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FOREWORD:

JOY OF THE HEART IN TAKING

THE FELLAHIN APART

YOUSSEF RAKHA

AN ACCOUNT OF THE SPIRIT OF THE BOOK

Two things were excised from Arabic literature during the so-called Age of Renaissance (ʿaṣr al-nahḍah), from the early 19th to the early 20th century. The first was the vernacular, which (in the form of Egyptian dialect, at least) had been a crucial component of written Arabic for centuries.

The second was what might be termed, for lack of anything more accurate, levity. Comparable to what is called “the carnivalesque” in reference to Rabelais and later European authors—Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded (1686) was completed almost exactly a century before The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1767)—levity is both a perspective on life and a literary modus operandi. It combines satire and parody with complex artifice, ironic wit, and a general distrust of solemnity.

Celebrating bawdiness and vice even as it purports to promote respectability and virtue, it is something to which the author of Brains Confounded, Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī, emphatically owns, calling it among other things “laughter and license,” “nonsensicality and farcicality,” “distractions,” and “licentiousness.”

In his introduction to the two-volume edition, Shirbīnī’s superlative translator Humphrey Davies stresses the author’s bitterness and disillusion in connection with these lines of the book’s dībājah (the traditional preamble). The frustrated scholar identifies “with plaints attributed to al-Būsīrī, al-Maʿarrī, and others against the neglect of the talented and eloquent in favor of ‘billy goats’ and ‘pimps and clowns,’” Davies writes. But it is to his passion for levity that I think Shirbīnī is referring—in a kind of metaself-parody—when he declares “buffoonery and profligacy” and “frivolity and effrontery” the way to “stay in tune with one’s days,” weathering an age in which “none survive but those possessed of a measure” of those evils.

Anecdote, wordplay, and the mixing of verse into prose are elements that characterize all pre-20th-century Arabic books to some degree. But it seems that humor took the form of obscenity and blasphemy through the Age of Decay (ʿaṣr al-inḥiṭāṭ), from the early 14th to the early 19th century, more often than in other periods. An author would indulge his love of such discursive transgressions however reluctant or disapproving they might pretend to be about reporting them at second or, more usually, third hand.

One way or another, dialect and humor seem to have been mainstays of writing all through that arbitrary period of literary history. (“Decay” is a better translation than the more common “decadence,” I think, because inḥiṭāṭ has an unequivocally derogatory connotation.) Lasting for nearly seven centuries and less thoroughly studied than any other period in Arabic literature, the Age of Decay is so called even though it produced, in Cairo, al-Maqrīzī (1364–1442), Ibn Iyās (1448–1524), and al-Jabartī (1753–1822). (It also produced Ibn Khaldūn [1332–1406], of course.)

Such authors being seen as chroniclers, stronger on historical fact than literary craft, no contradiction was perceived between the summary condemnation of their times from the point of view of literary art and their acknowledged greatness as human scientists.

As any contemporary reader of Ibn Iyās or al-Jabartī will testify, however, there is as much aesthetic as intellectual merit in the tomes they penned. Medieval gonzo journalists of the highest order, their gravity is offset by irony, and their variegated prose is as capable as any of narrative complexity, emotional appeal, metaphor, and lyricism.

Still, neither the vernacular nor levity are anywhere near as prominent in such celebrated figures as they are in Shirbīnī. Aside from being Egyptian letters’ most effective satire of the peasant population, the fellahin—a text of delightful vitality and wit—this makes Brains Confounded incredibly relevant to contemporary questions of identity and discourse. And why on earth should a book of such significance remain so pointedly marginalized?

AN ACCOUNT OF ITS IDIOM

As of the absurdly compromised (because British Empire-backed) push for independence from the Ottomans known as the Arab Revolt (1916–1918)—here’s a clue—the term inḥiṭāṭ began to reflect an ideological value judgement. Whatever it had meant before, early 20th-century history made it part of the anti-imperialist struggle.

In its various formulations, the (pan-)Arab postcolonial agenda saw non-Arab(ian)—Ottoman and, to a lesser extent, Mamluk—power as early forms of imperialism that subjugated national identity and obstructed progress. In literary terms, this meant associating heterogeneity with degeneration, objecting to stylistic surface ornament (muḥassināt badīʿyyah), and attempting to purge the language not only of non-Arabic but also of vernacular influences, which were deemed alien corruptions however familiar and un-foreign they felt.

Inḥiṭāṭ’s long epoch was after all concurrent with the political predominance of Turkic sultanates and emirates through the slow disintegration of the Abbasid caliphate, after Hulagu Khan’s 1258 sacking of Baghdad. With its patriotic and elitist overtones and its aspirations to the modern nation state, by contrast, the politically self-aware Renaissance modeled itself on the Abbasid golden age.

