Two things were excised from Arabic literature during the so-called Age of Renaissance (ʿaṣr al-nahḍah), from the early 19th to the early 20th century. The first was the vernacular, which (in the form of Egyptian dialect, at least) had been a crucial component of written Arabic for centuries.

The second was what might be termed, for lack of anything more accurate, levity. Comparable to what is called “the carnivalesque” in reference to Rabelais and later European authors—Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded (1686) was completed almost exactly a century before The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1767)—levity is both a perspective on life and a literary modus operandi. It combines satire and parody with complex artifice, ironic wit, and a general distrust of solemnity.

Celebrating bawdiness and vice even as it purports to promote respectability and virtue, it is something to which the author of Brains Confounded, Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī, emphatically owns, calling it among other things “laughter and license,” “nonsensicality and farcicality,” “distractions,” and “licentiousness.”

In his introduction to the two-volume edition, Shirbīnī’s superlative translator Humphrey Davies stresses the author’s bitterness and disillusion in connection with these lines of the book’s dībājah (the traditional preamble). The frustrated scholar identifies “with plaints attributed to al-Būsīrī, al-Maʿarrī, and others against the neglect of the talented and eloquent in favor of ‘billy goats’ and ‘pimps and clowns,’” Davies writes. But it is to his passion for levity that I think Shirbīnī is referring—in a kind of metaself-parody—when he declares “buffoonery and profligacy” and “frivolity and effrontery” the way to “stay in tune with one’s days,” weathering an age in which “none survive but those possessed of a measure” of those evils.

Anecdote, wordplay, and the mixing of verse into prose are elements that characterize all pre-20th-century Arabic books to some degree. But it seems that humor took the form of obscenity and blasphemy through the Age of Decay (ʿaṣr al-inḥiṭāṭ), from the early 14th to the early 19th century, more often than in other periods. An author would indulge his love of such discursive transgressions

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