest of Dalsland, on the south-western flank of Sweden.

Friends of my godfather invited us to stay, and to share their glorious outdoor life.

Before lunch one day, we were sitting in the garden, with my mother telling a story I’d heard a hundred times before.

All of a sudden, she stopped mid-flow and blurted out:

‘What lovely marrows!’

Our Swedish hosts looked at the trellis above the front door where she was pointing.

‘I’ve never seen such gorgeous marrows!’ she cried. ‘How do you cook them?’

Our hosts looked at one another blankly.

‘We don’t cook them,’ said the wife firmly.

‘Why ever not?’ my mother bellowed.

‘Because they are decorative,’ the husband said.

Never one to shy away from making her point, my mother picked some of the marrows, cooked them at once, and served them up for lunch.

Swedish marrows have been going around my head ever since…

Not because I am especially partial to marrows, as I’m not, but because the marrows of Dalsland, grown as decoration, were rather like the phenomenon of stories in the West.

Most of us are raised on stories in one form or another.

And of course, we all love them.

But a lot of the time we forget that they’re far more than mere entertainments.

They are a distillation of wisdom and experience, packaged in a form that can be received by anyone, from the smallest child to the oldest adult.

Think of the genius of it…

A genius so sophisticated that it teaches someone without them being aware they’re benefitting at all. Even though we benefit from the stories, we stand to profit far more by understanding them in a deeper way – like the marrows that are pleasing to look at, but even more pleasing to taste.

Last word must go to Amina, my eccentric aunt and storyteller extraordinaire.

When I was very small, I asked her why it was she could think of stories, and tell them as though she was still a child.

She looked at me with a sideways glance.

‘I tell stories as I do,’ she whispered, ‘because I am a story, and because the stories I tell are not stories at all – they are me.’

Tahir Shah