The single most important contribution to the understanding of Brains Confounded to date is Gabriel Baer’s article “Shirbīnī’s Hazz al-quḥūf and Its Significance” in Fellah and Townsman in the Middle East: Studies in Social History (London 1982).38 Baer was the first to direct attention to the value of the text for an understanding of the social history of Egypt rather than concentrating on its linguistic and literary aspects. Baer’s many valuable insights, which focus on the “relations between the fellah and the city and between urban and rural ʿulamāʾ,”39 remain, for the most part, unchallenged. However, his conclusion that al-Shirbīnī’s “attacks against the fellahs are to be understood as a defense against the contempt and derision on the part of the ʿulamāʾ from urban families, from which he and his like suffered” and for which he posits as background “the penetration of a rural element into the urban class of ʿulamāʾ”40 is questionable. Baer himself mentions that “throughout the centuries ʿulamāʾ of village origin lived, taught and wrote books in the cities,” and that “as to the eleventh/seventeenth century … one quarter of Cairo’s ʿulamāʾ whose biographies have been recorded by al-Muḥibbī were of rural origin.”41 Against this, the few examples that Baer provides of ʿulamāʾ being mocked for their rural origins42 all relate either to Syria or to Egypt in the sixteenth century and seem insufficient to justify such a passionate, complex, and extended diatribe as al-Shirbīnī’s.
AL-SHIRBĪNĪ’S COUNTRYSIDE
Because Brains Confounded is, in part, a satire, its depiction of the countryside must be treated with caution; as Omri points out, the book is “not an encyclopaedia of information … pertaining to peasants.”43 Nevertheless, the object of a satire must be recognizable if it is to be appreciated by its readers, and we may therefore assume that the basic information about the countryside that it provides is accurate.
A HIERARCHY OF SETTLEMENTS
The Egypt of Brains Confounded extends from Cairo to Dimyāṭ along the eastern branch of the Nile, on which the villages mentioned in the book (Hurbayṭ, Dundayṭ, Shanashah, Samannūd, etc.) are or were situated. The western Delta, Upper Egypt, and other parts of the country are mentioned only in passing. The settlements along this axis are of three types, which form a hierarchy.
In the heading to the first section of the work devoted specifically to the peasant, al-Shirbīnī limits his attention to “the commoners of certain of the people of the countryside” (§2.1). References in the material that follows make it clear that this subset of rural society is that living in “the hamlets and the small villages” (vol. 2, §11.21.7), and these, as we shall see below, were generally situated at a distance from the river or, as al-Shirbīnī puts it, “in the margins of the lands” (§7.1); as such, they probably received less water, like “tail-enders” in irrigation systems the world over.44 Al-Shirbīnī also uses the doublet “the hamlets and the villages of the swamp lands” (al-kufūr wa-bilād al-malaq) (vol. 2, §11.10.8), the latter being lowlying areas that remained, post-flood, too swampy and salty for cultivation. In other words, the hamlets whose inhabitants are the butt of the satire were the poorest.
The hamlets lack Friday mosques45 and have a mill that the villager must operate with his own oxen, in contrast to the villages on the river, which have mills operated by horsepower (vol. 2, §11.21.7). These hamlets are placed by al-Shirbīnī at the bottom of a tripartite hierarchy of settlements that moves upward from the hamlets, through the villages on the river, to the city. According to this hierarchy, the inhabitants of the hamlets are the most ignorant and isolated, those of the city are paragons of sophistication, and those of the villages by the river occupy a middle position.
This hierarchy is made most explicit in the repeated and pointed descriptions of the different recipes according to which various foods are prepared in the three different settings, for, as al-Shirbīnī states at the beginning of his discussion of stewed fava beans, “things are ennobled … by virtue of place” (vol. 2, §11.11.2). In dietary terms, this hierarchy is keyed largely to the amount of fat used. Thus, of mallow (khubbayzah), he says: “The people of the countryside take the leaves, chop them … and eat them …. The people of the villages on the river cook it with goose and chicken and so on, and the people of the cities cook it with fatty meats … and they add fats, clarified cow’s butter, greens, spices, and similar things, and this is the only way it should be eaten …. The way the country people do it … is worthless, and the same goes for the people of the villages on the river, for these … add no clarified butter or fat …. The latter is, nevertheless, more refined than the recipe of the country people referred to above. The best place to eat it, however, is in the cities ….” (vol. 2, §11.19.3). Similar comments are made in the case of slow-cooked fava beans, fava beans mashed with Jew’s mallow (bīsār), lentils, and rice pudding. In the latter case, al-Shirbīnī adds that “people of Turkish descent make it with milk alone, without water, and add just a little rice … this kind is the best tasting and most appetizing” (vol. 2, §11.25.2), thus placing the latter in a kind of supra-urban category.
THE THREE ESTATES OF AL-SHIRBĪNĪ’S RURAL SOCIETY
The terms most frequently used in Brains Confounded to designate its subjects collectively are ahl al-rīf and al-rayyāfah, both meaning “the people of the countryside.” The presence in Part One of Brains Confounded of three sections devoted to anecdotes about, respectively, “the commoners of certain of the people of the countryside” (ʿawāmm baʿḍ ahl al-rīf) (§§2.9–3.76), their “men of religion” (fuqahāʾ) (§§4.1–4.41), and their “dervishes” (fuqarāʾ, i.e., mendicant Sufis) (§§7.1–7.41) indicates that al-Shirbīnī saw the people of the countryside as being divided into three estates, of roughly similar social, if not numerical, importance. Al-Shirbīnī attacks each of these estates separately, leveling against each specific charges of physical grossness and moral and cultural turpitude.
The Peasant Cultivator As noted above, by “the commoners of certain of the people of the countryside” al-Shirbīnī means the peasant cultivators (fallāḥūn), especially those living in the hamlets and small villages away from the river. These are the people who “spend all their time with the plow and the shovel-sledge and shaking their caps around the threshing floors, or rushing about in the swamps and the fields, or bustling around after the crops, or jumping about harvesting and reaping,” etc. (§2.3). They are stigmatized by association; for example, al-Shirbīnī notes of the plowman (who, according to him, belongs to a particularly benighted subgroup of peasants) that “his companions by day are oxen and by night are women; consequently his mental capacities never become completely formed” (§5.2.6). They are also mocked for unprepossessing physical attributes: “Their pubic hair’s so long it twists as it grows” (§8.8); “The back of his neck had turned black from the heat, his feet were chapped from walking barefoot and from the cold” (§3.1); “His ass, from wear and tear, shows many a scar” (§8.8). The peasant is also taken to task for specific cultural practices: the making of a public spectacle of the bride at the ceremony called “the Showing” is described as “one of their foulest deeds and most wretched ways” (§2.24). Further charges leveled against the peasant include internecine fighting (“war and stubborn confrontation arise among them and villages are ruined at their hands” (§2.3)), with frequent references to the feuding clans of Saʿd (or Jud(h)ām) and Ḥarām (e.g., §2.3) and the village’s own foot soliders (mushāh) and apparently associated “brave lads” (jidʿān) (e.g., §2.23), bad management of land and livestock (vol. 2, §11.6.6), indebtedness (idem), flight from the land (idem), and even the residual use of Christian religious formulae after conversion to Islam (§3.64). Furthermore, their women are “hyenas”