Introduction
Kahlil Gibran, artist, poet and philosopher, is best known the world over as author of The Prophet. Published in 1923, The Prophet was the third of seven works that Gibran wrote in English. Though most of his life was spent in America, Gibran never lost his passion for his native Lebanon. His writing is steeped in Lebanese Christian mythology blended with the Sufi tradition of Lebanese Muslims, and imbued with a broad, oriental wisdom that derives from richly mixed influences. All his work is informed by a powerful sense of the unique qualities and far-reaching associations of his homeland, and fuses the culture and philosophies of East and West.
Gibran’s career as a writer was initially secondary to his career as a painter. Returning to Boston’s Chinatown after four years of higher education in Beirut, he sold the family business following the tragic deaths of one of his sisters, his brother and mother, and began to paint professionally. When he was little more than a child Gibran’s talent had been spotted by the photographer Fred Holland Day, and he had received commissions to design book covers. Now he gained easy access to artistic circles. He had an affair with the writer Josephine Peabody, who was the first to dub him ‘prophet’. [1] She also introduced him to Mary Haskell, an influential school teacher who became his sponsor and collaborator, editing all his English manuscripts and maintaining a lifelong correspondence that was inspirational to both of them.
Gibran started to write for an Arab émigré newspaper called Al Mohajer (The Emigrant). His philosophical articles, and the books of Arabic stories, verse and prose poems that he published between 1905 and 1908, were characterised by a contentious tone and an anti-establishment stance. Gibran saw society as a corrupting force that encourages the individual to forsake personal conscience for purposes of collective good. Books such as Ara’is al Muruj (Nymphs of the Valley) and Al-Arwah al Mutamarridah (Spirits Rebellious) attacked both state and church, and Al-Arwah al Mutamarridah was banned by the Syrian government after its clergy took offence.
Two years studying painting in Paris – where he exhibited and met Rodin [2] – stemmed the flow of his writing. On his return he moved to New York and soon found the studio known as ‘The Hermitage’ where he was to live for the rest of his life. Here he made portraits, sketching such eminent heads as W. B. Yeats in 1911. He continued to write articles and poems, and his novel, The Broken Wings, a tale based on his own first unhappy love affair as a schoolboy in Beirut, was published in 1913. This was reviewed by May Ziadah, a Lebanese critic living in Cairo, with whom Gibran discovered a close affinity. Although the two never met, Gibran considered May as the love of his life, and they corresponded regularly until his death. [3]
With the encouragement of Mary Haskell, Gibran began to write in English. A poem called The Perfect World appeared in 1915, and in 1918 Alfred Knopf published Gibran’s first book in English, The Madman. Correspondence with Mary Haskell [4] reveals Gibran’s concern with the language. He modelled his style on the biblical language of the King James I Authorised Version, saying,
The Bible is Syriac literature in English words. It is the child of a sort of marriage. There’s nothing in any other tongue to correspond to the English Bible. [5]
Appropriately, his philosophy, imagery and expression remain essentially Arab.
The Madman is fundamentally pessimistic, as were Gibran’s journalistic writings throughout the war. Couched in the parable form common to Arab fables and the New Testament, it has a nihilistic note that reflects the disillusionment wrought by civilisation, and an irony that seems Western in character. It echoes William Blake’s attitude to the madman as one who sees through the illusions that sustain society. This and his next English work, The Forerunner (1920), which uses the same form and derivations, celebrate the visionary perception of the prophet/seer. Both look forward to The Prophet in this and other themes, but The Forerunner is a more optimistic work and apt precursor to Gibran’s masterpiece.
The Prophet was a long time in its inception. Barbara Young claims that Gibran wrote a first draft in Lebanon when he was only fifteen, [6] but whether or not this is true, it was certainly three years in revision between 1920 and 1923, during which time the author was becoming famous both as an artist and writer. He had honed his English style to perfection, achieving a purity that was ideally suited to his spiritual concerns. His health, ever delicate, was beginning to fail, which perhaps intensified his purpose. The first edition of The Prophet, which included twelve illustrations by the author, sold all 13,000 copies within a month. Gibran himself was aware of the peculiar importance of the book, calling it ‘the best my soul ever conceived’ and Mary Haskell recognised its worth at once, writing to Kahlil,
This book will be held as one of the treasures of English literature . Generations will not exhaust it, but instead, generation after generation will find in the book what they would fain be – and it will be better loved as men grow riper and riper. [7]
The Prophet is an eclectic spiritual guide that has something for everyone. As he is about to leave the city of Orphalese where he has been for twelve years the stranger Almustafa is surrounded by the people and asked for advice. He delivers brief sermons on twenty-six subjects in language that is striking for its simplicity and its majesty, for its brilliant imagery, and for its graceful rhythm. His words, redolent with love and understanding, call for unity and affirm Gibran’s certainty of the correlated nature of all existence, and of re-incarnation. Gibran’s friend and biographer, Mikhail Naimy, has remarked on the extraordinary effectiveness of the title:
Thus with that one word ‘prophet’ Gibran the artist raised to the dignity and height of prophecy what Gibran the poet had to say, even before he said it. [8]
Many people, including Mary Haskell, have claimed that Almustafa is Gibran, and there are undoubtedly certain parallels in their circumstances. Almustafa is a stranger in Orphalese, exiled for years from his native land just as Gibran was. Almustafa’s mixed emotions as he contemplates returning to ‘the isle of his birth’ reflect the author’s own feelings, both for America and for Lebanon, and the fondness of the people of Orphalese for Almustafa mirrors the love of Gibran’s many friends and admiring devotees in America. Almitra, the seeress who asks Amustafa to speak to the people, is the one ‘who had first sought and believed in him’, and is widely accepted as a thinly veiled portrait of Mary Haskell. Yet Gibran was careful to deny the prophetic status attributed to him. His words recorded by Barbara Young,
While I was writing The Prophet, The Prophet was writing me, [9]
suggest a degree of divine inspiration, but equally they express the cathartic effect of creation experienced by many authors. His declaration that