He asks himself, can this beautiful face hide an ugly soul and a criminal heart? She tells Gibran, "her voice sweeter than the sound of a lyre," that when she was eighteen her much older husband married her and exhibited her triumphantly to his friends. She tells Gibran she is not, as people say, an adulteress, heretic and prostitute.

Here Gibran asserts one of his quarrels with organized religion. Madame Rose Hanie spells out Gibran's belief:

In God's eyes I was unfaithful and an adulteress only while at the home of Rashid Bey Namaan, because he made me his wife according to the customs and traditions and by the force of haste, before heaven had made him mine in conformity with the spiritual law of Love and Affection...Now I am pure and clean because the law of Love has freed me and made me honorable and faithful.

Millions of people know The Prophet, Gibran's uplifting work that is the best-selling book of poetry of the 20th century. It is still quoted in wedding ceremonies, Alcoholics Anonymous writings, and other moments of high emotion. The quote that AA uses is wonderful: "You pray in your distress and in your need: would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy."

This wide-ranging volume The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran is more varied and comprehensive than The Prophet and thus gives us a multi-faceted view of this gifted, spiritual, free-thinking, tortured and generous man. Letters to his friends and loved ones reveal personal details that infuse the legend with humanity: his excitement about going to Paris for a year to be among great artists, "the beginning of a new chapter in the story of my life"; the exhaustion of keeping up his necessary pace of writing and painting when his health was suffering; his humility as he asks a friend to forget and forgive an unmentioned transgression; the shy sweetness of his asking May Ziadeh, a Lebanese girl whom Gibran knew only through correspondence, "if you would like to talk to this man in the tongue he speaks, which you can understand better than anyone else." He confesses not to know how to ask her for her picture!

In another letter to May in 1925, soon after the publication of The Prophet, Gibran describes a very modern dilemma for a famous person who has lost the peace of anonymity:

A year ago I was living in peace and tranquility, but today my tranquility has turned into clamor and my peace into strife. The people devour my days and my nights and submerge my life in their conflicts and desires. Many a time I have fled from this awful city [New York] to a remote place to be away from the people and from the shadow of myself.

With this in mind, one of my favorite examples of his paradoxically practical and poetic sayings is this gem: "In battling evil, excess is good; for he who is moderate in announcing the truth is presenting half-truth. He conceals the other half out of fear of the people's wrath."

Another favorite of mine reveals his quest for personal honesty. He humbly writes, "I use hate as a weapon to defend myself; had I been strong, I would never have needed that kind of a weapon."

Gibran's inspirational message in The Prohpet is relevant here. If he had not suffered poverty and dislocation as a child, we would not have his profound writings. The Prohpet has helped millions of readers gain peace of mind because, as Gibran explained, the book teaches that we are greater than we know, and things are a lot better than we think.

Not that the world isn't filled with injustice, and Gibran's lyrical words especially soar when he writes about cruelty and injustice. In "The Cry of the Graves" we see the courtroom of the Emir as he passes deadly final judgment on three people accused and immediately convicted as a murderer, an adulteress and a thief. The narrator contemplates what he has seen, and further, goes to the place where the executed bodies have been thrown, wondering:

Three human beings, who yesterday were in the lap of Life, today fell as victims to Death because they broke the rules of human society. When a man kills another man, the people say he is a murderer, but when the Emir kills him, the Emir is just. When a man robs a monastery, they say he is a thief, but when the Emir robs him of his life, the Emir is honourable. ... Shedding of blood is forbidden, but who made it lawful for the Emir? ... What is Law? Who saw it coming with the sun from the depths of heaven? What human saw the heart of God and found its will or purpose?

The narrator learns the truth about each of the three victims as their loved ones come to mourn them: the murderer killed an attempted rapist in self-defense; the adulteress was a young girl married against her will by her father, whose husband found her during an innocent meeting with the boy she loved since childhood; the thief was a poor farmer whose five starving children cried for food, driving him to steal a bushel of wheat from the monastery where he had worked the fields until they dismissed him. And as the narrator considers the graves before him, he feels "as if the earth that enfolded the victims of oppression in that lonely place were filling my ears with sorrowful tunes of suffering souls, and inspiring me to talk."

Gibran proceeded to talk, to paint, to write, to represent the truth and fight for justice—inspiring his readers, generation after generation, to change. Most amazing is how much he moves us still. Gibran wrote that you can find in one drop of water all the secrets of all the oceans; it follows that in every person there can be found all aspects of existence. There is no place for injustice in that world.


Susan Braudy
New York, New York 2011

TIMELINE

1883
Gibran is born on January 6th to a poor Maronite family in Besharri, a town in what is now northern Lebanon near the famed "Cedars of Lebanon." At the time, Lebanon was a Turkish province under Ottoman rule.

 

1885
Birth of sister Marianna.

 

1887
Birth of sister Sultana.

 

1895
Gibran's father is jailed on charges of graft and his family is left homeless; Gibran, mother Kamila, half-brother Butros, and two sisters emigrate to Boston in the US, leaving his father behind. Kamila makes a living as a peddlar until Butros opens a small shop and supports the family while Kahlil goes to school.

 

1896
Gibran shows talent in drawing classes. Meets Boston art photographer Fred Holland Day, who has a significant artistic impact on Gibran.

 

1897
Gibran returns to Lebanon to continue his Arabic-language education; attends Madrasat-al-Hikmah high school in Beirut, including classes in religion, ethics, Arabic and French languages and literature.

 

1902
Gibran returns to Boston. He loses his sister Sultana and brother Butros to tuberculosis, and his mother Kamila to cancer in the same year.

 

1904
Holds a picture exhibit at Fred Holland Day's studio. Meets Mary Haskell, an American school head mistress who begins to support Gibran financially and with his writing in English: she will spend hours with Gibran going over his wording, correcting his mistakes and suggesting new ideas to his writings; their friendship will endure for Gibran's lifetime.

 

1905
Gibran publishes in Arabic a small pamphlet on "Music" and begins to publish his prose poems in the al-Muhajir ("The Emigrant") newspaper.

 

1906
Publishes Spirit Brides in New York in Arabic. This collection of three short stories reflects his fascination with the Bible, the mystical, the injustice of religious persecution and the nature of love.