How to save a muezzin
When Nasruddin was a small boy, his family moved to Akşehir, a town much bigger than the simple rural village of Sivrihişar. The mosque in his hometown was quite small, so when young Nasruddin saw for the first time the Akşehir mosque, which was large with a tall minaret, the scale of the edifice amazed him.
Just then the muezzin appeared at the top of the minaret to call the believers to prayer. Since the muezzin was singing in Arabic in a loud voice, Nasruddin couldn’t understand and so he misinterpreted the cries of the man.
Nasruddin ran up to the side of the minaret and shouted up to the muezzin, “I know you’re calling for help, but shouldn’t you have thought of that before you went up there and got yourself stuck? If you were caught in a tree, I could have climbed up the branches to save you, but how do you expect me to climb up this smooth tower?”
Your Daily Nasruddin
The muezzin is the cantor who intones the call to prayers from the top of a tall minaret. Among several man-in-the-minaret Nasruddin jokes, this one is repeatable in polite company.
