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Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded. Yūsuf al-ShirbīnīЧитать онлайн книгу.

Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded - Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī


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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

      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.

      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.

      Context and Sources

      The Salon, Polite Letters, and the Oral Factor

      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.


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