On Backgammon Time is a Teaching Story by Tahir Shah, one of the foremost writers of his generation, who was himself raised in the ancient tradition of stories and storytelling. The son of the prominent Sufi writer and thinker Idries Shah, Tahir was weaned on folktales and folklore, drawn from all points of the cultural compass. Encouraged to write stories of his own from early childhood, he was trained to draw both perception and entertainment from the great story treasuries, such as The Thousand and One Nights. Descended from a long line of storytellers, Tahir learnt that the simplest tale often contains interwoven layers of meaning, knowledge, and acuity frequently invisible to the reader - and that by learning to recognize the subtleties, it's possible to mine a treasure trove of wisdom.