As the wick of the lamp, as the silkworm they are": stupid schoolteachers as a literary topic in classical Arabic sources

The alleged stupidity of schoolteachers was a common topos in adab literature of the Abbasid period as well as in later sources. Indeed, ‘the stupid schoolteacher’ was a stereotype much like ‘the dull person’, ‘the smart sponger’ and ‘the ridiculous bedouin’. Frequent references to such images indicate that the intended audience revelled in this kind of literary device. This article examines diverse ways of reading and interpreting the adab sources which deal as much in fantasy as reality. Indeed, while the standard stereotypes of schoolteachers are varied, amusing and predominantly negative, they are not always as they at first appear