A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to l

Witty, bawdy, and vicious, Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī’s Brains Confounded pits the “coarse” rural masses against the “refined” urban population. In Volume O

Written in mid-seventeenth-century Egypt, Risible Rhymes is in part a short, comic disquisition on “rural” verse, mocking the pretensions and absurdities of