by T.L. James of MarsBlog. Part of our weekly Sufi Wisdom series. As terrorist Islam does its best to discredit the religion, it is important to remember that there are other voices within the faith. One such is the Sufis, a branch of Islamic mystics with roots in many religious traditions. The lessons of Sufism are often communicated through humorous stories and mystical or romantic poetry.

From Idries Shah's The Commanding Self, a little tale about missing the point:

A shopkeeper had a cask of oil, which he sealed with his ring-impression after filling it full. His assistants, however, found that they could steal oil by drilling a hole near the bottom of the barrel and plugging it until they wanted to draw off the oil from there.

When the shopkeeper opened his cask and found that, although the top was secure, the level had gone down, he was baffled. He asked a wiser man, who was a customer at his shop, what this might mean.

The wise man said, 'Some has been drawn off from the bottom: why don you look there for the source of your problem?'

'Fool!' shouted the shopkeeper: 'I am talking about the oil that is missing from the top!'

What is the shopkeeper missing (besides some of his oil)?