قحوف بشرح قصيد أبي شادوف
يوسف الشربينيّ
الجزء الأوّل
Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded
Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī
Volume One
Edited and translated by
Humphrey Davies
Volume editors
James E. Montgomery
Geert Jan van Gelder
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
Table of Contents
Letter from the General Editor
Introduction
Note on the Text
Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded, Part One
The Author Describes the Ode of Abū Shādūf
The Author Embarks on a Description of the Common Country Folk
An Account of Their Poets and of Their Idiocies and Inanities
An Account of Their Ignorant Dervishes and of Their Ignorant and Misguided Practices
Index
About the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute
About this E-book
Titles Published by the Library of Arabic Literature
About the Editor–Translator
Library of Arabic Literature
Editorial Board
General Editor
Philip F. Kennedy, New York University
Executive Editors
James E. Montgomery, University of Cambridge
Shawkat M. Toorawa, Cornell University
Editors
Julia Bray, University of Oxford
Michael Cooperson, University of California, Los Angeles
Joseph E. Lowry, University of Pennsylvania
Tahera Qutbuddin, University of Chicago
Devin J. Stewart, Emory University
Managing Editor
Chip Rossetti
Digital Production Manager
Stuart Brown
Assistant Editor
Gemma Juan-Simó
Letter from the General Editor
The Library of Arabic Literature series offers Arabic editions and English translations of significant works of Arabic literature, with an emphasis on the seventh to nineteenth centuries. The Library of Arabic Literature thus includes texts from the pre-Islamic era to the cusp of the modern period, and encompasses a wide range of genres, including poetry, poetics, fiction, religion, philosophy, law, science, history, and historiography.
Books in the series are edited and translated by internationally recognized scholars and are published in parallel-text format with Arabic and English on facing pages, and are also made available as English-only paperbacks.
The Library encourages scholars to produce authoritative, though not necessarily critical, Arabic editions, accompanied by modern, lucid English translations. Its ultimate goal is to introduce the rich, largely untapped Arabic literary heritage to both a general audience of readers as well as to scholars and students.
The Library of Arabic Literature is supported by a grant from the New York University Abu Dhabi Institute and is published by NYU Press.
Philip F. Kennedy
General Editor, Library of Arabic Literature
To Kristina Nelson and Clare and James Davies
Introduction
The Author
Yūsuf ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Jawād ibn Khiḍr al-Shirbīnī was either unknown to or ignored by the biographers of his generation, and no trace of his presence has yet been discovered in Egyptian archives. Our knowledge of him is therefore dependent on what can be gleaned from his literary works, for which we have three titles. The first is that of the work for which he is best known and which is presented in this volume, namely, Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded (Hazz al-quḥūf bi-sharḥ qaṣīd Abī Shādūf), hereafter Brains Confounded. The second and third titles are The Pearls (Al-Laʾāliʾ wa-l-durar) and The Casting Aside of the Clods for the Unstringing of the Pearls (Ṭarḥ al-madar li-ḥall al-laʾāliʾ wa-l-durar). The second and third titles, however, both appear to refer to the same work: a short homiletic tract, whose most notable feature is that it was written using only undotted letters.
The author refers to Shirbīn as “my town” (vol. 2, §§11.7.9 and 11.37.7) and “our village” (vol. 2, §11.9.2), and it can be assumed that he was born there, in
