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

pay it back. As the poet states:

      Be not generous to the peasant, ever,

      For that brings repentance in its wake!

      They yell when neither beaten nor hurt;

      Black of face, if not oppressed, others their victims they make!

      2.5

      When they put on a wedding, it has to be with shouting and screaming, with commotion and calamity, and often enough with breaking of pates and brawling. We have observed many of their weddings and all the futile nonsense that goes on at them, and a description of their nuptials and of their unseemly behavior towards their guests will follow. As for the entertainment they show their guests, it consists of shaking their robes and hats and sitting on benches while preening their beards and moustaches. If they are compelled to provide a meal, it is of lentils and bīsār and sour wheat groats with fava beans, or other kinds of stewed beans and herbs.

      2.6

      Even were one of them to reside a while in Cairo and Dimyāṭ, he would not acquire an ounce of refinement, and should one of their great men, the cynosure and patron of all, go to Cairo to meet with the emir or to settle some business with the vizier, he will be seen wearing fine clothes but, for all that, walking barefoot, innocent of shoes; there is no order to their affairs, and they exist in a state of hubbub and hullabaloo. Their devotion before dawn is to meditate on the cattle and sheep, and their magnificat in the dark is “Fetch me my belt and staff!” and “Put out the fodder and bring in the feed!” As the poet says:

      Don’t live in the country if you seek higher things,

      For abjection in the villages is something bequeathed.

      Their Gloria is “Fetch the fodder, put out the feed!

      Hitch up your ox, the plow’s arrived!”

      2.7

      They have no compassion for the young and no respect for the old. They expose their privates when they wash at the waterspouts after defecating, and their garments are rimmed with filth. They gather in the mosques to calculate their taxes, but not one of them makes a prostration or says a prayer. Their children go naked; if you saw them, you’d think them lunatics. Mercy among them is scarcely to be found and any kindness they show is paltry—as it is written in charms for the efficacious expulsion of ants, “Be gone, ye ants, as mercy is gone from the hearts of the village shaykhs!”¹⁶

      2.8