of themselves humorous, and it is not obvious why the writer should have made them if they were not true. In addition, the greater number and more elaborated form of such verses in Brains Confounded may point to the existence of a larger body of such work. Thus the stanzaic ode (qaṣīd) of Abū ʿAfr (Brains Confounded §§3.18.1–3.18.15), which is more or less equal in length to that of Abū Shādūf, and the “Ode of Abū Shādūf” itself and its associated poems, all far exceed in length the earlier material that is partially shared with Risible Rhymes and abandon the couplet in favor of other poetic forms of which al-Sanhūrī’s book contains no examples. It may be argued that the presence of certain comic devices—specifically the use of absurd metrical mnemonics and formulas (referring to couplets) of the pattern “its width is from [place A] to [place B], its breadth from [place C] to [place D]”—indicate direct borrowing by al-Shirbīnī from al-Sanhūrī, but that is not necessarily the case. The comic mnemonic, at least, has its forerunners in the work of al-Ṣafadī (see above), who also uses other comic devices (the false etymology, the straight-faced assertion of the patently false) to be found in Brains Confounded. Finally, we may wonder whether al-Sanhūrī was a writer of a caliber to have written such mock-rural verses or, as the rest of his book implies, a writer who seized on ready-made materials to fulfil the task he had been given, oblivious, in the case of the mock-rural verse, to the opportunities for satire that these provided and capable of offering only the mundane grammatical and rhetorical critique that he in fact provides.
None of the above arguments for the existence of a genre of commentaries on mock-rural verse is conclusive. Unless further texts of this sort emerge (as Risible Rhymes recently has), we shall never know whether al-Shirbīnī was directly and solely inspired by al-Sanhūrī, but should the existence of such a genre be proven, al-Shirbīnī will have to be reassessed, as less an eccentric outlier in the history of Arabic literature and more a writer of talent who saw the potential of an existing genre and exploited it in the service of a particular discourse.
Publication, Reception, and Scholarly Attention
Ten manuscript copies of Brains Confounded exist today, indicating at least a modest popularity of the work in the days before printing was introduced to Egypt in the early nineteenth century. An unpublished manuscript entitled Mukhtaṣar al-Īḍāḥ fī ʿilm al-nikāḥ (The Synopsis of The Work of Clarification concerning the Science of Copulation), which, like Al-Īḍāḥ fī ʿilm al-nikāḥ itself, is falsely attributed to Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī and which was copied in 1247/1832 (Ms Cantab. Add. 335, folios 8b–9a), contains a brief passage on pimping that the author attributes to Brains Confounded, though it does not in fact occur there. Thus, at this time, al-Shirbini was apparently well enough known to be cited as an authority on socio-sexual issues.30
Brains Confounded was first printed, at private expense, at the government press at Bulaq in 1274/1857–58, and was reprinted or lithographed thereafter at least five times during the nineteenth century. However, Jean Le Cerf’s comment in the 1930s that “les plus anciens journalistes du Caire se souvient d’un Kitab Abu Shaduf que nous n’avons pu retrouver, et qui date du temps du Khédive Ismail [sic]” indicates that the work was hard to find by the first half of the twentieth century. It was published once again, in a bowdlerized and generally unreliable edition, in 1963.31
Western scholars were the first to draw attention to the literary and linguistic importance of the work. The first study, by Mehren, appeared in 1872, twelve years after its first printing.32 Spitta incorporated material derived from it into his grammar of Egyptian Arabic of 1880,33 in 1887 Vollers made extensive use of it in a major article on Egyptian Arabic,34 and in 1906 Kern included mention of it in his review of new [sic] humorous writers.35 None of the above attempted a comprehensive study of the text, and some, if not all, appear to have been under the misapprehension that it dated from the nineteenth century.
Egyptian scholarly interest in Brains Confounded begins with Jurji Zaydān’s brief notice in 1931.36 Thereafter, a considerable body of work has been devoted to it by Egyptian writers, much of their attention being devoted to the issue of al-Shirbīnī’s attitudes towards his subject and his motives for writing the book. Most have taken the literalist approach (i.e., assumed that the “Ode of Abū Shādūf” is the product of a genuine rural poet), an approach that is rejected here.37
The single most important contribution to the understanding of Brains Confounded to date is Gabriel Baer’s article “Shirbīnī’s Hazz al-quḥūf and Its Significance” in Fellah and Townsman in the Middle East: Studies in Social History (London 1982).38 Baer was the first to direct attention to the value of the text for an understanding of the social history of Egypt rather than concentrating on its linguistic and literary aspects. Baer’s many valuable insights, which focus on the “relations between the fellah and the city and between urban and rural ʿulamāʾ,”39 remain, for the most part, unchallenged. However, his conclusion that al-Shirbīnī’s “attacks against the fellahs are to be understood as a defense against the contempt and derision on the part of the ʿulamāʾ from urban families, from which he and his like suffered” and for which he posits as background “the penetration of a rural element into the urban class of ʿulamāʾ”40 is questionable. Baer himself mentions that “throughout the centuries ʿulamāʾ of village origin lived, taught and wrote books in the cities,” and that “as to the eleventh/seventeenth century . . . one quarter of Cairo’s ʿulamāʾ whose biographies have been recorded by al-Muḥibbī were of rural origin.”41 Against this, the few examples that Baer provides of ʿulamāʾ being mocked for their rural origins42 all relate either to Syria or to Egypt in the sixteenth century and seem insufficient to justify such a passionate, complex, and extended diatribe as al-Shirbīnī’s.
Al-Shirbīnī’s Countryside
Because Brains Confounded is, in part, a satire, its depiction of the countryside must be treated with caution; as Omri points out, the book is “not an encyclopaedia of information . . . pertaining to peasants.”43 Nevertheless, the object of a satire must be recognizable if it is to be appreciated by its readers, and we may therefore assume that the basic information about the countryside that it provides is accurate.
A Hierarchy of Settlements
The Egypt of Brains Confounded extends from Cairo to Dimyāṭ along the eastern branch of the Nile, on which the villages mentioned in the book (Hurbayṭ, Dundayṭ, Shanashah, Samannūd, etc.) are or were situated. The western Delta, Upper Egypt, and other parts of the country are mentioned only in passing. The settlements along this axis are of three types, which form a hierarchy.
In the heading to the first section of the work devoted specifically to the peasant, al-Shirbīnī limits his attention to “the commoners of certain of the people of the countryside” (§2.1). References in the material that follows make it clear that this subset of rural society is that living in “the hamlets and the small villages” (vol. 2, §11.21.7), and these, as we shall see below, were generally situated at a distance from the river or, as al-Shirbīnī puts it, “in the margins of the lands” (§7.1); as such, they probably received less water, like “tail-enders” in irrigation systems the world over.44 Al-Shirbīnī also uses the doublet “the hamlets and the villages of the swamp lands” (al-kufūr wa-bilād al-malaq) (vol. 2, §11.10.8), the latter being low-lying areas that remained, post-flood, too swampy and salty for cultivation. In other words, the hamlets whose inhabitants are the butt of the satire were the poorest.
The hamlets lack Friday mosques45 and have a mill that the villager must operate with his own oxen, in contrast to the villages on the river, which have mills operated by horsepower (vol. 2, §11.21.7). These hamlets are placed by al-Shirbīnī at the
