As part of a larger book project on Humor in the Cold War, this paper explores how both the United States and the USSR appropriated Muslim folk humor—specifically stories of Nasreddin Hoja—as ideological instruments during the early Cold War. The United States Information Agency (USIA) produced filmed marionette shows for export to Muslim-majority countries, turning Nasreddin Hoja into an anti-communist patriarch who modeled Islamic moderation and quietism. Soviet authors and filmmakers, in contrast, reinvented Hoja as a proto-socialist critic of tradition and patriarchy, who championed women’s and workers’ emancipation. The USSR’s Hoja tales—disseminated in folklore collections, novels, and comedy—had more local buy-in and Central Asian contributors. Still, both sides used family dynamics and gender ideals to sell competing modernities that often clashed with the more complex folklore traditions of West and Central Asia.
Perin Gürel is associate professor of American Studies and director of Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her teaching and research explore the cultural aspects of diplomatic history, with a focus on U.S.-Middle East relations after World War I. She's the author of Türkiye, Iran, and the Politics of Comparison: America's Wife, America's Concubine (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey (Columbia University Press, 2017).
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Originally published at ftt.nd.edu.