The Prophet

The Prophet, a book of 26 poetic essays, has been translated into over 20 languages, has had 45 editions in America alone, and is Gibran Khalil Gibran's best-known work. In spite of its popular success, the book has received little critical attention.

Kahlil Gibran is widely considered to be one of the most influential literary figures of the Arab world in the 20th century, along with the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz and the Syrian poet Adonis. Although, he lived for only a short time and wrote his later work in English, Gibran became a model for those who aspired for a fundamental transformation in the content and form of the inherited literary tradition in the Arabic language. His writing style and aesthetic formation resulted from a peculiar mixture of Eastern Christianity, Islamic Sufism, Nietzschean romanticism, and modernism. Moreover, he was one of the early émigré writers in American literature whose work has appealed to a broad range of readership beyond the Arab immigrant community in the United States (Partington & Gibran, 2010).

Kahlil Gibran was born as Gibran Kahlil Gibran in Bsharri, a Maronite Christian village in northern Lebanon, then an Arab province in the Ottoman Empire. Gibran's father was a tax collector, and his mother was the daughter of a Maronite clergyman. When Gibran's father was imprisoned under the charge of tax evasion, his mother decided to emigrate to the United States. In 1895 the family settled in Boston's South End, which at the time had the second largest Syrian immigrant community after New York.

In the midst of the cultural, financial, and linguistic difficulties that any first-generation immigrant family had to endure, Kahlil Gibranfurthered his interests in art and literature. Impressed by his sketches and drawings, Gibran's art teacher introduced him to Fred Holland Day, a wealthy and ardent follower of the European avant-garde movement. Under Day's tutelage, Gibran entered the Bostonian art circles and began to read much of literature's Western canon, including William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, John Keats, William Blake, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Walt Whitman. Day was also influential in convincing young Gibran to complete his education back in Lebanon.

In 1898 Gibran arrived in Beirut to study at the Maronite college Madrasat-al-Hikmah. Despite his disappointment with the school's strict discipline and dogmatism, Gibran got on well with his Arabic teacher, Father Youssef Haddad. Under his teacher's guidance, Gibran read the Arab classics, translations from the French and contemporary Syrian novelists and poets. In his final year at the college, Gibran became the "college poet" and editor of a student magazine called The Beacon (Al-Manarah). More important, his experiences in Lebanon would later shape the themes of his early works in Arabic. Subsequent to his graduation from college in 1902, Gibran returned to Boston deeply disturbed by the negative aspects of religious or sectarian dogmatism, patriarchal traditions, imperial oppression, and feudal customs he witnessed in his native land (Gibran, 2009).

Within a year of his return, Gibran lost three members of his family: his sister, mother, and half ...