Slavs and Tatars Presents Molla Nasreddin review
A collection from an Azerbaijani magazine lifts the lid on a treasure trove of early Asian satire
Two women outside a house with blank walls, dressed head to toe in billowing black, stare enviously at a prison. "Sister, look how lucky they are: they have windows!"; a Muslim man drags a woman off by her hair to get married; a line of mullahs prostrate themselves, not towards Mecca but in front of a great big pile of money.
A new set of cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten? Election propaganda from some far-right European party? Neither: these images, and many more like them, come from Molla Nasreddin, an Azerbaijani magazine of the first half of the 20th century.
Stumbling across a set of reissues in a secondhand bookshop in Baku, a group of artists called "Slavs and Tatars" decided to share the find, selecting 200 or so covers and editorial cartoons from among thousands. The result is a strange kind of coffee-table book, Slavs and Tatars Presents Molla Nasreddin (JRP Ringier, 21), a peek into a world of superstition and zeal for reform, a boiling pot of Islam, nationalism and imperial power.
Molla Nasreddin, named after a traditional central Asian figure of fun (a sort of mullah-buffoon and the butt of countless Iranian jokes), was the brainchild of Azeri writer Jalil Mammadguluzadeh, who founded it in 1906. (It finally ceased publication in 1930, under Stalin.) In a society where many were still illiterate, he used illustrations, which comprised roughly half of each issue, to lampoon what he and his peers saw as the forces of reaction, be they political, religious, or linguistic.
In style, a cross between Gillray and Toulouse-Lautrec, but populated by crafty imams and burghers in astrakhan hats, the cartoons have incredible verve. There are wolves and bright red devils too, and an example of the latter dances a merry jig as a Muslim Azeri and Christian Armenian fight (one of the most bitter enmities of the region). When they kiss and make ! up, he p rances away, weeping big, salty tears. In another cartoon, five weary Azeri men struggle to carry as many spectacle-wearing, cigarette-smoking donkeys: these, the caption says, are their political leaders. As you might expect, those with power come off worst. The hypocrisy of the wealthy, foreigners and most importantly, the clergy, is laid bare. The treatment of women and lack of access to education crop up again and again. And along with this comes a fierce nationalistic pride, the kind that emerges when circumstances conspire to suppress fairly natural expressions of identity, such as language or the drive for self-determination.
But it's an odd combination, that defence of Azeri distinctiveness and a seeking after western, secular values that falls only a little short of hero-worship. There's a laughable naivety to the image of a man scaling a wall via a staircase of books. At the top stands a woman in western dress, who touches the sun, which is labelled "European culture". A traditionally dressed man, who has attempted to climb up using a rope made of handkerchiefs, topples over as it snaps.
Hard to imagine such willing debasement before the west now, at least in a satirical magazine. But the character of every utopia is conditioned by the particular dissatisfactions of the time. Molla Nasreddin was written in Azeri, a dialect of Turkish (and one seen as inferior to the "Istanbulli" used further west). This was a language spoken across swaths of Iran, the Caucasus and Russia. Its audience comprised, in many places, an ethnic minority, and in all, a people without representative government. Azeri political and economic ambitions were stymied, and the middle classes looked on greater development elsewhere with envy. The blame for this situation was placed with the Russian and Persian imperial establishments, manipulations by foreign powers and the Azeris' own stubborn refusal to modernise themselves: an "elite's snobbery vis-a-vis its own culture", as Slavs and Tatars put it.
Then a! s now, I slam was an easy target, the mode of its practice being seen as the cause of harm rather than a symptom of wider malaise. But then malaise is ever-present, if you only look for it. Modernisation came to the Azeri people in the form of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi on the one hand and the USSR on the other, both of them resolutely anti-clerical. Cheeky Molla Nasreddin's face pops up in every cartoon, the eternal spectator, his spotted turban appearing from around the corner. Could he be saying: "be careful what you wish for"?
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