The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin
About This Book
The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin is the second volume in Idries Shah's definitive anthology of Nasrudin teaching stories — gathering hundreds of additional tales and vignettes of the legendary wisdom-fool whose paradoxical adventures have served as a primary teaching vehicle in the Sufi tradition across multiple cultures and centuries. Where the first collection (The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin) introduced the Nasrudin tradition and its teaching function, The Pleasantries can be read as both a continuation and a deepening — the cumulative exposure to the Nasrudin material across both volumes produces a quality of effect in the reader that neither volume alone can quite achieve.
The 'pleasantries' of the title are a wry joke: what makes Nasrudin's stories pleasurable to read is also what makes them deeply uncomfortable, because their pleasure derives from the specific moment of recognition in which the reader suddenly sees their own unexamined assumption laid bare in Nasrudin's apparent foolishness. The form is invariably light, the technique invariably paradoxical, and the effect — for the reader who genuinely engages with the stories rather than simply enjoying their surface comedy — is a specific and repeatable experience of seeing outside the boundaries of habitual thought that is rare in any other literary form.
What You'll Learn
• Understand the cumulative effect of the Nasrudin tradition: how reading through a large collection of Nasrudin stories produces a different quality of effect than reading any single story — the repeated experience of the perceptual flip gradually sensitising the reader to the characteristic moment of awareness it activates, and eventually enabling the recognition of the same mechanism operating in situations outside the stories themselves
• Grasp the specific target of different story types: how different Nasrudin stories target different specific aspects of unconscious assumption — some targeting intellectual pretension, some social conformity, some spiritual pride, some the specific assumptions of different professional roles — and how the variety of targets ensures that no reader can comfortably position themselves as immune to the tradition's critique
• Recognise the Nasrudin teaching method as cross-cultural: how Shah demonstrates through the international distribution of Nasrudin stories (they appear in different forms in Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Central Asian, and Indian traditions) that the teaching function of these stories is not culture-specific but addresses something in the universal structure of conditioned human thinking
• Learn to read the stories on multiple levels: the development, through extended engagement with the material, of the capacity to hear simultaneously the surface comedy (which is real), the psychological observation (which is acute), and the Sufi teaching function (which is specific) — and how holding all three simultaneously produces the multi-level perception that the tradition's advanced practitioners describe
• Appreciate the form as a complete teaching technology: how The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin, understood as a Sufi teaching anthology rather than merely as an entertaining collection of folk humour, represents one of the most sophisticated and sustained attempts to transmit specific qualities of awareness through literary means in any spiritual tradition
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