Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded
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Unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature for taking the countryside as its central theme, Yusuf al-Shirbini’s Brains Confounded combines a mordant satire on seventeenth-century Egyptian rural society with a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of his day. In Volume One, al-Shirbini describes the three rural “types”—peasant cultivator, village man-of-religion and rural dervish—offering numerous anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness, illiteracy, lack of proper religious understanding, and criminality of each. He follows it in Volume Two with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abu Shaduf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes and bewails, above all, the lack of access to delicious foods to which his poverty has condemned him. Wielding the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbini responds to the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire of the ignorant rustic with numerous digressions into love, food, and flatulence.Witty, bawdy, and vicious, Brains Confounded belongs to an unrecognized genre from an understudied period in Egypt’s Ottoman history, and is a work of outstanding importance for the study of pre-modern colloquial Egyptian Arabic, pitting the “coarse” rural masses against the “refined” and urbane in a contest for cultural and religious primacy, with a heavy emphasis on the writing of verse as a yardstick of social acceptability.A bilingual Arabic-English edition.
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The Author
Yūsuf ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Jawād ibn Khiḍr al-Shirbīnī was either unknown to or ignored by the biographers of his generation, and no trace of his presence has yet been discovered in Egyptian archives. Our knowledge of him is therefore dependent on what can be gleaned from his literary works, for which we have three titles. The first is that of the work for which he is best known and which is presented in this volume, namely, Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded (Hazz al-quḥūf bi-sharḥ qaṣīd Abī Shādūf), hereafter Brains Confounded. The second and third titles are The Pearls (Al-Laʾāliʾ wa-l-durar) and The Casting Aside of the Clods for the Unstringing of the Pearls (Ṭarḥ al-madar li-ḥall al-laʾāliʾ wa-l-durar). The second and third titles, however, both appear to refer to the same work: a short homiletic tract, whose most notable feature is that it was written using only undotted letters.
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The fundamental accusation against the peasants, however, and that which underlies and gives rise to all their other faults, is “their lack of intelligence and overwhelming ignorance” (§2.4)). This means, in its most basic form, that they are ignorant of everything but their immediate environment: “the only things a countryman knows are belts and cudgels, cows and plow-shaft pins, waterwheels and drover’s whips,” etc. (§2.3). From this follow more specific areas of ignorance—of refined foods (§3.8), of appropriate dress (idem), of the appropriate language to use in poetry (§5), of personal hygiene (§8.15), and of such urban institutions as the bathhouse (§3.11) and the latrine (§§3.40–3.41). Above all, they are ignorant of and indifferent to religion: “They gather in the mosques to calculate their taxes, but not one of them makes a prostration or says a prayer” (§2.7). Al-Shirbīnī illustrates this trait with no fewer than thirteen separate anecdotes describing peasants voiding their prayers through ignorance (§§3.63–3.76).
Significantly too, al-Shirbīnī points, in his summary of the peasant’s characteristics, not only to the former’s general turpitude but also to a specific animus against members of the author’s own class: “They have no mercy on a scholar / Only on those who practice evil and the oppressor” (§8.18).
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