The Story of Mullah Nasreddin and the Scholar
When a foreign scholar came to Aksehir and asked to talk to the wisest man in town, they called Hodja. When they met, the man drew a circle on the ground with a long stick.
Then, Hodja got the stick and drew a straight line dividing the circle into two equal parts. The man then drew a line perpendicular to the one Hodja had drawn, thus dividing the circle into 4 equal parts.
The Story of Mullah Nasreddin and the Scholar
Hodja gestured like he was taking the three parts and leaving the fourth to the scholar.
Then, the stranger brought the fingers of his right hand together and shook his hand pointing towards the ground. Hodia did just the opposite; he stretched out his fingers.
When the meeting was over, the scholar explained:
“Your Hodja is very smart. When I told him that the Earth is round, he said that the equator divides the Earth into four sections, he said that three fourths of it is water and one fourth of it is land.
When I asked him what causes rain, he told me that water evaporates, vapor rises, forms clouds and then turns into rain.”
Then, they asked Hodja what happened during the meeting and this is what he told:
“That glutton! He said, ‘Let’s have a pan baklava’ I told him, you can’t eat it alone. I eat half of it’. ‘What you do, if I divide into four?’ he asked I told him, ‘I would three fourths of it’, Then he said ‘Let’s sprinkle some nuts on it’.
I said “OK, but you can’t do it on hot ashes, you need flaming fire for it. He couldn’t go on any more, so he left!”
Mullah Nasreddin are many hundreds of years old and in public domain and may be reproduced under creative commons.
