Many countries claim Mulla Nasrudin as a native, though few have gone so far as Turkey in exhibiting his grave and holding an annual Nasrudin Festival, when people dress up and enact the famous jokes at Eskishehir, the reputed place of his birth.The Greeks, who adopted few things from the Turks, regard Nasrudin quips as part of their own folklore. In the Middle Ages Nasrudin tales were widely used to deride odious authority. In more recent times, the Mulla became a People's Hero of the Soviet Union, when a film depicted him as scoring again and again off the wickedcapitalist rulers of the country. Nasrudin shades off into the Arab figure of Joha, and reappears in the folklore of Sicily. Stories attributed in Central Asia to the corpus are found applied to Baldakiev in Russia, in Don Quixote, even in the oldest French book, the Fables of Marie de France.The Mulla is variously referred to as very stupid, improbably clever, the possessor of mystical secrets. The dervishes use him as a figure to illustrate, in their teachings, the antics characteristic of the human mind. Such is the resilience of Nasrudin that republican Turkey, where the dervish orders were suppressed forty years ago, publishes booklets about him as part of their tourist activity. Scholars have used a great deal of ink on Nasrudin, though traditionally he had little time for them. Because the Mulla is reported to have said, 'I am upside down in this life', some have gone so far as to invert the reputed date of his death, trying to find the truth about the matter.The Sufis, who believe that deep intuition is the only real guide to knowledge, use these stories almost like exercises. They ask people to choose a few which especially appeal to them, and to turn them over in the mind, making them their own. Teaching masters of the dervishes say that in this way a breakthrough into a higher wisdom can be effected.But the Sufis concur with those who are not following a mystic way that everyone can do with the Nasrudin tales what people have done through the centuries -- enjoy them. IDRIES SHAH