The reader can infer from the book “Muhammad Shamil, Pioneer of Popular Art in Lebanon” (Dar Nelson) by director Muhammad Karim, an aspect of the path of Lebanese Beiruti folk comedy art. Shamil, the actor, artist, and playwright, and most often the director, was distinguished by his “comic sense,” and “With quick wit,” he began his artistic career as an amateur and ended it as a professional. “Between hobby and professionalism, he worked as a teacher in several schools and in different regions of Lebanon,” before moving to Radio Lebanon as head of the directing department.
Shamil wrote and acted in various forms of dramatic art: historical, literary, and social, and he excelled in all of them. Even when he dealt with popular social issues, he knew how to maintain his literary and artistic level, and as Muhammad Karim says, “He never regretted a day and never resorted to a joke in all of his works that he wrote.” Cheap, contrived situation, or vulgar dialogue for the sake of laughter. Rather, he maintained the level that befits his art and his status until the end of his giving, and thus he was able to raise the popular dramatic art to the level that satisfies the private and the public alike.” He was aware that “in comedy there is a thin and precise red line, which constitutes the dividing line between what is art and creativity, and what is low and cheap humor, between comedy and clowning.” He embodied the characters of Al-Nadman and the funny characters: Juha, Ashab, and Abu Al-Ghosn, in addition to the rest of the popular Beirut characters, at the forefront of which are Al-Mukhtar and Al-Hakawati. He played some of these characters in classical Arabic, in which he was well-versed and mastered its details, and others played roles in the Beirut colloquial language, which he had mastered. What was impressive in this field was his transition in comedy and tragedy from one role to another, and from one character to another, convincingly, with complete mastery in each of them. He was a skilled jeweler in “transforming some heritage books devoid of any seed of drama, into works that come alive,” such as the Book of Songs by Abu Al-Faraj Al-Isfahani, the Book of Animals by Al-Jahiz, the book Al-Mustarif fi Kul Fan Al-Mustadharif by Imam Al-Abshihi, and others.
Although Shamil was rare, as an author, in the field of theater (about ten plays) for reasons related to the pace of the theater movement in Lebanon, the abundance of his dramatic production found its widest scope in media other than theater, such as radio and television.
Muhammad Shamil, the writer, poet, playwright, and educator, was not paved with roses. On the contrary, it was lined with thorns on all sides. In recalling the memories of his miserable childhood in Damascus, where the family moved to escape famine during the days of Barlak’s journey, he says: “Happy children are born with spoons of honey in their mouths.” He is gone. As for the wretched people, and I am one of them, they are born with wooden spoons in their mouths. My mother gave birth to me in Beirut in 1909 in a place called “Jacob’s Gate” and then she died when I was six months old, so the equation was that a woman was at rest and a wretched child. Long until the father got married, his grandfather Youssef Hamad sponsored him, and the child, Muhammad Shamil, was raised by his grandparents. And in his grandmother’s lap, the first threads of the fabric of his popular art began to gather, which would be born after a while, as he heard the stories of the jinn and the ghouls, the biographies of Al-Zahir Baibars, Al-Zeer Salem, and Antara bin Shaddad, and the stories of One Thousand and One Nights: the Shater Hassan, and the adventures of Sinbad, and the legend of the roc bird, and the story of the Sultan’s daughter, and the story of Qamar Al-Zaman, Al-Sitt Badur and others. The child also heard from his grandmother about the heroics of the Beirut Qabayat, at the forefront of which were his two uncles: Ruslan and Muhammad, how “they and their rivals were challenging the Ottoman army and plotting against it, and how they were helping the desperate, helping the stranger, and supporting the oppressed.”
