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NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1 According to Awliyāʾ Shalabī (Evliya Çelebi), who visited Egypt during al-Shirbīnī’s lifetime, Shirbīn boasted 1,700 houses, a Friday mosque, fifty other mosques, and one madrasah (Baer, “Significance,” 38 n. 8; Baer does, however, point out that Shalabī was given to exaggeration). Shirbīn now falls within the more recently created governorate of al-Daqahliyyah.

2 Al-Muḥibbī, Khulāṣat al-athar, 1:175. Though al-Muḥibbī does not say so explicitly, it is highly likely that a scholar as prominent as al-Qalyūbī (whom al-Muḥibbī describes as “one of the leading ʿulamāʾ”) was an Azhari; this is supported by the fact that he was also a teacher of Aḥmad al-Sandūbī, whom al-Muḥibbī describes as such.

3 Al-Muḥibbī, Khulāṣat al-athar, 1:175.

4 See, e.g., M. A. J. Beg, “Ḥāʾik,” in EI2.

5 “It is said, ‘stupidity is of ten parts, nine of which are to be found in weavers’” (al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī, Muḥāḍarāt, 1:284).

6 Al-Sandūbī was “one of the leading teachers of al-Azhar” and, like al-Shirbīnī, studied under al-Qalyūbī (al-Muḥibbī, Khulāṣat al-athar, 1:156). He wrote several works, including a commentary on the Alfiyyah of Ibn Mālik, and “much verse” (al-Muḥibbī, Khulāṣat al-athar, 1:256–57). The relationship may have been based, in part, on the fact that the two men came from the same region (Minyat Sandūb lies on the eastern branch of the Nile about thirty miles south of al-Manṣūrah).

7 MS Gotha (A) 2346 (see OLA 141), at the top of p. 2[b] according to the “Arabic” numbering and following mention of the author’s name in the colophon at the end of Part Two: fa-halaka fī sanati iḥdā ʿashrata wa-miʾatin baʿd al-alfi l-hijriyyah.

8 Pertsch, Katalog, 4:329.

9 Mubārak, al-Khiṭaṭ, 1:127–28.

10 On the cultural importance of the majlis, see Hanna, “Culture,” 99.

11 Baer defines muʿāmil as “merchant or moneylender” (Baer, Fellah and Townsman in the Middle East, 6), but the references to muʿāmils in Brains Confounded concern moneylending only (see Davies, Lexicon, 78–79).

12 Ṭarḥ al-madar opens with a similar, though more explicitly personal, complaint: “I am, however, of good fortune and recognition deprived … and rare it is in these times for a master of eloquence to triumph” (p. 1).

13 Winter notes that he was unable to devote a chapter of his Egyptian Society under Ottoman Rule 1517–1798 “to that social class which formed the majority of the Egyptian population in the Ottoman period, namely the fellahin. To do the subject any measure of justice would have required much more information than is available to me at present” (p. xv).

14 It is difficult to find other than incidental mention of peasants in the histories that extensively chronicle Egypt’s political life. Al-Jabartī (1167–1241/1753–1825) devotes a few lines to peasants in connection with Muḥammad ʿAlī’s abolition of the tax-farming system (where he speaks of them in terms remarkably similar to those used by al-Shirbīnī; ʿAjāʾib, 4:64). In the modern period, according to a study of the peasant in Arabic literature, the first mention of the peasant in a literary prose context was made by ʿAbd Allāh al-Nadīm in the 1880s (see his recently republished play “Al-Waṭan” (Akhbār al-adab 217, Sept. 2003)), the first in poetry occurs in 1908 (see Ḥasan, Al-Fallāḥ, 24) , and the first in “literary journalism” in 1933 (ibid., 121). Two early Egyptian novels, Maḥmūd Haqqī’s Dīnshiwāy (1906) and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal’s Zaynab (1913), have rural settings.

15 An edition and translation of al-Sanhūrī’s work is being published by the Library of Arabic Literature under the title Risible Rhymes.

16 Jess Stern (ed.), The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Random House, 1979). Van Gelder argues that, because Arabic lacks an exact equivalent for the term “satire,” it may be dangerous to apply the term to “a tradition that had its own system of modes and genres” (van Gelder, “Satire, medieval,” in EAL). However, the presence in Brains Confounded of precisely the “moral dimension which is the hallmark of true satire” (idem) and of the “wit and sparkle usually associated with satire” (idem) seem to justify its use.

