A further distinguishing feature is the personalization of anecdotes. Al-Shirbīnī states that he has himself witnessed much of what he describes, using phrases such as “We have observed many of their weddings and all the futile nonsense that goes on at them” (§2.5) and “I saw a peasant talking to a friend of his and asking him …” (§3.61). He even says, in the context of an anecdote explaining why a girl was given a bizarre name, that he “actually saw this Khuraywah and asked her father why he had chosen that word for her name” (§2.17). Similarly, he relates lengthy anecdotes in whose events he is a participant (e.g., §§7.8–10). The credibility of such reports is undermined, however, by the recurrence elsewhere in the book of some of these tales with a different protagonist. For example, the tale, embroidered with much circumstantial and personal detail, of how al-Shirbīnī was inveigled into attending a meeting of heretical Sufis in Cairo and of his subsequent escape (§7.11) is prefigured elsewhere with different actors (§7.2), and the elaborate story of the dervishes who rob houses by night is followed immediately by al-Shirbīnī’s assertion that a similar incident occurred while he was living in Dimyāṭ (§§7.31–32). It seems probable, therefore, that even when al-Shirbīnī claims to have personal knowledge of alleged events, he is in fact drawing on a corpus of popular lore about the countryside or even on material not originally dealing with the countryside that could nevertheless be adapted to his purposes. Robert Irwin has discussed the need of medieval Arabic authors to attribute the anecdotes they relate to known figures in order to indicate their truth and thus usefulness, noting that stories “were not supposed to be made up; rather they were transmitted by their compiler.”26
TECHNIQUES: MARSHALING, ASSOCIATION, AND DISASSOCIATION
Authors of works in the tradition of polite letters address a given topic or topics by selecting relevant passages from the literary canon, which the author links together using his own observations, marshaling the whole into a coherent narrative with the goal of instructing, enlightening, and entertaining. While this method can give an impression of randomness, with apparent digressions, the successful author manipulates his material to advance an argument that gains cogency from the examples adduced.
The primary argument of the satirical dimension of Brains Confounded—that the “people of the countryside” are possessed of characteristics and guilty of practices that exclude them from consideration as civilized beings—is made using four main strategies: establishment of a framework of values against which to judge the accused; direct demonstration of guilt through the description of the uncivilized qualities of the accused; insinuation of guilt by association of the accused with other exemplars of uncivilized behavior; and disassociation of the accuser (the author) from the accused by demonstrating the latter’s qualifications as a member of civilized society.
The first lines of Brains Confounded establish the framework, which is that of a moral economy defined by the opposition of refinement (laṭāfah) to coarseness (kathāfah). This moral economy is explored further below.
The direct attack is delivered largely through the series of anecdotes in Part One that purport to describe the people of the countryside. Here we learn that they are ignorant of religion and elementary sanitary habits, have bizarre names, possess unappealing physical attributes, commit crimes, and so on.
The associative technique appears in the form of passages such as the two tales of “The Champions of Discourtesy of Cairo and Damascus” and “The Boors of Cairo and Damascus,” which occur in the middle of the section “An Account of Their [the Peasants’] Escapades.” These may appear to be irrelevant to the topic: their setting is explicitly urban, and they contain no mention of “the people of the countryside.” Nevertheless, al-Shirbīnī explicitly links them to his main theme by introducing the first with the words “Apropos of this peasant and his discourtesy, I am reminded of how it fell out that the Champion of Discourtesy of Damascus came to Cairo …” (§3.46). This linkage to further, nonrural, examples of discourtesy (ʿadam dhawq) and boorishness (thaqālah) appears to be made in order to situate the country dweller, in whom such characteristics supposedly are innate, in a broader moral context. Once his status as a specific case within an established behavioral pathology is established, the peasant’s presence within that universe of obnoxiousness appears the more natural. Similarly, the section on rural poetry in Part One is followed by another ridiculing urban doggerel (“It Now Behooves Us to Offer a Small Selection of the Verse of Those Who Lay Claim to the Status of Poets but Are in Practice Poltroons,” etc., §6), thus again associating the peasant with further nonrural examples of barbarous behavior, this time in the form of demonstrably ridiculous pretensions to high literary culture by the unqualified.
Some of the most seemingly irrelevant “digressions” in Brains Confounded may be understood as examples of the final tactic in al-Shirbīnī’s strategy of satire, namely, the disassociation of the author from his subject. Witty passages replete with quotations from the literary canon on farting (vol. 2, §§11.7.17–40), the different categories of amorous pursuit (§§5.3.2–8), the virtues of white hair (vol. 2, §§11.5.4–9), fish (vol. 2, §§11.35.3–6), the rarity of sincere friendship among men (vol. 2, §§12.18–19), and other topics too numerous to count appear to have no relevance to the topic at hand. Such passages do, however, demonstrate the author’s mastery of an accepted cultural discourse and thus confirm his credentials as someone with the authority to criticize the “people of the countryside.” They may also serve the function of siting the work, despite its unaccustomed topic, within a larger, already familiar and accepted, worldview, thus lending it credibility.27
While contemporary polite letters in general, and Brains Confounded in particular, are indisputably products of the salon, Mohamed-Salah Omri makes the corrective point that “adab is the work of individual writers. It appropriates other genres by writing them from the author’s particular point of view …. Focus on the act of writing allows us to shift attention from a writer’s sources … to the manner of incorporation …. Adab … is the creative writing of the Arabs, not the compiled erudition of their majlis discussions.”28
Al-Shirbīnī’s manipulation of the material at hand, recycled as this may be from earlier writings and from a living repertoire of jokes and anecdotes, results not only in accurate targeting of the subject of the satire, but also in the production of a distinctive individual voice; a voice that is cantankerous, witty, and unassuageably partisan. It is precisely this voice, and the window that it opens onto one mid-Ottoman Egyptian writer’s personal universe, that makes Brains Confounded a work of art capable of being enjoyed today as literature and not merely a text containing material relevant to the needs of historians and other scholars.
MODELS AND PRECURSORS
Examples of an interest, satirical or otherwise, in rural life and of related literary practices are to be found in earlier literature.
Qiṣṣat al-Miṣrī wa-l-rīfī A fragment of an anonymous seventeenth-century colloquial Rangstreit (debate over the virtues of two categories) entitled The Story of the Cairene and the Countryman (Qiṣṣat al-Miṣrī wa-l-rīfī), in which a townsman and a peasant debate the merits of their respective environments, proves that polemical confrontations between the city and the country were of interest to consumers of popular literature of the time. However, the Story differs from Brains Confounded in that the peasant apologist is not portrayed as intrinsically inferior to his urban opponent; in the pages that survive neither seems to be set up as the obvious