Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet: Why is it so loved?

By Shoku Amirani & Stephanie Hegarty

BBC World Service

12 May 2012

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Kahlil Gibran is said to be one of the world's bestselling poets, and his life has inspired a play touring the
UK and the Middle East. But many critics have been lukewarm about his merits. Why, then, has his
seminal work, The Prophet, struck such a chord with generations of readers?

Since it was published in 1923, The Prophet has never been out of print. The perennial classic has been
translated into more than 50 languages and is a staple on international best-seller lists. It is thought to
have sold tens of millions of copies.

Although practically ignored by the literary establishment in the West, lines from the book have inspired
song lyrics, political speeches and have been read out at weddings and funerals all around the world.

"It serves various occasions or big moments in one's life so it tends to be a book that is often gifted to a
lover, or for a birth, or death. That is why it has spread so widely, and by word of mouth," says Dr
Mohamed Salah Omri, lecturer in Modern Arabic literature at Oxford University.

The Beatles, John F Kennedy and Indira Gandhi are among those who have been influenced by its words.

"This book has a way of speaking to people at different stages in their lives. It has this magical quality,
the more you read it the more you come to understand the words," says Reverend Laurie Sue, an
interfaith minister in New York who has conducted hundreds of weddings with readings from The
Prophet.

"But it is not filled with any kind of dogma, it is available to anyone whether they are Jewish or Christian
or Muslim."
The book is made up of 26 prose poems, delivered as sermons by a wise man called Al Mustapha. He is
about to set sail for his homeland after 12 years in exile on a fictional island when the people of the
island ask him to share his wisdom on the big questions of life: love, family, work and death.

Its popularity peaked in the 1930s and again in the 1960s when it became the bible of the counter
culture.

The Prophet

On marriage: "Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the
shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup."

On children: ''Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for
itself.''

On beauty: ''Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror.''

"Many people turned away from the establishment of the Church to Gibran," says Professor Juan Cole,
historian of the Middle East at the University of Michigan who has translated several of Gibran's works
from Arabic.

"He offered a dogma-free universal spiritualism as opposed to orthodox religion, and his vision of the
spiritual was not moralistic. In fact, he urged people to be non-judgmental."

Despite the immense popularity of his writing, or perhaps because of it, The Prophet was panned by
many critics in the West who thought it simplistic, naive and lacking in substance.

"In the West, he was not added to the canon of English literature," says Cole. "Even though his major
works were in English after 1918, and though he is one of bestselling poets in American history, he was
disdained by English professors."

Image caption

Gibran sketched the Prophet after a dream

"He was looked down upon as, frankly, a 'bubblehead' by Western academics, because he appealed to
the masses. I think he has been misunderstood in the West. He is certainly not a bubblehead, in fact his
writings in Arabic are in a very sophisticated style.

"There is no doubt he deserves a place in the Western canon. It is strange to teach English literature and
ignore a literary phenomenon."

Gibran was a painter as well as a writer by training and was schooled in the symbolist tradition in Paris in
1908. He mixed with the intellectual elite of his time, including figures such as WB Yeats, Carl Jung and
August Rodin, all of whom he met and painted.

Symbolists such as Rodin and the English poet and artist William Blake, who was a big influence on
Gibran, favoured romance over realism and it was a movement that was already passe in the 1920s as
modernists such as TS Eliot and Ezra Pound were gaining popularity.

He painted more than 700 pictures, watercolours and drawings but because most of his paintings were
shipped back to Lebanon after his death, they have been overlooked in the West.

Professor Suheil Bushrui, who holds the Kahlil Gibran chair for Values and Peace at the University of
Maryland, compares Gibran to the English Romantics such as Shelley and Blake, and he says that like
Gibran, Blake was dismissed in his own time.

"He was called 'mad Blake'. He is now a major figure in English literature. So the fact that a writer is not
taken seriously by the critics is no indication of the value of the work".

In Lebanon, where he was born, he is still celebrated as a literary hero.

His style, which broke away from the classical school, pioneered a new Romantic movement in Arabic
literature of poetic prose.

A poet's life

Born to Maronite Catholic family in Lebanon, 1883

Moves to US aged 12 with mother and siblings after father imprisoned for embezzlement
Settles in South Boston's Lebanese community

Clerical error at school registers his name as Kahlil, not Khalil

He was a talented pupil and came to the attention of local artist and photographer Fred Holland Day

Returns to Lebanon at 15 to study Arabic

Soon after, he lost his mother, sister and brother to TB and cancer within months of each other

Back in the US in 1904, he meets Mary Haskell

In 1908, goes to Paris for two years to study art in the symbolist school

First book of poetry published in 1918, then The Prophet five years later

Dies in 1931 from cirrhosis of the liver and TB

Inspires a play Rest Upon the Wind, which tours UK and Middle East in 2012

"We are talking about a renaissance in modern Arabic literature and this renaissance had at its
foundation Gibran's writings," says Professor Suheil Bushrui, who holds the Kahlil Gibran Chair for
Values and Peace at the University of Maryland.