17 Random House Dictionary. Van Gelder has previously noted this double nature of the work (van Gelder, “Satire, medieval,” in EAL), but, while he sees these two sides to the work as mutually exclusive, I see them as complementary.

18 Hanna, “Chronicles,” 243.

19 Hanna, “Culture,” 98.

20 Ṣabrī, Riḥlah, 24.

21 For the Thousand and One Nights, see, e.g., Irwin, Companion, 122; similar is al-Ibshīhī, Al-Mustaṭraf, 1:266.

22 Al-Tanūkhī, Al-Faraj, 144–53.

23 In a version recorded in three different forms between 1959 and 1963 in Los Angeles, the protagonists are the pope and a rabbi; in a Turkish version, the protagonists are Nasrettin Hoca and, once more, a Persian scholar (see Greene, “Trickster”).

24 In the Indian version, which has Sanskrit roots, the actors are Akbar and his vizier Birbal (Marzolph, Arabia Ridens, 1:145); for older Arabic versions, see al-Ṭurṭūshī, Sirāj, 370 (where the story is told to the caliph al-Maʾmūn), al-Ibshīhī, Al-Mustaṭraf, 1:108, and al-Damīrī, Ḥayawān, 1:160.

25 See Baer, “Significance,” 24–25, for examples of stories said still to be current. An anonymous pamphlet entitled Tamaddun al-fallāḥīn (The Civilization of the Peasants), undated but probably mid-twentieth-century, contains “pleasant stories and curious and comic anecdotes about the contentious peasants,” most of which are in colloquial Arabic and several of which recall those in Brains Confounded.

26 Irwin, Companion, 54.

27 Not every digression can be attached without strain to the main frame of the work. The long passage narrating the death of al-Ḥusayn, introduced on the excuse that the word ṭafīf (“brimming”), which occurs in the “Ode of Abū Shādūf,” may derive from al-Ṭaff, the place where the Prophet’s grandson met his end, is more difficult to reconcile with the overall purpose of the book. It may be a particularly extreme example of al-Shirbīnī seeking to assert his credentials as a member of the erudite classes, in this instance going so far as to introduce material that cannot, by its nature, be treated humorously, or it may be that the reference to a dispute among Sufis over the final resting place of the martyr’s head (vol. 2, §11.31.14) points, in a coded way, to some allegiance of al-Shirbīnī’s.

28 Omri, “Adab,” 174.

29 Al-Shirbīnī lists seven poems under this heading (§§5.1–5.9.27). To these may be added three that occur as probative verses in the commentary on the first of the numbered poems. These extra poems are those starting shaḥṭiṭ ṣuḥaybak wa-rukhkhuh alfa farqillah (§5.2.4), taḍāl innak yā miḥrāt tāʿib jamāʿatak (the verse has no clear meter and the voweling is tentative), and qūmī mʿakī yā Khuṭayṭah shiʿratik bi-l-khayṭ (§5.2.15). Verses occurring (with minor variants) in both works are those beginning wa-llāhi wa-llāhi l-ʿaḍīmi l-qādirī (§5.5), hibabu furni-bni ʿammī (§5.6), saʾaltu ʿani l-ḥibb (§5.7), wa-qultu lahā būlī ʿalayya wa-sharshirī (§5.3), raqqāṣu ṭāḥūninā (§5.8), and raʾayt ḥarīfī bi-farqillah (§5.9). Verses occurring in al-Shirbīnī only are mā ḍāl qamīṣī yushaḥṭaṭ (§5.2) and the three “extra” poems mentioned above.

30 I am indebted to Mark Muehlhaeusler for bringing this to my attention. The sentence reads “We learn, among other things, from Hazz al-quḥūf ʿalā sharḥ Abī Shādūf [sic] that pimping is of various kinds, styles, and types. One of these is called ‘turning a blind eye’ (al-taṭnīsh), when the man is not gainfully employed and the woman is well-off and feeds and clothes him. Thus if he notices anything about her, he can say nothing to her and all he can do is pretend not to know what is going on and behave as though he has seen and heard nothing.”

31 Muḥammad Qindīl al-Baqlī (ed.), under the title Our Egyptian Village before the Revolution – 1 (Qaryatunā l-Miṣriyyah qabla l-thawrah – 1). The retitling underlines the ideological impetus behind the work’s republication during the Nasserist era.

