Rather than by his birth name Ahmed Abu Khalil ibn Hussein Agha Aqbiq, he is better known as Abu Khalil al-Qabbani. In the early 1870s, after having watched a performance of the play “
The Miser” by the French playwright
Molière at the Yazariya School in Damascus, he started to produce his own comedies in
Arabic. This play had already been staged in Beirut, after
Marun Al Naqqash had translated
The Miser into Arabic and published it under the title
Al-bakhīl in 1847 as the first known Arabic theatrical text. Al-Qabbani's style of adapting French theatre combined singing, acting and popular improvisation. He is said to have staged about 40 performances, using inspiration from the oral and written literary heritage, such as the
One Thousand and One Nights, as well as traditional melodies from Syrian
muwashshahat. In the beginning, al-Qabbani used to give female roles in his plays to younger boys with high-
pitched voices, because women were not allowed to act in theatre at his time. His play
Abu al-Hassan al-Mughaffal caused a wave of protest because of his mockery of the historical
Caliph Harun al-Rashid. This enraged religious authorities, who sent a delegation to complain to the
Ottoman caliph in
Istanbul. Following this, the authorities closed down al-Qabbani's theatre, at the time the only theatre in the region, and prevented theatrical performances in the
Ottoman province of Syria. After that, al-Qabbani left for
Egypt and produced his plays there until 1900. In Cairo, his theatre company included the female singer Al-Halabiyya, who was one of the first Arabs to take to the stage, at a time when women's singing in public was largely socially forbidden. She accompanied al-Qabbani to the
Chicago World Exposition in 1893, becoming the first Arab singer to perform in front of an American audience, and gained great fame with her song “O Day of the Lover”. Two years after his return to Syria, al-Qabbani died in 1903. == Notable relatives ==