Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded, with Risible Rhymes. Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī
11.1
yaqūlu abū shādūfi31 min ʿuẓmi mā shakā
mina l-qilli jismū mā yaḍāl naḥīf
Says Abū Shādūf: from all he has suffered
of want, his body’s ever skinny
COMMENTARY
11.1.1
These words are metered32 and tuned,33 have feet, and may be crooned.34 The meter’s the one that’s both “Long” and “Extended”35—and impaired and distended. Those who claim its meter’s “the Perfect” say it goes “without intellect, without intellect (mutahābilun mutahābilun),”36 while those who compare it to that called “the Exuberant” say, “This is the meter luxuriant!” and those who assign it to “the Diffused” say, “It’s flabby and confused!” while those who compare it to the Meter of the Chain37 say it goes “featherbrain, featherbrain (halhalah halhalah),”38 and those who compare it to other metrical clocks use, to represent it, “You’re a donkey or an ox.” Its usual tune goes to the measure “If you chew a bit of soap, it’ll make you like leather.”39 Its feet, of which we’ve already made mention, appear as follows, when in articulation:40
yaqūlu abū shā dūfi min ʿuẓmi mā shakā
nabūlu ʿalayhā fī l-ḍuḥā maʿ ghurū bihā
and the whole of the Ode is in the same mode, namely:
nabūlu ʿalayhā fī l-ḍuḥā maʿ ghurūbihā
We urinate upon it in the forenoon and at sunset.
Now that you know the meter and tune, the feet and the croon, let me embark on the exposition of the verse according to its rhythmic pattern, or in firecracker fashion.
11.1.2
Thus we declare:
yaqūlu (“Abū Shādūf says”)—i.e., he intends to initiate speech (qawl) external to himself that will contain an explanation of his state and evidence of the accidents of Time with which he was inflicted, and the occasions for woe and grief with which he was inflicted. The word qawl has paradigms and etymologies. The paradigm is qāla, yaqūlu, qawlan, and maqālatan, to which may be added qullatan (“water pitcher”)41 and qaylūlatan (“midday snooze”).42 It is derived from qaylūlah or from qulal (“water pitchers”) or from aqwāl (“sayings”) or from qālū (“they said”) or qulnā (“we said”).43
11.1.3
I have added these facetious paradigms and silly etymologies simply as a point of departure for the account that I shall relate to you of an encounter I once had with one of those persons who claim learning while in fact they are ignorant, to wit that, when I went on pilgrimage to God’s Holy House44 in the year 107445 and had reached the port of al-Quṣayr and was waiting there for the ships to leave, I stayed for a few days at a hostel on the sea, preaching to the people. One day, as I was reciting the Qurʾan there, explaining the words and their meanings to the people to make them clear, a sorry sight to see, accoutered for travel by sea, engaged in buffoonery and deliration, and cant and speechification,46 there came towards me—let no one doubt my say-so!—a man round as a halo, tall and cretinous, gross and hebetudinous, with a turban huge as the Primordial Lump, and a woolen shawl draped over his chump. Clearly up to no good, he sat himself down and fixed me with a frown, while his determination to involve me in trouble and contention plainly could be read, since he could barely wait for me to say the word “Said …” And so it was as I’ve described, and in the manner that I’ve implied, for no sooner had I begun to give my lesson, and declared, “Said the Prophet, upon him peace and benison …” than he asked me in tones unrefined, “What’s the meaning of ‘said’ when it’s declined?” When I heard his query, and understood his ignorance and inanity, I realized that in learning he was so far from an adept as to be quite unaware of the difference between word and concept. So I said to him, “From qāl both nouns and verbs we may decline: qāla, yaqūlu, qawlan, and maqālatan or qullatan or qaylūlatan in fine—and if you like I’ll make you up, for sure, in addition to these six, thirty more!” Said he to me, “In what standard text is this declension shown?” Said I, “In the collected works of Ibn Sūdūn!” Then he accepted my words—he was that ignorant and benighted—and I realized that he couldn’t tell the name from the thing cited. Thenceforth, after all the pretension and bluster, he followed me as a sheep its master, and submitted in his comings and goings to my sway, till he departed and went his way.
11.1.4
If it be said, “How come you set out to confuse this inquirer with such paradigms and etymologies, and you gave him such good measure of imbecilities, when you should have stuck to what they’d say in a grammar book, instead of ladling out such gobbledygook?” we reply, “All well and good, but that only goes for those who understand scholarship as one should. As for the dumb ignoramus, who’s gross and pertinacious, his ignorance calls for nothing better than whatever nonsense one may churn out, and the haughtiness befitting the condition of such a lout. Thus the reply that I have given above—taken as it came—was quite appropriate to a question so inane. The problem’s now revealed, the silliness no longer concealed.”
11.1.5
A Silly Topic for Debate: What’s the explanation for the fact that the poet starts his verse in the present tense and does not use the past, unlike, for example, the author of The Thousand Lines on Grammar,47 God have mercy on him, when he writes, “Muḥammad, Mālik’s son, has said … etc.?”48 The Facetious Answer: It is the past tense of the verb, namely, qāla, from which the present tense, namely, yaqūlu, is generated, and from yaqūlu comes the verbal noun qawl, as already noted in tracing the origins of these verbs and nouns; thus the poet simply settled for using the derived rather than the base form. Or it may be that he wanted to enumerate the changes and vicissitudes of fate that had befallen him and, not having mentioned them earlier using past-tense forms, he determined to narrate them using the present-tense form, namely, yaqūlu, albeit this has past meaning formally speaking and present meaning in reality. As the poet says:
So qāla’s past, yaqūlu’s present,
Though the last is its past in reality.49
And Abū l-Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī,50 may God excuse him his sins, says:
If what he intended were a present verb,
It would be past before any could negate it
—meaning, “If he intends to do something in the future, he completes the action before anything can ‘negate’ it,” that is, can intervene between him and its doing and silence the vowels of his verb.51 End. Also, if he were to introduce the past form, the meter would be broken, even if the meaning remained as before. Thus the answer now is right; the truth has loomed into sight.
11.1.6
Abū Shādūfi: this is his kunyah, but it took him over and became his primary name, as happened in the case of Maʿdīkarib, Baʿlabakk, Baraqa Naḥruhu, and so on.52 His real name was ʿUjayl, diminutive of ʿijl (“calf”), or so it is reported, the reason for his being so named being that, when his mother gave birth to him, she threw him in the cow’s trough, and then the calf came along and licked him, so they called him that for a few days, until he became known by the kunyah in question. The reason for his becoming known by the latter is variously explained. One version has it that when the times turned against him, as described above, he hired himself out to water the crops using the device made by the country people, called the Abū Shādūf.53 The