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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 An unpublished manuscript entitled Mukhtaṣar al-Īḍāḥ fī ʿilm al-nikāḥ (The Synopsis of The Work of Clarification concerning the Science of Copulation), which, like Al-Īḍāḥ fī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 bottom of a tripartite hierarchy of settlements that moves upward from the hamlets, through the villages on the river, to the city. According to this hierarchy, the inhabitants of the hamlets are the most ignorant and isolated, those of the city are paragons of sophistication, and those of the villages by the river occupy a middle position.

      This hierarchy is made most explicit in the repeated and pointed descriptions of the different recipes according to which various foods are prepared in the three different settings, for, as al-Shirbīnī states at the beginning of his discussion of stewed fava beans, “things are ennobled . . . by virtue of place” (vol. 2, §11.11.2). In dietary terms, this hierarchy is keyed largely to the amount of fat used. Thus, of mallow (khubbayzah), he says: “The people of the countryside take the leaves, chop them . . . and eat them. . . . The people of the villages on the river cook it with goose and chicken and so on, and the people of the cities cook it with fatty meats . . . and they add fats, clarified cow’s butter, greens, spices, and similar things, and this is the only way it should be eaten . . . . The way the country people do it . . . is worthless, and the same goes for the people of the villages on the river, for these . . . add no clarified butter or fat . . . . The latter is, nevertheless, more refined than the recipe of the country people referred to above. The best place to eat it, however, is in the cities . . . .” (vol. 2, §11.19.3). Similar comments are made in the case of slow-cooked fava beans, fava beans mashed with Jew’s mallow (bīsār), lentils, and rice pudding. In the latter case, al-Shirbīnī adds that “people of Turkish descent make it with milk alone, without water, and add just a little rice . . . this kind is the best tasting and most appetizing” (vol. 2, §11.25.2), thus placing the latter in a kind of supra-urban category.

      The Three Estates of al-Shirbīnī’s Rural Society

      The terms most frequently used in Brains Confounded to designate its subjects collectively are ahl al-rīf and al-rayyāfah, both meaning “the people of the countryside.” The presence in Part One of Brains Confounded of three

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