The date of greatest relevance to Brains Confounded, and that which establishes the non ante quem for its completion, is 1 Jumādā al-Ūlā 1097/26 March 1686, the death date of Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī l-Sandūbī. The author refers to the latter early in the book without naming him, referring to him only as the commissioner of the work and as “one whom I cannot disobey and with whose commands I have no choice but to comply” (§1.1).6 In the poem that closes the book, al-Shirbīnī makes this reference explicit but speaks of al-Sandūbī in the past tense and includes prayers for his soul (vol. 2, §13.2). One deduces that al-Sandūbī died between the commissioning of the work and its completion. That al-Shirbīnī was still in Cairo at this time is evident from his comment in Brains Confounded that “there is no place like Cairo … and praise be to God that here I reside” (§§8.44–45).
Prayers in the prologue to The Pearls for Ḥamzah Bāshā, viceroy of Egypt from 1094/1682 to 1098/1686, show that it was at this period that al-Shirbīnī also wrote this, his likely only other extant, work.
Finally, a note added by the copyist of one manuscript of Brains Confounded states that the author “perished” in 1111/1699–17007 (at an age of not less than fifty-four, if our calculations are correct). However, this claim is undocumented and the manuscript itself is described as being “quite new.”8
Shirbīn appears to have been, in al-Shirbīnī’s day as now, a rural center serving the administrative and economic needs of the surrounding villages. Al-Shirbīnī makes it clear, however, that he is not of peasant stock, stating that “we thank God that he has relieved us of farming and its woes; it was never our father’s or our grandfathers’ occupation” (vol. 2, §11.10.6). When he mentions in passing (and somewhat jocularly) that he married a peasant woman (vol. 2, §11.2.16), he both confirms his closeness to the world of the peasants and his distance from it.
In keeping with its status as a town of some standing, Shirbīn was also a recognized contributor to the literary and religious culture of the day, with biographers recording at least three noted scholars or Sufis from the town in the generations before Yūsuf was born.9 Al-Shirbīnī boasts that it is “a town of pride in rank / And brains, whose fame all men do hymn” (vol. 2, §11.37.7) and elsewhere refers to it as being “great among cities.” He also refers in passing to the fact that Shirbīn was, in his day, sufficiently sophisticated to support udabāʾ (“men of letters”) who wrote witty verse (vol. 2, §11.31.16). Among these was al-Shirbīnī’s own father, to whom he attributes verses replete with “elegant simile and orthographic wordplay” (§7.40). Even after moving to Dimyāṭ and then Cairo, he probably kept up contacts with Shirbīn: he narrates, for example, an (undated) adventure that befell him while traveling up the Nile, from Shirbīn to Cairo (vol. 2, §11.7.9).
While al-Shirbīnī apparently failed to attract the attention of his contemporaries for his learning or, apparently, to attain any post in a teaching or other religious institution, the acquaintance with Qurʾanic exegesis (tafsīr), prophetic Traditions (ḥadīth), jurisprudence (fiqh), literature, philology, medicine, and other sciences that he displays throughout Brains Confounded demonstrates that he was a man of broad culture, familiar with both the religious and secular sciences of his time. This familiarity was no doubt due partly to his education (and in particular to his contact with al-Qalyūbī) and partly to his profession as a bookseller. On this evidence, he must have qualified, if not as a full-blown scholar (ʿālim), then at least as one of the “men of culture” (ahl al-adab) who, while not attached to any institution of learning, had a recognized place within such critical cultural institutions as the majlis (“literary gathering or salon”).10 There he would have hobnobbed with scholars and other members of the religious and intellectual establishment—a point al-Shirbīnī seems to be at pains to make when he mentions that he once heard an anecdote from “a noble sharīf [descendant of the Prophet Muḥammad] in al-Maḥallah al-Kubrā, at the house of the Learned Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq al-ʿAbdillāwī” (§7.29). It would, no doubt, have been for this milieu that he produced other work that he either quotes from in Brains Confounded, such as his occasional verse (see, e.g., §5.3.16) and a short comic sermon on edibles (vol. 2, §11.25.7–13), or that he refers to there in passing, such as the treatise entitled Riyāḍ al-uns fī-mā jarā bayn al-zubb wa-l-kuss (Meadows of Intimate Vim concerning What Transpired ‘twixt the Prick and the Quim) (vol. 2, §11.4.10) and another, untitled, on peasant nuptials (§2.26.2).
Baer believes that al-Shirbīnī earned his living as a moneylender (muʿāmil) “or at least this was the occupation of the family or social group to which he belonged.”11 There are indeed references in Brains Confounded to moneylenders and their trade, usually in the form of complaints about their mistreatment by peasants (e.g., §8.5 and vol. 2, §11.6.5). The text, however, contains no positive statement that moneylending was, in fact, al-Shirbīnī’s profession, while explicit references, noted above, refer to other occupations.
Early in the work, a note of disillusionment is struck, the author identifying himself with plaints attributed to al-Būṣīrī, al-Maʿarrī, and others against the neglect of the talented and eloquent in favor of “billy goats” and “pimps and clowns” (§1.4). The result, according to the author, is that “in this age of ours, none survive but those possessed of a measure of buffoonery and profligacy and frivolity and effrontery” (idem) and that he “who cannot pen a line is blessed with a living fine, while the master of wit sees of victuals not a whit” (idem).12 A similarly bitter note is sounded in the closing passages of the book (vol. 2, §§12.18–19). Such statements may be to some degree conventional and are also self-serving in that they preempt, with an implied plea of poverty, objections to the author’s undertaking of an exercise that, by his own admission, is not without “license and buffoonery” (§1.4). Nevertheless, they appear also to carry conviction.
Despite, or perhaps because of, his low scholarly profile, al-Shirbīnī reveals a lively sense of his right and duty, as a “man of knowledge,” to intervene when necessary in defense of true religion. As already noted, al-Shirbīnī recounts how once a heretical dervish who had been filling the head of “one of the eminent” with blasphemies “had no idea that I was a man of knowledge because, at the time, I was occupied in the craft of weaving.” Undeterred, or perhaps even galvanized, by this failure to recognize his status, al-Shirbīnī then approaches the dervish, knife in hand, striking terror into him; subsequently he explains to the heretic’s victim “how things were and showed him what was truth and what a slur” (§7.8). Elsewhere, al-Shirbīnī mentions that a man whose performance of the prayer was blasphemous “repented at my hand and the Almighty rescued him from error and brought him to right guidance” (§7.36). Similarly, al-Shirbīnī takes pride in putting in their place those who lay false claim to an understanding of grammar, as when he corrects someone whose ignorance of basic semantics was such that he “couldn’t tell the name from the thing cited,” with the result that “after all the pretension and bluster, he followed me as a sheep its master and submitted in his comings and goings to my sway” (vol. 2, §11.1.3).
The ambiguities inherent in al-Shirbīnī’s status as an educated man with no clear position in the scholarly establishment and a declared grievance against his lack of recognition may have made him eager to accept a prominent scholar’s request for a book praising the educated elite and mocking the pretensions of outsiders.
THE WORK
Brains Confounded hails from an underdocumented and understudied period of Egypt’s history. The work thus derives part of its importance from its status as a rare witness to an obscure period. This importance is increased by the even greater scarcity of material on its primary topic, the countryside.13 Indeed, the author’s preoccupation with the latter as a cultural, social, economic, and religious site in its own right is probably unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature (and unusual in any pre-twentieth-century scholarly literature).14 Furthermore,