The Mountains Behind the Prophet:

 

As someone who read Gibran during my time in Lebanon (excluding “The Prophet”), I recall all types of exaggerations about the poet, including those labeling him a genius, almost prophetic, without daring to explain his limitations to the level that at times I confused him with one of the many Christian Maronite saints, especially when this sect had ordained a large number of saints. Kahlil Gibran’s worldwide success can not be attributed solely to the East or the West. Influenced by both his childhood in Lebanon and the new realms of knowledge that opened up to him in the West, Gibran’s universal voice spoke on experiences that anyone, regardless of nation or creed, could understand. The success of “The Prophet” introduced the writer’s name to global audiences. Since then, the book has sold over 100 million copies worldwide and has been translated into over 100 languages. In his essay, “Before the West, There Was Lebanon: How Was Gibran’s Character Shaped?”, published in Al Quds Al Arabi, Mouloud Benzadi traces some of Gibran’s most major influences to the many years before the writer emigrated to the United States — his childhood in Lebanon.*

 

Gibran should not be understood primarily as a product of the West. Most accounts of Gibran’s life attribute his success to the West, where his work found wide readership and acclaim. While America and the knowledge, tutelage, and opportunities there helped him establish an international platform for his writing, Lebanon provided many of the experiences, images, and ideas that shaped his literary personality.

 

On January 6, 1883, Kahlil Gibran was born in the town of Bsharri in northern Lebanon and spent much of his early childhood surrounded by the region's mountains and valleys. This environment played a significant role in the development of his spiritual life and literary career. From an early age, the young Gibran and his family endured hardship. His father’s gambling and alcoholism brought major debt upon the family, leading to his father’s arrest and the confiscation of their property. Suddenly the family’s only breadwinner, Gibran’s mother, Kamila, worked tirelessly to support her children, selling lace and opening a small shop.

 

Gibran’s early education — at least on a formal level — was sparse. As Benzadi writes, educational opportunities in Bsharri were limited at the end of the 19th century. While some boys received formal education, Gibran was denied the opportunity to learn. Instead, Gibran’s education is better described as self-education; he absorbed all he could from the Maronite priests who visited his home, as well as from a local scholar and physician named Salim Daher, who taught him the basics of Arabic, history, and art. As written in the biographical book “Kahlil Gibran: His Life and World” by Jean Gibran and Kahlil G. Gibran (the cousin and namesake of poet Kahlil Gibran), “The truth remains that his elementary education was never subjected to the discipline of a teacher or the regularity of a classroom, and throughout his life the poet never learned spelling correctly.” According to Benzadi, the poet’s lack of formal education freed him from the rigidity of academic systems, giving him ample space to develop intellectual independence and to interact with sacred texts on a different, arguably deeper level, enriching his writing, sense of rhythm, spiritual depth, and style. Benzadi states that Gibran’s religious style was influenced by his “imperfect command of the language in which writers from around the world…were publishing.” 

 

It is an injustice to the poet to assume that Gibran’s lack of formal education in his earlier years meant that Lebanon did little for him as a writer. Though he lacked formal schooling, he forged a rich intellectual foundation through self-education, religious instruction, mentorship, observation, contemplation, and nature. Additionally, this discredits the education Gibran received in his teenage years. At age 15, after emigrating to the States, Gibran returned to Beirut to attend the Maronite Catholic college, Collège de la Sagesse (Madrasat al-Ḥikmah), where he spent four years studying Arabic literature and French. As Benzadi writes, “There is no doubt that the West opened new horizons for him, broadened his intellectual outlook, and offered opportunities unavailable in his small homeland. But before that, Lebanon had given him the raw material from which he would construct his literary and humanistic vision.”

 

Gibran’s sense of nature and beauty was founded on his childhood in the mountains. Nature became a vast source of inspiration and energy, a key influence in the development of his philosophy. The religious culture of his environment also fostered in him a contemplative disposition and an inquisitiveness about life's deeper meanings. The spiritual language and religious imagination that surrounded his life in the Holy Valley (Qadisha Valley) and its Maronite heritage played a significant role in his later work.

 

Gibran’s early experiences with poverty and deprivation in Lebanon also instilled in him a sense of compassion for humanity and its suffering. He keenly understood suffering, having witnessed and lived through his father’s imprisonment, the family’s financial hardships, and his mother’s struggles. These formative experiences cultivated his compassion and sympathy for the vulnerable, as is expressed in some of his writing: “Poverty is a veil that hides in the face of greatness, and begging is a mask that covers the face of misery.” In the words of Benzadi, “The mountains taught him contemplation and wonder; the hardships of childhood taught him sensitivity and compassion; and the traditions of the valley encouraged him to reflect on questions that extended beyond earthly life.”

 

At the same time, Gibran’s success could not have been possible without the opportunities and guidance he encountered in the West. One of the most prominent influences in Gibran’s life was the photographer, publisher, bibliophile, and patron of the arts and literature, Fred Holland Day, who introduced Gibran to Boston’s avant-garde cultural circles. Day introduced the poet to writers and ideas, including Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Emerson, the Transcendentalists, the Pre-Raphaelites, and more. It was through him that Gibran encountered an entirely new intellectual map and learned about Romanticism, mysticism, symbolism, aestheticism, poetry, and the idea of the artist as an independent cultural figure. Gibran acknowledged Day’s role, as cited in “The Borderless World of Kahlil Gibran” by Piney Kesting, writing, “You, dear Brother, who first opened the eyes of my childhood to light, will give wings to my manhood.”**

 

Gibran also connected with the American poet and dramatist Josephine Preston Peabody, who was an instructor in English at Wellesley College from 1901 to 1903. She had met Gibran, then 15, at an exhibit of Day’s photography in March 1898 and praised the spirituality in Gibran’s drawings, describing him as a “mystic” and “prophet.” Peabody helped introduce Gibran’s work to a wider cultural audience, and it was through her connection that an exhibition of his work was arranged at Wellesley College. It was also Peabody who invited an acquaintance, Mary Haskell, to attend an exhibit of Gibran’s drawings at Day’s studio.

 

Mary Haskell is arguably one of the most acknowledged influences in Gibran’s life. A highly educated woman who had studied literature, philosophy, German, and the sciences at Wellesley, she invested in Gibran’s potential not only by personally helping him with his writing but also by financing his studies at the Académie Julian in Paris. In doing so, she ensured that rather than spending all his energy earning a living, Gibran could instead devote himself to art and writing. The writer constantly struggled with spelling and grammar, as well as learning English and adapting to the academic environment. His relationship with Haskell was collaborative; Haskell helped him as an editor, an intellectual companion, and as a patron. She did not merely correct Gibran’s English, but guided him into finding the answers himself. Gibran supplied the ideas, while she sometimes helped find the English phrasing, but, most importantly, she helped him think through what he was trying to say in English. Haskell encouraged him to write directly in English rather than translate his Arabic thinking into English, helping him achieve a much stronger command over English by the 1920s. