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

The issue of whether or not the “Ode” is “genuine” is inextricably bound up with question of al-Shirbīnī’s motives in writing Brains Confounded and his attitude towards its subjects. Arguments in support of a literalist reading are comprehensively presented and analyzed by Baer (“Significance,” 25–35), according to whom, in the light of the renewed interest in and empathy for the peasant that came with the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, “Shirbīnī’s book confronted [Egyptian scholars] with a difficult problem. How should they explain that a native Egyptian writer born himself in an Egyptian village mocked and despised the fellah as if he expressed the views of the fellah’s Turkish and Mamluk oppressors?” (p. 28). Baer detects two responses to this problem. The first is to see al-Shirbīnī in a favorable light. Scholars taking this approach believe that al-Shirbīnī intended to condemn the exploitation and oppression of Egyptians by the Ottomans “by describing the poverty of the people and their oppression by the foreign kāshifs and multazims” (idem); he also intended to condemn the fallāḥ’s cultural backwardness in order to “arouse the ʿulamāʾ … and remind them of their responsibility to educate society properly” (p. 29). Most writers who espouse these ideas explain al-Shirbīnī’s apparent hostility to the peasant as camouflage to protect the author from a putative (but, in fact, nonexistent) Ottoman censorship. A second group holds that, while al-Shirbīnī was hostile to the peasant and the book “clearly reflects the social struggle between fellahs and townsmen, their derision by them and the townsmen’s arrogance in their treatment of the peasants” (p. 32), the author expressed these negative sentiments either because he did not write the book of his own free will or because he did so to ingratiate himself with the Ottoman authorities; an extension of the latter theory would have it that al-Shirbīnī was an agent of the same authorities, who employed him to deride the poem by “the unknown popular poet Abū Shādūf, the voice of the silent oppressed,” as one scholar of this persuasion characterizes him (p. 34).

      38 A shorter version of the article (lacking the discussion of the debate over attitudes and motives) appeared as “Fellah and Townsman in Ottoman Egypt: A Study of Shirbīnī’s Hazz al-Quḥūf,” Asian and African Studies [Jerusalem] 8 (1972): 221–56. Muhsin al-Musawi, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters, devotes a chapter to Brains Confounded, describing it as a “contribution to contrafaction” of critical importance to the literature of the period; unfortunately, it appeared too recently to allow a consideration of his arguments.

      39 Baer, “Significance,” 3.

      40 Baer, “Significance,” 35.

      41 Baer, “Significance,” 35.

      42 Baer, “Significance,” 36.

      43 Omri, “Adab,” 187.

      44 “The documents are full of numerous examples of the neglect of the dykes or their cutting before the irrigation of distant areas, leading to the non-irrigation of thousands of feddons in those areas” (Ibrāhīm, Al-Azamāt, 109).

      45 Baer quotes Aḥmad al-Jazzār Bāshā, “Behind some of the villages there are small villages without minarets. The people of Egypt call them kafr” (Baer, “Significance,” 8). Numerous anecdotes in Brains Confounded attest, however, to the existence of mosques, albeit of a primitive sort, in the kufūr.

      46 Restored passages are §§7.1–29 and §§7.31–32. On possible reasons for this omission, see Note on the Text.

      47 A new wave of Sufi thought, based on what Ahmet Karamustafa calls “socially deviant renunciation,” arose in Iran and Anatolia in the thirteenth century and soon spread to Syria and Egypt (Karamustafa, Friends, 10). According to the same source, “ethnically … the leaders—and one suspects the rank and file—of the movement at this stage were not Arabs but mostly Iranians” (ibid., 55). However, Sabra has pointed out that, “while there is not much doubt that the leaders were Iranians, the composition of the rank and file is less clear. It is not out of the question that locals joined these groups” (Sabra, Poverty, 29). There is nothing in Brains Confounded to suggest that the dervishes referred to there were anything but Egyptians.

      48 Winter, Society and Religion, 104, 114; al-Ṭawīl, Al-Taṣawwuf, 1:116.

      49 Winter, Society and Religion, 106.

      50 Winter, Society and Religion, 106.

      51 Winter, Society and Religion, 116.

      52 Winter, Society and Religion, 115.

      53 Membership in one or several Sufi orders was usual among the ʿulamāʾ of al-Shirbīnī’s day, including shaykhs of al-Azhar.

      54 Al-Shirbīnī’s attitude to rural fuqarāʾ does not imply hostility on his part to Sufism per se; on the contrary, the text is peppered with approving references to Sufis such as al-Shaʿrānī and other “initiates of God.” Rather, as Karamustafa points out, “to the ‘enlightened’ cultural elite … the antinomian dervish was the symbol par excellence of the religion of the vulgar” (Karamustafa, Friends, 8).

      55 Winter, Egyptian Society, 51.

      56 Karamustafa, Friends, 10.

      57 Davies, Profile, 66–67.

      58 On the persistence of a conceptual distance between the medium of expression of the educated and that of the uneducated, whereby only the latter—in disregard of the facts—speak the colloquial language, see Armbrust, who writes that “sometimes when colloquial is retained in written language it is to confirm the ideology of social separation by emphasizing a class difference” (Armbrust, Culture, 54).

      59 Hanna, “Culture,” 87.

      60 Hanna, “Culture,” 88.

      61 Hanna, “Culture,” 103.

      62 Hanna, “Culture,” 102.

      63 Hanna, “Culture,” 95.

      64 Winter, Egyptian Society, 118–19: “While Al-Azhar had acquired a special prestige under Ayyubid and Mamluk rule, it was only in the 17th and 18th centuries that it eclipsed the other madrasas (religious teaching establishments) of Cairo to become completely identified with the ulama establishment.”

      65 Al-ʿAyyāshī, Al-Riḥlah, 1:126.

      66 Raymond, Artisans, 2:614.

      67 Raymond makes the point that “il y avait une contradiction latente entre les liens matériels et sociaux qui unissaient les cheikhs à la caste dirigeante et le rôle de porte-parole qu’étaient censés pour les ʿulamāʾ vis-à-vis de la population égyptienne puisque ses difficultés et les abus dont elle soufrait avaient précisément pour causes principales le mauvais gouvernement ou la tyrannie des Mamelouks et de leurs gens. Aussi les ʿulamāʾ eurent-ils parfois une attitude ambiguë à l’égard des mouvements populaires et il leur arriva de ne les soutenir qu’avec une évidente réserve” (Raymond, Artisans, 2:431). It would be equally true that, despite their links to the ruling elite, the obligation of the ʿulamāʾ to support the sharia may have made them, on occasion, sympathetic (albeit always with that “certain reserve”) to the complaints of the masses.

      68 Despite its importance, sharḥ appears to be little studied as a genre. For an orientation to the various subgenres, see Gilliot, “Sharḥ” and Rippin, “Tafsīr,” in EI2.

      69 Rippin, “Tafsīr,” in EI2: 84.

      70 Al-Shirbīnī’s use of maṣdar, which more correctly means “verbal noun,” for this purpose is idiosyncratic.

      71 Humphrey Davies. Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī’s Brains Confounded, Vol. 2, English Translation. Only short passages of Brains Confounded have been translated elsewhere (in any language, to my knowledge). The story of the “Persian Savant” (§§4.5–9) was rendered into English by Herbert Howarth and Ibrahim Shukrallah sixty years ago (Howarth and Shukrallah,