Tricksters. Tiny Tales of Nasruddin

To finish up this week of Nasruddin stories, I'm going to include my own book! It's called Tiny Tales of Nasruddin, and it contains 200 Nasruddin stories, each just 100 words long. 

This was actually the first Tiny Tales book that I wrote; I've now written ten Tiny Tales books. You can find all of them at the Internet Archive because I upload all the books for which I own the rights to the Archive. In addition, the book is also available in other formats at my Tiny Tales blog: Nasruddin.LauraGibbs.net.

There's also an audiobook version you can listen to at SoundCloud, and I've embedded that here too:  Tiny Tales of Nasruddin playlist.

Laura Gibbs · Tiny Tales of Nasruddin

Plus you can see a story displayed at random here: Random Nasruddin.

I gathered these stories from many different sources, and there are still many more Nasruddin stories I would like to tell in this format, so maybe in the year 2023 I can write volume 2 of this book. Meanwhile, there are 200 tiny Nasruddin stories that await you here, and I hope you will enjoy them. 

Tiny Tales of Nasruddin

by Laura Gibbs

Tricksters: Folktales of Joha, Jewish Trickster

For this week of Nasruddin, I'm including this book of stories about "Nasruddin" but under a different name. This popular folklore figure appears under different names in different traditions, but with the same cluster of stories told about him. So, for example, in Arabic traditions he is often called Juha (or Goha), and thus in the Sicilian tradition he became known as Giufa. In addition to being popular among the Muslim storytellers of the Middle East, these stories were also popular with Jewish storytellers. In Morocco, for example, he is known as Seha, and in the Sephardic Jewish tradition, he is Joha. This book contains 300 Joha stories published in Ladino and Hebrew by Matilda Koen-Sarano, and translated by David Herman: Folktales of Joha, Jewish Trickster.

The full-page illustrations are by Ezra Masch. Here is his drawing for the famous story of Joha counting the donkeys and forgetting to count the donkey he himself is riding:

The stories come from over 80 different narrators in 17 different countries, collected over a period of over 20 years; the stories of Joha spread throughout the world when the Jewish people were expelled from Spain in 1492 and settled in Sephardic communities in North Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. The stories are organized thematically in a kind of life cycle: Joha's family, Joha at school, Joha at work, Joha and the animals, Joha's marriage, Joha's wife, Joha's children, Joha and the king, Joha's neighborhood, Joha talks about himself, Joha and God, Joha and the law, Joha the glutton, Joha in the hospital, and the death of Joha. The book also has a useful introduction which discusses the cultural context of the stories and also the identity of Joha as both fool and trickster.

Many of the stories come from Matilda Koen-Sarano herself and members of her extended family. She was born in 1939 in Italy (and is still with us!), and her family originally came from Turkey. During World War II, her family hid in the mountains to escape the Nazi Holocaust. You can read more about her life and work at Wikipedia.

Meanwhile, if you are curious about the Ladino language, also known as Judeo-Spanish, you can find out more at Wikipedia.

Folktales of Joha, Jewish Trickster
by Matilda Koen-Sarano

Tricksters. 202 Jokes of Nasreddin Hodja

Carrying on with the week of Nasruddin at Internet Archive, here is another book of short Nasruddin stories, so much so that the author calls them "jokes," and there are many Nasruddin stories that feel just like jokes with a punchline and everything: 202 Jokes of Nasreddin Hodja, published by the Galeri Minyatür in Istanbul; I haven't been able to determine the name of the author or of the illustrator.

This book works something like the Kabacali one where there often multiple stories in any given two-page spread, with an illustration for one of those stories, like this illustration for one of my favorites about when Nasruddin "rescued" the moon from being trapped inside the well!

So jump in anywhere in this book and enjoy... the wisdom traditions of Sufism can help you to find the profundity here (often in ways you might never have expected), but you can also just enjoy the stories of Nasruddin for the delight and humor of it all!

202 Jokes of Nasreddin Hodja

Tricksters: Watermelons, Walnuts, and the Wisdom of Allah

So far in this "week of Nasruddin" books, I have featured books which tell the Nasruddin stories in very short forms, something more like a joke than actual story. The stories in today's book are told in a more fully-fledged "storyful" approach, actual folktales rather than jokes or tiny parables: Watermelons, Walnuts, and the Wisdom of Allah, and Other Tales of the Hoca by Barbara K. Walker.

The book contains 18 stories about Nasruddin, and the illustrations are by Harold Berson. Here, for example, is the famous story of Nasruddin in the melon patch (one of my favorites!):

Barbara Walker was a folklorist who specialized in the storytelling traditions of Turkey. You can also find her Treasury of Turkish Folktales for Children at the Internet Archive, along with other books. You will find some Nasruddin stories here, along with all sorts of other folktale genres!

Walker also worked on African folktales, especially the folktales of Nigeria; readers of this blog might remember this earlier post about her two books of Nigerian folktales:

Nigerian Folk Tales

The Dancing Palm Tree and Other Nigerian Folktales

Walker is a great example of someone with an academic interest in folktales (she was the curator of the Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative at Texas Tech University) who also knew how to write for a general audience, and her Nasruddin book is a great way to get introduced to the tradition of Nasruddin stories in Turkey, as also in the book from yesterday by Alpay Kabacali. Turkey is the traditional home of Nasruddin, so it's a perfect place in which to start exploring his stories!

Watermelons, Walnuts, and the Wisdom of Allah,

and Other Tales of the Hoca

by Barbara K. Walker

Tricksters: Nasreddin Hodja

The focus this week is Nasruddin stories, and I was so glad to find one of my favorite Nasruddin books at the Archive: Nasreddin Hodja by Alpay Kabacali.

Kabacali is a Turkish writer, and you can read about his dramatic life and literary work at Turkish Wikipedia (Google Translate can render the Turkish text into English; that's how I read the article).

You will find over 100 stories here, along with beautiful illustrations by Faith M. Durmus. Several stories appear on each two-page spread, and one of those stories gets a full-page illustration as you can see here:

One of the advantages of Nasruddin stories is that a single story fits nicely on the page, and the artist can then build the illustrations around the stories, as you can see here:

In addition to the stories and wonderful illustrations, there is also a bibliography in the back with sources in many languages. So much enjoy here!

Nasreddin Hodja

by Alpay Kabacali

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.

So, here are the Internet Archive books, one by one: enjoy!

The World of Nasrudin

by Idries Shah

The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin

by Idries Shah

The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin 

by Idries Shah

The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin

by Idries Shah

The Sufis

by Idries Shah