Al-Ṣafadī’s Ikhtirāʿ al-khurāʿ The Concoction of Craziness (Ikhtirāʿ al-khurāʿ) of Khalīl ibn Aybak al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363) consists of a humorous commentary on two lines of nonsense verse that has many points in common with al-Shirbīnī’s work, the most obvious being the exploitation of the comic potential inherent in the text-and-commentary genre and the targeting of unjustified pretensions to participation in the literary culture. The two works also share a mise-en-scène (the verses in question are brought to the attention of a gathering of litterateurs, one of whose members is commissioned to write a commentary “to be strung to fit their strange string”) and certain (but by no means all) comic devices, such as false etymologies, incorrect meters, freewheeling word association, and the straight-faced assertion of the patently false, and these impart a sense of kinship to the two texts.
An essential difference between al-Ṣafadī and al-Shirbīnī, however, lies in the fact that al-Ṣafadī’s parody lacks any reference to the countryside and that the verses that are its target are more or less pure nonsense, in contrast to the highly meaning-laden odes and mawāliyās (two-line poems of four rhyming hemistichs in basīṭ meter, often with colloquial features) of al-Shirbīnī’s country people. Their author, likewise, is a cipher, without an identifiable human face, and as such, in contrast to al-Shirbīnī’s countryman, represents no particular social group. It follows that al-Ṣafadī’s humor is more abstract and, perhaps because it has no flesh-and-blood victim, less malicious than al-Shirbīnī’s. By the same token, The Concoction of Craziness contains none of the description and critique of social behavior that enriches Brains Confounded.
Al-Sanhūrī’s Muḍḥik dhawī l-dhawq: Inspiration or Genre? Muḥammad ibn Maḥfūẓ al-Sanhūrī’s recently discovered work Risible Rhymes (Muḍḥik dhawī l-dhawq wa-l-niẓām fī ḥall shadharatin min kalām ahl al-rīf al-ʿawāmm) contains six of the ten verses occurring in the section in Brains Confounded headed “An Account of Their Poets and of Their Idiocies and Inanities” (§5) and, presented within the same sequence as the latter, four that do not.29 What might be the relationship between these two works, and what conclusion should we draw from the appearance of Brains Confounded some forty years after Risible Rhymes?
One possible conclusion is that al-Shirbīnī read al-Sanhūrī’s book, found the concept appealing, added some verses (presumably of his own composition), discarded others, and used the whole as a foundation for his more ambitious project, adopting from al-Sanhūrī, in addition, certain comic devices, such as the absurd metrical mnemonics. According to such a scenario, the writing of commentaries on mock-rural verse would be a phenomenon that started with Risible Rhymes and ended with Brains Confounded, and this may indeed have been the case. However, the occurrence in each work of verses not found in the other suggests another possibility, namely, that each writer drew on a common stock of mock-rural verse that was in circulation at the time, and that the two works thus constitute what has survived, or what we know so far to have survived, of a genre.
Elements in both works imply the existence of such a common stock. Al-Sanhūrī says that he was asked to “decode a sampling of what the rural rank and file have said in verse,” while al-Shirbīnī describes the “Ode of Abū Shādūf” as being “among the rural verse to come my way … and which has become the subject of comment in certain salons”; such references are not in and of themselves humorous, and it is not obvious why the writer should have made them if they were not true. In addition, the greater number and more elaborated form of such verses in Brains Confounded may point to the existence of a larger body of such work. Thus the stanzaic ode (qaṣīd) of Abū ʿAfr (Brains Confounded §§3.18.1–15), which is more or less equal in length to that of Abū Shādūf, and the “Ode of Abū Shādūf” itself and its associated poems, all far exceed in length the earlier material that is partially shared with Risible Rhymes and abandon the couplet in favor of other poetic forms of which al-Sanhūrī’s book contains no examples. It may be argued that the presence of certain comic devices—specifically the use of absurd metrical mnemonics and formulas (referring to couplets) of the pattern “its width is from [place A] to [place B], its breadth from [place C] to [place D]”—indicate direct borrowing by al-Shirbīnī from al-Sanhūrī, but that is not necessarily the case. The comic mnemonic, at least, has its forerunners in the work of al-Ṣafadī (see above), who also uses other comic devices (the false etymology, the straight-faced assertion of the patently false) to be found in Brains Confounded. Finally, we may wonder whether al-Sanhūrī was a writer of a caliber to have written such mock-rural verses or, as the rest of his book implies, a writer who seized on ready-made materials to fulfil the task he had been given, oblivious, in the case of the mock-rural verse, to the opportunities for satire that these provided and capable of offering only the mundane grammatical and rhetorical critique that he in fact provides.
None of the above arguments for the existence of a genre of commentaries on mock-rural verse is conclusive. Unless further texts of this sort emerge (as Risible Rhymes recently has), we shall never know whether al-Shirbīnī was directly and solely inspired by al-Sanhūrī, but should the existence of such a genre be proven, al-Shirbīnī will have to be reassessed, as less an eccentric outlier in the history of Arabic literature and more a writer of talent who saw the potential of an existing genre and exploited it in the service of a particular discourse.
PUBLICATION, RECEPTION, AND SCHOLARLY ATTENTION
Ten manuscript copies of Brains Confounded exist today, indicating at least a modest popularity of the work in the days before printing was introduced to Egypt in the early nineteenth century. An unpublished manuscript entitled Mukhtaṣar al-Īḍāḥ fī ʿilm al-nikāḥ (The Synopsis of The Work of Clarification concerning the Science of Copulation), which, like Al-Īḍāḥ fī ʿilm al-nikāḥ itself, is falsely attributed to Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī and which was copied in 1247/1832 (Ms Cantab. Add. 335, folios 8b–9a), contains a brief passage on pimping that the author attributes to Brains Confounded, though it does not in fact occur there. Thus, at this time, al-Shirbini was apparently well enough known to be cited as an authority on socio-sexual issues.30
Brains Confounded was first printed, at private expense, at the government press at Bulaq in 1274/1857–58, and was reprinted or lithographed thereafter at least five times during the nineteenth century. However, Jean Le Cerf’s comment in the 1930s that “les plus anciens journalistes du Caire se souvient d’un Kitab Abu Shaduf que nous n’avons pu retrouver, et qui date du temps du Khédive Ismail [sic]” indicates that the work was hard to find by the first half of the twentieth century. It was published once again, in a bowdlerized and generally unreliable edition, in 1963.31
Western scholars were the first to draw attention to the literary and linguistic importance of the work. The first study, by Mehren, appeared in 1872, twelve years after its first printing.32 Spitta incorporated material derived from it into his grammar of Egyptian Arabic of 1880,33 in 1887 Vollers made extensive use of it in a major article on Egyptian Arabic,34 and in 1906 Kern included mention of it in his review of new [sic] humorous writers.35 None of the above attempted a