Al Farid deserted his times and shunned his milieu, seeking seclusion to write and to unite in his universal poetry the unknown with the known in life.

Al Farid did not choose his theme from daily events as Al Mutanabbi2 had done. He did not busy himself with the enigma of life as Maary2 had done. Rather, he shut his eyes against the world in order to see beyond it, and he closed his ears against the tumult of the earth so that he could hear the eternal songs.

This, then, was Al Farid, a soul pure as the rays of the sun, a heart aflame, a mind as serene as a mountain lake, his poetry reaching beyond the dreams of those who came before and after him.

Al Ghazali

There exists between Al Ghazali and St. Augustine a spiritual unity. They represent two eras, but one idea despite the difference in the time, the religion and the society of their days. That idea is that there is a desire deep within the soul which drives man from the seen to the unseen, to philosophy and to the divine.

Al Ghazali gave up a life of ease and a high position to follow a life of asceticism and mysticism.3 He searched for those thin lines which join the end of science to the beginning of religion. He searched for that hidden chalice in which the intelligence and experience of man is blended with his aspirations and his dreams.

St. Augustine had searched for the same chalice more than five centuries earlier. Whoever reads The Confessions of St. Augustine finds that he used the world and its fruit as a ladder to climb to consciousness of eternal truth.

However, I have found Al Ghazali nearer the secret and the heart of the matter than St. Augustine. This could be attributed to the difference in their eras; also, to Al Ghazali’s inheritance of the teaching and philosophies of the Arabs and Greeks who preceded him, as well as St. Augustine’s bequest. By this I mean the matters that one mind hands down to another just as customs and dress represent certain eras.

I found in Ghazali a golden chain linking those mystics of India who preceded him with the deists who followed him. There is something of Al Ghazali in Buddhism and there is some of Ghazali’s thinking in Spinoza and Blake.

Al Ghazali is highly respected among learned Orientalists of the West. The religious among them consider his the greatest and noblest concepts born of Islam. Strange as it seems, I saw on the wall of the fifteenth-century church in Venice a mural including Al Ghazali among the philosophers, saints and theologians whom, in the Middle Ages, the Church considered the cornerstones and pillars of its spiritual temple.

*    *

Gibran, in his articles about Avicenna, Al Farid and Al Ghazali, left no doubt about his admiration for these great Arabic philosophers and made clear his belief in the philosophy of Avicenna: “There is no poem … nearer my own beliefs and my spiritual inclination than that poem of Avicenna.”

Gibran followed the definition of Averröes: “Space and matter are in God.” Gibran said: “We are the breath and the fragrance of God.” Gibran believed in the existence of God, in the existence of the soul and its rebirth, but not according to the doctrine of Nirvana.

Those who follow the doctrine of Nirvana believe that after death the soul enters the bodies of lower animals or the bodies of other human beings; and that it passes from one body to another until it is purified. It then returns to the dwelling place of its god.

Gibran did not accept the purification process. He believed that the soul comes back to finish what the man abandoned when he left the earth.

In an article about reincarnation and Nirvana, “The poet from Baalbek,” written in Arabic, Gibran stated that the soul returns to an equal status. He wrote: “And the prince inquired, saying, ‘Tell us, O sage, will the gods ever restore me to this world as a prince and bring back the deceased poet to life? Will my soul become incarnated in a body of a great king’s son and the soul of the poet in the body of a great poet? Will the sacred laws permit him to face eternity composing poetry about life? Will I be able to shower him with gifts?’ And the sage answered the prince saying: ‘Whatever the soul longs for it will attain. The sacred laws which restore the Spring after the passing of the winter will reinstate you a prince and will reinstate the poet as a poet.’”

Gibran wrote in The Prophet:

Fare you well, people of Orphalese

This day has ended.

Forget not that I shall come back to you.

A little while, and my longing shall gather dust and foam for another body.

A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me.

Gibran wrote in the last page of The Garden of the Prophet:

O, Mist, my sister, my sister, Mist,

I am one with you now.

No longer am I a self.

The walls have fallen,

And the chains have broken;

I rise to you, a mist,

And together we shall float upon the sea until life’s second day,

When dawn shall lay you, dewdrops in a garden,

And me a babe upon the breast of a woman.

In the late eighteenth-century materialism gained wide hold in Europe. The economic life of society became more important than religious ethics. The theory of natural selection was held to justify might against right, whether between individuals or nations.

Nietzsche and many other writers made the “self” the center of something approaching worship. Nietzsche even proclaimed that God was dead.

John A. T. Robinson maintained that Nietzsche was not an atheist, that he was trying to free man from the God who is a tyrant, who impoverishes, enslaves and annihilates man. He was trying to get rid of the kindly old man who could be pushed into one corner while men “got on with business.”

One of Gibran’s biographers has claimed that Gibran became acquainted with the work of Nietzsche and was even influenced by it.

Gibran demanded that his people in the Middle East should revolt against Turkish rule. But at no time did he ever deny the existence of God.

We know that Gibran believed in God and in the immortality of the soul. But did he believe that man and his soul required guidance and, if so, what kind of guidance?

It is essential that we know the traditions and auspices of Gibran’s background to answer the questions raised by his works. Gibran was born to the daughter of a Maronite priest, was baptized by his grandfather in rites employing Syriac, or Aramaic, the language Christ spoke.