Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded: Volume One (Library of Arabic Literature, 14)
Books / Hardcover
Books › Literary Collections › Middle Eastern
ISBN: 1479882348 / Publisher: NYU Press, December 2016
Active from about 1665 to about 1687, Shirbini was either unknown to or deliberately ignored by the biographers of his generation, says Davies, and no trace of him has been found in Egyptian archives, so any knowledge about him must be gleaned from his three surviving titles, of which this is the first and best known. The satire is from an underdocumented and understudied period of Egypt's history, thus deriving part of its importance from its status as a rare witness to an obscure period. He lampoons country people, their religion, and especially their poetry. Davis presents the Arabic and English translation on facing pages. Annotation ©2016 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
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Unique in pre-twentieth-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. A bilingual Arabic-English edition.
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