"His secret is the Bata'a". About Sultan Hamed who built Egypt

Who is the farmer who was touched and carried his soul on his palm and led the men and his people to expel the colonizer and build a state called Egypt? A question that has preoccupied the minds of dozens of Egyptian creators, whether in fiction or film writing, or in television drama.

Osama Anwar Okasha, in his famous series "Al-Masrawiya", tried to imagine the beginning from the house of Mayor Fathallah Al-Husseini (played by the late artist Hisham Selim) to form a state in the face of the Ottoman authority, and Youssef Idris in his short story "Sira Al-Bata" (published in a group under the name "An Incident of Honor" in 1958) also touched that imagination and those questions, and was translated by director and author Khaled Youssef in a series of the same title (His Secret Al-Bata) presented within the drama Ramadan 2023.

The story of the series "Sirat Al-Bata" revolves during two times, the first in our time, about a young man looking for a secret that blesses the people of his region with the tomb of "Sultan Hamid", and the search journey takes him back to the time of the French campaign starting in 1798 AD.

A time that witnessed the heroism of the Egyptian people in the face of the French occupation through Hamed, who was transformed by the popular imagination into Sultan Hamed, and many years after his departure, the child Hamed comes to look for him.

The work tells the story of the formation of the Egyptian identity whose leader passed away, turning his death into a value that left millions of resistance fighters and leaders who stood against the occupier, and gathered people from different parts of Egypt to become one people whose formal and cultural features can be distinguished once dealt with.

Old Questions and New Drama

The maker of the work not only read and conveyed the spirit of the great creator Youssef Idris, but he pushed it with his own questions and shades from his childhood and youth, and presented a parallel narrative text that was woven with the Idrisid story to make a dramatic work that the recipient feels that he has seen like him before, but also feels a special vitality and unprecedented boldness that throws him into the world of complete certainty at times and to doubt at other times.

In any case, the viewer does not remain in his place, dazzled by the distinctive image and drama that exercised his personal power and power, so he did not give the characters of his work complete freedom to say what they wanted, but put on their tongues what he wants to say of his own opinions and convictions, and neglected some historical details in favor of the overall vision.

The work is witnessing brilliant acting, especially from young actors such as Ahmed Al-Saadani and Ahmed Fahmy, and in the tight management of groups that in some scenes numbered thousands of people.

The series is similar to a general conference for actors and actresses in Egypt, starting with the stars Hussein Fahmy, Ahmed Fahmy and Ahmed Al-Saadany, and ending with the actors of one or two scenes (comparators) in each series, which is a special success formula by which the series summoned the audience of all these actors to follow it and preempted it with an unusual media campaign.

Religion and homeland

The series touches on thorny issues related to the Egyptian identity and the way of religiosity among Egyptians, some attribute the Egyptian people to the ancient Egyptians and demand a return to that identity, others believe that the formation of the modern Egyptian state came at the moment of Muhammad Ali Pasha the Great assuming the rule of Egypt, and others see it as "the moment of revolutionary July", and so each party tries to make its founding myths for its biases towards the identity of the Egyptian people.

If Youssef Idris was preoccupied in his story with the relationship of the Egyptian people with their leaders who resist the occupation and how Egyptians put them in the rank of saints, the series made this relationship a special case of religiosity and the relations of peoples with their leaders.

According to the series, Sultan Hamid became a righteous and beloved man because of his leadership of the resistance against the colonizer and became a guardian and a shrine holder for fighting the enemies of the homeland, which puts forward a different vision that makes the religious symbol in fact a pure national symbol surrounded by an aura of holiness.

Visual language

There is an ambition for a different visual language, and the manufacture of epic work in the first episodes of the work, the signs of which appeared in the battle of the French army against the Mamluks, where the work team was able to mobilize a huge number of groups as French and Mamluk soldiers in addition to the Egyptians, and the "cadres" came wide in portraying the French army with its clear organization and armament compared to footage of the Mamluk warriors who entered the battlefield without order carrying their swords only in the face of the cannons.

It is the paradox that made the French victory and the Mamluk defeat between an organized modern army and another prisoner of war with a sword and a chaotic attack that is closer to the idea of quarrel rather than war and its military machine.

The interior scenes came to provide an elegant visual language, as the director manipulated the available spaces and accessories, especially the houses of Sheikh Al-Balad and the merchant Shehab, and the houses overflowed with details belonging to the end of the 17th century during the French attack, those household items made of clay, stones, palm wicker and timber before the modernization phase that followed the French campaign.

The scene of the demonstrations following the killing of the young Egyptian Azhari Saber (embodied by the poet Hisham Al-Jakh) revealed the same epic sense, but the demonstration was organized exaggeratedly, even confirming that it was the work of a director and not the work of the anger of the parents against their murdered son.

The slogans launched by the demonstrators conveyed the inflammatory sense of the January 25, 2011 revolution, in a beautiful gesture that underscored the extension of tyranny, murder and the endless flow of Egyptian victims.

The movement of the characters on the screen confirms in a clear and simple visual language the clear separation between the generations of adults by their surrender and their preference to live in peace and appeasement, as opposed to the young people who carry the banner of the revolution against the ugliness of the Mamluk and French occupations.