Front from the back

by rjs
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Published on: October 3, 2010

Front from the back

Mullah Nasruddin
Mullah Nasruddin

Once Mesut, Nasruddin’s uncle, asked the boy, “Can you point to your nose?”
Nasruddin pointed to the back of his head.

“Wrong, Nasruddin, that’s not your nose. You don’t know your front from your back.”

“Not quite true,” said Nasruddin. “If the back of something is not known, how can you tell for certain exactly where its front may be? If the wrong is not known, how can you understand what is right?”

Excerpted from The Uncommon Sense of the Immortal Mullah Nasruddin: Stories, Jests, and Donkey Tales of the Beloved Persian Folk Hero

Your Daily Nasruddin

How do we know if something is right or wrong? This is a fundamental question at the heart of learning. We say something is right if we agree with its apparent correctness. But we can also know that something is right by ascertaining its opposite is wrong. This is an obvious contradiction that young Nasruddin apprehends and demonstrates by pointing backward when his instructor asks him to point forward.

As Nasruddin says in another tale, “The truth is a coin with facts on both sides.”

Adding to the irony in this story is a role reversal: the student is teaching the teacher.

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