Ridiculing the Learned: Jokes about the Scholarly Class in Mediaeval Arabic Literature

Abstract

Sarcastic stories and comments against the representatives of various intellectual professions is a highly conspicuous phenomenon in the high Abbasid and Buwayhid periods. While the experts of Classical Arabic grammar appear to have been special targets of such jesting in the literature of those times, we also find lots of texts in which other "serious" disciplines and their specialists (like the study of hadīth and Islamic jurisprudence, etc.) are singled out for ridicule. Examining the sources of irony in these anecdotes, jokes and poems, the article seeks to identify the common element of the texts in question in the fact that the jesting is almost always directed against the pedantry and solemnity of the scholars, whereas gaiety, common sense and frivolity are portrayed as attractive alternatives. All this might be interpreted in the context of the huge social changes taking place under the Abbasids: it is reasonable to suppose that simply the new, highly civilized, urbanized and frivolous literary culture is reflected in these texts, which, no longer content to mimic earlier, more solemn models of Speech, lifestyle and culture, sought to manifest itself much more freely in literature as well as other spheres of cultural activity. These transformations, however, seem to have been limited to the educated élite, and one probably should not interpret our texts as the voice of the common people in literature.