Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) was a Lebanese-American poet, writer, and visual artist, born in Bsharri in the Ottoman-ruled Mount Lebanon region to a Maronite Christian family.

He emigrated with his mother and siblings to Boston in 1895, moving between the United States and study in Paris and Lebanon before settling in New York. Writing first in Arabic and later in English, he became the leading figure of the Mahjar, the émigré Arab literary movement, and a bridge between Eastern and Western sensibilities.

His blend of religious traditions was genuinely syncretic: rooted in his Maronite Christianity, he drew openly on the mysticism of the Sufis, on Islam and the Baha’i Faith, and on the Romantic visionaries William Blake and Nietzsche.

His best-known work, The Prophet (1923), is a slim book of twenty-six prose-poem counsels delivered by a sage, Almustafa, on the eve of his departure — on love, work, freedom, joy and sorrow, and self-knowledge.

It became one of the best-selling books of all time, translated into more than a hundred languages, and its popularity surged again with the 1960s counterculture and the later New Age movement. The “sufism” tag here is the closest of the available traditions and is apt for his contemplative tone of the soul’s union with the divine, but it should be read with the caveat that Gibran blends Christian, Sufi, and Romantic mysticism into something of his own rather than belonging to any single school.