According to this theory, evidence of this decentralization is to be seen in the spread of the kuttāb, a school in which young children memorized the Qurʾan and achieved basic literacy and numeracy, as a result of which “many more people knew how to read and write beyond those who were attached to institutions of higher education”61 and literacy spread, especially among artisans and tradesmen.62 In other words, the scholars “… cannot be said to have had a complete monopoly on knowledge, since the kind of knowledge associated with the ʿulamāʾ was not the only kind of socially accepted knowledge.”63 Al-Shirbīnī’s bugbear, popular Sufism, may have played an important role in spreading literacy.
At the same time, for reasons that are yet to be convincingly explained and are, on the face of it, in contradiction to the above, it was during the Ottoman period that a single dominant institution, the mosque-university of al-Azhar, emerged to promote religious orthodoxy in Egypt and foster the influence of the scholars.64 A contemporary traveler from Morocco, Abū Sālim al-ʿAyyāshī, impressed by its obvious dynamism, describes how he “spent the night at the al-Azhar mosque, it being the twenty-seventh night [of Ramadan]; but in fact, every night in that mosque is like the Night of Power because it is alive with dhikr, recitation of the Qurʾan, and teaching throughout the night and the day, while worship there never ceases, night or day, summer or winter, for it is without peer among the mosques of the entire world.”65
Thus the scene would seem to have been set for a clash between the burgeoning energy of a hegemonistic al-Azhar and the decentralized, multi-faceted forces released by the spread of education. In this struggle, al-Shirbīnī identifies with al-Azhar heart and soul. When its scholars are mentioned, he prays God to “send them victorious and let them lead the Muslims unto the Day of Judgment!” (§4.5) and he champions them consistently through a series of anecdotes that exude a palpable sense of competition between urban scholars (ʿulamāʾ) and rural men of religion (fuqahāʾ) (§4.14ff).
Brains Confounded may thus represent a counterattack on behalf of the Azharites—and, more broadly, the representatives of “refined” culture—against the threat to their hegemony from the “coarse.” With larger numbers of people being educated and with independent and self-confident Sufis playing an important role in the intellectual and cultural leadership of the newly literate, it is perhaps not surprising to find al-Shirbīnī, the bookseller and marginal scholar, defending the rights of the flagship institution of the mainstream cultural elite by associating its enemies with the despised world of the countryside.
AL-SHIRBĪNĪ’S CONDEMNATIONS OF ABUSES
It remains to address a seeming anomaly—those rare, albeit eloquent, passages in which al-Shirbīnī takes the side of the peasant against the tyranny and injustices of the government. These passages target specific practices. One is the extortion of the wajbah (a levy in the form of food for visiting officials and their animals), of which al-Shirbīnī says, “It is a form of injustice, and eating such food is forbidden by religion so long as the peasants do not give it of their own free will and cheerfully” (vol. 2, §11.3.10). Other practices condemned by the author are the corvée, the related “fine on the landless,” and various fiscal imposts, all of which were unofficial levies that were imposed for the first time during the seventeenth century and were, as Raymond notes, “incessantly denounced, periodically abolished, but almost always reinstated.”66
Al-Shirbīnī’s argument against these practices rests on their characterization as bidʿah, that is, innovations unsanctioned by religion, for, as he says when considering the question of whether a tax farmer (multazim) has the right to continue “the fine on the landless” when he takes over a village where it was imposed by his predecessor, “the answer is to be found in the Tradition of the Prophet, upon whom blessings and peace, that says, ‘He who introduces into this affair of ours that which is not in it is rejected’ … such things being called ‘innovation’” (vol. 2, §11.3.11). These innovations al-Shirbīnī contrasts with an earlier, utopian, state of affairs, which he identifies with “the first [tax-collection] apparatus in Egypt [which] was created at the direction of Our Master ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ when he conquered Egypt, though it was not organized in a uniform manner” (vol. 2, §11.6.7). Not only was this early, sanctioned, system productive of “enormous wealth” (idem), it was also, according to al-Shirbīnī, better for farming, for “in earlier times … a person would farm the land and the tax calculated on it would be light, and the levy in kind in support of the tax farmer and his lieutenants (wajbah) and the fine on the landless and the rest were quite unknown. Blessing was unconfined, all the land was under cultivation, and the people enjoyed the greatest good fortune, affluence, and profit” (vol. 2, §11.8.7).
Despite his condemnation of later practice, however, al-Shirbīnī clearly supports the status quo. He does not see the abuses he condemns as providing excuses for the peasant to avoid his duties, for “there is no escape, in any case, from paying the tax, even if that results in affliction and woe” and if the peasant is “put in prison to be beaten and punished,” it is “so that the ordinances of the Almighty may be implemented against him” (vol. 2, §11.6.3). His discussion of the troublesome area of tax collection, where the legitimate right of the state to collect revenue and the oppression that may result from the way in which that right is applied are inextricably intertwined, ends with a telling disquisition on the differences between the good peasant and the bad (vol. 2, §11.6.5), in which al-Shirbīnī makes it plain that one of the most important distinguishing characteristics of the former is that he pays both his taxes and his debts (idem), while the latter pays neither (idem). The fact that this passage contains the only positive description of a peasant in the entire work indicates that al-Shirbīnī may have felt that “the good peasant” was more a logically necessary residual category than a living reality.
In the end, it would seem that al-Shirbīnī wanted to have it both ways: to condemn the “people of the countryside” and all they represented while criticizing the secular authorities for their violations of religious law. This must have been a comfortable position for a scholar (or would-be scholar) concerned to maintain for his like, as society’s best representatives of refinement, a distance between the challenge from the coarse on the one hand and the arrogance of the ruling elite on the other.67 At the same time, it would be anachronistic to assume that this position implies sympathy for the country dweller or objection to his treatment by the authorities, outside of the narrow area of practice identified by the author. Nowhere in Brains Confounded is there a declaration of sympathy for, or defense of, “the people of the countryside” equal in size or scope to the condemnation and vilification to which they are subjected throughout most of the work.
THE PARODY OF LITERARY CULTURE
Brains Confounded is not only a satire directed against the “people of the countryside” but also a parody of textual commentary (sharḥ), a culturally central and highly elaborated genre that aimed to extract from a text, whether in the field of grammar and philology, poetry, religious sciences (in which context it was often called tafsīr), or philosophy,68 the maximum value for the literate community. While the parody consists, in essence, of abusing the venerable conventions of sharḥ by applying these to material that is, in the author’s view, unworthy, the process is not without danger to the satire itself, for by pushing these conventions to their logical extremes, the author risks exposing them to ridicule, thus undermining the assumptions of contemporary literary discourse to which they bear witness and on which the satire depends.
It seems likely, however, that in choosing the sharḥ genre as a vehicle for his satire, al-Shirbīnī was inspired, in the first instance at least, by the authority, and thus the advantage over his adversary, that these assumptions granted him. As Rippin remarks, “As an implement for asserting the scholar’s status and authority, arguments over grammar have no rival.”69 Any subversion of the genre