Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded. Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī
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in verse are typically explained by al-Shirbīnī as being adaptations of literary forms made “for the meter.” Examples—among almost two dozen such cases—are naḥīf for naḥīfan (vol. 2, §11.1.21), la-jat for la-jāʾat (vol. 2, §11.3.19), and la-minnūfor minhu (vol. 2, §11.4.3). Any language that deviates from standard literary norms is thus denied autonomy. In fact, whenever al-Shirbīnī describes a nonstandard form as “rural” or being “for the meter,” this information may safely be ignored.
The slipperiness of the designation “rural” is also conspicuous outside the field of language. The heretical dervishes who play such an important role in the work are, on the one hand, explicitly described as rural: they are “a sect that has been raised in the margins of the lands” (§7.1). On the other hand, the anecdotes describing them in Part One include little rural circumstantiality, with only three out of a score containing references to the countryside. Moreover, in several stories the events recounted are explicitly described as taking place in urban settings such as Alexandria (§7.12), al-Maḥallah al-Kubrā (§7.29), Cairo (§7.31), or Dimyāṭ (§7.32). The sophistication of the philosophical and religious concepts attributed to these Sufis also moves the reader far from al-Shirbīnī’s stereotypical peasant who “knows only belts and cudgels, palm switches and plow-shaft pins, waterwheels and drover’s whips.”
Similarly, the section on rural poetry in Part One is followed by another ridiculing the pretensions of nonrural poetasters (“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”) (§6), thus leading the reader again towards broader vistas of “coarseness.” The inclusion there of long quotations (§§6.2–6.4) from verses written by “the Amīr Murjān al-Ḥabashī,” a black African, reinforces the identification of “coarseness” with a broader marginality (just as we have seen earlier, a man’s base behavior is explained by the fact that his mother—Murjānah—is a black slave (§3.5)).
It seems, therefore, that in Brains Confounded “rurality” is equated with the broader deviance of the “coarse,” wherever they may be found, from the linguistic, religious, and social norms defined by the “refined.” Al-Shirbīnī’s argument seems to be that, without regard to geographical location, the common people—or at least those of them who are guilty of the charges of ignorance, spurious pretensions to participation in elite culture, and perversion of religion that he brings against “the people of the countryside”—pose a threat to the elite.
The Threat and the Response
Summing up at the end of his section on bad rural poetry, al-Shirbīnī asserts that “all this [bad verse] stems from lack of intelligence and perspicacity, an excess of ignorance, and a paucity of education. A man of sound taste, in contrast, would never allow such poor language to pass his lips” (§6.8). This objective lack of learning, however, does not prevent members of the commons from claiming to be possessed of knowledge, or learning, (ʿilm), and the book is full of anecdotes in which these pretensions are manifested, only to be deflated, by Azharis, other scholars, or “sophisticates.” Al-Shirbīnī clearly felt that access to education by those who had no innate right to it was an issue that needed addressing in the Egypt of his day. As he says of rural men of religion, “The condition of such people is well known, the likes of them are everywhere, and their goings-on are beyond numbering” (§3.76).
It has been hypothesized that the relegation of Cairo from the status of imperial capital under the Mamluks to provincial capital under the Ottomans resulted in a decentralization of cultural control and education, which spread to encompass larger numbers, drawn from previously excluded classes: “When the state is decentralized . . . and the structures at the top are weaker, the cultural forms and patterns from below are more likely to emerge”; 59 this tendency would have been aided by the fact that “the policy of the Ottomans towards their provinces was one of restrained intervention in matters that were not of immediate interest to them. The Ottomans, for instance, did not have a policy of ottomanizing culture.”60
According to this theory, evidence of this decentralization is to be seen in the spread of the kuttāb, a school in which young children memorized the Qurʾan and achieved basic literacy and numeracy, as a result of which “many more people knew how to read and write beyond those who were attached to institutions of higher education”61 and literacy spread, especially among artisans and tradesmen.62 In other words, the scholars “. . . cannot be said to have had a complete monopoly on knowledge, since the kind of knowledge associated with the ʿulamāʾ was not the only kind of socially accepted knowledge.”63 Al-Shirbīnī’s bugbear, popular Sufism, may have played an important role in spreading literacy.
At the same time, for reasons that are yet to be convincingly explained and are, on the face of it, in contradiction to the above, it was during the Ottoman period that a single dominant institution, the mosque-university of al-Azhar, emerged to promote religious orthodoxy in Egypt and foster the influence of the scholars.64 A contemporary traveler from Morocco, Abū Sālim al-ʿAyyāshī, impressed by its obvious dynamism, describes how he “spent the night at the al-Azhar mosque, it being the twenty-seventh night [of Ramadan]; but in fact, every night in that mosque is like the Night of Power because it is alive with dhikr, recitation of the Qurʾan, and teaching throughout the night and the day, while worship there never ceases, night or day, summer or winter, for it is without peer among the mosques of the entire world.”65
Thus the scene would seem to have been set for a clash between the burgeoning energy of a hegemonistic al-Azhar and the decentralized, multi-faceted forces released by the spread of education. In this struggle, al-Shirbīnī identifies with al-Azhar heart and soul. When its scholars are mentioned, he prays God to “send them victorious and let them lead the Muslims unto the Day of Judgment!” (§4.5) and he champions them consistently through a series of anecdotes that exude a palpable sense of competition between urban scholars (ʿulamāʾ) and rural men of religion (fuqahāʾ) (§4.14ff).
Brains Confounded may thus represent a counterattack on behalf of the Azharites—and, more broadly, the representatives of “refined” culture—against the threat to their hegemony from the “coarse.” With larger numbers of people being educated and with independent and self-confident Sufis playing an important role in the intellectual and cultural leadership of the newly literate, it is perhaps not surprising to find al-Shirbīnī, the bookseller and marginal scholar, defending the rights of the flagship institution of the mainstream cultural elite by associating its enemies with the despised world of the countryside.
Al-Shirbīnī’s Condemnations of Abuses
It remains to address a seeming anomaly—those rare, albeit eloquent, passages in which al-Shirbīnī takes the side of the peasant against the tyranny and injustices of the government. These passages target specific practices. One is the extortion of the wajbah (a levy in the form of food for visiting officials and their animals), of which al-Shirbīnī says, “It is a form of injustice, and eating such food is forbidden by religion so long as the peasants do not give it of their own free will and cheerfully” (vol. 2, §11.3.10). Other practices condemned by the author are the corvée, the related “fine on the landless,” and various fiscal imposts, all of which were unofficial levies that were imposed for the first time during the seventeenth century and were, as Raymond notes, “incessantly denounced, periodically abolished, but almost always re-instated.”66
Al-Shirbīnī’s argument against these practices rests on their characterization as bidʿah, that is, innovations unsanctioned by religion, for, as he says when considering the question of whether a tax farmer (multazim) has the right to continue “the fine on the landless” when he takes over a village where it was imposed by his predecessor, “the answer is to be found in the Tradition of the Prophet, upon whom blessings and peace, that says, ‘He who introduces into this affair of ours that which is not in it is rejected’