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

this he smiled, revealing teeth like a pearly line, his willowy body close to mine, and said, “Nay, by Him who split the grain²⁶⁸ and planted in your heart love’s tree, I’ll never break this oath of mine—no third shall come between us till the end of time!” And so we remained, he with me, till he joined the Lord of Majesty.²⁶⁹

      11.7.35

      An amusing story relates how Sultan Qānṣawh al-Ghawrī was walking in disguise one day with his vizier in the streets of Cairo when he heard one singer say to another, “You dare to boast of your superiority to me, So-and-so, when I know how to produce the musical modes from my ass?” The sultan said to his vizier, “Bring the man to me!” So the vizier brought him before him and the sultan related to him what he had heard him say and said to him, “Seeing is believing! Make good your claim!” “Please let me off, Your Majesty,” the man replied, “for in the heat of an argument a man may say anything!” However, the sultan answered, “Prove your claim or I’ll kill you!” “Will you grant me immunity from punishment?” said the man. “That is yours,” said the sultan. “Let it be in an empty place,” said the man. “So be it,” said the sultan. So the sultan decamped to the reception hall, had the man brought, spoke kindly to him, and told him, “Proceed at your leisure!” (Sultan al-Ghawrī was well-versed in this art and had written several treatises on it).²⁷⁰ “What mode would you like?” said the man. “Ḥijāz,²⁷¹ for example,” said the sultan. So the man worked his buttocks and produced it, and then continued to make one mode after another until he had run through them all, along with their transitions,²⁷² omitting none and leaving no room for criticism. The sultan was delighted and said, “Such as you must surely be the master of Egypt in this art!” Then he awarded him a thousand dinars and appointed him chief of all the singers of Egypt, and it is said that he is the ancestor of the Awlād al-ʿAtr Troupe that is famous today.

      11.7.36

      Once I met a man called Māḍī the Farter, God have mercy on his soul. He was extremely meticulous in his religion and pious, as well as refined and musical, and he knew the Qurʾan very well by heart. His farts were made by artifice, in that he did them with his armpit, but he could still make any mode whatsoever that way and work variations and so on on them. He was a source of amazement to all who saw him and hearing him would make a stone laugh. He was famous among the emirs and received by the mighty, may God excuse him his sins.

      11.7.37

      A bit of facetious useful knowledge that I heard from a profligate: Satan, God curse him, farts five farts every day and distributes them among five individuals. The first of these is the man who puts his wife on a mount and takes her around to visit the tombs of the saints and the cemeteries. The second is the man who sees two people delighting in one another’s company and inserts himself between them; such people are known as a “parasites of friendship.” The third is the man who sees two people fighting and inserts himself between them so that most of the blows fall on him, according to the proverb “The peacemaker gains nothing but torn clothes.” The fourth is the man who walks in the highway looking this way and that for no reason. And the fifth is the man who is a prisoner of his wife. Many more could be added to the list.

      11.7.38

      If it be said that a fart is a sound, and sound has been defined as “air compressed between what is pulled and what it is pulled out of,” or “between what strikes and what is struck”—while, in this case, there is no striker and nothing struck, the fart merely emerging from the anus at the parting and articulation of the buttocks—so what is the explanation, we would reply that it may be said that this phenomenon, namely, the fart, can be integrated only under a second definition, which is that sound is air that forms waves on the collision of two bodies. Thus the answer now is clear.

      11.7.39

      And if it be said that there is a problem with the poet’s words, “and my farts are like a loud drum,” to wit that, if his farts resembled the sound of heavy drumming, everyone who heard them would come to him and they would discover him, his presence would become known, and the Christian and others would be informed about it, so there would be no point in his hiding among the women or in wrapping himself in the ʿabāʾah, so what is the wisdom in this, we would reply that the poet mentions that he would fart in this manner only after wrapping himself in the ʿabāʾah. Thus, even if his farts were forceful and loud, nothing would be heard once he had wrapped himself in the ʿabāʾah. Thus the meaning is that, absent any envelopment and wrapping, his farting would be heard like the sound of drums. As it stands, however, the situation would be similar, for example, to that of a man imprisoned in a deep pit who has drums with him on which he beats: scarcely any of the sound would be heard, even if he were beating on them hard, for the ability to hear the sound would be confined to the man himself, or to those standing at the opening of the pit or close to it—the ʿabāʾah playing the role of the pit, albeit narrower, because he is enveloped and wrapped up in it—and even if the farting were strong on the inside, the noise would emerge only feebly to the outside. Or it may be that the whole thing should be treated under the rubric of “impossible rhetorical exaggeration,” similar to the example given by al-Ṣafī al-Ḥillī in his Embellished Ode in the Prophet’s Praise (Al-Badīʿiyyah), when he says:²⁷³

      A champion so strong that were the night to seek his aid

      Against the morn, mankind would live in darkness!

      11.7.40

      Or it may be said that, even if this farting were to be heard as described, no one would imagine that it was a man who was hiding; rather, it might be thought that it was a man or a woman relieving him or herself, in which case there would be no reason to think that there was anything suspicious. In any case, there is nothing problematic in the poet’s words, and the answer now is clear.

      And I would like to add that I am the only person to have set forth such an interpretation, made such a classification of farting, and defined it in such terms, so far as I am aware.

      11.7.41

      Next the poet draws attention to the fact that his life has been expended in puerility and passed in futility, because he is so poor and earns so little. He says:

      TEXT

      11.8

       wa-yā dawba ʿumrī fī l-kharāji wa-hammihī

       taqaḍḍā wa-lā lī fī l-haṣād saʿīf

Almost all my life on the tax and its woes

      Has been spent, and I have no helper when the harvest comes!

      COMMENTARY

      11.8.1

      wa-yā dawba (“almost all”): wa- (“and”) is the conjunction that coordinates the words with what goes before, yā is the vocative particle, and dawb is a term that has facetious etymologies²⁷⁴ and a variety of meanings. It may derive from the daʾb (“ongoing concern”) of a person, that is to say, his affairs, and the circumstances in which he is involved. Thus the meaning would be, “You are aware, my brethren, that my ongoing concern, throughout

      11.8.2

      “ʿumrī (‘my life’): has lain (in addition to the worries that afflicted me previously) in the computation of, worrying over, and great suffering concerning how much

      11.8.3

      “of al-kharāji (‘the tax’) and what springs from hammihī (‘its woes’), that is, the land tax (kharāj al-arḍ), namely, the tax that is entered against my name in payment for cultivation of the land and for what it produces every year, for these do not cover the tax I owe, because the latter is great, while farming produces little, and because I am so weak and poor and have few to help me in sowing and harvesting. Consequently, my life

      11.8.4

      “taqaḍḍā (‘has been spent’): in this state,” etc.

      11.8.5