32 Mehren’s article is devoted mainly to the historical and literary background and a summary of the contents, and it has a limited Arabic-French glossary of words occurring in the work and “little used in the literary language” (Mehren, “Et Par Bildrag Bedømmelse”).

33 Spitta, Grammatik, Texts VIII and X. Spitta’s two texts combine three stories from Brains Confounded in an order different from that of the original and with passages originally in literary Arabic translated into colloquial. Spitta probably transcribed the stories as they were read to him by an informant from the book (Spitta, Grammatik; see, further, Davies, Profile, 34–35).

34 Vollers’s article is the most systematic and penetrating of the three but is limited largely to linguistic analysis (Vollers, “Beiträge”).

35 Kern, “Neuere ägyptische Humoristen.”

36 Zaydān, Taʾrīkh adab, 3:276–77.

37 The issue of whether or not the “Ode” is “genuine” is inextricably bound up with question of al-Shirbīnī’s motives in writing Brains Confounded and his attitude towards its subjects. Arguments in support of a literalist reading are comprehensively presented and analyzed by Baer (“Significance,” 25–35), according to whom, in the light of the renewed interest in and empathy for the peasant that came with the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, “Shirbīnī’s book confronted [Egyptian scholars] with a difficult problem. How should they explain that a native Egyptian writer born himself in an Egyptian village mocked and despised the fellah as if he expressed the views of the fellah’s Turkish and Mamluk oppressors?” (p. 28). Baer detects two responses to this problem. The first is to see al-Shirbīnī in a favorable light. Scholars taking this approach believe that al-Shirbīnī intended to condemn the exploitation and oppression of Egyptians by the Ottomans “by describing the poverty of the people and their oppression by the foreign kāshifs and multazims” (idem); he also intended to condemn the fallāḥ’s cultural backwardness in order to “arouse the ʿulamāʾ … and remind them of their responsibility to educate society properly” (p. 29). Most writers who espouse these ideas explain al-Shirbīnī’s apparent hostility to the peasant as camouflage to protect the author from a putative (but, in fact, nonexistent) Ottoman censorship. A second group holds that, while al-Shirbīnī was hostile to the peasant and the book “clearly reflects the social struggle between fellahs and townsmen, their derision by them and the townsmen’s arrogance in their treatment of the peasants” (p. 32), the author expressed these negative sentiments either because he did not write the book of his own free will or because he did so to ingratiate himself with the Ottoman authorities; an extension of the latter theory would have it that al-Shirbīnī was an agent of the same authorities, who employed him to deride the poem by “the unknown popular poet Abū Shādūf, the voice of the silent oppressed,” as one scholar of this persuasion characterizes him (p. 34).

38 A shorter version of the article (lacking the discussion of the debate over attitudes and motives) appeared as “Fellah and Townsman in Ottoman Egypt: A Study of Shirbīnī’s Hazz al-Quḥūf,” Asian and African Studies [Jerusalem] 8 (1972): 221–56. Muhsin al-Musawi, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters, devotes a chapter to Brains Confounded, describing it as a “contribution to contrafaction” of critical importance to the literature of the period; unfortunately, it appeared too recently to allow a consideration of his arguments.

39 Baer, “Significance,” 3.

40 Baer, “Significance,” 35.

41 Baer, “Significance,” 35.

42 Baer, “Significance,” 36.

43 Omri, “Adab,” 187.

44 “The documents are full of numerous examples of the neglect of the dykes or their cutting before the irrigation of distant areas, leading to the non-irrigation of thousands of feddons in those areas” (Ibrāhīm, Al-Azamāt, 109).

45 Baer quotes Aḥmad al-Jazzār Bāshā, “Behind some of the villages there are small villages without minarets. The people of Egypt call them kafr” (Baer, “Significance,” 8). Numerous anecdotes in Brains Confounded attest, however, to the existence of mosques, albeit of a primitive sort, in the kufūr.

46 Restored passages are §§7.1–29 and §§7.31–32. On possible reasons for this omission, see Note on the Text.

47 A new wave of Sufi thought, based on what Ahmet Karamustafa calls “socially deviant renunciation,” arose in Iran and Anatolia in the thirteenth century and soon spread to Syria and Egypt (Karamustafa, Friends, 10). According to the same source, “ethnically … the leaders—and one suspects the rank and file—of the movement at this stage were not Arabs but mostly Iranians” (ibid., 55). However, Sabra has pointed out that, “while there is not much doubt that the leaders were Iranians, the composition of the rank and file is less clear. It is not out of the question that locals joined these groups” (Sabra, Poverty, 29). There is nothing in Brains Confounded to suggest that the dervishes referred to there were anything but Egyptians.

