Part One of Brains Confounded consists of an extensive and highly critical survey of rural society, organized into three groups: the peasant (and above all the poor peasant) cultivator (fallāḥ); the rural man of religion (faqīh); and the mendicant rural dervish (faqīr). Other sections in Part One present and critique verses that are ascribed to rural poets or, more generally, to “poltroons” who, while not of rural origin, apparently demonstrate a similar capacity to write bad verse. In Part One, the author seeks to demonstrate, and deride, the ignorance, dirtiness, stupidity, and moral turpitude of the people of the countryside and associate these with the inability to write acceptable poetry.
Part Two is constructed around a forty-seven-line “ode” (qaṣīd) supposedly written by a peasant named Abū Shādūf, the ode itself being preceded by an account of the poet’s birth and fortunes, as described in the work of other poets of his milieu. Each line of the ode is subjected to extensive commentary (which often digresses to matters felt by the author to be relevant) and the ode closes with “miscellaneous anecdotes,” many of which are at the expense of grammarians.
This carefully constructed work depends for its comic impact on two conceits. The first is that the “Ode” and other verses ascribed by the author to peasants are indeed of rural origin and represent actual rural literary production. However, the assertion that the “Ode of Abū Shādūf” and its like are the work of real rural poets is untenable in view of the patently satirical nature of the work as a whole and of the indignities and crimes that “Abū Shādūf” and his peers attribute to themselves in the poems. It is difficult to imagine, for example, that a genuine peasant poet would describe himself as lice- or nit-ridden (vol. 2, §11.2), as defecating upon himself from fear (vol. 2, §11.6), as farting like a loud drum (vol. 2, §11.7), or as stealing slippers from mosques (vol. 2, §11.38). This is the stuff of satire, not self-description. Rejection of the attribution of such verses to real rural poets requires, in turn, the recognition that they were in fact written with the express purpose of being satirized, a supposition that may gain strength from the recent discovery of Muḥammad ibn Maḥfūẓ al-Sanhūrī’s Risible Rhymes (Muḍḥik dhawī l-dhawq wa-l-niẓām fī ḥall shadharatin min kalām ahl al-rīf al-ʿawāmm), a title more literally translated as Book to Bring a Smile to the Lips of Devotees of Taste and Proper Style through the Decoding of a Sampling of the Verse of the Rural Rank and File,15 a work written some forty years before Brains Confounded that contains a treatment of some of the same material.
The second conceit is that the “Ode of Abū Shādūf” and its like merit the use of the tools of etymological, grammatical, rhetorical, and historical analysis developed by Arab philologists for the elucidation of the fundamental texts of their culture, such as the Qurʾan and classical verse, even while the author takes pains to stress that the material that is the object of these critical attentions is innately ridiculous and unworthy of consideration as literature by virtue both of its “rural” language and of the low social status, and concomitant vices, of its creators. This allows al-Shirbīnī to explore the humorous potential of certain tendencies innate in the conventional philological methodology by taking them to their logical extremes. How subversive may be this parody of contemporary critical scholarship—directed against the very culture with which the author himself identifies—is discussed below.
The work thus consists of both a satire (“the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.”)16 directed against “the people of the countryside” and a parody (“a humorous or satirical imitation”)17 of contemporary literary culture with a focus on the text-and-commentary genre, and it derives much of its dynamism from the interplay between these two elements.
CONTEXT AND SOURCES
THE SALON, POLITE LETTERS, AND THE ORAL FACTOR
Brains Confounded is the product of a critical cultural institution of Ottoman Egypt, the majlis (“cultural salon”); as al-Shirbīnī says in the work’s opening passage, “among the rural verse to come my way … and which has become the subject of comment in certain salons, was the ‘Ode of Abū Shādūf’ ….” (§1.1). Nelly Hanna describes the majlis as a setting in which “people discussed specific issues of concern; they debated literary or religious questions, they read and composed verse, they listened to an improvisation in verse or prose, and so on …. The people who attended these gatherings [were] scholars, shaykhs from al-Azhar or from other towns than Cairo, Sufi shaykhs, government administrators and other men of learning and culture.”18 As such, it was typical of the “kind of informal cultural and educational activity, independent of institutions, and centered around individual residences”19 that flourished under the Ottomans.
Much of the literature read by those who attended such salons was of the genre known as adab (which we translate here as “polite letters”) to which Brains Confounded belongs.
Like any other author in this tradition, al-Shirbīnī mines a range of sources from the literary canon for anecdotes with which to buttress his argument. We meet with such stock figures of adab literature as exemplary caliphs (e.g., ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, ʿAbd al-Malik, and, repeatedly, Hārūn al-Rashīd), as well as the poet Abū Nuwās and the philologist al-Aṣmaʿī. Quotations from or references to well-known authors such as al-Maqrīzī, al-Suyūṭī, Ibn Khallikān, and al-Shirbīnī’s near contemporary, the biographer al-Munāwī (952–1031/1545–1621), are also deployed. In addition, prophetic Traditions (albeit many of which are “weak,” i.e., of dubious authority) are quoted, as are passages from the Qurʾan. The text is liberally interspersed with verses that confirm or summarize a point made in prose. Much of the material in Brains Confounded, however, is unattributed and cannot easily be traced. This is particularly true of the verse, much of which probably belongs to the underdocumented Mamluk and Ottoman periods.
Some of the stories of which peasants are the protagonists in Brains Confounded are probably adapted from material originally directed against other social groups. A story comparable to that of the passerby who is called upon to solve a dispute over the wording of the Qurʾan (§4.18) was apparently also recounted by al-Aṣmaʿī with unidentified actors.20 In The Thousand and One Nights and other works, Bedouin are sometimes the butts of stories reminiscent of those told by al-Shirbīnī of peasants.21 Many of the stories are to be found in varying forms in older Arab writings. To give but two examples, that of the Persian scholar and his debate with the scholars of al-Azhar (§4.5) occurs as early as the tenth century, in al-Tanūkhī’s Al-Faraj baʿd al-shiddah,22 while that of the talking owls (vol. 2, §11.12.17) goes back at least to Abbasid times. Some stories indeed belong to a global tradition of orally transmitted stories and jokes: that of the Persian and the Azharis, for example, is found, with appropriate variations, in Europe, India, Argentina, Japan, the United States, and Turkey,23 while that of the talking owls is known from Mughal India.24
Brains Confounded is, however, distinguished from most works in the genre of polite letters by its frequent recourse to an apparently contemporary tradition of jokes and other oral material about rural life, a tradition that is also part of modern oral culture.25 Al-Shirbīnī typically introduces anecdotes with the words “[And] it is said” (§3.7) or “And another story is told” (§3.8), etc., and may end an anecdote with “in another version it says that …” (§3.39). Further evidence of orality is provided by the formulaic expressions with which several anecdotes end (compare, for example, “the people of his village then went for three years without going to Cairo, for fear of the corvée” (§3.28) with “I’ll never go back to the villages on the river so long as I live” (§3.31) and “he never went to the city again as long as he lived” (§3.39)). This oral dimension may even have influenced the transmission of the text itself, since, over the entirety of certain anecdotes, the wording differs constantly in detail among the different manuscripts without diverging significantly in substance, a phenomenon perhaps attributable to a freedom that copyists may have felt in dealing