Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded. Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī
a writer’s sources . . . to the manner of incorporation . . . . Adab . . . is the creative writing of the Arabs, not the compiled erudition of their majlis discussions.”28
Al-Shirbīnī’s manipulation of the material at hand, recycled as this may be from earlier writings and from a living repertoire of jokes and anecdotes, results not only in accurate targeting of the subject of the satire, but also in the production of a distinctive individual voice; a voice that is cantankerous, witty, and unassuageably partisan. It is precisely this voice, and the window that it opens onto one mid-Ottoman Egyptian writer’s personal universe, that makes Brains Confounded a work of art capable of being enjoyed today as literature and not merely a text containing material relevant to the needs of historians and other scholars.
Models and Precursors
Examples of an interest, satirical or otherwise, in rural life and of related literary practices are to be found in earlier literature.
Qiṣṣat al-Miṣrī wa-l-rīfī
A fragment of an anonymous seventeenth-century colloquial Rangstreit (debate over the virtues of two categories) entitled The Story of the Cairene and the Countryman (Qiṣṣat al-Miṣrī wa-l-rīfī), in which a townsman and a peasant debate the merits of their respective environments, proves that polemical confrontations between the city and the country were of interest to consumers of popular literature of the time. However, the Story differs from Brains Confounded in that the peasant apologist is not portrayed as intrinsically inferior to his urban opponent; in the pages that survive neither seems to be set up as the obvious victor in the argument.
Ibn Sūdūn
The only author acknowledged by al-Shirbīnī as a model is the Mamluk writer ʿAlī ibn Sūdūn al-Bashbughāwī. Al-Shirbīnī indicates at the beginning of Brains Confounded that he will provide the reader with “license and buffoonery, with just a touch of Ibn Sūdūn-ery” (§1.4). Al-Shirbīnī quotes twice from Ibn Sūdūn’s works. The first quotation is of Funayn’s Letter (§§4.36–4.37.6), a long, comically inane missive sent by a certain Funayn from Upper Egypt to his parents in some other, unspecified, part of Egypt, and probably appealed to al-Shirbīnī because of its epistolary form (it initiates a short section on silly letters) and its fit with the naturalistic colloquial prose used in his own peasant monologues. The second quotation from Ibn Sūdūn may have provided direct inspiration for Brains Confounded, in that it consists of a commentary on four lines of colloquial verse (“Abū Qurdān / sowed a feddan . . .”) followed by a zany explanation of the etymology of the word mulūkhiyyā (“Jew’s mallow”) (vol. 2, §11.12.8). Al-Shirbīnī does not, however, make this connection himself and the passage, which is short, is buried in a larger discussion.
Al-Ṣafadī’s Ikhtirāʿ al-khurāʿ
The Concoction of Craziness (Ikhtirāʿ al-khurāʿ) of Khalīl ibn Aybak al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363) consists of a humorous commentary on two lines of nonsense verse that has many points in common with al-Shirbīnī’s work, the most obvious being the exploitation of the comic potential inherent in the text-and-commentary genre and the targeting of unjustified pretensions to participation in the literary culture. The two works also share a mise-en-scène (the verses in question are brought to the attention of a gathering of litterateurs, one of whose members is commissioned to write a commentary “to be strung to fit their strange string”) and certain (but by no means all) comic devices, such as false etymologies, incorrect meters, freewheeling word association, and the straight-faced assertion of the patently false, and these impart a sense of kinship between the two texts.
An essential difference between al-Ṣafadī and al-Shirbīnī, however, lies in the fact that al-Ṣafadī’s parody lacks any reference to the countryside and that the verses that are its target are more or less pure nonsense, in contrast to the highly meaning-laden odes and mawāliyās (two-line poems of four rhyming hemistichs in basīṭ meter, often with colloquial features) of al-Shirbīnī’s country people. Their author, likewise, is a cipher, without an identifiable human face, and as such, in contrast to al-Shirbīnī’s countryman, represents no particular social group. It follows that al-Ṣafadī’s humor is more abstract and, perhaps because it has no flesh-and-blood victim, less malicious than al-Shirbīnī’s. By the same token, The Concoction of Craziness contains none of the description and critique of social behavior that enriches Brains Confounded.
Al-Sanhūrī’s Muḍḥik dhawī l-dhawq: Inspiration or Genre?
Muḥammad ibn Maḥfūẓ al-Sanhūrī’s recently discovered work Risible Rhymes (Muḍḥik dhawī l-dhawq wa-l-niẓām fī ḥall shadharatin min kalām ahl al-rīf al-ʿawāmm) contains six of the ten verses occurring in the section in Brains Confounded headed “An Account of Their Poets and of Their Idiocies and Inanities” (§5) and, presented within the same sequence as the latter, four that do not.29 What might be the relationship between these two works, and what conclusion should we draw from the appearance of Brains Confounded some forty years after Risible Rhymes?
One possible conclusion is that al-Shirbīnī read al-Sanhūrī’s book, found the concept appealing, added some verses (presumably of his own composition), discarded others, and used the whole as a foundation for his more ambitious project, adopting from al-Sanhūrī, in addition, certain comic devices, such as the absurd metrical mnemonics. According to such a scenario, the writing of commentaries on mock-rural verse would be a phenomenon that started with Risible Rhymes and ended with Brains Confounded, and this may indeed have been the case. However, the occurrence in each work of verses not found in the other suggests another possibility, namely, that each writer drew on a common stock of mock-rural verse that was in circulation at the time, and that the two works thus constitute what has survived, or what we know so far to have survived, of a genre.
Elements in both works imply the existence of such a common stock. Al-Sanhūrī says that he was asked to “decode a sampling of what the rural rank and file have said in verse,” while al-Shirbīnī describes the “Ode of Abū Shādūf” as being “among the rural verse to come my way . . . and which has become the subject of comment in certain salons”; such references are not in and of themselves humorous, and it is not obvious why the writer should have made them if they were not true. In addition, the greater number and more elaborated form of such verses in Brains Confounded may point to the existence of a larger body of such work. Thus the stanzaic ode (qaṣīd) of Abū ʿAfr (Brains Confounded §§3.18.1–3.18.15), which is more or less equal in length to that of Abū Shādūf, and the “Ode of Abū Shādūf” itself and its associated poems, all far exceed in length the earlier material that is partially shared with Risible Rhymes and abandon the couplet in favor of other poetic forms of which al-Sanhūrī’s book contains no examples. It may be argued that the presence of certain comic devices—specifically the use of absurd metrical mnemonics and formulas (referring to couplets) of the pattern “its width is from [place A] to [place B], its breadth from [place C] to [place D]”—indicate direct borrowing by al-Shirbīnī from al-Sanhūrī, but that is not necessarily the case. The comic mnemonic, at least, has its forerunners in the work of al-Ṣafadī (see above), who also uses other comic devices (the false etymology, the straight-faced assertion of the patently false) to be found in Brains Confounded. Finally, we may wonder whether al-Sanhūrī was a writer of a caliber to have written such mock-rural verses or, as the rest of his book implies, a writer who seized on ready-made materials to fulfil the task he had been given, oblivious, in the case of the mock-rural verse, to the opportunities for satire that these provided and capable of offering only the mundane grammatical and rhetorical critique that he in fact provides.
None of the above arguments for the existence of a genre of commentaries on mock-rural verse is conclusive. Unless further texts of this sort emerge (as Risible Rhymes recently has), we shall never know whether al-Shirbīnī was directly and solely inspired