Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded: Volume One

Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded: Volume One

Al-Shirbīnī, Yūsuf
Davies, Humphrey
Davies, Humphrey

Hardcover

Series: Library of Arabic Literature, Book 14

Literary CriticismFiction AnthologiesGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 1479882348
ISBN13: 9781479882342
Publisher: New York Univ Pr
Published: Jul 12 2016
Pages: 465
Weight: 1.92
Height: 1.25 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Unique 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.

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