ONE dark night a dervish was passing a dry well when he heard a cry for help from below. ‘What is the matter?’ he called down. ‘I am a grammarian, and I have unfortunately fallen, due to my ignorance of the path, into this deep well, in which I am now all but immobilized,’ responded the other. ‘Hold, friend, and I’ll fetch a ladder and rope,’ said the dervish. ‘One moment, please!’ said the grammarian.
‘Your grammar and diction are faulty; be good enough to amend them.’ ‘If that is so much more important than the essentials,’ shouted the dervish, ‘you had best stay where you are until J have learned to speak properly.’ And he went his way
This tale was related by Jalaludin Rumi and is recorded in Aflaki’s Acts of the Adepts. Published in England in 1965, under the title of Legends of the Sufis, this account of the Mevlevis and their supposed doings was written in the fourteenth century.
Some of the stories are mere wonder-tales, but others are historical: and some are of the strange type known by the Sufis as ‘illustrative history’: that is to say, a series of events are concocted to point a meaning connected with psychological processes. For this reason such tales have been called ‘The Artistry of the Dervish scientists’.