STORIES are the heartbeat of humanity, because they convey the music of what happens. Though we demand the "facts", truth is often more elusive because it is not just about events but what they mean to the people involved.

This is starkly apparent in the current movement of people out of the Middle East and Africa. Is that a migrant crisis or an understandable flow of refugees away from war and social breakdown? The language is of "waves", "hordes", "desperate boatloads crossing the seas" – it is an invasion; we are under attack.

To achieve this effect the migrants must be a faceless mass, possessed by a remorseless single will. We are up against a kind of monster from which we must be defended, rather than an accumulation of people like us who are in trouble.

A few years ago Iyad Hayatleh came from Syria to live in Sighthill, Glasgow. His family first became refugees in 1948 when their village in the Galilee was destroyed by the conflict through which Jewish migrants and refugees formed the State of Israel. There is irony in that date, as 1948 was also the year in which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was agreed in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Iyad’s family went to Damascus in Syria where they prospered. Although he eventually had to escape the increasingly oppressive regime in Syria, Iyad’s hope was to return to his "second homeland". In a moving poem, for Iyad is an accomplished Arabic poet, he writes of his desire to hear the "athan", the Muslim call to prayer, in Syria at the moment of his death. Just as it was whispered in his right ear immediately after birth.

O you seagulls and doves, are you strangers like me?

I believe you are for you are rootless and

there is no home for you on window ledges.

Come, I provide a love-camp for you.

Seek asylum in my heart, I, the diehard refugee-

life still beats strongly within me.

Come ... where my mother lays out my poems

in the sun with tears and songs.

There decades ago I received the testimony

and there I wish to be buried –

and I wish that when I am dying

there remains one who will prompt me

in that recital.

Those words were written in 2010 and translated with the help of the late Tessa Ransford, founding director of the Scottish Poetry Library. Since then the part of Damascus in which Iyad’s family lived has been completely destroyed and depopulated. His wife has died and been buried in Glasgow, where they both felt welcome and safe. Now Iyad believes he will never return to Syria for he and his children are as much Scottish as they are either Palestinian or Syrian, and there is nothing to which they can return except dust and ruins.

Middle Eastern storytellers have been writing about migration and exile for millennia. The earliest figures in the ancient stories of Judaism, Islam and Christianity were people on the move. One wave left Canaan to seek refuge in Egypt from famine. Then they had to leave under the leadership of a religious visionary called Moses to escape oppression and slavery. Much later another religious tradition was forged as people migrated in Arabia guided by the visions of the Prophet Mohammed.

These events often affected women and children disproportionately. In Egypt a Jewish woman had to cast her baby afloat onto the Nile in a basket to evade the execution of male children. These events are echoed much later when a family has to flee from Bethlehem in Palestine to Egypt because the reigning tyrant has ordered a massacre of male children – a form of genocide that has re-surfaced in our own times.

Narrative patterns recur while history also continues on old tracks. Europe has been interfering in the Middle East since the age of the Greek and Roman Empires through the Crusades to the Ottoman Empire. After its 20th-century disintegration, the Western nations carved up the Ottoman spoils with consequences that have come back to haunt us today. Only those with attention span matching a Sun headline or a Nigel Farage tweet could conclude that the present problems have nothing to do with us.

At the root of all this are human needs that transcend borders or historical divisions. We need shelter and safety to rear our young. We need to belong to places and communities that give that give us a sense of identity. Nowadays we exist with multiple overlapping identities, but that has increased not reduced our emotional desire to be interconnected.

Storytelling traditions have always recognised and nurtured those human needs. In Scotland and the Middle East, hospitality is paramount. Everyone is welcome at the ceilidh and invited to contribute, especially the guest or stranger. According to Celtic lore, food is to be set out in the eating place, drink in the drinking place, music in the listening place, dance in the dancing place, and stories in the heart.

Amidst the traditional stories featuring in this year’s Scottish International Storytelling Festival is one about the wise fool Nasruddin who is a hero or anti-hero of the Middle East. One day Nasruddin is trudging home hot, dusty and dirty. Coming through the town he sees a bustle around the rich merchant’s house. What is it? A free feast thrown for the town’s people. So Nasruddin joins the queue. Only his robe is stained, his third best sandals cracked, and his second best turban awry. He is turned away by the bouncers.

Nasruddin goes home, bathes, dresses in his best robe with the wide embroidered sleeves, adds a waistcoat, and tops all with his best turban that wraps round his head seven times. Then he heads back to the feast, and is immediately ushered to the top table.

Drinks are served, but Nasruddin pours a glass of iced sherbert down his left sleeve. This is followed by a delicious mint soup, which Nasruddin pours down his right sleeve. His strange behaviour is attracting notice. Trays of chicken legs and pheasant wings arrive. Nasruddin tucks several of these into his turban.

By now every eye in the room is fixed on Nasruddin in his seat of honour beside the merchant. The servants are bearing in huge trays loaded with steaming goat stew. The host loses his nerve. "What are you doing?" he hisses to Nasruddin, "you are making me a laughing stock!" "Not at all," replies Nasruddin, "but since it is my clothes rather than myself that have been welcomed to the feast, it seems only fair that my clothes should be fed first."

