{"product_id":"brains-confounded-vol-2-hardcover","title":"Brains Confounded Vol 2 (Hardcover)","description":"\u003cp\u003eUnique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature for taking the countryside as its central theme, Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī’s \u003ci\u003eBrains Confounded \u003c\/i\u003ecombines 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWitty, bawdy, and vicious, \u003ci\u003eBrains Confounded\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA bilingual Arabic-English edition.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Al-Shirbini, Yusuf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":52337252761874,"sku":"9781479838905","price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0270\/9238\/5846\/files\/24354993482714.jpg?v=1780437945","url":"https:\/\/hbswarehousesale.com\/products\/brains-confounded-vol-2-hardcover","provider":"Harvard Book Store Warehouse Sale","version":"1.0","type":"link"}