Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded. Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī
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organized in a uniform manner” (vol. 2, §11.6.7). Not only was this early, sanctioned, system productive of “enormous wealth” (idem), it was also, according to al-Shirbīnī, better for farming, for “in earlier times . . . a person would farm the land and the tax calculated on it would be light, and the levy in kind in support of the tax farmer and his lieutenants (wajbah) and the fine on the landless and the rest were quite unknown. Blessing was unconfined, all the land was under cultivation, and the people enjoyed the greatest good fortune, affluence, and profit” (vol. 2, §11.8.7).
Despite his condemnation of later practice, however, al-Shirbīnī clearly supports the status quo. He does not see the abuses he condemns as providing excuses for the peasant to avoid his duties, for “there is no escape, in any case, from paying the tax, even if that results in affliction and woe” and if the peasant is “put in prison to be beaten and punished,” it is “so that the ordinances of the Almighty may be implemented against him” (vol. 2, §11.6.3). His discussion of the troublesome area of tax collection, where the legitimate right of the state to collect revenue and the oppression that may result from the way in which that right is applied are inextricably intertwined, ends with a telling disquisition on the differences between the good peasant and the bad (vol. 2, §11.6.5), in which al-Shirbīnī makes it plain that one of the most important distinguishing characteristics of the former is that he pays both his taxes and his debts (idem), while the latter pays neither (idem). The fact that this passage contains the only positive description of a peasant in the entire work indicates that al-Shirbīnī may have felt that “the good peasant” was more a logically necessary residual category than a living reality.
In the end, it would seem that al-Shirbīnī wanted to have it both ways: to condemn the “people of the countryside” and all they represented while criticizing the secular authorities for their violations of religious law. This must have been a comfortable position for a scholar (or would-be scholar) concerned to maintain for his like, as society’s best representatives of refinement, a distance between the challenge from the coarse on the one hand and the arrogance of the ruling elite on the other.67 At the same time, it would be anachronistic to assume that this position implies sympathy for the country dweller or objection to his treatment by the authorities, outside of the narrow area of practice identified by the author. Nowhere in Brains Confounded is there a declaration of sympathy for, or defense of, “the people of the countryside” equal in size or scope to the condemnation and vilification to which they are subjected throughout most of the work.
The Parody of Literary Culture
Brains Confounded is not only a satire directed against the “people of the countryside” but also a parody of textual commentary (sharḥ), a culturally central and highly elaborated genre that aimed to extract from a text, whether in the field of grammar and philology, poetry, religious sciences (in which context it was often called tafsīr), or philosophy,68 the maximum value for the literate community. While the parody consists, in essence, of abusing the venerable conventions of sharḥ by applying these to material that is, in the author’s view, unworthy, the process is not without danger to the satire itself, for by pushing these conventions to their logical extremes, the author risks exposing them to ridicule, thus undermining the assumptions of contemporary literary discourse to which they bear witness and on which the satire depends.
It seems likely, however, that in choosing the sharḥ genre as a vehicle for his satire, al-Shirbīnī was inspired, in the first instance at least, by the authority, and thus the advantage over his adversary, that these assumptions granted him. As Rippin remarks, “As an implement for asserting the scholar’s status and authority, arguments over grammar have no rival.”69 Any subversion of the genre itself may have been an unavoidable result of the momentum of the parody rather than its deliberate purpose, and ultimately the author’s attitude to his own parody appears ambiguous.
The Conventions Parodied
The commentators’ preoccupations most prominently parodied by al-Shirbīnī are meter, etymology, conventions for the identification of verbal paradigms and morphological patterns, and the use of lexical authorities in support of the latter, as well as probative verse quotations and the rhetorical debate as a heuristic tool.
In his commentary on the first example of rural verse in the “Account of Their Poets and of Their Idiocies and Inanities” (§5.2), al-Shirbīnī plunges immediately into an analysis of the meter, which he claims belongs to baḥr al-kharā al-wāfir, or “the ‘abundant’ ocean of shite” (§5.2.1) playing on the dual sense of baḥr as “ocean” and as “meter,” as well as on the name of one of the commoner meters, al-wāfir, literally “the abundant.” In this context, a conventional commentator might be expected to provide the standard mnemonic for this meter, using forms of the root f-ʿ -l (“to do”), to represent the pattern of long (L) and short (S) syllables for a hemistich, namely, mufāʿalatun mufāʿalatun faʿūlun (i.e., SLSSL|SLSSL|SLL). Al-Shirbīnī does provide a mnemonic but uses the root kh-b-ṭ, claiming that the meter is to be parsed as mutakhabbiṭun khābiṭun mutakhabbiṭun khubāṭ (i.e., SSLSL|LSL|SSLSL|SL). Not only does this bear no relation to al-wāfir, but the author, by using this root, which includes within its semantic range the concepts of “striking,” “trampling,” “dust,” “diabolical madness,” and “sheep bloat,” is able to bring the verse, and hence its author and audience, into linguistic and cultural areas that are both opprobrious in and of themselves and ridiculously inappropriate for a prestigious undertaking such as textual commentary. This joke is repeated throughout. Roots employed for such mnemonics include h-b-l (“foolishness,” “raving”), kh-l-b-ṭ (“causing malicious trouble; confusing”), th-q-l (“heaviness; boorishness”), and many others.
Al-Shirbīnī also follows the grammarians’ habit of using words of a given pattern or measure of long and short syllables (wazn) to disambiguate that of the word under discussion. Again, for comic effect, he employs the technique of using as disambiguators words of mundane or undignified connotation. Thus “kūz (‘mug for water’) is of the pattern of būz (‘muzzle’) because its wide mouth resembles the muzzle of a cow or a calf” (vol. 2, §11.3.4) and “jubnah (‘piece of cheese’) [is] of the measure of ubnah (‘passive sodomy’)” (vol. 2, §11.26.3), and so on.
Al-Shirbīnī also provides spurious etymologies for many words. For example, he claims that ma-ḍāl (“he ceased not to” or “he kept on” (doing something)) derives from ḍall (“error”) or ḍalāl (“delusion”) or ḍaʾīlah (“slender snake, viper”). Not only are these etymons incorrect (ḍall and ḍalāl derive from the root ḍ-l-l, ḍaʾīlah from ḍ-ʾ-l; ḍāl, a strictly colloquial form, might be considered to derive from ḍ-w-l or ḍ-y-l but historically derives from z-w-l with conflation of this root with ẓ-l-l), they also exploit the technique of ridicule by association used with regard to the meters. On occasion, these false etymologies are elaborated into lengthy flights of whimsicality, as when al-Shirbīnī provides four possible etymons, all entirely spurious, for the word qarrūfih (a sort of vessel) (vol. 2, §11.3.5). In support of such etymologies al-Shirbīnī often invokes the authority of the nonexistent dictionary Al-Qāmūs al-azraq wa-l-nāmūs al-ablaq (The Blue Ocean and Piebald Canon), a title reminiscent of al-Fīrūzābādhī’s famous Al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ (The Encompassing Ocean) and perhaps other lexica (see n. 126).
Similar are the “paradigms” (maṣādir, singular maṣdar)70 with which al-Shirbīnī sometimes completes his analysis of a given word, mimicking the lexicographers’ habit of using these to establish the base forms of the conjugation. Thus, according to the author, the maṣdar of ḍāl is “ḍalla, yaḍillu, ḍalālan, and ḍāllun and maḍlūlun” (§5.2.2); in reality, however, this paradigm is that of the verb ḍalla (“to go astray”), which bears no etymological relationship to the