Collecting Nasreddin stories in Bukhara, Uzbekistan (Photo: Emily O'Dell)
Last night on Homeland...
If you watched Homeland last night, you might not have caught the name of the operation being planned for Brody in Iran.
According to the intelligence officer to the left, the name of the operation to get Brody safely into and out of Iran is: “Mullah Nasreddin majnoon.” Translation: “Mullah Nasreddin is crazy.”
So, who is this mysterious mullah? Mullah Nasreddin (or Nasreddin Hoca in Turkish) is a legendary “holy fool” who appears in numerous jokes and absurd anecdotes in the Middle East and Central Asia. These stories about the adventures of a wise old spiritual “teacher,” however, are much more than just jokes–since many of them point at the hypocrisy of religious, political, and social systems. Much like a court jester, Nasreddin casts himself as the crazy fool–to let him take aim at any target under the guise of being unwise.
The first time I went to the main square in Bukhara, Uzbekistan to collect Nasreddin tales for my research, I ran into a statue of Mullah Nasreddin sitting on his fabled donkey (below). Nearby, I purchased collected tales of Nasreddin in a bookstore tucked inside a restored medieval madressa. And whenever I’m strolling through the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, I always spy t-shirts and plates decorated with Nasreddin’s smiling, wise face. As for his presence in America, even President Woodrow Wilson was reportedly fond of telling Nasreddin jokes–and UNESCO declared the year 1996 as “the Year of Nasreddin Hoca.”
Even though Homeland is using his name for an operation in Iran, so many countries like to claim Nasreddin as their own. In my Sufism seminar at Columbia, some of my students did a wonderful project comparing Nasreddin stories in Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Albania, Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.
As for Homeland, naming an operation after a wise fool whose irrational actions never seem to make any sense to anyone else until the end of the tale–well, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if a number of seemingly misguided maneuvers in Iran end up looking wise and brilliant when the season finally concludes…
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“If you want truth,” Nasreddin told a group of Sufi seekers who had come to hear this teachings, “you will have to pay for it.”
“But why should you have to pay for something like truth,” one of them asked.
“Have you not noticed,” said Nasreddin, “that it is the scarcity of a thing which determines its value?”
Statue of Nasreddin in Bukhara, Uzbekistan
