Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded, with Risible Rhymes. Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī

construction. If they were to be found in a village, it would be in the house of the bailiff or the tax farmer, for example, to which the poet would never have access and in which he would never sleep. In fact, their houses are mostly made out of slabs of dung mixed with urine and of daub, to which dung cakes are sometimes added. As a result, they are unacquainted with bedbugs and do not see them and tend not to frequent the same places. Ants, though found in the villages of the countryside, nevertheless favor only those places in which there are fatty things such as clarified butter and oil, and they like sweet things, such as honey and sugar; they come to these and feed off them simply by smelling them, as mentioned by the author of The Life of Animals,¹⁴⁶ resembling in this the cumin plant, which can live simply on the prospect of being watered. As the poet¹⁴⁷ says:

      Don’t treat me like the cumin in its plot,

      Whom promises content though it be watered not!

      Our poet never saw any trace of ants in his house because it contained so few fats and sweets, or, rather, because there were none of these whatsoever. As a result, ants would have no way of getting to him, whether via his clothes or his home, and this would be the reason for their failure to affect him. As for gnats, though these are found in the villages of the countryside, they come just on certain days and then go away again, unlike lice and nits, whose harm is constant and unremitting, in clothes and elsewhere, as mentioned above; and the harm done by something that hurts a little and is absent a lot is insignificant, and this may be the reason for his omitting to complain about the lot of them. Thus the answer’s clear.

      11.2.22

      Useful Note: If colocynth is steeped in water in which yarn has been thoroughly soaked and the place is sprinkled with that water while it is hot, it will kill the bedbugs and not one will be left, and if ants appear in a place where there are bedbugs, they eat them. As the poet says:

      My body couldn’t take another bug,

      Their bite was giving me such pain.

      I brought the ants. They helped me out—

      They spared not one and let not one remain.¹⁴⁸

      Ants are repelled by the smell of tar, gnats by the smoke made by burning bran.

      11.2.23

      A Silly Topic for Debate: What is the wisdom in the fact that, if a louse bites a man or a flea or any other harmful creature stings him, the pain spreads through the body, outside and in, until it comes to embrace the liver, the lungs, the heart, and so on, even though the louse, the flea, and the rest do not have access to the inside of the body, unless one of them should enter through one of the orifices; and if, on some rare occasion, it should enter, it usually dies immediately, even before it reaches the interior of the body, as indeed a flea has often entered my own ear and stayed a while moving about and doing damage and then quickly come out or died? What is the explanation for this? The fatuous reply to this silly enquiry is: it may be said that the body experiences pain to the same degree internally and externally because the spirit circulates within it the way sap circulates in a green branch. Thus, if any damage is done to the body’s surface, the spirit feels pain and the pain spreads to the whole body, outside and in. Let me draw you a facetious example, to wit, if a man is imprisoned in a small closet, for example, that is too small to hold anyone else and has no outlet and the man is locked up there for a long time, his body weakens, changes, and sickens and he feels pain both externally and internally, especially if he is pressed by the urge to urinate and does so until he fills the place, or if he farts there too and the resulting odors rise upwards and then, finding no escape, come back down on his beard and mustache, causing him grievous harm, especially if he is the owner of a long, broad beard (as long as its breadth has not rendered its length odious, in which case the damage will be less, or it has not become less commode-ious, in which instance it is the same for both cases).¹⁴⁹ Thus the situation’s now revealed, the silliness no more concealed.

      11.2.24

      Next the poet embarks on the description of another disaster that afflicted him—one yet more damaging, taken as a whole, than lice and nits, for it comes to him from the direction of his relatives. He says:

      TEXT

      11.3

       wa-lā ḍarranī ʾillā-bnu ʿammī Muḥaylibah

       yawmin tajī l-wajbah ʿalayya yaḥīf

And none has harmed me as much as the son of my paternal uncle, Muḥayliba—

      the day the wajbah comes, he heaps upon me more than my lot.

      COMMENTARY

      11.3.1

      wa-lā ḍarranī (“and none has harmed me”): that is, harmed me over and above what has already been mentioned.

      11.3.2

      ʾillā-bnu ʿammī (“as much as the son of my paternal uncle”): that is, my father’s brother, ʿamm (“paternal uncle”), being derived from ʿumūm (“generality”) because his competence encompasses both his own children and those of his brother, for he is like a father to them, if their actual father is not present. This is why the Arabs call the paternal uncle “father.” One of the commentators on the words of the Almighty «When Ibrahim said unto his father Āzar,»¹⁵⁰ says, “What is meant is ‘his paternal uncle.’” Or the word is derived from ʿimāmah (“turban”) because of the latter’s being high above the head, like a crown—as it says in the Tradition, “Turbans are the crowns of the Arabs”—for the paternal uncle has an exalted position with regard to his brother’s children because of his responsibility for and guardianship of them.

      11.3.3

      Muḥaylibah: diminutive of maḥlabah, which is a vessel made of red earthenware with a concave belly and a narrow neck; it has one handle but is sometimes made with two, if it is large.¹⁵¹ It is so called because milk is milked (ḥalb) into it, according to the rule of “naming the container after the thing contained.”

      11.3.4

      A Brief Overview: Vessels prepared for milking are of different sorts. There is the maḥlabah, and there is the miḥlāb, which is itself of three sorts—small, large, and medium; the miḥlāb is taller than the maḥlabah and has a wider mouth and more slender belly; its bottom is like that of the jar in which the water is raised on a waterwheel (qādūs),¹⁵² being very small. There is also the rubʿ, which is a small vessel that holds, as a unit of measurement, one quarter of a maḥlabah. And there is the qarrūfih (with a after the q, double r, i after the f, and no vowel on the h at the end).¹⁵³ This resembles the miḥlāb in having a small base, but has a narrow neck and a very wide belly, like the maḥlabah; it has either one or two handles. The largest of the milk vessels is the qisṭ, which is a large jar. There is also another vessel, called the kūz, with which milk is sold in the cities, as we have observed; it is crudely made and holds little. Muḥaylibah is of the measure of mudawlibah (“causing to go round and round”), miḥlāb of the measure of dūlāb (“waterwheel”), and qisṭ of the measure of qibṭ (“Copts”). It is called a qisṭ because it is divided up (muqassaṭ) by weight or volume. The word rubʿ is of the pattern of surʿ (“reins”), and kūz is of the pattern of būz (“muzzle”) because its wide mouth resembles the muzzle of a cow or a calf; kūz is derived from kazz which means “to bite” (ʿaḍḍa);¹⁵⁴ one says the earth “bit” (kazzat) on the plow, when it seizes (ʿaḍḍat) it with the share, and the child “bit” (kazza) on his finger, when it takes it between its teeth (ʿaḍḍahu); so I find in The Blue Ocean and Piebald Canon. If milk or water is put in the kūz, it gurgles and moans, complaining of the pain of the fire and all that it suffered when being turned into pottery.

      The mug makes a gurgle