The Way of Khoja Nasreddin

One night, a knock sounded at Khoja Nasreddin’s door. Opening it, he found a wretched-looking pauper who announced: “Allah has guided me to this house for a good meal.” “I am very sorry,” the Khoja replied, “but you have the wrong house.” He pointed to his neighbor’s home. “Allah lives over there.”

Mulla (or Khoja) Nasreddin is a beloved folk hero across the Muslim world, particularly in the East. While his true origins are lost to time, the character may be based on an actual 13th-century Sufi sheikh.

Some say he was born in Anatolia; others place him in Azerbaijan or as far east as Bukhara. Regardless of his birthplace, he is a charming figure—a kind of wise fool usually depicted riding backward on his faithful donkey, using sharp-witted ruses to outmaneuver the whimsical, the corrupt, and the morally bankrupt.

Historical sources disagree on the man behind the myth, or at least on the original source of the tales. In the Arab world, the stories of Juha are common, likely stemming from a much older narrative layer that portrays a simpler fool. It is possible that in the Persian-Turkish sphere, Nasreddin evolved from these earlier Arabic roots, gaining new nuances and dimensions along the way.

In the West, Nasreddin’s stories gained fame through the adaptations of the controversial author and teacher Idries Shah. Shah emphasized the didactic and Sufi contexts of the tales, urging readers to treat them as primary tools for acquiring wisdom and insight:

“Tell me, Honorable Khoja,” someone once asked, “do you have a definitive proof for the existence of Allah, the Sovereign of Worlds, the Lord of All?”

Nasreddin thought for a moment and replied: “Listen to this: ever since I reached the age of reason, everything that happens does so solely according to the will of Allah. If the Almighty were not the arbiter of fate, surely things would have happened according to my own will by now...”

And also:

A friend visited Nasreddin and brought a duck; Nasreddin cooked it and they shared a meal. A week later, a stranger arrived claiming to be the cousin of the friend who brought the duck. Nasreddin fed him. Another week passed, and someone else arrived claiming to be a friend of the cousin of the man who brought the duck. Nasreddin fed him too. This continued until the connection to his friend grew impossibly thin. Finally, when yet another “friend of the cousin of the friend” arrived, Nasreddin served him a bowl of hot water. “What is this?” the man asked. “This,” Nasreddin told him, “is the soup of the soup of the soup of the duck.”

In Israel, these stories became known through the translations of Leonid Solovyov, a Tripoli-born Russian journalist. His version inspired a play at the Cameri Theatre in the 1950s and 60s, which introduced the song “In Beautiful Bukhara” into the Israeli cultural canon.

“Nasreddin in Bukhara,” a 1943 Soviet film.

I was delighted to discover a wonderful old animated version of his stories from Chinese television, based on the local Uyghur culture of Xinjiang. In China, Nasreddin is called Afanti, a shortened form of his title in East Turkestan: Nasreddin Effendi.

Setting aside Pan-Turkic politics—and the current grim reality of the Uyghurs under Chinese control—this series is completely captivating. With a simple, innocent design faithful to the local culture, it perfectly captures the charm of Chinese Central Asia, all through a proletarian lens.

“Molla Nasreddin,” a satirical magazine published primarily in Baku, Azerbaijan, until the 1930s, which enjoyed immense influence throughout the Muslim world.

Folktales are a wonderful example of how universal human motifs are woven through time and culture, wandering, taking root, and being endlessly adapted under new guises and languages. Our good Khoja, on his long journey from the cities of Anatolia to the mountains of Persia, and from the stage of the Cameri to Chinese state television, is a perfect example.

In the pictures:

The (supposed) tomb of Khoja Nasreddin in Akşehir, near Konya, Turkey.

Modern representations of Nasreddin, including from the Chinese television series.