The culture of the Middle East contains a vast repository of stories. Circulating for hundreds of years in oral form, and  often told by professional storytellers in the marketplace, the West became aware of them initially through Bible stories, and later through versions of the Arabian Tales in The  One Thousand and One Nights.

Complex and often multilayered, connected to Sufist thought, these stories can reveal deep psychological understanding of human behaviour, as well as  humour and life guidance to the reader.