Such authors being seen as chroniclers, stronger on historical fact than literary craft, no contradiction was perceived between the summary condemnation of their times from the point of view of literary art and their acknowledged greatness as human scientists.
As any contemporary reader of Ibn Iyās or al-Jabartī will testify, however, there is as much aesthetic as intellectual merit in the tomes they penned. Medieval gonzo journalists of the highest order, their gravity is offset by irony, and their variegated prose is as capable as any of narrative complexity, emotional appeal, metaphor, and lyricism.
Still, neither the vernacular nor levity are anywhere near as prominent in such celebrated figures as they are in Shirbīnī. Aside from being Egyptian letters’ most effective satire of the peasant population, the fellahin—a text of delightful vitality and wit—this makes Brains Confounded incredibly relevant to contemporary questions of identity and discourse. And why on earth should a book of such significance remain so pointedly marginalized?
AN ACCOUNT OF ITS IDIOM
As of the absurdly compromised (because British Empire-backed) push for independence from the Ottomans known as the Arab Revolt (1916–1918)—here’s a clue—the term inḥiṭāṭ began to reflect an ideological value judgement. Whatever it had meant before, early 20th-century history made it part of the anti-imperialist struggle.
In its various formulations, the (pan-)Arab postcolonial agenda saw non-Arab(ian)—Ottoman and, to a lesser extent, Mamluk—power as early forms of imperialism that subjugated national identity and obstructed progress. In literary terms, this meant associating heterogeneity with degeneration, objecting to stylistic surface ornament (muḥassināt badīʿyyah), and attempting to purge the language not only of non-Arabic but also of vernacular influences, which were deemed alien corruptions however familiar and un-foreign they felt.
Inḥiṭāṭ’s long epoch was after all concurrent with the political predominance of Turkic sultanates and emirates through the slow disintegration of the Abbasid caliphate, after Hulagu Khan’s 1258 sacking of Baghdad. With its patriotic and elitist overtones and its aspirations to the modern nation state, by contrast, the politically self-aware Renaissance modeled itself on the Abbasid golden age.
It mimicked the “pure,” high-style eloquence (balāghah) and the learned, often intentionally difficult diction of such 9th- and 10th-century figures as al-Jāḥiẓ (776–868), al-Mutanabbī (915–965), and al-Maʿarrī (973–1057). Its Egyptian pillars from Rifāʿah al-Ṭahṭāwī (1801–1873) and Aḥmad Shawqī (1868–1932) to Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm (1898–1987) championed for the most part a universal, puritanical, and noble Arabic over the sometimes obscure, thoroughly hybrid, and essentially plebeian vernaculars.
In the space of a single century, as a result, written Arabic was transformed from a multifarious living language in ever evolving conversation with its earlier (Qurʾanic) form to a single, standardized simplification of said form, purposefully divorced from day-to-day speech. In place of a Middle Arabic that seamlessly combines colloquial with classical registers of discourse, a stuffy, homogeneous, and dialect-phobic Modern Standard Arabic became the order of the day.
It was a bloodbath, and it has engendered no end of self-estrangement among generations of readers and writers who would have been more self-possessed had they been able to use Middle Arabic unproblematically. Shirbīnī is the most compelling proof of the massacre.
No other text I’ve read shows just how thoroughly levity and the vernacular were surgically removed from Egypt’s literary corpus within two centuries of when I started to write in the mid-1990s. None bears as much testimony to the authenticity, continuity, and plausibility of Egyptian dialect as a written language, not in the sense of a separate alternative to or descendent of the classical tongue, but as a complex, inseparable dimension of it.
In this context Shirbīnī makes the perennial issue of a colloquial-classical (ʿāmmiyyah-fuṣḥā) dichotomy look like an Orientalist, purely conceptual imposition on what is otherwise a perfectly functional if very different philological landscape. Rather than two discrete languages, in other words—one written, honorable, and dead, the other spoken, shameful, and alive—Egyptian Arabic is in reality made up of two varieties or modes that are distinct, it’s true, but so completely interdependent that in practice one cannot conceivably function without the other.
In contrast to Arab nationalists, who tend to dismiss dialect as a corruption of one of the primary factors of unity, Orientalists have always been pro-ʿāmmiyyah. But they’ve tended to conceive of it as a suppressed language, separate from classical Arabic in the way that Spanish or Italian is from Latin, and deprived of the (official) status it deserves by stunted progress. The Arab countries, in other words, continue to disown their true national languages because they are still unable to operate as nation states.
Since Shirbīnī’s time, both these positions have contributed to exiling ʿāmmiyyah from written Arabic. And together with the Renaissance’s tyranny of the serious, I feel, it is this that explains Shirbīnī’s obscurity. The irony is that it is still thanks only to an Arabist like Davies that I have any access to this seminal work, which, perhaps more than any other, tells me who I am linguistically.
AN ACCOUNT OF ITS INTENT
“Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded” is the translator’s rendition of the book’s rhymed-prose title, which translates literally as “Shaking Skulls by Commenting on Abū Shādūf’s Verse.”
The word for “skulls” (or, more accurately, “crania,” hence “brains”), quḥūf, can also mean “headgear,” yielding the humorous image of a “dung-eater” mindlessly nodding his head. More often in the book, however, quḥūf is used in the extant colloquial sense of “boneheads.” A withering reference to the fellahin, its implication is that of “boors.”
There is therefore ambiguity in the original “shaking” (hazz), which besides the peasants idiotically shaking their own heads could refer either to the readers shaking their heads in exasperation and amusement at the peasants or to the author metaphorically taking hold of peasant heads and shaking (or breaking) them in disparagement and ridicule.
This is interesting because it suggests that the book may be confounded with its subject. It is indubitable that in satirizing and parodying the fellahin—however mordantly—Shirbīnī ends up embracing, even celebrating their language and ways more than any other writer I know of.
(This includes later 20th-century figures like ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ al-Jamal, whose 1992 novel Muḥib, named after a village not far from Shirbīn, explicitly mimics the language and ways of the countryside, albeit sympathetically.)
My feeling in fact is that Shirbīnī is less haughtily removed from the life of ahl al-rīf (or “country people,” as he calls them) than his text pretends. There has been considerable debate as to whether my late 17th-century namesake was a merchant, a bookseller, a minor religious scholar, or merely a ṣāḥib mazag (or “owner of a [high] humor”), as a modern Egyptian might describe the kind of majlis—or “literary salon”—frequenting “man of culture” he is believed to have been.
But the narrator, if not necessarily the author of Brains Confounded, is incontestably a rancorous man full of reactionary vitriol. His writing betrays a lack of learning even by Decay standards, and his attitude is that of someone who defensively promotes himself by dissociating from a despised group. It is not impossible to see his censure of the fellahin as a convoluted if typical form of (negative) self-assertion,