It mimicked the “pure,” high-style eloquence (balāghah) and the learned, often intentionally difficult diction of such 9th- and 10th-century figures as al-Jāḥiẓ (776–868), al-Mutanabbī (915–965), and al-Maʿarrī (973–1057). Its Egyptian pillars from Rifāʿah al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–1873) and Aḥmad Shawqī (1868–1932) to Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm (1898–1987) championed for the most part a universal, puritanical, and noble Arabic over the sometimes obscure, thoroughly hybrid, and essentially plebeian vernaculars.

In the space of a single century, as a result, written Arabic was transformed from a multifarious living language in ever evolving conversation with its earlier (Qurʾanic) form to a single, standardized simplification of said form, purposefully divorced from day-to-day speech. In place of a Middle Arabic that seamlessly combines colloquial with classical registers of discourse, a stuffy, homogeneous, and dialect-phobic Modern Standard Arabic became the order of the day.

It was a bloodbath, and it has engendered no end of self-estrangement among generations of readers and writers who would have been more self-possessed had they been able to use Middle Arabic unproblematically. Shirbīnī is the most compelling proof of the massacre.

No other text I’ve read shows just how thoroughly levity and the vernacular were surgically removed from Egypt’s literary corpus within two centuries of when I started to write in the mid-1990s. None bears as much testimony to the authenticity, continuity, and plausibility of Egyptian dialect as a written language, not in the sense of a separate alternative to or descendent of the classical tongue, but as a complex, inseparable dimension of it.

In this context Shirbīnī makes the perennial issue of a colloquial-classical (ʿāmmiyyah-fuṣḥā) dichotomy look like an Orientalist, purely conceptual imposition on what is otherwise a perfectly functional if very different philological landscape. Rather than two discrete languages, in other words—one written, honorable, and dead, the other spoken, shameful, and alive—Egyptian Arabic is in reality made up of two varieties or modes that are distinct, it’s true, but so completely interdependent that in practice one cannot conceivably function without the other.

In contrast to Arab nationalists, who tend to dismiss dialect as a corruption of one of the primary factors of unity, Orientalists have always been pro-ʿāmmiyyah. But they’ve tended to conceive of it as a suppressed language, separate from classical Arabic in the way that Spanish or Italian is from Latin, and deprived of the (official) status it deserves by stunted progress. The Arab countries, in other words, continue to disown their true national languages because they are still unable to operate as nation states.

Since Shirbīnī’s time, both these positions have contributed to exiling ʿāmmiyyah from written Arabic. And together with the Renaissance’s tyranny of the serious, I feel, it is this that explains Shirbīnī’s obscurity. The irony is that it is still thanks only to an Arabist like Davies that I have any access to this seminal work, which, perhaps more than any other, tells me who I am linguistically.

AN ACCOUNT OF ITS INTENT

“Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded” is the translator’s rendition of the book’s rhymed-prose title, which translates literally as “Shaking Skulls by Commenting on Abū Shādūf’s Verse.”

The word for “skulls” (or, more accurately, “crania,” hence “brains”), quḥūf, can also mean “headgear,” yielding the humorous image of a “dung-eater” mindlessly nodding his head. More often in the book, however, quḥūf is used in the extant colloquial sense of “boneheads.” A withering reference to the fellahin, its implication is that of “boors.”

There is therefore ambiguity in the original “shaking” (hazz), which besides the peasants idiotically shaking their own heads could refer either to the readers shaking their heads in exasperation and amusement at the peasants or to the author metaphorically taking hold of peasant heads and shaking (or breaking) them in disparagement and ridicule.

This is interesting because it suggests that the book may be confounded with its subject. It is indubitable that in satirizing and parodying the fellahin—however mordantly—Shirbīnī ends up embracing, even celebrating their language and ways more than any other writer I know of.

(This includes later 20th-century figures like ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ al-Jamal, whose 1992 novel Muḥib, named after a village not far from Shirbīn, explicitly mimics the language and ways of the countryside, albeit sympathetically.)

My feeling in fact is that Shirbīnī is less haughtily removed from the life of ahl al-rīf (or “country people,” as he calls them) than his text pretends. There has been considerable debate as to whether my late 17th-century namesake was a merchant, a bookseller, a minor religious scholar, or merely a ṣāḥib mazag (or “owner of a [high] humor”), as a modern Egyptian might describe the kind of majlis—or “literary salon”—frequenting “man of culture” he is believed to have been.

