Written in mid-seventeenth-century Egypt, Risible Rhymes is in part a short, comic disquisition on "rural" verse, mocking the pretensions and absurdities of uneducated poets from Egypt's countryside.
The 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, Y¿suf al-Shirb¿n¿'s Brains Confounded by the Ode of Ab¿ Sh¿d¿f Expounded, 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. Risible Rhymes 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-Mutanabb¿.
Taken as a whole, Risible Rhymes 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-Sanh¿r¿'s day and shedding light on the literature of this understudied era.
A bilingual Arabic-English edition.

Muhammad ibn Mahfuz al-Sanhuri (Author)
Mu¿ammad ibn Mäf¿¿ al-Sanh¿r¿ is an eleventh/seventeenth-century author who likely hailed from Egypt's Fayyum region, although nothing else is known about him.
Humphrey Davies (Edited and Translated by)
Humphrey Davies is an award-winning translator of some twenty-five works of modern Arabic literature, among them Alaa Al-Aswany's The Yacoubian Building, five novels by Elias Khoury, including Gate of the Sun, and A¿mad F¿ris al-Shidy¿q's Leg over Leg. He has also made a critical edition, translation, and lexicon of the Ottoman-period Brains Confounded by the Ode of Ab¿ Sh¿d¿f Expounded by Y¿suf al-Shirb¿n¿, as well as editions and translations of al-T¿nis¿'s In Darfur and al-Sanh¿r¿'s Risible Rhymes from the same era. In addition, he has compiled with Madiha Doss an anthology in Arabic entitled Al-¿¿mmiyyah al-mi¿riyyah al-makt¿bah: mukht¿r¿t min 1400 il¿ 2009 (Egyptian Colloquial Writing: selections from 1400 to 2009) and co-authored, with Lesley Lababidi, A Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo. He read Arabic at the University of Cambridge, received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and previous to undertaking his first translation in 2003, worked for social development and research organizations in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Sudan. He is affiliated with the American University in Cairo.