Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931) was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist, considered the leading author of modern Arabic literature.
Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931) was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist, considered the leading author of modern Arabic literature. ◦ He was also considered a philosopher, although he himself rejected the title. ◦ Born in Bsharri, a village of the Ottoman-ruled Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate to a Maronite Christian family, Gibran immigrated with his mother and siblings to the United States in 1895, settling in Boston's South End after his father was imprisoned for embezzlement and the family's property was confiscated. ◦ By the time of his death at age 48 from cirrhosis and incipient tuberculosis, Gibran had achieved literary fame on both sides of the Atlantic. ◦
Gibran's life was, in the words of Suheil Bushrui and Joe Jenkins, "often caught between Nietzschean rebellion, Blakean pantheism and Sufi mysticism." ◦ His literary and artistic output is highly romantic in outlook and was influenced by the Bible, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William Blake, and his writings deal with themes such as love, death, nature, and a longing for the homeland. ◦ He drew on the Christian influence of his Maronite upbringing and the King James Bible, the Islamic tradition and Sufism he observed in Lebanon, alongside Buddhism, Hinduism, Blake, Nietzsche, Whitman, and the Transcendentalist, Romantic and Symbolist writers, synthesizing East and West into a single mystical voice. ◦ Gibran wrote of his desire "to write a book that heals the world." ◦ The essential, paradoxical teaching of *The Prophet* is that the truths of how to live cannot in fact be taught: "No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge." ◦ As he wrote, the teacher "does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind." ◦
With the financial help of his benefactress Mary Haskell — headmistress of a Boston girls' school, nine years his senior — Gibran studied art in Paris from 1908 to 1910. ◦ Haskell spent large sums to support him and edited all of his English writings. ◦ The two were briefly engaged between 1910 and 1911 but never married. ◦ In 1908 Gibran published *Spirits Rebellious* in Arabic, a novel deeply critical of secular and spiritual authority. ◦ In 1920 he re-founded the Pen League (al-Rabitah al-Qalamiyah) with fellow Mahjari emigrant poets in New York. ◦ His body was transferred to his birth village of Bsharri, to which he had bequeathed all future royalties on his books. ◦ Self-consciously cast by enthusiastic Boston and New York artistic circles as "the prophet" avant la lettre, Gibran internalized the philosopher-poet-priest image his patrons projected onto him until it became inseparable from his identity — yet he once confessed to a friend, "I'm a false alarm," disavowing his own grandiosity. ◦
Gibran expressed the view that "No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge." ◦ He wrote that the teacher "does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind." ◦ In his meditation on parenthood, he offered the metaphor that "You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness; For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable." ◦
Gibran is best known as the author of *The Prophet*, first published in the United States in 1923, which has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, translated into more than 100 languages. ◦ *The Prophet* has made Gibran the third-bestselling poet in history, behind Shakespeare and Lao Tzu. ◦ His principal works in English are *The Madman* (1918), *The Forerunner* (1920), *The Prophet* (1923), *Sand and Foam* (1926), and *Jesus, the Son of Man* (1928). ◦ His principal Arabic works include *Nymphs of the Valley*, *A Tear and a Smile*, *Spirits Rebellious*, and *The Broken Wings*. ◦ In Arabic, Gibran is held to be a crucial modern innovator, a transitional bridge between a classical tradition and a newer, freer, romantic sensibility. ◦ Salma Khadra Jayyusi called him "the single most important influence on Arabic poetry and literature during the first half of [the twentieth] century." ◦ The 1960s were *The Prophet*'s apogee — at its height, 5000 copies were selling a week — and it became, in effect, a counterculture alternative to the Bible. ◦
Gibran's writings are full of lyrical outpourings and are expressive of his deeply religious and mystic nature. ◦
Although he was considered a philosopher, Gibran himself rejected the title. ◦ His life was "often caught between Nietzschean rebellion, Blakean pantheism and Sufi mysticism." ◦ According to Barbara Young, "in an incredibly short time it was burned in the market place in Beirut by priestly zealots who pronounced it dangerous, revolutionary, and poisonous to youth." ◦ Its first print run of some twelve hundred copies sold out within a month — unheard-of for a poetry volume — yet publisher Alfred A. Knopf expressed bafflement at its success, saying "I haven't met five people who ever read Gibran." ◦ Self-consciously cast by enthusiastic Boston and New York artistic circles as "the prophet" avant la lettre, Gibran internalized the philosopher-poet-priest image his patrons projected onto him until it became inseparable from his identity — yet he once confessed to a friend, "I'm a false alarm," disavowing his own grandiosity. ◦ In Arabic, he is held to be a crucial modern innovator, whereas in the West, academic opinion long regarded his concerns as anti-modern. ◦ As the scholar Nadeem Naimy wrote, "To be an emigrant is to be an alien. But to be an emigrant mystical poet is to be thrice alienated." ◦
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"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts." ◦
"You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness; For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable." ◦
"No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge." ◦
"does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind." ◦
"I'm a false alarm," ◦