The ‘trickster’ element of Diogenes teaching (which wasn’t really a teaching or philosophy but more a mode of behaviour) is very likely preserved in the motifs of Mulla Nasrudin - the Middle Eastern mystical fool - whose tales are very similar to those told of Diogenes.

Diogenes is important for numerous reasons. Firstly he IS the embodiment of the Trickster himself but, more significantly, he is a precursor of Christ and the Cynic School influenced Christianity to a very large and unacknowledged degree. The Byzantine concept of the ‘Holy Fool’ for example is pure Cynicism and it survives intact as a tradition incorporating magical elements right up to the time of Rasputin who is also of this lineage.

But the Cynics are important for another reason - they are a link in a chain which passes directly to Christianity and on to Islam/Sufism. The Greek tradition you mention would not have the significance to us it has were it not for it being salvaged by Jewish/Christian/Muslim scholars working in medieval Spain. These schools of philosophy and mysticism translated the Greek works we later inherited and which would otherwise be lost.

Having passed through a filter which was itself in essence a synthesis of Jewish/Christian/Islamic (mystical) belief, Greek thought became the bedrock of western civilization but in a form which was an amalgam of the highest of the three other traditions which nurtured it. I think this synthesis is important and evidence of it can be found everywhere in the west today - I won’t bore anyone with examples!

http://www.livejournal.com/users/quantanephilim/2003/09/23/