Cover design, Molla Nasreddin: the Magazine that Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve, ed. Christoph Keller, 2011. Offset print, 24 x 28 cm, 208 pages, color throughout. Edition of 1,700.
Molla Nasreddin was an Azerbaijani satirical magazine published in Tbilsi (1906-1917), Tabriz (1921) and Baku (1922-1931). The magazine takes its name from the itinerant populist philosopher Hoja Nasreddin, whose origins can be traced back to medieval Central Asia, but who remains a pivotal figure in the folklore of the Middle East at large. Nasreddin is world-weary, mercurial and opportunistic, but often at his own expense, revealing a solicitous yet duplicitous nature. His misadventures serve a pedagogic purpose. “Hoja” is a variant of “Hajji” and “Molla,” of “Mullah.” The New Yorker called it “the magazine that almost changed the world” for its revolutionary treatment of sensitive topics through the medium of humor. As Mark Twain has written, “irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense,” and the magazine seemed to live by this maxim.
Slavs and Tatars is an international artists’ collective that describes itself as, “a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low) focusing on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians, and Central Asians.”
Last year, they issued a partial reprint of this legendary publication. It features a selection of the most iconic covers, illustrations and caricatures from three decades of the periodical. In their own words: “The most important publication of its kind, Molla Nasreddin was read across the Muslim world from Morocco to Iran, addressing issues whose relevance has not abated, such as women’s rights, the Latinization of the alphabet, Western imperial powers, creeping socialism from Russia in the north, and growing Islamism from Iran in the south. Molla Nasreddin not only contributed to a crucial understanding of national identity in the case study of the complexity called the Caucasus, but offered a momentous example of the powers of the press both then and today.”
This is really a tremendous effort to familiarize Western readers with the cultural traditions of the Central Asia and the Caucasus, which have mostly been lumped with the rest of the Middle East in the miscellaneous brown people bin. I’ve already placed my order, but I’m a foregone conclusion. I hope enough of you white people buy it.
2 
