Unique in pre-20th-century Arabic literature for taking the countryside as its central theme, Yusuf al-Shirbini'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-Shirbini 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...

Unique in pre-20th-century Arabic literature for taking the countryside as its central theme, Yusuf al-Shirbini'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-Shirbini 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...