But the narrator, if not necessarily the author of Brains Confounded, is incontestably a rancorous man full of reactionary vitriol. His writing betrays a lack of learning even by Decay standards, and his attitude is that of someone who defensively promotes himself by dissociating from a despised group. It is not impossible to see his censure of the fellahin as a convoluted if typical form of (negative) self-assertion, especially since it is likely the real Shirbīnī, however urbanized, was of peasant stock.

(I feel connected to this eccentric Jonathan Swift of the Nile Delta in more than just a literary way. Shirbīn, the eastern Delta town after which he is named, is exactly nine miles from al-Zarqā, the town in which my father was born, lived until the age of sixteen, and is buried.)

Society may have been differently constituted in the 1670s. But it is tempting to recall that, while townsfolk do make a show of deriding the peasantry in Egypt, for as long as anyone remembers this has been more of an affectation than a conviction, since the sweeping majority of Cairo and Alexandria dwellers owe strong cultural and emotional allegiances to (real or imagined) peasant roots.

My own critical conceit is that the “I” of Brains Confounded is an invention of the author’s whose diatribes are intended to be at least as risible as the subjects they target. This need not imply that Shirbīnī consciously created a funny, fellahin-hating alter-ego. Rather, he simply gave himself over—in writing—to a humorous mood or habit of mind in which the peasantry conversationally becomes a metonym for all that is repulsive and laughable.

AND, FINALLY, AN ACCOUNT OF ITS CONTENT

Written partly in rhymed prose (sajʿ)—a feature it shares with most Decay texts, and one that Davies manages to approximate to a remarkably satisfying degree—Brains Confounded is in fact two books in one. The first part is a treatise on three categories of peasant (commoners, religious scholars, and dervishes). Ostensibly, it is offered by way of introducing and contextualizing the main subject, or ultimate purpose (gharaḍ), of the book:

[A]mong the rural verse to come my way … and which has become the subject of comment in certain salons, was the “Ode of Abū Shādūf” … Then [a patron] whom I cannot disobey and with whose commands I have no choice but to comply besought me to stick on it a commentary …

The second is that same commentary (sharḥ), presented alongside the poem in the traditional style.

The point has been made that this is more of a parody of the sharḥ genre than an actual sharḥ, just as the “ode” itself, considering what it has Abū Shādūf say of himself and his people, cannot have been written by a real peasant but must be a spoof of fellahin verse.

Unlike the sprawling, raucous critique of the fellahin in the first part, the poem-and-sharḥ may appear at first to be less accessible to a reader in English, since much of what this part of the book plays on has to do with etymology, meter, and literary precedent. But, coupled with Abū Shādūf’s impossible self-vilification, Shirbīnī’s way of replacing the high-minded sublime with the dung-smeared mundane to hilarious effect is perfectly reflected in the English text. Here is a relatively mild example:

Now I wonder, how is flaky-pastry-in-milk?

At the thought of its gulping [zalṭihā] my heart beats violently! …

The word zalṭ (“swallowing without chewing, gulping”) derives from zalaṭ (“pebbles”) … The zalṭ (“gulping”) of food is named after the latter because of the smoothness and quickness of the action, which occurs without chewing; or because the piece of food that is gulped down resembles a large pebble, for a pebble, when thrown from the hand, gains force and speed, as witness the expression “A pebble in your head!” for example, meaning, “May a blow from a pebble strike your head at speed so that the striking impacts upon it!”

Still, even as a satire of the countryside, let alone a lampoon of countryside literature, the book goes far beyond its brief. It is a lewd letter in the style of the great 12th-century writer of manāmāt (or texts purporting to be accounts of dreams) Rukn al-Dīn al-Wahrānī. It is a subject-specific encyclopedia in the Egyptian tradition of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Abshīhī (1388-1448) and, before him, the somewhat more serious Shihāb al-Dīn al-Nuwayrī (1279-1333), whose The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition appeared last year in Elias Muhanna’s translation. It is a pile of anecdotes and tales-within-tales using stock characters, settings, and tropes that recalls The Thousand and One Nights. In the attention it pays food and different ways of preparing it, it might even qualify as a late medieval cookbook.

Ultimately, however—and this may be Shirbīnī’s true genius—Brains Confounded is about nothing much beyond its own, lasting effervescence. Neither fellahin literature nor city-versus-country lore are ends so much as means to a conversational brand of literary delight. In which capacity the book has definitely survived not only the passage of time but the passage into English as well.

Indeed, should you choose to imagine that no Arabic text ever existed, that what you’re reading is a kind of Borgesian fabulation, this translation would remain a powerful enough literary creation to stand on its own.

Youssef Rakha

Cairo