The legendary Nasreddin is the most popular character in the folklore of the Middle East, Central Asia, the Balkans, Southern Russia and Transcaucasia. There are some regional variations of his name, as well as several stories about his origin. Persian and some Arabic sources suggest he came from Kufa (present day Iraq) and lived in the second half of the ninth century ce. Turkish sources insist he was a Turk and a contemporary of the Turko-Mongolian conqueror Timur (d. 1405), who invaded Anatolia, the Middle East and India (Marzolph 1990: 239; Modarres 1970: 6:189; Downing and Papas 1965: 3; Gurkas 2005).

Persian and Azerbaijani sources call him Mollå Nasreddin. The term mollå can cover a variety of minor secular as well as religious ranks – thus emphasising that mollå does not necessarily designate a Shi'i religious scholar or functionary (for which the more respectable/respectful term in Persian is ākhund). It is a semantic chimera, referring to any person in a community with a degree of literacy/ education and thus with some formal or informal authority. Stories attributed to Mollå Nasreddin come from many sources. They include tales of Nasreddin Hodja (Turkish spelling Nasreddin Hoca), the Arab trickster Johā, and other fools of classical Persian literature, some of which circulated in manuscript tradition for several centuries. Nasreddin is thus a composite figure who emerged in the late nineteenth century, though his ‘presence in the Persian tradition is much older, in fact dating from the beginning of the present millennium’ (Marzolph 1995: 158). Marzolph has suggested the term ‘Nasreddinia’ to refer to all these variations in his name.

The first modern printed edition of Nasreddin Hodja stories appeared in Turkish in 1837. An Arabic edition was published in Cairo in 1864, and a Persian one in 1881 (Marzolph 1990: 243; Marzolph 1996: 1018–19). The move from oral and manuscript tradition to modern print edition involved important changes in the folk character. The sexually and religiously transgressive stories of Nasreddin were gradually shed, leaving behind a vast majority of the tales. The character of Mollå Nasreddin was made into an educational tool for children, or alternatively portrayed as a ‘cunning philosopher’.