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

until most, or all, of the penis has entered.²⁷⁵ Then the boy submits until the profligate has gotten what he wants, either for fear of anyone stirring or because scared of causing strife. Sometimes the boy will then reproach him gently, or chide him lightly, and the other will say, “God has decreed it so, and I am your slave,” for example, or “I’m dying for love of you” and so on, until things are sorted out to everyone’s satisfaction. A poet has said in a mawāliyā:

      I crept up at night on a boy most cute

      And rode like a hawk with his back in my clutch.

      Waking, he asked, “Who’s this who’s won his suit?”

      Said I, “A blind man, poking with his crutch!”

      11.8.6

      The meaning would be “at any time, the worry and fatigue associated with the land tax and the calculation of it may creep up on me and deny me any ease in my daily life or pleasure in my days and so on as long as I live, just as the profligate creeps up on the beardless boy, who feels nothing until the man is on his back and has had his way with him, as described above.” Or it may be from the spreading (dabīb) of the poison of the scorpion, in the sense that preoccupation with making this sort of calculation night and day engenders a depression that diffuses itself to the heart and spreads itself there, just as the scorpion’s poison spreads throughout the entire body. Or it may be derived from dubb (“bear”), with u after the d, an animal with a massive body, thick hair, and slow reactions, than which there is no more slow-witted beast, albeit its powers of comprehension are greater than others’—as the proverb says, “Better the slowness of the bear than the quickness of the monkey.” One of its remarkable traits is that, if it sees a hunting party coming, it rubs its hair against gum from trees so that the gum mixes with the hair, then rolls in the sand until the hair becomes as hard as rock. Thereafter, neither arrow nor anything else has any effect on it, and the hair protects it.

      There is a kind of ease and a way of testing people’s thinking to be found in reacting slowly to things. As the poet says:

      Affect slowness, weighing thus men’s minds,

      And these will reveal to you things you never knew!

      11.8.7

      In this case, the meaning would be “Excessive worry from calculating the money that I owe in tax and weighing out the tax in kind²⁷⁶ have brought me to a state that resembles that of the bear in the slowness of its reactions and its sluggishness in bestirring itself, because of the low earnings and small profit that are to be gotten from farming and my extreme poverty and the unceasing demands upon me from one moment to the next, for I am denied the good things of this world and my situation benefits me nothing.” As a certain poet²⁷⁷ has said:

      I’m left with neither work nor leisure—

      Our earnings are from a bargain vexed;

      And the outcome of it all and the upshot

      Is naught in this life and naught in the next!

      —for I can see no profit in farming, starting from the lack of seed and my inability to improve the land, for only the strong, affluent peasant can cultivate the land, especially in view of the abusive levies,²⁷⁸ tax augmentations, and customary dues that are entered nowadays against the peasants, and the “obligations.” For, though it is written that it is “nine-tenths of all blessing,” farming falls short of such a yield because of the pervasive injustices. In earlier times, the peasant did not have “customary dues” or “charges” or “obligations” or any of the other things that exist today imposed upon him. On the contrary, a person would farm the land, the tax calculated on it would be light, and he would know nothing of the wajbah, the fine on the landless, and the rest. Blessing was unconfined, all the land was under cultivation, and the people enjoyed the greatest good fortune, affluence, and profit.

      11.8.8