Thirteenth-Fourteenth Century
Comic Figure

Biographical Data. Nasr al-Din Khoja (Nasreddin Hoca in modern Turkish) is the best-known humorous character in Turkish-Islamic culture from the Balkans to Central Asia. Like the Arabic jester Juha, Nasr al-Din Khoja was a legendary figure whose historical existence is unprovable. He is supposed to have been active around the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, perhaps in Persia.

Comic Figure. Early manuscripts of the adventures of Nasr al-Din Khoja include more than one hundred anecdotes, and by modern times around four hundred had been collected from oral and written sources. Like Juha, whom Egyptians melded with Nasr al-Din into one jokester hero, Nasr al-Din Khoja has various names, including Mulla Nasr al-Din (in Persian), Ependi or Apandi, Efendi (giving rise to the Chinese word A-fan-t'i for trickster), and Nastradin (in Greek, Albanian, Serbian, and Croatian). Modern scholarship has shown that tales attributed...