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

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      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.

      The author refers to Shirbīn as “my town” (vol. 2, §§11.7.9 and 11.37.7) and “our village” (vol. 2, §11.9.2), and it can be assumed that he was born there, in what was, at the time, a significant rural center on the eastern branch of the Nile, in the province of al-Gharbiyyah.¹

      The earliest date in Brains Confounded is 1066/1655–56, al-Shirbīnī stating that, at that time, he was living in Dimyāṭ (Damietta), a port on the estuary of the eastern branch of the Nile, some thirty miles northeast of Shirbīn; Dimyāṭ was Egypt’s second city during the Ottoman period (§7.32). His reference to his having witnessed certain public events in that city implies that al-Shirbīnī lived there as an adult, say, over the age of twenty. He was thus probably born no later than (and possibly well before) 1046/1636–37.

      In 1069/1659, the noted scholar Aḥmad Shihāb al-Dīn ibn Salāmah al-Qalyūbī, whom al-Shirbīnī refers to as “our shaykh” (§4.3), that is, his teacher, died. In all likelihood, therefore, al-Shirbīnī had moved to Cairo before that date and become a student at the mosque-university of al-Azhar.² According to al-Muḥibbī, al-Qalyūbī was “a compendium of the religious sciences and thoroughly at home with the rational sciences”; he was also skilled at and practiced in medicine.³ In Brains Confounded, al-Shirbīnī demonstrates acquaintance with medical literature (e.g., vol. 2, §§11.15.7, 11.20.9, 11.23.6) and at least passing acquaintance with other rational sciences, such as physics (vol. 2, §11.7.38) and time-keeping (§5.9.24).

      Five years later, in 1074/1664, al-Shirbīnī made the pilgrimage to Mecca (vol. 2, §11.1.3), and he did the same the following year (vol. 2, §11.13.2). These trips may have been made possible by the income derived from a new profession: in 1077/1666–67 the author received a letter sent to him at the book market that speaks of him as a bookseller (§4.38.1). Elsewhere, al-Shirbīnī makes use of an anecdote apparently current in the book trade (§4.15).

      Al-Shirbīnī also mentions that, when on pilgrimage and waiting for a ship in al-Quṣayr, on the Red Sea coast, he “stayed for a few days at a hostel on the sea, preaching to the people” (vol. 2, §11.1.3), though he does not indicate that he did so for money or that this was an occupation he followed on a regular basis.

      Al-Shirbīnī states that, on one occasion, a heretical dervish failed to recognize that he was a man of knowledge because he was, at the time, “occupied in the craft of weaving and so on” (§7.8). Weaving was a craft that was held in low esteem,⁴ and weavers were proverbial for their stupidity;⁵ thus the contrast would have struck his readers as funny. This does not, however, mean that al-Shirbīnī made this claim simply for the sake of a somewhat arbitrary joke.

      The date of greatest relevance to Brains Confounded, and that which establishes the non ante quem for its completion, is 1 Jumādā al-Ūlā 1097/26 March 1686, the death date of Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī l-Sandūbī. The author refers to the latter early in the book without naming him, referring to him only as the commissioner of the work and as “one whom I cannot disobey and with whose commands I have no choice but to comply” (§1.1).⁶ In the poem that closes the book, al-Shirbīnī makes this reference explicit but speaks of al-Sandūbī in the past tense and includes prayers for his soul (vol. 2, §13.2). One deduces that al-Sandūbī died between the commissioning of the work and its completion. That al-Shirbīnī was still in Cairo at this time is evident from his comment in Brains Confounded that “there is no place like Cairo … and praise be to God that here I reside” (§§8.44–45).

      Prayers in the prologue to The Pearls for Ḥamzah Bāshā, viceroy of Egypt from 1094/1682 to 1098/1686, show that it was at this period that al-Shirbīnī also wrote this, his likely only other extant, work.

      Finally, a note added by the copyist of one manuscript of Brains Confounded states that the author “perished” in 1111/1699–1700⁷ (at an age of not less than fifty-four, if our calculations are correct). However, this claim is undocumented and the manuscript itself is described as being “quite new.”⁸

      Shirbīn appears to have been, in al-Shirbīnī’s day as now, a rural center serving the administrative and economic needs of the surrounding villages. Al-Shirbīnī makes it clear, however, that he is not of peasant stock, stating that “we thank God that he has relieved us of farming and its woes; it was never our father’s or our grandfathers’ occupation” (vol. 2, §11.10.6). When he mentions in passing (and somewhat jocularly) that he married a peasant woman (vol. 2, §11.2.16), he both confirms his closeness to the world of the peasants and his distance from it.

      In keeping with its status as a town of some standing, Shirbīn was also a recognized contributor to the literary and religious culture of the day, with biographers recording at least three noted scholars or Sufis from the town in the generations before Yūsuf was born.⁹ Al-Shirbīnī boasts that it is “a town of pride in rank / And brains, whose fame all men do hymn” (vol. 2, §11.37.7) and elsewhere refers to it as being “great among cities.” He also refers in passing to the fact that Shirbīn was, in his day, sufficiently sophisticated to support udabāʾ (“men of letters”) who wrote witty verse (vol. 2, §11.31.16). Among these was al-Shirbīnī’s own father, to whom he attributes verses replete with “elegant simile and orthographic wordplay” (§7.40). Even after moving to Dimyāṭ and then Cairo, he probably kept up contacts with Shirbīn: he narrates, for example, an (undated) adventure that befell him while traveling up the Nile, from Shirbīn to Cairo (vol. 2, §11.7.9).

      While al-Shirbīnī apparently failed to attract the attention of his contemporaries for his learning or, apparently, to attain any post in a teaching or other religious institution, the acquaintance with Qurʾanic exegesis (tafsīr), prophetic Traditions (ḥadīth), jurisprudence (fiqh), literature, philology, medicine, and other sciences that he displays throughout Brains Confounded demonstrates that he was a man of broad culture, familiar with both the religious and secular sciences of his time. This familiarity was no doubt due partly to his education (and in particular to his contact with al-Qalyūbī) and partly to his profession as a bookseller. On this evidence, he must have qualified, if not as a full-blown scholar (ʿālim), then at least as one of the “men of culture” (ahl al-adab) who, while not attached to any institution of learning, had a recognized place within such critical cultural institutions as the majlis (“literary gathering or salon”).¹⁰ There he would have hobnobbed with scholars and other members of the religious and intellectual establishment—a point al-Shirbīnī seems to be at pains to make when he mentions that he once heard an anecdote from “a noble sharīf [descendant of the Prophet Muḥammad] in al-Maḥallah al-Kubrā, at the house of the Learned Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-ʿAbdillāwī” (§7.29). It would, no doubt, have been for this milieu that he produced other work that he either quotes from in Brains Confounded, such as his occasional verse (see, e.g., §5.3.16) and a short comic sermon on edibles (vol. 2, §11.25.7–13), or that he СКАЧАТЬ