Humphrey Davies

Muhammad ibn Mahfuz al-Sanhuri

Written in mid-17th century Egypt, Risible Rhymes is a short, comic disquisition on “rural” verse, mocking the pretensions and absurdities of uneducated poets from Egypt’s countryside. Like al-Shirbini’s Brains Confounded, written some forty years later, it combines a biting satire on Egyptian rural society with a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of the day. The two texts also share six overlapping short poems, which suggests that they emanate from a common corpus of pseudo-rural verse that circulated in Ottoman Egypt. Nothing is known about the author, al-Sanhuri, who likely hailed from Egypt’s Fayyum region, although he describes his text as having been written at the behest of an unnamed friend. Alongside the later Brains Confounded, al-Sanhuri’s Risible Rhymes provides further evidence of a hitherto unrecognized genre of Arabic literature during this period, namely, mock-scholarly commentary on verse of supposedly rural provenance. Preoccupation with the countryside as a cultural, social, economic, and religious locus in its own right is unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature. Using clever literary analysis and wordplay, this mordant commentary offers readers a rare window on rural life in Ottoman-era Egypt.

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