Society may have been differently constituted in the 1670s. But it is tempting to recall that, while townsfolk do make a show of deriding the peasantry in Egypt, for as long as anyone remembers this has been more of an affectation than a conviction, since the sweeping majority of Cairo and Alexandria dwellers owe strong cultural and emotional allegiances to (real or imagined) peasant roots.
My own critical conceit is that the “I” of Brains Confounded is an invention of the author’s whose diatribes are intended to be at least as risible as the subjects they target. This need not imply that Shirbīnī consciously created a funny, fellahin-hating alter-ego. Rather, he simply gave himself over—in writing—to a humorous mood or habit of mind in which the peasantry conversationally becomes a metonym for all that is repulsive and laughable.
AND, FINALLY, AN ACCOUNT OF ITS CONTENT
Written partly in rhymed prose (sajʿ)—a feature it shares with most Decay texts, and one that Davies manages to approximate to a remarkably satisfying degree—Brains Confounded is in fact two books in one. The first part is a treatise on three categories of peasant (commoners, religious scholars, and dervishes). Ostensibly, it is offered by way of introducing and contextualizing the main subject, or ultimate purpose (gharaḍ), of the book:
[A]mong the rural verse to come my way … and which has become the subject of comment in certain salons, was the “Ode of Abū Shādūf” … Then [a patron] whom I cannot disobey and with whose commands I have no choice but to comply besought me to stick on it a commentary …
The second is that same commentary (sharḥ), presented alongside the poem in the traditional style.
The point has been made that this is more of a parody of the sharḥ genre than an actual sharḥ, just as the “ode” itself, considering what it has Abū Shādūf say of himself and his people, cannot have been written by a real peasant but must be a spoof of fellahin verse.
Unlike the sprawling, raucous critique of the fellahin in the first part, the poem-and-sharḥ may appear at first to be less accessible to a reader in English, since much of what this part of the book plays on has to do with etymology, meter, and literary precedent. But, coupled with Abū Shādūf’s impossible self-vilification, Shirbīnī’s way of replacing the high-minded sublime with the dung-smeared mundane to hilarious effect is perfectly reflected in the English text. Here is a relatively mild example:
Now I wonder, how is flaky-pastry-in-milk?
At the thought of its gulping [zalṭihā] my heart beats violently! …
The word zalṭ (“swallowing without chewing, gulping”) derives from zalaṭ (“pebbles”) … The zalṭ (“gulping”) of food is named after the latter because of the smoothness and quickness of the action, which occurs without chewing; or because the piece of food that is gulped down resembles a large pebble, for a pebble, when thrown from the hand, gains force and speed, as witness the expression “A pebble in your head!” for example, meaning, “May a blow from a pebble strike your head at speed so that the striking impacts upon it!”
Still, even as a satire of the countryside, let alone a lampoon of countryside literature, the book goes far beyond its brief. It is a lewd letter in the style of the great 12th-century writer of manāmāt (or texts purporting to be accounts of dreams) Rukn al-Dīn al-Wahrānī. It is a subject-specific encyclopedia in the Egyptian tradition of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Abshīhī (1388-1448) and, before him, the somewhat more serious Shihāb al-Dīn al-Nuwayrī (1279-1333), whose The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition appeared last year in Elias Muhanna’s translation. It is a pile of anecdotes and tales-within-tales using stock characters, settings, and tropes that recalls The Thousand and One Nights. In the attention it pays food and different ways of preparing it, it might even qualify as a late medieval cookbook.
Ultimately, however—and this may be Shirbīnī’s true genius—Brains Confounded is about nothing much beyond its own, lasting effervescence. Neither fellahin literature nor city-versus-country lore are ends so much as means to a conversational brand of literary delight. In which capacity the book has definitely survived not only the passage of time but the passage into English as well.
Indeed, should you choose to imagine that no Arabic text ever existed, that what you’re reading is a kind of Borgesian fabulation, this translation would remain a powerful enough literary creation to stand on its own.
Youssef Rakha
Cairo
INTRODUCTION
THE AUTHOR
Yūsuf ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Jawād ibn Khiḍr al-Shirbīnī was either unknown to or ignored by the biographers of his generation, and no trace of his presence has yet been discovered in Egyptian archives. Our knowledge of him is therefore dependent on what can be gleaned from his literary works, for which we have three titles. The first is that of the work for which he is best known and which is presented in this volume, namely, Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded (Hazz al-quḥūf bi-sharḥ qaṣīd Abī Shādūf), hereafter Brains Confounded. The second and third titles are The Pearls (Al-Laʾāliʾ wa-l-durar) and The Casting Aside of the Clods for the Unstringing of the Pearls (Ṭarḥ al-madar li-ḥall al-laʾāliʾ wa-l-durar). The second and third titles, however, both appear to refer to the same work: a short homiletic tract, whose most notable feature is that it was written using only undotted letters.
The author refers to Shirbīn as “my town” (vol. 2, §§11.7.9 and 11.37.7) and “our village” (vol. 2, §11.9.2), and it can be assumed that he was born there, in what was, at the time, a significant rural center on the eastern branch of the Nile, in the province of al-Gharbiyyah.1
The earliest date in Brains Confounded is 1066/1655–56, al-Shirbīnī stating that, at that time, he was living in Dimyāṭ (Damietta), a port on the estuary of the eastern branch of the Nile, some thirty miles northeast of Shirbīn; Dimyāṭ was Egypt’s second city during the Ottoman period (§7.32). His reference to his having witnessed certain public events in that city implies that al-Shirbīnī lived there as an adult, say, over the age of twenty. He was thus probably born no later than (and possibly well before) 1046/1636–37.
In 1069/1659, the noted scholar Aḥmad Shihāb al-Dīn ibn Salāmah al-Qalyūbī, whom al-Shirbīnī refers to as “our shaykh” (§4.3), that is, his teacher, died. In all likelihood, therefore, al-Shirbīnī had moved to Cairo before that date and become a student at the mosque-university of al-Azhar.2 According to al-Muḥibbī, al-Qalyūbī was “a compendium of the religious sciences and thoroughly at home with the rational sciences”; he was also skilled at and practiced in medicine.3 In Brains Confounded, al-Shirbīnī demonstrates acquaintance with medical literature (e.g., vol. 2, §§11.15.7, 11.20.9, 11.23.6) and at least passing acquaintance with other rational sciences, such as physics (vol. 2, §11.7.38) and time-keeping (§5.9.24).
Five years later, in 1074/1664, al-Shirbīnī made the pilgrimage to Mecca (vol. 2, §11.1.3), and he did the same the following year (vol. 2, §11.13.2). These trips may have been made possible by the income derived from a new profession: in 1077/1666–67 the author received a letter sent to him at the book market that speaks of him as a bookseller (§4.38.1). Elsewhere, al-Shirbīnī makes use of an anecdote apparently current in the book trade (§4.15).
Al-Shirbīnī also mentions that, when on pilgrimage and waiting for a ship in al-Quṣayr, on the Red Sea coast, he “stayed for a few days at a hostel on the sea, preaching to the people” (vol. 2, §11.1.3), though he does not indicate that he did so for money or that this was an occupation he followed on a regular basis.
Al-Shirbīnī states that, on one occasion, a heretical dervish