Anecdotes Showing that a Man Cannot Escape His Inborn Nature
Anecdotes Showing the Stupidity of Country People
Accounts of What Happened to Peasants Who Went to the City
The Peasant Who Attended the Friday Prayer in a Village by the River
The Tale of the Three Whores of Cairo
Anecdotes Concerning Country People Who Went to the City and Were Overtaken by the Need to Relieve Themselves, Etc.
The Tale of the Champions of Discourtesy of Cairo and Damascus
The Tale of the Boors of Cairo and Damascus
More Anecdotes Illustrating the Stupidity of Country People
Anecdotes about Country People Who Voided Their Prayers
The Tale of the Persian Scholar
Sermons by Country Pastors
Further Anecdotes Showing the Ignorance of Country Pastors
Funayn’s Letter and Another Missive
An Account of Their Poets and of Their Idiocies and Inanities
The First of Their Verses: “My shirt kept trailing behind the plow”
The Second of Their Verses: “And I said to her, ‘Piss on me and spray!’”
The Verse of Shaykh Barakāt: “Barakāt was passin’ by”
The Third of Their Verses: “By God, by God, the Moighty, the Omnipotent”
The Fourth of Their Verses: “The soot of my paternal cousin’s oven is as black as your kohl marks”
The Fifth of Their Verses: “I asked after the beloved. They said, ‘He skedaddled from the shack!’”
The Sixth of Their Verses: “The rattle staff of our mill makes a sound like your anklets”
The Seventh of Their Verses: “I saw my beloved with a plaited whip driving oxen”
Verses by al-Amīn
Verses by Murjān al-Ḥabashī
Verses by a Turkish Judge
Verses by Shaykh Muḥammad al-Rāziqī
Elegy by a Certain Dim-Witted Poet to the Emir Ibn al-Khawājā Muṣṭafā
A Chronogram
An Account of Their Ignorant Dervishes and of Their Ignorant and Misguided Practices
The Practices of the Khawāmis Sect
Anecdotes Showing the Ignorance of Country Dervishes
More Anecdotes Showing the Beliefs and Practices of Heretical Dervishes
About the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute
Titles Published by the Library of Arabic Literature
FOREWORD:
JOY OF THE HEART IN TAKING
THE FELLAHIN APART
YOUSSEF RAKHA
AN ACCOUNT OF THE SPIRIT OF THE BOOK
Two things were excised from Arabic literature during the so-called Age of Renaissance (ʿaṣr al-nahḍah), from the early 19th to the early 20th century. The first was the vernacular, which (in the form of Egyptian dialect, at least) had been a crucial component of written Arabic for centuries.
The second was what might be termed, for lack of anything more accurate, levity. Comparable to what is called “the carnivalesque” in reference to Rabelais and later European authors—Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded (1686) was completed almost exactly a century before The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1767)—levity is both a perspective on life and a literary modus operandi. It combines satire and parody with complex artifice, ironic wit, and a general distrust of solemnity.
Celebrating bawdiness and vice even as it purports to promote respectability and virtue, it is something to which the author of Brains Confounded, Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī, emphatically owns, calling it among other things “laughter and license,” “nonsensicality and farcicality,” “distractions,” and “licentiousness.”
In his introduction to the two-volume edition, Shirbīnī’s superlative translator Humphrey Davies stresses the author’s bitterness and disillusion in connection with these lines of the book’s dībājah (the traditional preamble). The frustrated scholar identifies “with plaints attributed to al-Būsīrī, al-Maʿarrī, and others against the neglect of the talented and eloquent in favor of ‘billy goats’ and ‘pimps and clowns,’” Davies writes. But it is to his passion for levity that I think Shirbīnī is referring—in a kind of metaself-parody—when he declares “buffoonery and profligacy” and “frivolity and effrontery” the way to “stay in tune with one’s days,” weathering an age in which “none survive but those possessed of a measure” of those evils.
Anecdote, wordplay, and the mixing of verse into prose are elements that characterize all pre-20th-century Arabic books to some degree. But it seems that humor took the form of obscenity and blasphemy through the Age of Decay (ʿaṣr al-inḥiṭāṭ), from the early 14th to the early 19th century, more often than in other periods. An author would indulge his love of such discursive transgressions