Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded. Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