Hodja
I did some reading, and the Hodja is a famous story character in Turkish and general Islamic culture.
Once I thought about it, I realized (and later confirmed) that hodja is a transliteration of the Turkish hoca, which means a wise man or religious teacher.
This actually came up in a really cool book Kristin and I both read called The Yogurt Man Cometh, which is an American teacher’s account of a time spent teaching in Turkey. The students called him hocam (my hoca), although they weren’t supposed to do that because the word is very formal and archaic.
There is a lot of hold-over ultra-respect in Turkish daily usage. My blog platform is called efendi, which is like a lord or nobleman. If you can’t understand a taxi driver, it’s perfectly normal to say “my lord?” Of course, the general Turkish norm is to be pretty rough with the guy otherwise, but you still call him a nobleman when you can’t hear him.
It’s a lot like the Spanish señor, I think.