A Tale of Four Dervishes

by Mir Amman and Mohammed Zakir

This book is a collection of five main stories and several sub-stories loosely strung together, with all the ingredients of a traditional oriental epic--beauty, valour, love and adventure with elements of the supernatural. The principal characters are four wandering dervishes--three princes and a rich merchant--who have renounced the world on account of their failure in love. In their journeys they meet characters more unfortunate than themselves who tell stories more fantastical than their own...Wonderfully entertaining as fiction, the stories should be of added interest because of the rich descriptive detail they provide of the customs, beliefs and people of the time.

About the Author:

MOHAMMED ZAKIR lives in Delhi where he has been teaching Urdu language and literature at the Jamia Millia Islamia. Among his published works are Distracting Words,; The Quintessence of Self-Culture; Lessons in urdu Script, and some anthologies of urdu prose and poetry. Presently he is working on a book for English readers on N.M. Rashed, a major Urdu poet.