Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded. Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī
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found, with appropriate variations, in Europe, India, Argentina, Japan, the United States, and Turkey,23 while that of the talking owls is known from Mughal India.24
Brains Confounded is, however, distinguished from most works in the genre of polite letters by its frequent recourse to an apparently contemporary tradition of jokes and other oral material about rural life, a tradition that is also part of modern oral culture.25 Al-Shirbīnī typically introduces anecdotes with the words “And it is said” (§3.7) or “And another story is told” (§3.8), etc., and may end an anecdote with “in another version it says that . . .” (§3.39). Further evidence of orality is provided by the formulaic expressions with which several anecdotes end (compare, for example, “the people of his village then went for three years without going to Cairo, for fear of the corvée” (§3.28) with “I’ll never go back to the villages on the river so long as I live” (§3.31) and “he never went to the city again as long as he lived” (§3.39)). This oral dimension may even have influenced the transmission of the text itself, since, over the entirety of certain anecdotes, the wording differs constantly in detail among the different manuscripts without diverging significantly in substance, a phenomenon perhaps attributable to a freedom that copyists may have felt in dealing with material that was both informal in idiom and already familiar to them. Sometimes the same joke or device is used in unrelated material. A joke about “a pair of slippers as red as your face,” for example, is used twice, the first time in a peasant monologue (§3.17), the second, much later in the text, in an anecdote about the Mamluk poet al-Būṣīrī (vol. 2, §11.38.8). The story of the man who is tricked by a woman into taking off his clothes and descending into a well to recover some bracelets that the woman pretends to have dropped occurs twice in Brains Confounded, once as the second episode of the tale of “the three whores of Cairo” (§3.34), in which the humor is turned against a gullible peasant, and a second time with an old woman as the trickster and an unnamed narrator as the victim (§5.4.9); in its second occurrence, the story is adduced to show not the stupidity of the victim but “the wiles of old women and their cunning” (idem).
A further distinguishing feature is the personalization of anecdotes. Al-Shirbīnī states that he has himself witnessed much of what he describes, using phrases such as “We have observed many of their weddings and all the futile nonsense that goes on at them” (§2.5) and “I saw a peasant talking to a friend of his and asking him . . .” (§3.61). He even says, in the context of an anecdote explaining why a girl was given a bizarre name, that he “actually saw this Khuraywah and asked her father why he had chosen that word for her name” (§2.17). Similarly, he relates lengthy anecdotes in whose events he is a participant (e.g., §§7.8–7.10). The credibility of such reports is undermined, however, by the recurrence elsewhere in the book of some of these tales with a different protagonist. For example, the tale, embroidered with much circumstantial and personal detail, of how al-Shirbīnī was inveigled into attending a meeting of heretical Sufis in Cairo and of his subsequent escape (§7.11) is prefigured elsewhere with different actors (§7.2), and the elaborate story of the dervishes who rob houses by night is followed immediately by al-Shirbīnī’s assertion that a similar incident occurred while he was living in Dimyāṭ (§§7.31–7.32). It seems probable, therefore, that even when al-Shirbīnī claims to have personal knowledge of alleged events, he is in fact drawing on a corpus of popular lore about the countryside or even on material not originally dealing with the countryside that could nevertheless be adapted to his purposes. Robert Irwin has discussed the need of medieval Arabic authors to attribute the anecdotes they relate to known figures in order to indicate their truth and thus usefulness, noting that stories “were not supposed to be made up; rather they were transmitted by their compiler.”26
Techniques: Marshaling, Association, and Disassociation
Authors of works in the tradition of polite letters address a given topic or topics by selecting relevant passages from the literary canon, which the author links together using his own observations, marshaling the whole into a coherent narrative with the goal of instructing, enlightening, and entertaining. While this method can give an impression of randomness, with apparent digressions, the successful author manipulates his material to advance an argument that gains cogency from the examples adduced.
The primary argument of the satirical dimension of Brains Confounded—that the “people of the countryside” are possessed of characteristics and guilty of practices that exclude them from consideration as civilized beings—is made using four main strategies: establishment of a framework of values against which to judge the accused; direct demonstration of guilt through the description of the uncivilized qualities of the accused; insinuation of guilt by association of the accused with other exemplars of uncivilized behavior; and disassociation of the accuser (the author) from the accused by demonstrating the latter’s qualifications as a member of civilized society.
The first lines of Brains Confounded establish the framework, which is that of a moral economy defined by the opposition of refinement (laṭāfah) to coarseness (kathāfah). This moral economy is explored further below.
The direct attack is delivered largely through the series of anecdotes in Part One that purport to describe the people of the countryside. Here we learn that they are ignorant of religion and elementary sanitary habits, have bizarre names, possess unappealing physical attributes, commit crimes, and so on.
The associative technique appears in the form of passages such as the two tales of “The Champions of Discourtesy of Cairo and Damascus” and “The Boors of Cairo and Damascus,” which occur in the middle of the section “An Account of Their [the Peasants’] Escapades.” These may appear to be irrelevant to the topic: their setting is explicitly urban, and they contain no mention of “the people of the countryside.” Nevertheless, al-Shirbīnī explicitly links them to his main theme explicitly by introducing the first with the words “Apropos of this peasant and his discourtesy, I am reminded of how it fell out that the Champion of Discourtesy of Damascus came to Cairo . . .” (§3.46). This linkage to further, nonrural, examples of discourtesy (ʿadam dhawq) and boorishness (thaqālah) appears to be made in order to situate the country dweller, in whom such characteristics supposedly are innate, in a broader moral context. Once his status as a specific case within an established behavioral pathology is established, the peasant’s presence within that universe of obnoxiousness appears the more natural. Similarly, the section on rural poetry in Part One is followed by another ridiculing urban doggerel (“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,” etc., §6), thus again associating the peasant with further nonrural examples of barbarous behavior, this time in the form of demonstrably ridiculous pretensions to high literary culture by the unqualified.
Some of the most seemingly irrelevant “digressions” in Brains Confounded may be understood as examples of the final tactic in al-Shirbīnī’s strategy of satire, namely, the disassociation of the author from his subject. Witty passages replete with quotations from the literary canon on farting (vol. 2, §§11.7.17–40), the different categories of amorous pursuit (§§5.3.2–5.3.8), the virtues of white hair (vol. 2, §§11.5.4–9), fish (vol. 2, §§11.35.3–6), the rarity of sincere friendship among men (vol. 2, §§12.18–19), and other topics too numerous to count appear to have no relevance to the topic at hand. Such passages do, however, demonstrate the author’s mastery of an accepted cultural discourse and thus confirm his credentials as someone with the authority to criticize the “people of the countryside.” They may also serve the function of siting the work, despite its unaccustomed topic, within a larger, already familiar and accepted, worldview, thus lending it credibility.27
While contemporary polite letters in general, and Brains Confounded in particular, are indisputably products of the salon, Mohamed-Salah