Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
An Azhari poet and jurist, he lived and died in Palestine before Balfour and Sykes-Picot, but he founded a scientific and cultural family from which his son, the martyr poet Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud, graduated. Even if he was not one of the great poets, he emerged from his home as a great poet, as did Sheikh Saeed Al-Karmi, whom we talked about previously. Our poet for this episode is Sheikh Abdel Halim Mahmoud Al-Anabtawi (1820-1919).
There are few sources that talk about him, and rare are the traces he left behind. The sources are few, but they are confirmed and documented, and his papers are found in one of his grandchildren (Tariq Abdel Karim Mahmoud)...
Sheikh Mahmoud Abdel Halim belongs to the town of Anabta, located on the main road between Nablus and Tulkarm, about 150 meters above sea level. The former Hejaz Railway and the Iskenderun River pass through the middle of the town. The town’s loads come from two large loads (Al-Jitawi and Omar), and our poet is from a family known in the past as “the family of jurists,” which belongs to the Jitawi section.
Our poet, who was born in 1820, studied with the sheikhs of the village known for belonging to the Hanbali school of thought. Then he went to Al-Azhar to complete his legal education. After graduating, he returned to his country, where he became one of the greatest sheikhs of the Hanbali school of thought in the region.
He held several religious positions in his country, as he was an imam, preacher, and preacher. Then he was questioned in the Sharia court. He was bold in his criticism and frank in his poetic statements. Among his positions that indicate his strong hostility to his contemporary was the poet Sheikh Yusuf al-Nabhani (the Sufi), who criticized some Hanbali scholars with harshness and insult, and Sheikh Mahmoud responded to him with his sufficient poem in which he says: Yusuf waded into the stream, lost, and he was neither a floater nor a passenger on the astronomy
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Another of his famous positions is his satire of judges, officials, and some notables in Palestine in the late Ottoman era, especially those who were known to take bribes. He was not complacent in his life, but rather he was very serious (he was a Hanbali), and this is what brought him some hostility. Sheikh Mahmoud criticized the people of Nablus for their fanaticism towards their civilization and their belittling of the people of the village. There were poetic debates between him and the mayor of Nablus, Omar Zuaiter (the father of Adel and Akram Zuaiter), some of which were preserved and most of which were lost.
It was clear that Sheikh Abd al-Halim gave his family cultural attention, and one of his children became the poet Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud (1913-1948), as his father surrounded him with signs of kindness and care - as Kamel al-Sawafiri mentioned in his introduction to Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud’s collection of poems - and taught him in the village, then in the city of Tulkarm, then in The city of Nablus, and he had an important influence on his son’s talent.
Sheikh Mahmoud has a long poem entitled “The Labid Journey,” named after the village of Kafr Labd, near Anabta, where sheikhs, scholars, and friends gathered and walked toward northern Palestine, stopping in the many villages they passed through. During this trip, he wrote a description of his impressions of everything he saw. , with the names of prominent and well-known personalities at that time.
Sheikh Mahmoud has many poems, most of which have been lost, to the point that many fans of his son’s poetry and his relatives do not know this aspect of his life.
The poet lived for 99 years, full of scientific, literary, and political vitality. He left 14 children and a large offspring, one of whose stars was the poet Abdel Rahim Mahmoud. He died in 1919, two years after the British occupation, and the forms of resistance to the occupation had not yet crystallized in Palestine.
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