The Elephant in the Dark

A group of men sought to examine an elephant in a dark room. Each took hold of a different part – an ear, the tail, a leg. Each mistook his particular part for the whole – and became convinced that an elephant was a fan, a rope, a pillar – and so on. With this seven hundred year old fable by the Sufi giant Jalaluddin Rumi, Idries Shah presents the Sufi perspective that Christianity and Islam stem from one, inner, origin. Based on his celebrated Geneva University lectures, this book dazzles with the breadth of its scholarship and the depth of its ideas.