Introduction

Summary

Many of the caricatures and graphics in Mollå Nasreddin about our public lives are not in fact caricatures, not a fiction or likening. I would dare say these are the true photos of people and realities.

Ömar Fāeq Nemānzādeh (Gurbanov 1992: 16)

The reinterpretation of myths and folklore has been an essential genre in literature. From Sophocles and Euripides to Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison, poets and writers have reinterpreted old tales to forge new social criticism. This book is a historical exploration of such a genre among Azerbaijani-speaking people of South Caucasus, a region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, which was once part of the Russian Empire, and today comprises the countries of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia, as well as parts of Southern Russia (Dagestan).

In 1906, a group of artists and intellectuals reinterpreted the tales of the Middle Eastern trickster, Mollå Nasreddin, to construct a progressive anticolonial discourse with a strong emphasis on social, political and religious reform. The founder and editor of the new periodical, Mollå Nasreddin, was Jalil Memedqolizādeh. Commonly known as Mirza Jalil, he was an Azerbaijani educator and playwright. His wife, Hamideh Khānum Javānshir, was an early Azerbaijani feminist and a philanthropist. Using folklore, visual art and satire, their eight-to twelve-page weekly, which had full-page lithographic cartoons in colour, reached tens of thousands of people across the Muslim world, impacting the thinking of a generation. The present study will look at the milieu in which the periodical Mollå Nasreddin was born, the manner through which the journal recast the trickster trope for its audience, and the influence of European graphic artists on its cartoons and illustrations.

The key to this successful cultural mélange was the editor’s creative use of the trickster figure as a medium of social criticism, and the sophisticated appropriation of both the name and the persona of the trickster for modern political satire. To this end, the folk tales of the original trickster figure, including some highly transgressive ones, became grist for the mill of the social democratic writers and artists of Mollå Nasreddin. The traditional wise fool, the trope of the folk character Nasreddin, had long succeeded because of its grotesque realism. It had broken conventional boundaries of thought and morality, revealing the hypocrisy of the existing social reality while also ridiculing the overbearing theologian, the conceited scholar, the indolent aristocrat and the autocratic king.