The Man with Bad Manners

(Bilingual English-Dari edition) This is the story of a very badly behaved man, how a young boy in the village hatches a plan to change the man's behavior - and how, with the help of the other villagers, the plan succeeds, to everyone's benefit. Children, of course, love the idea of an adult behaving badly. At the same time, the story helps them learn valuable lessons about initiative, negotiation, conflict resolution and cooperation. Rose Mary Santiago's illustrations provide delightful and amusing counterpoint to the tale. The Man with Bad Manners is one of an illustrated series of Sufi teaching stories from the Middle East and Central Asia that were collected and adapted for children by Idries Shah, and that have captivated hearts and minds for more than a thousand years. The stories are designed to help children learn to examine their assumptions and to think for themselves. In the Sufi tradition, there is a continuum between the children's story, the entertainment or folklore story and the instructional or instrumental story. A story can help children deal with difficult situations and give them something to hold on to, but it can also stimulate a deeper understanding in adults.

Idries Shah spent much of his life collecting and publishing Sufi classical narratives and teaching stories from oral and written sources in the Middle East and Central Asia. The tales he retold especially for children are published by Hoopoe Books in beautifully illustrated editions and have been widely commended - by Western educators and psychologists, the U.S. Library of Congress, National Public Radio and other media - for their unique ability to foster social-emotional development, thinking skills and perception in children and adults alike. Told for centuries, these stories express universal themes from the cultures that produced them, showing how much we have in common and can learn from each other. As noted by reviewers, such stories are more than just entertaining; familiarity with them provokes flexibility of thought, since each one contains levels of meaning that unfold in accordance with an individual's experience and understanding.