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

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СКАЧАТЬ and another, untitled, on peasant nuptials (§2.26.2).

      Baer believes that al-Shirbīnī earned his living as a moneylender (muʿāmil) “or at least this was the occupation of the family or social group to which he belonged.”¹¹ There are indeed references in Brains Confounded to moneylenders and their trade, usually in the form of complaints about their mistreatment by peasants (e.g., §8.5 and vol. 2, §11.6.5). The text, however, contains no positive statement that moneylending was, in fact, al-Shirbīnī’s profession, while explicit references, noted above, refer to other occupations.

      Early in the work, a note of disillusionment is struck, the author identifying himself with plaints attributed to al-Būṣīrī, al-Maʿarrī, and others against the neglect of the talented and eloquent in favor of “billy goats” and “pimps and clowns” (§1.4). The result, according to the author, is that “in this age of ours, none survive but those possessed of a measure of buffoonery and profligacy and frivolity and effrontery” (idem) and that he “who cannot pen a line is blessed with a living fine, while the master of wit sees of victuals not a whit” (idem).¹² A similarly bitter note is sounded in the closing passages of the book (vol. 2, §§12.18–19). Such statements may be to some degree conventional and are also self-serving in that they preempt, with an implied plea of poverty, objections to the author’s undertaking of an exercise that, by his own admission, is not without “license and buffoonery” (§1.4). Nevertheless, they appear also to carry conviction.

      Despite, or perhaps because of, his low scholarly profile, al-Shirbīnī reveals a lively sense of his right and duty, as a “man of knowledge,” to intervene when necessary in defense of true religion. As already noted, al-Shirbīnī recounts how once a heretical dervish who had been filling the head of “one of the eminent” with blasphemies “had no idea that I was a man of knowledge because, at the time, I was occupied in the craft of weaving.” Undeterred, or perhaps even galvanized, by this failure to recognize his status, al-Shirbīnī then approaches the dervish, knife in hand, striking terror into him; subsequently he explains to the heretic’s victim “how things were and showed him what was truth and what a slur” (§7.8). Elsewhere, al-Shirbīnī mentions that a man whose performance of the prayer was blasphemous “repented at my hand and the Almighty rescued him from error and brought him to right guidance” (§7.36). Similarly, al-Shirbīnī takes pride in putting in their place those who lay false claim to an understanding of grammar, as when he corrects someone whose ignorance of basic semantics was such that he “couldn’t tell the name from the thing cited,” with the result that “after all the pretension and bluster, he followed me as a sheep its master and submitted in his comings and goings to my sway” (vol. 2, §11.1.3).

      The ambiguities inherent in al-Shirbīnī’s status as an educated man with no clear position in the scholarly establishment and a declared grievance against his lack of recognition may have made him eager to accept a prominent scholar’s request for a book praising the educated elite and mocking the pretensions of outsiders.

      THE WORK

      Brains Confounded hails from an underdocumented and understudied period of Egypt’s history. The work thus derives part of its importance from its status as a rare witness to an obscure period. This importance is increased by the even greater scarcity of material on its primary topic, the countryside.¹³ Indeed, the author’s preoccupation with the latter as a cultural, social, economic, and religious site in its own right is probably unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature (and unusual in any pre-twentieth-century scholarly literature).¹⁴ Furthermore, as passages placed in the mouths of peasants are largely in colloquial, the Arabic text provides a rich source for the history of the Egyptian dialect. Last, but by no means least, the book merits attention as an unconventional work of literature, full of mordant wit, cantankerous verve, and elegant displays of satirical and parodic talent.

      Part One of Brains Confounded consists of an extensive and highly critical survey of rural society, organized into three groups: the peasant (and above all the poor peasant) cultivator (fallāḥ); the rural man of religion (faqīh); and the mendicant rural dervish (faqīr). Other sections in Part One present and critique verses that are ascribed to rural poets or, more generally, to “poltroons” who, while not of rural origin, apparently demonstrate a similar capacity to write bad verse. In Part One, the author seeks to demonstrate, and deride, the ignorance, dirtiness, stupidity, and moral turpitude of the people of the countryside and associate these with the inability to write acceptable poetry.

      Part Two is constructed around a forty-seven-line “ode” (qaṣīd) supposedly written by a peasant named Abū Shādūf, the ode itself being preceded by an account of the poet’s birth and fortunes, as described in the work of other poets of his milieu. Each line of the ode is subjected to extensive commentary (which often digresses to matters felt by the author to be relevant) and the ode closes with “miscellaneous anecdotes,” many of which are at the expense of grammarians.

      This carefully constructed work depends for its comic impact on two conceits. The first is that the “Ode” and other verses ascribed by the author to peasants are indeed of rural origin and represent actual rural literary production. However, the assertion that the “Ode of Abū Shādūf” and its like are the work of real rural poets is untenable in view of the patently satirical nature of the work as a whole and of the indignities and crimes that “Abū Shādūf” and his peers attribute to themselves in the poems. It is difficult to imagine, for example, that a genuine peasant poet would describe himself as lice- or nit-ridden (vol. 2, §11.2), as defecating upon himself from fear (vol. 2, §11.6), as farting like a loud drum (vol. 2, §11.7), or as stealing slippers from mosques (vol. 2, §11.38). This is the stuff of satire, not self-description. Rejection of the attribution of such verses to real rural poets requires, in turn, the recognition that they were in fact written with the express purpose of being satirized, a supposition that may gain strength from the recent discovery of Muḥammad ibn Maḥfūẓ al-Sanhūrī’s Risible Rhymes (Muḍḥik dhawī l-dhawq wa-l-niẓām fī ḥall shadharatin min kalām ahl al-rīf al-ʿawāmm), a title more literally translated as Book to Bring a Smile to the Lips of Devotees of Taste and Proper Style through the Decoding of a Sampling of the Verse of the Rural Rank and File,¹⁵ a work written some forty years before Brains Confounded that contains a treatment of some of the same material.

      The second conceit is that the “Ode of Abū Shādūf” and its like merit the use of the tools of etymological, grammatical, rhetorical, and historical analysis developed by Arab philologists for the elucidation of the fundamental texts of their culture, such as the Qurʾan and classical verse, even while the author takes pains to stress that the material that is the object of these critical attentions is innately ridiculous and unworthy of consideration as literature by virtue both of its “rural” language and of the low social status, and concomitant vices, of its creators. This allows al-Shirbīnī to explore the humorous potential of certain tendencies innate in the conventional philological methodology by taking them to their logical extremes. How subversive may be this parody of contemporary critical scholarship—directed against the very culture with which the author himself identifies—is discussed below.

      The work thus consists of both a satire (“the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.”)¹⁶ directed against “the people of the countryside” and a parody (“a humorous or satirical imitation”)¹⁷ of contemporary literary culture with a focus on the text-and-commentary genre, and it derives much of its dynamism from the interplay between these two elements.

      CONTEXT AND SOURCES

      THE SALON, POLITE LETTERS, AND THE ORAL FACTOR

      Brains Confounded is the product of a critical cultural institution of Ottoman Egypt, the majlis (“cultural salon”); as al-Shirbīnī СКАЧАТЬ