The way we see things

Somewhere along the line, Middle-Eastern storytellers had put an identity to the jokes that go, "You ever hear about the guy who...?"

Instead of being just any random man, "the guy" is a semi-fictional character called Mullah Nasruddin who serves as a culture-wide subject of the same big joke. He blurs the line between foolishness and wisdom and probably existed in the 13th century as a Mullah – a teacher or educated man. Sufism eventually incorporated him into their teachings as a destroyer of expectations.

For my Afghan-American friend K and I, the Mullah became a shared fictional acquaintance and shared experience.

My friend and I met as first-graders shortly after her family moved to the States, into a fairly empty apartment in the hilly Martian landscape of our 'hood. We were skinny dorks at age sixish with little need for television. We were perfectly happy playing Monopoly and deep cleaning the bathroom while her big brother set fruit on fire with his magnifying glass. Otherwise, we were pestering her cool teenage sister to put on "Whoomp! (There It Is)" – mis-memorizing the lyrics to what we believed was the baddest hip hop song in the world, thinking the main chorus was, "Whoop, ehhhh?" The song was actually pretty terrible in retrospect, if you're YouTube-curious.

Then we grew up and discovered Nas, Tupac Shakur, and Wu-Tang Clan. We manifested new visions of ourselves. We became women who loved the arrangements of words, words that were never sufficient to express philosophical growth, metaphysical anthropology and our responsibilities to culture and religious life. We pushed against what we believed to be true and custom-built a social narrative that could make sense to us. We went in search and collection of witnesses, because a meaningful life is a witnessed life.

Sometime in college, she and I also bonded over stories about Mullah Nasruddin. One of the sillier ones went like this: "Mullah Nasruddin was sitting in a chair, eating eggs. When someone asked him, 'Mullah Nasruddin, why are you sitting in a chair and eating eggs?' his response was, 'Why, do you think I ought to sit on the eggs and eat the chair?!?"

There are more stories in this collection of retellings by Sufi scholar Indries Shah.

One December day, the village boys decided to play a trick on Mullah Nasruddin to fool him. They hid Mullah Nasruddin's coat when he was performing ablution for Friday ritual. But Mullah Nasruddin perceived [that] trick on the way. "Mullah Nasruddin, it's a cold day, why don't you wear your coat?" asked one of them "I left my coat at home to keep the place warm!" answered Mullah Nasruddin.

Because these stories have spread by word of mouth across Turkish, Greek, Afghan, Bulgarian, and other cultures in that neighborhood, historians have a similar problem here as with baklava...There are many variations on the Mullah's name (Nasreddin, Nasr al-Din, etc...), and origin stories differ. Here for example, or here (PDF). There are hundreds if not thousands of unique Mullah stories (see here for some that have been published), many of them incorporated into the practices of Sufism, varying greatly in length and in the degree to which they are funny (See also: Evolutionary Psychology's exploration of humor as a cognitive function, PDF).

I remember calling and leaving Mullah joke voicemails. Most of these stories are fairly short and easy to remember – conveniently voicemail-sized – and much funnier to those who have "known" the Mullah for a while. We still laugh at the one about the eggs and the chair, even though on the grand scale of funny, it lands somewhere next to Mother Goose.

My friend and I don't talk about the Mullah much anymore, opting for conversations about personal purpose and asking the right questions over searching for the right answers. We also came to an understanding that loss only exists if containers exist.

I guess the Mullah isn't too far removed from our thoughts, after all  – he might have told us those exact things in his cryptic ways.