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

end, for it is the harbinger of death. A poet says:

      When a man’s skin turns black and his hair turns white,

      And his robe’s too long in front,

      And he takes short steps as he walks along,

      Tell him then that he’s close to defunct.

      And another, putting it excellently, said:²¹⁹

      The smile of white hairs on the young man’s cheeks

      Forced tears from his eyelids to race.

      And who would not weep for himself

      When white hairs laugh in his face?

      11.5.5

      The lines contain “antithesis” in the wording,²²⁰ as you will have noticed. Women, however, dislike white hair. Hārūn al-Rashīd asked his wife, “What kind of men do you women find attractive?” She replied, “One whose cheek is like my cheek and whose member is like my forearm.” “And if his beard grows?” he asked. “He should keep his eyes to himself, and be ready with his wealth!” she said. “And if his hair turns white?” he said. “He must either put up with strife, or offer to divorce his wife!” she said—for this is something they condemn and the company of pretty women is denied to such men, especially if their money’s tight, in which case their outlook’s not bright. As the poet²²¹ said:

      Ask me how women are, for I’m

      Well versed in women’s ways, a physician.

      When a man’s hair turns white or his money runs out,

      Let him abandon all hope of their affection.

      11.5.6

      How much worse, then, for the man who has both—white hair and poverty! Such a one might as well not exist, as far as they are concerned. Al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil,²²² God have mercy on him, said:

      She wondered, when my wealth took off

      Right when my hair had lost its hue—

      “This thing I see,” she said, “what is’t?

      Is it dust from some mill that I have in view?”

      Said I, “Be not amazed! This is

      The powder that from time’s mill does accrue.”

      —that is, her mood darkened when she saw that white hair resembling mill dust had appeared upon his face and altered his beard, and she wondered at its sudden onset, a wonderment that necessarily plunged her into gloom and “rolled up the carpet of her conviviality.” Then he answered her by saying, “Be not amazed” at how fast it has appeared—for the wondrous events that the passing of time brings and the disasters that result from these, which may be likened in their turning to a mill, have caused the appearance of these flecks that you see; so do not blame me, and patiently endure this misfortune that has befallen you. A poet²²³ has compared the onset of white hair in the beard to the bird called the vulture because of the latter’s whiteness²²⁴ and compared the remaining part, in its blackness, to the “Ibn Dāyah” (“Son of a Midwife”), which is the black crow. He says:

      When I saw the vulture mourn Ibn Dāyah

      And roost in its two nests,²²⁵ my heart felt pain at his loss.

      11.5.7

      Others have likened its onset to the appearance of the light of morning and have said that the way it “catches fire” in the blackness is like fire catching in thick, dry firewood. Ibn Durayd, may the Almighty have mercy upon him, says at the start of his maqsūrah:²²⁶

      Ah Gazelle, so like the oryx

      ’Twixt al-ʿAqīq and al-Liwā grazing,²²⁷

      See you not how my head’s color has mimicked

      The dawn’s gleam ’neath the skirts of darkness trailing,

      And how the whiteness in the blackness has caught

      Just as fire in a saxaul log breaks out blazing?

      Methought it was some pitch-dark night

      In whose expanse the morn, unloosed, turns all to light!

      11.5.8

      Similes of this sort for white hair are legion. The word shayb (“white hair”) is derived from the shaybah (“artemisia”) that is sold at the druggist’s, because of its whiteness and the fineness of its roots and the way its hairs become entangled with one another, which is why they say, “They saw impurity in the artemisia” as a proverb.²²⁸ The paradigm is shāba, yashību, shayban (“to turn white (of hair)”). The fact that he mentions that the sides of his beard turned white first is an indication that he was a man of stature and nobility, for the first thing to turn white on a noble man is the sides of the beard, and on an ignoble man the hair between the lower lip and the chin. The poet says:

      White hairs on the noble start at the whiskers,

      On the vile above the chin.

      White hairs on the head by worry are fed

      And white hairs on the chest are a sin!

      11.5.9

      However, his restriction of mention of white hairs to those on the sides of his beard is arbitrary: they would begin at the edges and then progress ineluctably to the rest of his beard. In other words, he stated the root and the secondary phenomena follow as a matter of course. As for his adding the feminine marker -t to the verb, he follows in this the language of the country people, of whom the poet was one; and, in addition, had he said shāba ʿāriḍī or shābū ʿawāriḍī, the meter would have been thrown off. Thus he acted in accord with both his own speech habits and the meter.²²⁹

      11.5.10

      A Silly Topic for Debate: What makes him refer to the nazlah (“descent”) of the Inspectors instead of their nuzūl, when a slow-witted listener might imagine that the former refers to the nazlah that afflicts a person when he catches cold that is, “catarrh,”²³⁰ and then descends (yanzilu) in the head and gives rise to sneezing and sickness and so on, the treatment for which is to anoint the forehead with egg white mixed with mastic, which alleviates it? And what is the wisdom in his immediately following a reference to the sides of the beard with one to the heart, which is located far from the former and has no meaningful connection with them? Should he not rather have talked about his mustache and the hair on his lower lip, after the manner of the poet who said:

      Up the ass of an unleashed bitch

      Shove your mustache, plus the tuft below your lip!

      Then lick her shit, good Connoisseur,

      And spoon it, sip by sip!?

      We respond: the reply is that nazlah is of the measure of ʿijlah (“female calf”) and nuzūl is of the measure of ʿujūl (“calves”), and ʿujūl is a plural, so he used the lesser to stand for the greater; likewise the female²³¹ is more refined in form and feature than the male (albeit the male is more honorable)—not to mention that, to a peasant, the female calf or cow is more useful than the male calf or the ox. From this it may be deduced that the poet loved females rather than males, in contrast to the school of reprobates like us—for we follow the words of Abū Nuwās:²³²

      I wonder at one who has sex with girls

      When there’s a beardless boy in sight.

      Aren’t we all agreed from the start

      Your stallion’s the better mount in a fight?

      11.5.11

      As for his mentioning the heart in the same breath as the sides of the beard, this amounts to no more than a shift in wording while the meaning remains the same, from the perspective