48 Winter, Society and Religion, 104, 114; al-Ṭawīl, Al-Taṣawwuf, 1:116.

49 Winter, Society and Religion, 106.

50 Winter, Society and Religion, 106.

51 Winter, Society and Religion, 116.

52 Winter, Society and Religion, 115.

53 Membership in one or several Sufi orders was usual among the ʿulamāʾ of al-Shirbīnī’s day, including shaykhs of al-Azhar.

54 Al-Shirbīnī’s attitude to rural fuqarāʾ does not imply hostility on his part to Sufism per se; on the contrary, the text is peppered with approving references to Sufis such as al-Shaʿrānī and other “initiates of God.” Rather, as Karamustafa points out, “to the ‘enlightened’ cultural elite … the antinomian dervish was the symbol par excellence of the religion of the vulgar” (Karamustafa, Friends, 8).

55 Winter, Egyptian Society, 51.

56 Karamustafa, Friends, 10.

57 Davies, Profile, 66–67.

58 On the persistence of a conceptual distance between the medium of expression of the educated and that of the uneducated, whereby only the latter—in disregard of the facts—speak the colloquial language, see Armbrust, who writes that “sometimes when colloquial is retained in written language it is to confirm the ideology of social separation by emphasizing a class difference” (Armbrust, Culture, 54).

59 Hanna, “Culture,” 87.

60 Hanna, “Culture,” 88.

61 Hanna, “Culture,” 103.

62 Hanna, “Culture,” 102.

63 Hanna, “Culture,” 95.

64 Winter, Egyptian Society, 118–19: “While Al-Azhar had acquired a special prestige under Ayyubid and Mamluk rule, it was only in the 17th and 18th centuries that it eclipsed the other madrasas (religious teaching establishments) of Cairo to become completely identified with the ulama establishment.”

65 Al-ʿAyyāshī, Al-Riḥlah, 1:126.

66 Raymond, Artisans, 2:614.

67 Raymond makes the point that “il y avait une contradiction latente entre les liens matériels et sociaux qui unissaient les cheikhs à la caste dirigeante et le rôle de porte-parole qu’étaient censés pour les ʿulamāʾ vis-à-vis de la population égyptienne puisque ses difficultés et les abus dont elle soufrait avaient précisément pour causes principales le mauvais gouvernement ou la tyrannie des Mamelouks et de leurs gens. Aussi les ʿulamāʾ eurent-ils parfois une attitude ambiguë à l’égard des mouvements populaires et il leur arriva de ne les soutenir qu’avec une évidente réserve” (Raymond, Artisans, 2:431). It would be equally true that, despite their links to the ruling elite, the obligation of the ʿulamāʾ to support the sharia may have made them, on occasion, sympathetic (albeit always with that “certain reserve”) to the complaints of the masses.

68 Despite its importance, sharḥ appears to be little studied as a genre. For an orientation to the various subgenres, see Gilliot, “Sharḥ” and Rippin, “Tafsīr,” in EI2.

69 Rippin, “Tafsīr,” in EI2: 84.

70 Al-Shirbīnī’s use of maṣdar, which more correctly means “verbal noun,” for this purpose is idiosyncratic.

71 Humphrey Davies. Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī’s Brains Confounded, Vol. 2, English Translation. Only short passages of Brains Confounded have been translated elsewhere (in any language, to my knowledge). The story of the “Persian Savant” (§§4.5–9) was rendered into English by Herbert Howarth and Ibrahim Shukrallah sixty years ago (Howarth and Shukrallah, Images, 21–23) and again recently by Geert Jan van Gelder, along with the story of the peasants who visit a bathhouse (§§3.25–27) (van Gelder, Anthology, 339–44 and notes on 422–24). J. Finkel includes a translation of a brief passage from al-Shirbīnī’s mock sermon on foods (vol. 2, §11.25.7) in his essay on a Mamluk work of the same type (Finkel, “King Mutton,” 132–36).

72 Davies, Lexicon.

73 Davies, Profile.