. . . and remind them of their responsibility to educate society properly” (p. 29). Most writers who espouse these ideas explain al-Shirbīnī’s apparent hostility to the peasant as camouflage to protect the author from a putative (but, in fact, nonexistent) Ottoman censorship. A second group holds that, while al-Shirbīnī was hostile to the peasant and the book “clearly reflects the social struggle between fellahs and townsmen, their derision by them and the townsmen’s arrogance in their treatment of the peasants” (p. 32), the author expressed these negative sentiments either because he did not write the book of his own free will or because he did so to ingratiate himself with the Ottoman authorities; an extension of the latter theory would have it that al-Shirbīnī was an agent of the same authorities, who employed him to deride the poem by “the unknown popular poet Abū Shādūf, the voice of the silent oppressed,” as one scholar of this persuasion characterizes him (p. 34).
A shorter version of the article (lacking the discussion of the debate over attitudes and motives) appeared as “Fellah and Townsman in Ottoman Egypt: A Study of Shirbīnī’s Hazz al-Quḥūf,” Asian and African Studies [Jerusalem] 8 (1972): 221–56. Muhsin al-Musawi, The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters, devotes a chapter to Brains Confounded, describing it as a “contribution to contrafaction” of critical importance to the literature of the period; unfortunately, it appeared too recently to allow a consideration of his arguments.
“The documents are full of numerous examples of the neglect of the dykes or their cutting before the irrigation of distant areas, leading to the non-irrigation of thousands of feddons in those areas” (Ibrāhīm, Al-Azamāt, 109).
Baer quotes Aḥmad al-Jazzār Bāshā, “Behind some of the villages there are small villages without minarets. The people of Egypt call them kafr” (Baer, “Significance,” 8). Numerous anecdotes in Brains Confounded attest, however, to the existence of mosques, albeit of a primitive sort, in the kufūr.
A new wave of Sufi thought, based on what Ahmet Karamustafa calls “socially deviant renunciation,” arose in Iran and Anatolia in the thirteenth century and soon spread to Syria and Egypt (Karamustafa, Friends, 10). According to the same source, “ethnically . . . the leaders—and one suspects the rank and file—of the movement at this stage were not Arabs but mostly Iranians” (ibid., 55). However, Sabra has pointed out that, “while there is not much doubt that the leaders were Iranians, the composition of the rank and file is less clear. It is not out of the question that locals joined these groups” (Sabra, Poverty, 29). There is nothing in Brains Confounded to suggest that the dervishes referred to there were anything but Egyptians.
Al-Shirbīnī’s attitude to rural fuqarāʾ does not imply hostility on his part to Sufism per se; on the contrary, the text is peppered with approving references to Sufis such as al-Shaʿrānī and other “initiates of God.” Rather, as Karamustafa points out, “to the ‘enlightened’ cultural elite . . . the antinomian dervish was the symbol par excellence of the religion of the vulgar” (Karamustafa, Friends, 8).
On the persistence of a conceptual distance between the medium of expression of the educated and that of the uneducated, whereby only the latter—in disregard of the facts—speak the colloquial language, see Armbrust, who writes that “sometimes when colloquial is retained in written language it is to confirm the ideology of social separation by emphasizing a class difference” (Armbrust, Culture, 54).