In the Arab world, Gibran is regarded as a rebel, both in a literary and political sense. He emigrated to
the US at 12 but returned to study in Lebanon three years later where he witnessed injustices suffered
by peasants at the hands of their Ottoman rulers.

"He was a Christian but he saw things being done in the name of Christianity which he could not accept,"
says Bushrui.

In his writing, he raged against the oppression of women and the tyranny of the Church and called for
freedom from Ottoman rule.

"What he was doing was revolutionary and there were protests against it in the Arab world," says Juan
Cole. "So he is viewed in Arabic literature as an innovator, not dissimilar to someone like WB Yeats in the
West."

Image caption

Gibran the painter created more than 700 works, including this one of his family

Political leaders considered his thoughts poisonous to young people and one of his books, Spirit
Rebellious, was burnt in the market place in Beirut soon after it was published.
By the 1930s, Gibran had become a prominent and charismatic figure within the Lebanese community
and New York literary circles.

But the success of his writing in English owes much to a woman called Mary Haskell, a progressive
Boston school headmistress who became his patron and confidante as well as his editor.

Haskell supported him financially throughout his career until the publication of The Prophet in 1923.

Find out more

The Man behind The Prophet was broadcast on Heart & Soul for the BBC World Service

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Their relationship developed into a love affair and although Gibran proposed to her twice, they never
married.

Haskell's conservative family at that time would never have accepted her marrying an immigrant, says
Jean Gibran, who married Kahlil Gibran's godson and his namesake and dedicated five years to writing a
biography of the writer.

In their book, Jean Gibran and her late husband didn't shy away from the less favourable aspects of the
Gibran's character. He was, they admit, known to cultivate his own celebrity.

He even went so far as to create a mythology around himself and made pretensions to a noble lineage.

But Jean Gibran says that he never claimed to be a saint or prophet. "As a poor but proud immigrant
amongst Boston's elite, he didn't want people to look down on him. He was a fragile human being and
aware of his own weaknesses."
But arguably for Gibran's English readers, none of this mattered much.

"I don't know how many people who picked up The Prophet, read it or gifted it, would actually know
about Gibran the man or even want to know," says Dr Mohamed Salah Omri.

"Part of the appeal is perhaps that this book could have been written by anybody and that is what we do
with scripture. It just is."

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The Prophet

(1923)

Kahlil Gibran

The Prophet is a book of prose poetry that made its Lebanese-American author famous. Commonly
found in gift shops and frequently quoted at weddings or any occasion where uplifting 'spiritual'
thoughts are required, the work has never been a favorite of intellectuals - to some readers it may seem
a bit twee or pompous - yet its author was a genuine artist and scholar (see bio, below right) whose
wisdom was hard-earned.

The Prophet begins with a man named Almustafa living on an island call Orphalese. Locals consider him
something of a sage, but he is from elsewhere, and has waited twelve years for the right ship to take
him home. From a hill above the town, he sees his ship coming into the harbor, and realizes his sadness
at leaving the people he has come to know. The elders of the city ask him not to leave. He is asked to tell
of his philosophy of life before he goes, to speak his truth to the crowds gathered. What he has to say
forms the basis of the book.

The Prophet provides timeless spiritual wisdom on a range of subjects, including giving, eating and
drinking, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, teaching, time, pleasure, religion,
death, beauty and friendship. Corresponding to each chapter are evocative drawings by Gibran himself.
Love and marriage

Foolish is the person, the prophet says, who 'would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure', for to
wish this leads to less of a person, who has seen less pain but also less pure joy. The prophet says:
"When love beckons to you, follow him/Though his ways are hard and steep".

We cannot wish for love to reach only a certain measure, or to presume that we can direct the way its
course, "for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course." As much as love allows for our growth, it
also acts to prune us so that we grow straight and tall.

When questioned about marriage, the prophet departs from the conventional wisdom that it involves
two people becoming one. A true marriage gives both people space to develop their individuality, in the
same way that "the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow".

