{"product_id":"risible-rhymes","title":"Risible Rhymes","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eMuhammad ibn Mahfuz al-Sanhuri\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eHumphrey Davies (translation)\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHardback, 128 pages\u003cbr\u003eBilingual Arabic-English edition\u003cbr\u003e9781479877928\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWritten in mid-seventeenth-century Egypt, \u003cem\u003eRisible Rhymes\u003c\/em\u003e is in part a short, comic disquisition on “rural” verse, mocking the pretensions and absurdities of uneducated poets from Egypt’s countryside.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe interest in the countryside as a cultural, social, economic, and religious locus in its own right that is hinted at in this work may be unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature. As such, the work provides a companion piece to its slightly younger contemporary, Yūsuf al-Shirbīnī’s \u003cem\u003eBrains Confounded by the Ode of Abū Shādūf Expounded\u003c\/em\u003e, which also takes examples of mock-rural poems and subjects them to grammatical analysis. The overlap between the two texts may indicate that they both emanate from a common corpus of pseudo-rural verse that circulated in Ottoman Egypt. \u003cem\u003eRisible Rhymes\u003c\/em\u003e also examines various kinds of puzzle poems—another popular genre of the day—and presents a debate between scholars over a line of verse by the fourth\/tenth-century poet al-Mutanabbī. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTaken as a whole, \u003cem\u003eRisible Rhymes\u003c\/em\u003e offers intriguing insight into the critical concerns of mid-Ottoman Egypt, showcasing the intense preoccupation with wordplay, grammar, and stylistics that dominated discussions of poetry in al-Sanhūrī's day and shedding light on the literature of this understudied era.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Library of Arabic Literature","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39846011076643,"sku":"9781479877928","price":42.0,"currency_code":"SGD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2514\/8624\/products\/DSC_1399.jpg?v=1666789446","url":"https:\/\/wardahbooks.mom\/products\/risible-rhymes","provider":"Wardah Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}