000			02130nam a22001937a 4500
003			PMNP
005			20250606095054.0
008			250606b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9781479838905
040			_aPMNP _beng _cKutubkhanah Diraja
082			_a307.72096209032
245			_aBrains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded _bVolume Two / _cYūsuf al-Shirbīnī; Edited and Translated by Humphrey Davies
260			_aNew York _bNYU Press _c2016
300			_a546 _c6.00 x 9.00 in
520			_aUnique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature for taking the countryside as its central theme, Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī’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-Shirbīnī 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 Abū Shādūf, 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-Shirbīnī 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.
650		0	_9580 _aArabic literature
942			_2ddc _cBK _n0
999			_c3317 _d3317