Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded. Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī
commentary (sharḥ) that are central to its purpose. In our translation we have borne in mind that these commentaries on specific verses are commentaries on Arabic and not on English texts and that it is Arabic words and not English words that are at issue. When the commentator discusses ʿadīm (colloquial for ʿaẓīm), he is not discussing the English word “mighty”; in such cases, the English translation is an approximation whose lexical boundaries differ, in all likelihood, from those of its Arabic “equivalent.” In these passages, therefore, Arabic has been privileged, in the sense that the verses in question are reproduced in transcription in the English text and precede their English translations, both when they first occur and in the commentary. The reader who does not know Arabic may well allow his eye to skip these transcriptions; they are, however, essential to the logic of the text.
Notes to the Introduction
| 1 | According to Awliyāʾ Shalabī (Evliya Çelebi), who visited Egypt during al-Shirbīnī’s lifetime, Shirbīn boasted 1,700 houses, a Friday mosque, fifty other mosques, and one madrasah (Baer, “Significance,” 38 n. 8; Baer does, however, point out that Shalabī was given to exaggeration). Shirbīn now falls within the more recently created governorate of al-Daqahliyyah. |
| 2 | Al-Muḥibbī, Khulāṣat al-athar, 1:175. Though al-Muḥibbī does not say so explicitly, it is highly likely that a scholar as prominent as al-Qalyūbī (whom al-Muḥibbī describes as “one of the leading ʿulamāʾ”) was an Azhari; this is supported by the fact that he was also a teacher of Aḥmad al-Sandūbī, whom al-Muḥibbī describes as such. |
| 3 | Al-Muḥibbī, Khulāṣat al-athar, 1:175. |
| 4 | See, e.g., M. A. J. Beg, “Ḥāʾik,” in EI2. |
| 5 | “It is said, ‘stupidity is of ten parts, nine of which are to be found in weavers’” (al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī, Muḥāḍarāt, 1:284). |
| 6 | Al-Sandūbī was “one of the leading teachers of al-Azhar” and, like al-Shirbīnī, studied under al-Qalyūbī (al-Muḥibbī, Khulāṣat al-athar, 1:156). He wrote several works, including a commentary on the Alfiyyah of Ibn Mālik, and “much verse” (al-Muḥibbī, Khulāṣat al-athar, 1:256–57). The relationship may have been based, in part, on the fact that the two men came from the same region (Minyat Sandūb lies on the eastern branch of the Nile about thirty miles south of al-Manṣūrah). |
| 7 | MS Gotha (A) 2346 (see OLA 141), at the top of p. 2[b] according to the “Arabic” numbering and following mention of the author’s name in the colophon at the end of Part Two: fa-halaka fī sanati iḥdā ʿashrata wa-miʾatin baʿd al-alfi l-hijriyyah. |
| 8 | Pertsch, Katalog, 4:329. |
| 9 | Mubārak, al-Khiṭaṭ, 1:127–28. |
| 10 | On the cultural importance of the majlis, see Hanna, “Culture,” 99. |
| 11 | Baer defines muʿāmil as “merchant or moneylender” (Baer, Fellah and Townsman in the Middle East, 6), but the references to muʿāmils in Brains Confounded concern moneylending only (see Davies, Lexicon, 78–79). |
| 12 | Ṭarḥ al-madar opens with a similar, though more explicitly personal, complaint: “I am, however, of good fortune and recognition deprived . . . and rare it is in these times for a master of eloquence to triumph” (p. 1). |
| 13 | Winter notes that he was unable to devote a chapter of his Egyptian Society under Ottoman Rule 1517–1798 “to that social class which formed the majority of the Egyptian population in the Ottoman period, namely the fellahin. To do the subject any measure of justice would have required much more information than is available to me at present” (p. xv). |
| 14 | It is difficult to find other than incidental mention of peasants in the histories that extensively chronicle Egypt’s political life. Al-Jabartī (1167–1241/1753–1825) devotes a few lines to peasants in connection with Muḥammad ʿAlī’s abolition of the tax-farming system (where he speaks of them in terms remarkably similar to those used by al-Shirbīnī; ʿAjāʾib, 4:64). In the modern period, according to a study of the peasant in Arabic literature, the first mention of the peasant in a literary prose context was made by ʿAbd Allāh al-Nadīm in the 1880s (see his recently republished play “Al-Waṭan” (Akhbār al-adab 217, Sept. 2003)), the first in poetry occurs in 1908 (see Ḥasan, Al-Fallāḥ, 24), and the first in “literary journalism” in 1933 (ibid., 121). Two early Egyptian novels, Maḥmūd Haqqī’s Dīnshiwāy (1906) and Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal’s Zaynab (1913), have rural settings. |
| 15 | An edition and translation of al-Sanhūrī’s work is being published by the Library of Arabic Literature under the title Risible Rhymes. |
| 16 | Jess Stern (ed.), The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Random House, 1979). Van Gelder argues that, because Arabic lacks an exact equivalent for the term “satire,” it may be dangerous to apply the term to “a tradition that had its own system of modes and genres” (van Gelder, “Satire, medieval,” in EAL). However, the presence in Brains Confounded of precisely the “moral dimension which is the hallmark of true satire” (idem) and of the “wit and sparkle usually associated with satire” (idem) seem to justify its use. |
| 17 | Random House Dictionary. Van Gelder has previously noted this double nature of the work (van Gelder, “Satire, medieval,” in EAL), but, while he sees these two sides to the work as mutually exclusive, I see them as complementary. |
| 18 | Hanna, “Chronicles,” 243. |
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