This tale features in Stories Of The Stranger’, one of the Storytelling Festival exhibitions. It shows that traditional storytelling delivers moral insight, but also humour and entertainment. Traditional stories range freely between fantasy and history, the sharp edge of human suffering and the power to dream of something different. Laughter is sometimes better medicine than tears, and the freedom of imagination is the source of delight. Bringing Celtic and Middle Eastern storytelling together is like a World Cup final.

Scotland has excelled for centuries in the strength and diversity of its storytelling traditions. These are often interwoven with music and dance, food and drink. When mass media arrived in the 20th century, it seemed they would mark the end for oral storytelling. Instead it has come powering back, harnessing the more diverse digital and social media technologies to its mission to share "eye to eye, mind to mind, and heart to heart".

In 1989 the Scottish International Storytelling Festival (SIFS) was founded, and in 1995 a Scottish Storytelling Centre opened in Edinburgh under the joint inspiration of Orkney storyteller George Mackay Brown and the leading artists of Scotland’s Travelling People. Rapidly the vision of an international flagship rooted in Scotland took shape. Between 2003 and 2006, the Netherbow Arts Centre was dramatically re-built by Malcolm Fraser Architects as Europe’s first purpose-built storytelling venue.

The opening of the Storytelling Centre gave new impetus to Scotland’s international narrative feast. Supported from its inception by Creative Scotland and Edinburgh City Council, the festival has achieved global reach because of the backing of the Scottish Government through its Festival Expo Fund. This connects Scottish storytellers with festivals in other parts of the world, and brings international artists not only to Edinburgh but to communities across the country.

It is important that storytellers come to represent their art and their traditions, not their country, government or region. That is what makes this year’s gathering of those dispersed or divided by the Middle Eastern conflicts so extraordinary. Everyone is at an open table hosted by Scotland, and all are welcomed and heard. Moreover what is shared is the richness of culture, the magic of story, and our common capacity to overcome through tears and laughter.

SISF’s Stories Without Borders also bridges technological divides. The festival highlights Iranian film, and the "Talking Syria" Quisetna blog, both of which defy our Western stereotypes to convey real human experiences. In a series of events, alongside traditional story and music, the Storytelling Festival explores the influence of oral storytelling on theatre, film, the visual arts and digital media.

The art of storytelling transcends differences in time, language and culture. In the past it was also believed that stories could reach even between life and death. That is why Hallowe’en – or the Gaelic Samhuinn – is such an important moment in the Celtic calendar. As light gives way to dark, and outdoors to indoors, the worlds of time and spirit draw close. From its inception the Storytelling Festival has celebrated this moment, and encouraged a revival of traditional guising as the creative alternative to "trick or treat".

So can storytelling change anything in that real world of facts? Clearly stories can reconnect us with what is most valuable in human life, but in the right hands storytelling can also actively contribute to conflict resolution. This theme is explored in Stories Without Borders through a series of afternoon workshops. How to bridge divides of misunderstanding and prejudice? To hear someone else’s story and tell your own may be the vital opening to new ways of thinking and feeling.

The tipping point is accepting complexity and difference as a rewarding part of life, rather than as a threat. Instead of defining boundaries we can begin to map crossing points and connections. Good storytelling constantly reminds us that we don’t fit into neat categories, nor can we impose perfect beginnings, middles and ends – those things are part of dreaming.

There were once two neighbours who were best of friends. One day they fell out. It began over a trivial matter of where the wheelie bins should be kept, and escalated into a full scale dispute about garden boundaries, pavements and parking spaces. As things got out of hand, a mutual friend persuaded them to call in an arbitrator.

The arbitrator proved to be a portly old fellow with a twinkle in his eye but no small talk. He listened attentively as the first neighbour poured out his accumulated grievances. "Yes," said the old man, "I understand. I can see your problem. You are in the right."

Next the arbitrator listened with equal attention to the extended complaints of the second neighbour. "Yes," he said appreciatively, "I understand your problem. You seem to have the right of it."

At this the mutual friend lost patience with the old man. "Look, they can’t both be right!"

"Yes," nodded the old fellow, "that’s true, you’re right as well."

The wisdom of stories is their ability to encompass different points of view. If we could live with differences and accept that competing stories can co-exist, then the world would be a more tolerant and intriguing place.

More than ever we need stories without borders, and Scotland is ready to host the global ceilidh. The next few years will be exceptionally testing for Homo Sapiens, but sometimes a time of crisis can provoke transformation in the ways we think and feel. The story of human potential is still unfolding. Stories help us imagine how it can be different.

Donald Smith is a storyteller, playwright, novelist and performance poet, and was the founding director of the Scottish Storytelling Centre

The Scottish International Storytelling Festival: Stories Without Borders opens this Friday and runs until Sunday, November 1. Events include live storytelling sessions, exhibitions, children's events, talks and tours. For more information and a full programme visit http://www.tracscotland.org/festivals/scottish-international-storytelling-festival