A Look at Laura's Bookshelf: Tricksters: The World of Nasrudin

I'm really excited about the posts for this week because they are all going to be about Nasruddin, the wise fool and trickster of the Middle East who is also famous throughout South Asia, and now all around the world. For the past couple of weeks at this blog, I've focused on the tricksters who are culture heroes and gods in the traditions of Africa (and the African Diaspora) and also among the Native peoples of the Americas, tricksters like Spider and Rabbit. With Nasruddin, we move to another kind of trickster tradition: not the trickster of mythological traditions, but the trickster of wisdom traditions.

In the case of Nasruddin, that means especially the wisdom traditions of the Sufis. In his monumental book, The Sufis, Idries Shah devotes a chapter to Nasruddin stories, situating them firmly within Sufi tradition: Mulla Nasrudin. (Reading this book back in the 1980s is how I first encountered the Mulla myself!)

Of course, Nasruddin is also a popular folktale people, and many people who tell his stories do not tell those stories with any sense of esoteric wisdom traditions, much as many people might tell Brer Rabbit stories without any notion of the cultural force of the trickster. I'll share some folktale collections of Nasruddin this week, but for today, I want to focus on the beautiful books that Idries Shah produced, full of Nasruddin stories, which you can find at the Internet Archive, and also free to read online at the Idries Shah Foundation website.