Title Brains confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf expounded. Volume one / Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī ; translated by Humphrey Davies ; volume editors, James E. Montgomery, Geert Jan van Gelder

Published New York : New York University Press, [2016]

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Description 1 online resource (lviii, 430 pages) Series Library of Arabic Literature Library of Arabic literature. Contents Machine generated contents note: PART ONE -- The Author Describes the Ode of Abu Shaduf -- The Author Embarks on a Description of the Common Country Folk -- An Account of a Few of Their Names, Nicknames, and Kunyahs -- Their Children -- Their Women during Intercourse -- Their Weddings -- An Account of Their Escapades -- Anecdotes Showing that a Man Cannot Escape His Inborn Nature -- Anecdotes Showing the Stupidity of Country People -- Accounts of What Happened to Peasants Who Went to the City -- The Peasant Who Attended the Friday Prayer in a Village by the River -- The Tale of the Three Whores of Cairo -- Anecdotes Concerning Country People Who Went to the City and Were Overtaken by the Need to Relieve Themselves, Etc. -- The Tale of the Champions of Discourtesy of Cairo and Damascus -- The Tale of the Boors of Cairo and Damascus -- More Anecdotes Illustrating the Stupidity of Country People -- Anecdotes about Country People Who Voided Their Prayers -- An Account of Their Pastors and of the Compounded Ignorance, Imbecility, and Injuries to Religion and the Like of Which They Are Guilty -- The Tale of the Persian Scholar -- Sermons by Country Pastors -- Further Anecdotes Showing the Ignorance of Country Pastors -- Funayn's Letter and Another Missive -- An Account of Their Poets and of Their Idiocies and Inanities -- The First of Their Verses: "My shirt kept trailing behind the plow" -- The Second of Their Verses: "And I said to her, ̀Piss on me and spray!'" -- The Verse of Shaykh Barakat: "Barakat was passin' by" -- The Third of Their Verses: "By God, by God, the Moighty, the Omnipotent" -- The Fourth of Their Verses: "The soot of my paternal cousin's oven is as black as your kohl marks" -- The Fifth of Their Verses: "I asked after the beloved. They said, ̀He skedaddled from the shack!'" -- The Sixth of Their Verses: "The rattle staff of our mill makes a sound like your anklets" -- The Seventh of Their Verses: "I saw my beloved with a plaited whip driving oxen" -- 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, and Who Make Up Rhymes but Are Really Looney Tunes -- Verses by al-Amin -- Verses by Murjan al-Habashi -- Verses by a Turkish Judge -- Verses by Shaykh Muhammad al-Raziqi -- Elegy by a Certain Dim-Witted Poet to the Emir Ibn al-Khawaja Mustafa -- A Chronogram -- An Account of Their Ignorant Dervishes and of Their Ignorant and Misguided Practices -- The Practices of the Khawamis Sect -- Anecdotes Showing the Ignorance of Country Dervishes -- More Anecdotes Showing the Beliefs and Practices of Heretical Dervishes -- Urjuzah Summarizing Part One Summary Unique in pre-20th-century Arabic literature for taking the countryside as its central theme, Yusuf al-Shirbini's Brains Confounded combines a mordant satire on seventeenth-century Egyptian rural society with a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of his day. In Volume One, Al-Shirbini describes the three rural "types"--peasant cultivator, village man-of-religion and rural dervish--offering numerous anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness, illiteracy, lack of proper religious understanding, and criminality of each. He follows it in Volume Two with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abu Shaduf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes and bewails, above all, the lack of access to delicious foods to which his poverty has condemned him. Wielding the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbini responds to the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire of the ignorant rustic with numerous digressions into love, food, and flatulence.Witty, bawdy, and vicious, Brains Confounded belongs to an unrecognized genre from an understudied period in Egypt's Ottoman history, and is a work of outstanding importance for the study of pre-modern colloquial Egyptian Arabic, pitting the "coarse" rural masses against the "refined" and urbane in a contest for cultural and religious primacy, with a heavy emphasis on the writing of verse as a yardstick of social acceptability Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes In English with orginal Arabic text Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on December 21, 2020) Subject Villages -- Egypt -- Early works to 1800 Social problems in literature -- Early works to 1800 Satire, Arabic -- Egypt -- Early works to 1800 Arabic literature -- Egypt -- Early works to 1800 LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Middle Eastern. Arabic literature Rural conditions Satire, Arabic Social problems in literature Villages SUBJECT Egypt -- Rural conditions -- Early works to 1800 Subject Egypt Genre/Form Early works Form Electronic book Author Davies, Humphrey T. (Humphrey Taman), editor, translator Montgomery, James E. (James Edward), 1962- editor. Gelder, G. J. H. van, editor. Shirbīnī, Yūsuf ibn Muḥammad, active 1665-1687. Hazz al-quḥūf fī sharḥ qaṣīd Abī Shādūf. Shirbīnī, Yūsuf ibn Muḥammad, active 1665-1687. Hazz al-quḥūf fī sharḥ qaṣīd Abī Shādūf. English. ISBN 9781479822362 1479822361

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