7 MS Gotha (A) 2346 (see OLA 141), at the top of p. 2[b] according to the “Arabic” numbering and following mention of the author’s name in the colophon at the end of Part Two: fa-halaka fī sanati iḥdā ʿashrata wa-miʾatin baʿd al-alfi l-hijriyyah.
8 Pertsch, Katalog, 4:329.
9 Mubārak, al-Khiṭaṭ, 1:127–28.
10 On the cultural importance of the majlis, see Hanna, “Culture,” 99.
11 Baer defines muʿāmil as “merchant or moneylender” (Baer, Fellah and Townsman in the Middle East, 6), but the references to muʿāmils in Brains Confounded concern moneylending only (see Davies, Lexicon, 78–79).
12 Ṭarḥ al-madar opens with a similar, though more explicitly personal, complaint: “I am, however, of good fortune and recognition deprived … and rare it is in these times for a master of eloquence to triumph” (p. 1).
13 Winter notes that he was unable to devote a chapter of his Egyptian Society under Ottoman Rule 1517–1798 “to that social class which formed the majority of the Egyptian population in the Ottoman period, namely the fellahin. To do the subject any measure of justice would have required much more information than is available to me at present” (p. xv).
14 It is difficult to find other than incidental mention of peasants in the histories that extensively chronicle Egypt’s political life. Al-Jabartī (1167–1241/1753–1825) devotes a few lines to peasants in connection with Muḥammad ʿAlī’s abolition of the tax-farming system (where he speaks of them in terms remarkably similar to those used by al-Shirbīnī; ʿAjāʾib, 4:64). In the modern period, according to a study of the peasant in Arabic literature, the first mention of the peasant in a literary prose context was made by ʿAbd Allāh al-Nadīm in the 1880s (see his recently republished play “Al-Waṭan” (Akhbār al-adab 217, Sept. 2003)), the first in poetry occurs in 1908 (see Ḥasan, Al-Fallāḥ, 24) , and the first in “literary journalism” in 1933 (ibid., 121). Two early Egyptian novels, Maḥmūd Haqqī’s Dīnshiwāy (1906) and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal’s Zaynab (1913), have rural settings.
15 An edition and translation of al-Sanhūrī’s work is being published by the Library of Arabic Literature under the title Risible Rhymes.
16 Jess Stern (ed.), The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Random House, 1979). Van Gelder argues that, because Arabic lacks an exact equivalent for the term “satire,” it may be dangerous to apply the term to “a tradition that had its own system of modes and genres” (van Gelder, “Satire, medieval,” in EAL). However, the presence in Brains Confounded of precisely the “moral dimension which is the hallmark of true satire” (idem) and of the “wit and sparkle usually associated with satire” (idem) seem to justify its use.
17 Random House Dictionary. Van Gelder has previously noted this double nature of the work (van Gelder, “Satire, medieval,” in EAL), but, while he sees these two sides to the work as mutually exclusive, I see them as complementary.
18 Hanna, “Chronicles,” 243.
19 Hanna, “Culture,” 98.
20 Ṣabrī, Riḥlah, 24.
21 For the Thousand and One Nights, see, e.g., Irwin, Companion, 122; similar is al-Ibshīhī, Al-Mustaṭraf, 1:266.
22 Al-Tanūkhī, Al-Faraj, 144–53.
23 In a version recorded in three different forms between 1959 and 1963 in Los Angeles, the protagonists are the pope and a rabbi; in a Turkish version, the protagonists are Nasrettin Hoca and, once more, a Persian scholar (see Greene, “Trickster”).
24 In the Indian version, which has Sanskrit roots, the actors are Akbar and his vizier Birbal (Marzolph, Arabia Ridens, 1:145); for older Arabic versions, see al-Ṭurṭūshī, Sirāj, 370 (where the story is told to the caliph al-Maʾmūn), al-Ibshīhī, Al-Mustaṭraf, 1:108, and al-Damīrī, Ḥayawān, 1:160.
25 See Baer, “Significance,” 24–25, for examples of stories said still to be current. An anonymous pamphlet entitled Tamaddun al-fallāḥīn (The Civilization of the Peasants), undated but probably mid-twentieth-century, contains “pleasant stories and curious and comic anecdotes about the contentious peasants,” most of which are in colloquial Arabic and several of which recall those in Brains Confounded.
26 Irwin, Companion, 54.
27 Not every digression can be attached without strain to the main frame of the work. The long passage narrating the death of al-Ḥusayn, introduced on the excuse that the word ṭafīf (“brimming”), which occurs in the “Ode of Abū Shādūf,” may derive from al-Ṭaff, the place where the Prophet’s grandson met his end, is more difficult to reconcile with the overall purpose of the book. It may be a particularly extreme example of al-Shirbīnī seeking to assert his credentials as a member of the erudite classes, in this instance going so far as to introduce material that cannot, by its nature, be treated humorously, or it may be that the reference to a dispute among Sufis over the final resting place of the martyr’s head (vol. 2, §11.31.14) points, in a coded way, to some allegiance of al-Shirbīnī’s.
28 Omri, “Adab,” 174.
29 Al-Shirbīnī lists seven poems under this heading (§§5.1–5.9.27). To these may be added three that occur as probative verses in the commentary on the first of the numbered poems. These extra poems are those starting shaḥṭiṭ ṣuḥaybak wa-rukhkhuh alfa farqillah (§5.2.4), taḍāl innak yā miḥrāt tāʿib jamāʿatak (the verse has no clear meter and the voweling is tentative), and qūmī mʿakī yā Khuṭayṭah shiʿratik bi-l-khayṭ (§5.2.15). Verses occurring (with minor variants) in both works are those beginning wa-llāhi wa-llāhi l-ʿaḍīmi l-qādirī (§5.5), hibabu furni-bni ʿammī (§5.6), saʾaltu ʿani l-ḥibb (§5.7), wa-qultu lahā būlī ʿalayya wa-sharshirī (§5.3), raqqāṣu ṭāḥūninā (§5.8), and raʾayt ḥarīfī bi-farqillah (§5.9). Verses occurring in al-Shirbīnī only are mā ḍāl qamīṣī yushaḥṭaṭ (§5.2) and the three “extra” poems mentioned above.
30 I am indebted to Mark Muehlhaeusler for bringing this to my attention. The sentence reads “We learn, among other things, from Hazz al-quḥūf ʿalā sharḥ Abī Shādūf [sic] that pimping is of various kinds, styles, and types. One of these is called ‘turning a blind eye’ (al-taṭnīsh), when the man is not gainfully employed and the woman is well-off and feeds and clothes him. Thus if he notices anything about her, he can say nothing to her and all he can do is pretend not to know what is going on and behave as though he has seen and heard nothing.”
31 Muḥammad Qindīl al-Baqlī (ed.), under the title Our Egyptian Village before the Revolution – 1 (Qaryatunā l-Miṣriyyah qabla l-thawrah – 1). The retitling underlines the ideological impetus behind the work’s republication during the Nasserist era.
32 Mehren’s article is devoted mainly to the historical and literary background and a summary of the contents, and it has a limited Arabic-French glossary of words occurring in the work and “little used in the literary language” (Mehren, “Et Par Bildrag Bedømmelse”).
33 Spitta, Grammatik, Texts VIII and X. Spitta’s two texts combine three stories from Brains Confounded in an order different from that of the original and with passages originally in literary Arabic translated into colloquial. Spitta probably transcribed the stories as they were read to him by an informant from the book (Spitta, Grammatik; see, further, Davies, Profile, 34–35).
34 Vollers’s article is the most systematic and penetrating