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).
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.
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.
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.
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”).
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.
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.
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.
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), hibābu furni-bni ʿammī (§5.6), saʾaltu ʿani l-ḥibbi (§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.
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
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