The Tales of Nasr-ed-Din Khoja

275 Pages·2016·53.44 MB·English

TALES OF
NASR-ED-DIN
~
KHOJA
~
~
z
11-4
Q
I
Q
~
I
~
00
~
~
0
00
~
~

TALES OF
NASR-ED-DI KHOJA
HE. RY D. B NHAM C.M.G.
IR VALHN--r E GHIROL
2:onbon
.NISBET & CO. LTD.
2l »BRNERS STRBBT, W.l
Firsl Published in 1923
l'rl..Utl .,. GriM BrWII11 b)'
HIJUII, WOIII01t lit Yfluy, U., l..Dittlott alttl A)IU.bW7•
FOREWORD
AT a time when some profess to believe
that a " new " Turkey is emerging
from the wdter of war and massacre and
ruin in the Near East, my friend Mr. H. D.
Barnham, C.M.G., whom I first met more
than forty . years ago at Constantinople on
the threshold of his long career in the Levant
COnsular Service, has, not inopportunely,
produced an English replica of the homely
pieture of the Turk by a Turk which still
enjoys, in the quaint tales of Nasr-ed-Din
Khoja, an absolutely unique popularity in
Turkey itself.
It is not of course a picture of the ruling
Turk, black-coated with a W~stern veneer,
as he learnt to posture at the Porte and at
Y eldiz Kiosk or more recently at Angora and
at Lausanne, but of the primitive and much
more piCturesque Turk-simple-minded
and blissfully ignorant, patient and plod
ding, gifted with a broad sense of humour,
5
FOREWORD
and by nature good-tempered and easy-going,
but a born fighter and apt to " see red"
when his racial and religious passions are
unloosed " by superior order "-as he lived
and moved and had his being five cen
turies ago, and still continues to do, in
his " ancient and renowned homelands of
Asia Minor."
The Turks have never wielded the pen as
, effectively as the sword, and. Turkish litera
ture, like the polite language of the Stamboul
literati and of the Ottoman bureaucracy,
has been largely borrowed from or modelled
upon Persian and Arabic, under the influence
of the higher civilisations with which a rude
race of invaders from the wilds of Central
Asia first came into contact. Nasr-ed-Din
Khoja, on the contrary, speaks the simple,
unsophisticated tongue of the Turkish people.
The tales.originated about five hundred years
ago, and they have passed chiefly by word
of mouth from generation to generation ;
but their actuality is still such that only
twenty years ago they were tabooed by the
Sultan Abdul Hamid, who scented danger
to his Imperial authority in the Khoja's
frequent jibes at those who in his day stood
6
FOREWORD
for authority, and especially for judicial
authority. The " Young Turks " raised the
taboo after the Revolution of 1908, but per
haps if the Khoja's ghost could have visited
the other day the Conference Hall on the
Lake of Geneva, it might yet have been heard
chuckling over Ismet Pasha's lofty indigna
tion that anybody should venture to question
the unimpeachable methods of Turkish
justice.
Patronymics being rarely used in Turkey,
Nasr-ed-Din, or "Victory of the Faith,"
was the name given by his parents to the
author of the tales, and Khoja, meaning
"Master" or "Teacher," is the honorific
title which he subsequently acquired. He
was born probably after the middle of the
fourteenth century and was a native of Sivri
hissar in the district of Angora which has
lately leapt into fame. He was sent at· an
early age to be taught the' essentials of
Mohammedan religious and legal learning
according to the Hanafiya school at Konia.
He qualified thus to be a schoolmaster and
an " Imam," or leader of public prayers in
the M-osque, and he also became a Cadi, or
magistrate dispensing Mohammedan Canon
7
FOREWORD
Law, which was in theory the only law of
the land, tempered though it might be
frequently by weightier considerations of
a material order. He belonged to what
might perhaps be called the middle classes,
if such a designation were not somewhat
inappropriate to the Turkish social struc
ture.
He grew up when the Turkish conquerors
were rapidly building a vast Empire on the
ruins of earlier Mohammedan states in
Western Asia as well as of Christian kingdoms
and principalities in South-eastern Europe.
They had not yet captured Constantinople,
where the shadow of the old Byzantine
Empire still survived, but they had encircled
it. Suddenly in the year 1400 Sultan
Bayazid, surnamed Yilderim, the " Thun
derbolt," was arrested in the full tide of
unbroken victory by the furious invasion
of Timurlange, or Timur the Lame, a
descendant of the great Jenghiz Khan. His
Tatar hordes poured forth from the old and
then still overflowing Central Asian reservoir
of hungry humanity, and he wielded a
mightier thunderbolt than Bayazid's. The
Turkish armies which had carried the Cres-
S
FOREWORD
cent to the banks of the Danube were out
numbered, out-generalled, overwhelmed, and
routed with a great slaughter by Timur's
hosts in the neighbourhood of Angora. But
that was long before the dawn of Turkish
" Nationalism," and Nasr-ed-Din Khoja
appears to have had no scruple in transferring
his allegiance to the victorious Timur, at
whose Court he enjoyed great favour as a
jester.
Timur, it must however be remembered,
was as good a Mohammedan as Bayazid, and
if he sometimes spent the morning building
up pyramids of heads, cut off with equal
impartiality from Bayazid's defeated Turks
and from the Christian knights who fell in
the defence of Smyrna, he always put in a
punctual appearance at noonday prayers in
the Mosque. It may, moreover, be doubted
whether a change of masters had more than
a passing effect upon the life of' the people,
who were accustomed in those days to the
perpetual tramp of fierce competing armies,
which finds indeed few echoes in Nasr-ed
Din Khoja's tales. Yet if he became a
Court jester he never demeaned himself
to abject flattery. When Timur on one
9
FOREWORD
occasion asked him to say what would
become of him on the day of Judgment,
he boldly replied that His Imperial Majesty
should not worry or have .t he slightest
doubt on the subject ; for he would as
suredly have a seat of honour where
his forbears, Jenghiz Khan and Hulagu, had
already gone-straight to Hell. That may
well have been one of the tales that gave
personal umbrage five hundred years later
to Abdul Hamid !
For the most part, however, it is with the
ordinary doings of humbler folk, with their
oddities and weaknesses, with their household
squabbles and social differences, with their
farmyards and their animals, that the Khoja
loves to deal in his own impish and seldom
unkindly way. Like all real humorists, he
is just as ready to laugh at himself as at others,
and " Imam" though he was, even his reli
gion often sits lightly upon him, for with his
last breath he scandalises his wife by making
fun of the grim angel of death, Azrail, whom
he sees already hovering near him. , He is,
in fact, always intensely human, and for
that reason not only is his tomb at Akshehir
still a favourite place of popular pilgrimage
10