The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin
Paperback book cover (2015 edition)
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| Author | Idries Shah |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Octagon Press, The Idries Shah Foundation |
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Publication date
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1968, 2015 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback), E-book, Audiobook |
| ISBN | (earlier paperback edition) |
The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin is a book by the writer Idries Shah, based on lectures he delivered at the University of Geneva as Visiting Professor in 1972–1973. Published by Octagon Press in 1968, the book was re-released in paperback, ebook and audiobook editions by The Idries Shah Foundation in 2015.
Shortly before he died, Shah stated that his books form a complete course that could fulfil the function he had fulfilled while alive. As such, The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin can be read as part of a whole course of study.
Part of a series of books, The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin is a collection of teaching stories, anecdotes and jokes drawn from Middle Eastern folklore and the Sufi mystical tradition, which feature the populist Middle Eastern philosopher and wise fool, Mulla Nasrudin.
Thousands of stories have been written around this popular folk character over the centuries, since his purported birth in the 13th century in what is now modern Turkey.
Douglas Hill, Literary Editor of the socialist Tribune weekly magazine, wrote in 1969 that The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin contained “a great deal of timeless and universal wisdom made accessible and highly attractive with humour”, adding that “conventional responses and received frames of mind are challenged on every page.”
In The New York Times, award-winning writer and later winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, Doris Lessing called The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin “perhaps the most shocking to our assumptions about ‘mysticism’” of Shah's books at the time. She said that this corpus of Nasrudin “jokes” was “deliberately created to inculcate Sufic thinking, to outwit The Old Villain, which is a name for the patterns of conditioned thinking which form the prison in which we all live.”
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Wikipedia