THE TRANSFORMATIONAL POWER OF IMMUTABILITY
The transformational power of the principle that man’s character is determined at birth and immutable is so great that it can determine the nature, and thus the acceptability of, any behavior. Al-Shirbīnī devotes considerable space, for example, to farting as a characteristic behavior of country people and one that confirms their coarseness. On the other hand, in one anecdote, a fart delivered by a refined person turns out to be a veritable social coup: a youth, who is “comely of person, refined of personality” puts to flight, with an inadvertent fart, “a bunch of those whose persons are coarse and natures gross.” Al-Shirbīnī assuages the youth’s embarrassment with a verse to the effect that the boy has cleverly saved the situation by showing his disdain for the “people of coarseness and disagreeableness” with a “delicate sound (laṭīf lafẓ), like honey.” In other words, it is not what is done that matters but who does it: from the refined all things are refined and to the refined all things are forgiven. The converse is equally true: a peasant praised by a poet for his beauty cannot be truly beautiful, for “the actions of a peasant, however beautiful he may be, are well known to be devoid of any refinement” (§5.8.6).
THE PEOPLE OF THE COUNTRYSIDE AS SURROGATES FOR THE COARSE IN GENERAL
While al-Shirbīnī’s satire of “the people of the countryside” may be read as simply that—an attack on one social group—another reading is suggested here. According to this, “the people of the countryside,” whether peasants, men of religion, or dervishes, while undeniably the proximate target of al-Shirbīnī’s satire, ultimately play the role of surrogates for all that al-Shirbīnī perceived as “coarse (kathīf)” in the Egypt of his day. The coarse, in al-Shirbīnī’s worldview, are the coarse in general, the masses, the great unwashed, the opposite of all that is refined in terms of disposition, aptitude, behavior, appearance, linguistic competence, dress, and food. This reading rests on a contradiction between some of the evidence used by the author to demonstrate the rural nature of those people and the objective character of that evidence.
In the opening lines of the work, al-Shirbīnī promises to “embellish it with an explanation of the linguistic peculiarities of the countryside” (§1.1). In his actual analysis of those rural “linguistic peculiarities,” however, al-Shirbīnī routinely characterizes as “rural” linguistic phenomena that are not so. For example, despite the fact that the shift from interdental fricative consonants to dental consonants is attested in urban speech from at least as early as the thirteenth century,57 al-Shirbīnī states that “the word t(a)bāt originally has a thāʾ, but, being a rural word, just as they say mīrāt (‘legacy’) with tāʾ (for mīrāth), so also they say tabāt (for thabāt)” (§5.2.20), a claim that he also makes in connection with the shift from ẓ to ḍ (§5.5.2, vol. 2, §11.15.8, etc.) and dh to d (vol. 2, §11.36.16). Similarly, assimilation of f in niṣf (“half”), resulting in the standard colloquial form nuṣṣ, is described as being “in accordance with the rural language” (vol. 2, §11.11.10). At the lexical level, the relative pronoun illī (“who”) (vol. 2, §11.27.5), the phrase yā raytanī (“would that I”) (§5.6.12), and numerous other items commonly used in modern urban Egyptian Arabic are characterized by the author as being “rural forms.”
For al-Shirbīnī, “rural speech” thus consists of forms that deviate from the literary norm, or, to put it differently, “rural speech” as he describes it is simply the standard colloquial language of his day, as spoken in the cities as well as in the countryside.58 Intrinsically rural lexical items (such as certain types of vessel) aside, no rural-urban isoglosses can be discerned in the language of al-Shirbīnī’s country people. At the same time, colloquial forms used in verse are typically explained by al-Shirbīnī as being adaptations of literary forms made “for the meter.” Examples—among almost two dozen such cases—are naḥīf for naḥīfan (vol. 2, §11.1.21), la-jat for la-jāʾat (vol. 2, §11.3.19), and la-minnū for minhu (vol. 2, §11.4.3). Any language that deviates from standard literary norms is thus denied autonomy. In fact, whenever al-Shirbīnī describes a nonstandard form as “rural” or being “for the meter,” this information may safely be ignored.
The slipperiness of the designation “rural” is also conspicuous outside the field of language. The heretical dervishes who play such an important role in the work are, on the one hand, explicitly described as rural: they are “a sect that has been raised in the margins of the lands” (§7.1). On the other hand, the anecdotes describing them in Part One include little rural circumstantiality, with only three out of a score containing references to the countryside. Moreover, in several stories the events recounted are explicitly described as taking place in urban settings such as Alexandria (§7.12), al-Maḥallah al-Kubrā (§7.29), Cairo (§7.31), or Dimyāṭ (§7.32). The sophistication of the philosophical and religious concepts attributed to these Sufis also moves the reader far from al-Shirbīnī’s stereotypical peasant who “knows only belts and cudgels, palm switches and plow-shaft pins, waterwheels and drover’s whips.”
Similarly, the section on rural poetry in Part One is followed by another ridiculing the pretensions of nonrural poetasters (“It Now Behooves Us to Offer a Small Selection of the Verse of Those Who Lay Claim to the Status of Poets but Are in Practice Poltroons”) (§6), thus leading the reader again towards broader vistas of “coarseness.” The inclusion there of long quotations (§§6.2–4) from verses written by “the Emīr Murjān al-Ḥabashī,” a black African, reinforces the identification of “coarseness” with a broader marginality (just as we have seen earlier, a man’s base behavior is explained by the fact that his mother—Murjānah—is a black slave (§3.5)).
It seems, therefore, that in Brains Confounded “rurality” is equated with the broader deviance of the “coarse,” wherever they may be found, from the linguistic, religious, and social norms defined by the “refined.” Al-Shirbīnī’s argument seems to be that, without regard to geographical location, the common people—or at least those of them who are guilty of the charges of ignorance, spurious pretensions to participation in elite culture, and perversion of religion that he brings against “the people of the countryside”—pose a threat to the elite.
THE THREAT AND THE RESPONSE
Summing up at the end of his section on bad rural poetry, al-Shirbīnī asserts that “all this [bad verse] stems from lack of intelligence and perspicacity, an excess of ignorance, and a paucity of instruction. A man of sound taste, in contrast, would never allow such poor language to pass his lips” (§6.8). This objective lack of learning, however, does not prevent members of the commons from claiming to be possessed of knowledge, or learning, (ʿilm), and the book is full of anecdotes in which these pretensions are manifested, only to be deflated, by Azharis, other scholars, or “sophisticates.” Al-Shirbīnī clearly felt that access to education by those who had no innate right to it was an issue that needed addressing in the Egypt of his day. As he says of rural men of religion, “The condition of such people is well known, the likes of them are everywhere, and their goings-on are beyond numbering” (§3.76).
It has been hypothesized that the relegation of Cairo from the status of imperial capital under the Mamluks to provincial capital under the Ottomans resulted in a decentralization of cultural control and education, which spread to encompass larger numbers, drawn from previously excluded