Yusuf al-Shirbini

Muhammad ibn Mahfuz al-Sanhuri

Witty, bawdy, and vicious, Yusuf al-Shirbini’s Brains Confounded pits the “coarse” rural masses against the “refined” urban population. In Volume One, al-Shirbini describes the three rural “types”—peasant cultivator, village man-of-religion, and rural dervish—offering anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness, and criminality of each. In Volume Two, he presents a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of his day, with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abu Shaduf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes. Wielding the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbini responds to the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire with digressions into love, food, and flatulence. Volume Two of Brains Confounded is followed by Risible Rhymes, a concise text that includes a comic disquisition on “rural” verse, mocking the pretensions of uneducated poets from Egypt’s countryside. Risible Rhymes also examines various kinds of puzzle poems, which were another popular genre of the day, and presents a debate between scholars over a line of verse by the tenth-century poet al-Mutanabbi. Together, Brains Confounded and Risible Rhymes offer intriguing insight into the intellectual concerns of Ottoman Egypt, showcasing the intense preoccupation with wordplay, grammar, and stylistics and shedding light on the literature of the era.

Volume Two

Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded, with Risible Rhymes

Humphrey Davies

Written in mid-17th century Egypt, Risible Rhymes is a short, comic disquisition on “rural” verse, mocking the pretensions and absurdities of uneducated poets from Egypt’s countryside. Like al-Shirbini’s Brains Confounded, written some forty years later, it combines a biting satire on Egyptian rural society with a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of the day. The two texts also share six overlapping short poems, which suggests that they emanate from a common corpus of pseudo-rural verse that circulated in Ottoman Egypt. Nothing is known about the author, al-Sanhuri, who likely hailed from Egypt’s Fayyum region, although he describes his text as having been written at the behest of an unnamed friend. Alongside the later Brains Confounded, al-Sanhuri’s Risible Rhymes provides further evidence of a hitherto unrecognized genre of Arabic literature during this period, namely, mock-scholarly commentary on verse of supposedly rural provenance. Preoccupation with the countryside as a cultural, social, economic, and religious locus in its own right is unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature. Using clever literary analysis and wordplay, this mordant commentary offers readers a rare window on rural life in Ottoman-era Egypt.

Muhammad ibn Mahfuz al-Sanhuri

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