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

      NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

       New York and London

      Table of Contents

      Letter from the General Editor

      Introduction

      Note on the Text

       Notes to the Introduction

       Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded, Part One

       The Author Describes the Ode of Abū Shādūf

       The Author Embarks on a Description of the Common Country Folk

       An Account of Their Escapades

       An Account of Their Pastors and of the Compounded Ignorance, Imbecility, and Injuries to Religion and the Like of Which They Are Guilty

       An Account of Their Poets and of Their Idiocies and Inanities

       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, and Who Make Up Rhymes but Are Really Looney Tunes

       An Account of Their Ignorant Dervishes and of Their Ignorant and Misguided Practices

       Urjūzah Summarizing Part One

      Index

      About the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute

      About this E-book

      Titles Published by the Library of Arabic Literature

      About the Editor–Translator

      Library of Arabic Literature

      Editorial Board

      General Editor

      Philip F. Kennedy, New York University

      Executive Editors

      James E. Montgomery, University of Cambridge

      Shawkat M. Toorawa, Cornell University

      Editors

      Julia Bray, University of Oxford

      Michael Cooperson, University of California, Los Angeles

      Joseph E. Lowry, University of Pennsylvania

      Tahera Qutbuddin, University of Chicago

      Devin J. Stewart, Emory University

      Managing Editor

      Chip Rossetti

      Digital Production Manager

      Stuart Brown

      Assistant Editor

      Gemma Juan-Simó

      Letter from the General Editor

      The Library of Arabic Literature series offers Arabic editions and English translations of significant works of Arabic literature, with an emphasis on the seventh to nineteenth centuries. The Library of Arabic Literature thus includes texts from the pre-Islamic era to the cusp of the modern period, and encompasses a wide range of genres, including poetry, poetics, fiction, religion, philosophy, law, science, history, and historiography.

      Books in the series are edited and translated by internationally recognized scholars and are published in parallel-text format with Arabic and English on facing pages, and are also made available as English-only paperbacks.

      The Library encourages scholars to produce authoritative, though not necessarily critical, Arabic editions, accompanied by modern, lucid English translations. Its ultimate goal is to introduce the rich, largely untapped Arabic literary heritage to both a general audience of readers as well as to scholars and students.

      The Library of Arabic Literature is supported by a grant from the New York University Abu Dhabi Institute and is published by NYU Press.

      Philip F. Kennedy

      General Editor, Library of Arabic Literature

      To Kristina Nelson and Clare and James Davies

      Introduction

      The Author

      Yūsuf ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Jawād ibn Khiḍr al-Shirbīnī was either unknown to or ignored by the biographers of his generation, and no trace of his presence has yet been discovered in Egyptian archives. Our knowledge of him is therefore dependent on what can be gleaned from his literary works, for which we have three titles. The first is that of the work for which he is best known and which is presented in this volume, namely, Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded (Hazz al-quḥūf bi-sharḥ qaṣīd Abī Shādūf), hereafter Brains Confounded. The second and third titles are The Pearls (Al-Laʾāliʾ wa-l-durar) and The Casting Aside of the Clods for the Unstringing of the Pearls (Ṭarḥ al-madar li-ḥall al-laʾāliʾ wa-l-durar). The second and third titles, however, both appear to refer to the same work: a short homiletic tract, whose most notable feature is that it was written using only undotted letters.

The author refers to Shirbīn as “my town” (vol. 2, §§11.7.9 and 11.37.7) and “our village” (vol. 2, §11.9.2), and it can be assumed that he was born there, in what was, at the time, a significant rural center on the eastern branch of the Nile, in the province of al-Gharbiyyah.¹

      The earliest date in Brains Confounded is 1066/1655–56, al-Shirbīnī stating that, at that time, he was living in Dimyāṭ (Damietta), a port on the estuary of the eastern branch of the Nile, some thirty miles northeast of Shirbīn; Dimyāṭ was Egypt’s second city during the Ottoman period (§7.32). His reference to his having witnessed certain public events in that city implies that al-Shirbīnī lived there as an adult, say, over the age of twenty. He was thus probably born no later than (and possibly well before) 1046/1636–37.

In 1069/1659, the noted scholar Aḥmad Shihāb al-Dīn ibn Salāmah al-Qalyūbī, whom al-Shirbīnī refers to as “our shaykh” (§4.3), that is, his teacher, died. In all likelihood, therefore, al-Shirbīnī had moved to Cairo before that date and become a student at the mosque-university of al-Azhar.² According to al-Muḥibbī, al-Qalyūbī was “a compendium of the religious sciences and thoroughly at home with the rational sciences”; he was also skilled at and practiced in medicine.³ In Brains Confounded, al-Shirbīnī demonstrates acquaintance with medical literature (e.g., vol. 2, §§11.15.7, 11.20.9, 11.23.6) and at least