Muhammad Karim says, “The child became attached to his grandmother, who compensated him for the mother’s tenderness by humiliating him. The grandmother became attached to her grandson, who was comforted by the loss of her young daughter, Fatima, who died in the prime of her youth, leaving behind her only child, Muhammad Shamil. The grandson also alleviated the pain of the grandmother, who had bereaved her son, who The Ottoman officer killed him, and the period between his killing and the execution by hanging of his cousin, the martyr Omar Hamad, at the hands of Jamal Pasha was more than six months.” During World War I, the grandmother walked on foot to Damascus one day when she heard that a dog had bitten her grandson while he was staying at his aunt’s house in the “Sarouja” neighborhood of Damascus. The grandmother stayed with her grandson for nearly a year until her illness became severe and she died. That day, the child felt a great emptiness, after he lost her tenderness, the only tenderness he had left in the world. Commenting on this event, Shamil says: “After my grandmother’s death, I began to live in the autumn of days, when I was nine years old. A childhood that loses love is like a year that passes without spring.”…
The nine-year-old’s childhood days were not ordinary, if not happy, like the lives of other children who grow up in the embrace of a mother and the protection of a father. Recalling his miserable childhood memories, he says: “One of the tragedies that I experienced during my childhood in Damascus was that my father did not send me to the bookstore except once. I stayed there for nearly a month, then he soon sent me to a welder. I worked for him for days and then left when I was almost My right index finger was cut off under the force of his knife. Then I worked for a man at the entrance to the neighborhood who sold boiled beets. I used to wash his beets in a pool of water while I was barefoot, with only thin clothes covering my body, and the cold of winter in Damascus was definite. Asthma killed me, even if it had not cured it. By the grace of God, I would have been saved from suffocation (that is, anything that is extremely cold) or suffocation.”
When World War I ended and the family returned to Beirut and lived in Al-Basta, Muhammad Shamil’s eyes were opened to the popular atmosphere that was manifesting its most beautiful manifestations during holidays, weddings and occasions. As for the cafés and the conversations that took place in them about the Qabayat, their cauldrons, and their badges, and the stories and biographies that the storyteller narrated in them, Shamil would excel in photographing them later. All of these popular atmospheres and manifestations were stored in his memory, just as they captured the minutest details of the daily events that he observed during his work in the professions. And various letters in his childhood, which are the details necessary to produce popular art that became unique in its depiction later, in the stage of intellectual and cultural maturity.
At the age of fourteen, Muhammad Shamil was introduced to school for the first time in his life, but it was an external acquaintance. His aunt – his stepmother – wanted to send her young son (Shafiq Hassan) to school, but she was afraid that he would go there alone, so the father delegated his son Shamil to accompany and take care of his half-brother. Days passed and Muhammad Shamil was waiting outside, listening to what the teacher was saying behind the window of the classroom of the “Syrian School,” which was run at the time by its owner, “Sheikh Noman Hanbal,” in the Khandaq Al-Ghamiq district. Had it not been for this, Muhammad Shamil says: “I would not have learned the alphabet.” He had spent some time in this school when his father transferred him to Al-Maqasid School in Al-Harj. Among his companions there was Sheikh Abdullah Al-Alaili, and when Al-Alaili decided to move with his brother to Al-Azhar in Cairo, Shamil wanted to accompany him to become a sheikh like him, and he almost sailed with him, after preparing his equipment for the matter, had he not been surprised at the last moment by the Egyptian consulate’s refusal to grant him an entry visa. The consul said to him: You are not going to seek knowledge, but rather your goal is to work in acting. Shamil was shocked by the matter, but his astonishment quickly subsided when he learned that his father and stepmother were the ones who reported him to the consul. Thus, his hopes were dashed and his dreams were in vain.
Muhammad Shamil’s artistic talent can be sensed at an early stage in his life, when he began imitating his teachers at Al-Harj School affiliated with the Al-Maqasid Islamic Charitable Society in Beirut. For this, he received his share of reprimands, bashing, and beatings, and then the threat of expulsion from school if he did not quit. It was imitation and his success in it, but the artistic vision was not clear to him at that time, so most of what he sought was to appear in front of an audience of people to make them laugh or to arouse their wrath or anger. Then he was guided to the beginning of the road: to the theater.
