Tricksters and fools in Middle Eastern tradition

Throughout the Middle East, narrative cycles-sets of stories centered on a constant theme or hero-featuring trickster-fools have long been popular. Indeed, Hasan El-Shamy notes that many of the characters and their actions have ancient origins.

Seth, an ancient Egyptian deity, was essentially a divine trickster, and some of the animals associated with Seth—including the jackal, the hyena, and the donkey—still appear in various traditions as anthropomorphic animal tricksters, sometimes with supernatural abilities. While the true animal trickster is virtually absent from modern Middle Eastern folklore, the human trickster-fool remains alive and well.  El-Shamy suggests that, based on the distribution of animal and human tricksters in Africa and the Middle East, we can assume that the trickster and his exploits are indigenous and have ancient Middle Eastern origins, and that where animal tricksters have disappeared, their names have simply been replaced by the local names of human trickster-fools.

Localization is a common phenomenon in folklore.  By this process, a tale, legend, or other item whose basic form is known over a vast geographical and cultural range, becomes localized to a specific place; thus when, for example, a legend “migrates” from one place to another, its import is made more immediate by changing unfamiliar names to more recognizable local names.  Many religious traditions, for instance, have legends claiming that a site was chosen when a revered person’s mount, unguided by human hands, stopped at a particular place.  That simple story—what folklorists call a “tale type”—explains in its many localized forms, or variants, the origins of mosques, Sufi shrines, Christian churches and monasteries, and so on, attributing the divinely inspired choice of locale to camels, donkeys, and horses.  So with the trickster-fool tales of the Middle East, although the same plot may be found from Morocco to Afghanistan and perhaps beyond, the hero goes by different names in different parts of the region: Juha, Abu Nawwas, Mullah Nasruddin, Nasruddin Hodja.

In the Arab countries, the trickster-fool is known most commonly as Juha (Goha in the Egyptian dialect) or Abu Nawwas.  Juha tends to appear more frequently in oral tradition, but Abu Nawwas is found over a wider geographic area, and even beyond the Arab world in East Africa.  In Iran and Afghanistan the trickster-fool goes by the Farsi name Mullah Nasruddin, and in Turkey he is Nasruddin Hodja.  Arguments have been made to establish the historical origins of the popular hero’s various incarnations.