Work

It is not just the loss of a wage or even status that is so disheartening, but the feeling that you have been
left out of the normal procession of life. Neither is it enough just to work for money alone. People think
of work as a curse, the prophet says, but in doing your work "you fulfil a part of earth's furthest dream,
assigned to you when that dream was born." Through work you express your love for whoever will
benefit from it, and satisfy your own need to create. Those who enjoy their work know that it is a secret
to fulfillment, that we can be saved through what we do.

Sorrow and pain

Sorrow carves out our being, says the prophet, but the space it makes provides room for more joy in
another season of life. In one of his standout lines, he remarks, "Your pain is the breaking of the shell
that encloses your understanding." Try to marvel at your pain as another experience of precious life. If
you can do this, you can be more serene about your emotions, like the passing of the seasons.

Few realize, the prophet says, that suffering is the means to heal ourselves, "the bitter potion by which
the physician within you heals your sick self." Consider, the next time you are in a state of sorrow, that it
may have been self-chosen at some level of your being, to bring about an enlargement of your self.
Without struggles we would learn nothing about life.
Property

Guard against the love of houses and things, the prophet warns, for these comforts erode the strength
of the soul. If you attach yourself too much to the domestic luxuries of life, "Your house shall not be an
anchor but a mast." You will be tied to it when the ship sinks.

Freedom

The longing for freedom is itself a kind of slavery. When people speak of wanting to be free, often it is
aspects of themselves they are trying to get away from.

Prayer

You cannot ask for anything in prayer, because God already knows your deepest needs. As God is our
main need, so we should not pray for other things, but ask for more of God.

The divided self

The prophet likens the soul to a battlefield, in which our reason and passion seem eternally opposed.
Yet it does not do much good to fight either: You have to be peacemaker, loving all your warring
elements before you can heal yourself.

The boundless self

The prophet tries to convey to those gathered that the lives we lead on earth represent only a fraction
of our larger selves. We all have 'giant selves' inside us, but we have to first recognize that they may
exist. "In your longing for your giant self lies your goodness", the prophet says. In pursuit of self-
knowledge, therefore, we are looking for the best in ourselves.

Final word
Taken as a whole, Gibran's book is a metaphor for the mystery of life: we come into the world and go
back to where we came from. As the prophet readies himself to board his ship, it is clear that his words
refer not to his journey across the seas but to the world he came from before he was born. His life now
seems to him like a short dream.

The book suggests that we should be glad of the experience of coming into the world, even if it seems
full of pain, because after death we will see that life had a pattern and a purpose, and that what seems
to us now as 'good' and 'bad' will be appreciated without judgment as good for our souls.

The prophet also teaches that the separation we feel from other people and all forms of life while on
earth is not real. We are merely expressions of a greater unity now forgotten. As he looks forward to his
journey, Almustafa likens himself to "a boundless drop in a boundless ocean." To feel yourself to be a
temporary manifestation of an infinite source is greatly comforting, and perhaps accounts for the feeling
of peace and liberation many experience in reading The Prophet.

"You are not enclosed within your bodies, nor confined to houses or fields. That which is you dwells
above the mountain and roves with the wind."

Kahlil Gibran

Born in 1883 in northern Ottoman Lebanon, Gibran received no schooling, but enjoyed informal
religious and language lessons from a priest. His father's gambling brought the family to financial ruin,
which prompted his mother to emigrate with her children (without Gibran snr.) to the United States. A
registration error upon arrival in Boston created the name 'Kahlil' instead of the correct Khalil.

At school, Kahlil showed talent in drawing and found a mentor in the artist and photographer Fred
Holland Day, but returned to Lebanon to complete his secondary schooling. At 19 he returned to Boston,
but his mother, brother and one of his sisters were tragically lost to tuberculosis. He found another
mentor in Mary Haskell, a headmistress with an interest in orphans who supported Gibran's painting
career, and he began to have his prose poetry, short stories and essays published in Arabic.

In 1908 Gibran began a two year stay in Paris, studying art, and in 1912 moved permanently to New York
where was able to exhibit his paintings and have more work published, including Al-Ajniha Al-
Mutakassirah (The Broken Wings) and The Madman. In 1920 he established a society of Arab writers,
and continued his writings in Arabic in support of Lebanon and Syria's emancipation from Ottoman rule.
The release of The Prophet in 1923 received largely unfavorable reviews, but word of mouth made it a
bestseller. After his death in 1931, associates completed and published the two sequels he had begun:
The Garden of the Prophet and Death of the Prophet.

Source: 50 Spiritual Classics: Your shortcut to the most important ideas on self-discovery, enlightenment
and purpose by Tom Butler-Bowdon (London & Boston: Nicholas Brealey)