Mullah Nasrudin — the Wise Fool — has wandered for centuries through villages, courts, taverns, and minds, carrying nothing but a donkey, a question, and an inconvenient truth. In The Ways of the Wise Fool , Javad Hashtroudian retells and reimagines classic Nasrudin parables alongside original tales, allowing the fool to speak not only to medieval kings and scholars, but to modern readers living amid bureaucracy, certainty, and noise. These are stories about pride and hunger, power and stupidity, sex and sanctity, certainty and doubt. Some are brief and sharp as a slap. Others unfold slowly, turning inside out before you realize what has happened. A few are crude. A few are tender. All are aimed in the same direction: at the reader’s own assumptions. This is not a children’s book, and it does not pretend wisdom is polite. Nasrudin teaches by embarrassing the clever, confusing the righteous, and occasionally revealing that the joke has been on us all along. Illustrated with surreal, Persian-inspired images and ending with a reflective afterword, The Ways of the Wise Fool is a book to be dipped into, argued with, laughed at, and returned to — a reminder that sometimes the shortest path to truth is through the fool who walks backwards on a donkey.