Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded, with Risible Rhymes : : Volume Two / / Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī, Muḥammad ibn Maḥfūẓ al-Sanhūrī.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter New York University Press Complete eBook-Package 2019
• VerfasserIn: al-Shirbīnī, Yūsuf,; al-Sanhūrī, Muḥammad ibn Maḥfūẓ,
• TeilnehmendeR: Davies, Humphrey.
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2019]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: Library of Arabic Literature ; 7
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Witty, bawdy, and vicious, Yusuf al-Shirbini’s Brains Confounded pits the “coarse” rural masses against the “refined” urban population. In Volume One, al-Shirbini describes the three rural “types”—peasant cultivator, village man-of-religion, and rural dervish—offering anecdotes testifying to the ignorance, dirtiness, and criminality of each. In Volume Two, he presents a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of his day, with a 47-line poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abu Shaduf, who charts the rise and fall of his fortunes. Wielding the scholarly tools of elite literature, al-Shirbini responds to the poem with derision and ridicule, dotting his satire with digressions into love, food, and flatulence. Volume Two of Brains Confounded is followed by Risible Rhymes, a concise text that includes a comic disquisition on “rural” verse, mocking the pretensions of uneducated poets from Egypt’s countryside. Risible Rhymes also examines various kinds of puzzle poems, which were another popular genre of the day, and presents a debate between scholars over a line of verse by the tenth-century poet al-Mutanabbi. Together, Brains Confounded and Risible Rhymes offer intriguing insight into the intellectual concerns of Ottoman Egypt, showcasing the intense preoccupation with wordplay, grammar, and stylistics and shedding light on the literature of the era.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Brains confounded by the ode of abū shādūf expounded. Part two -- An account of the lineage of the poet and its components, and of the place that took him to its bosom and gave him shelter from his earliest moments, and of the origins of his fortune and how it was brought, and of the nature of his beard, whether it was long or short, and of how, at the end, by fate he was o’erthrown, as a result of which he composed this ode for which he became famous and well known -- The ode of abū shādūf with commentary -- Some miscellaneous anecdotes with which we conclude the book625 -- Let us conclude this book with verses from the sea of inanities -- Notes -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Further reading -- Risible rhymes or the book to bring a smile to the lips of devotees of proper taste and style through the decoding of a sampling of the verse of the rural rank and file -- Introduction -- Note on the text -- Notes to the introduction -- Risible rhymes -- Preamble -- The author declares his intention to decode a sampling of rural verse and to follow this with a sampling of hints, wrangles, and riddles -- A sampling of the verse of the rural rank and file -- A sampling of hints and riddles -- A wrangle over a line by al-mutanabbī -- The author mentions the date of composition of the work and apologizes for its brevity -- Notes -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the nyu abu dhabi institute -- About the translator -- The library of arabic literature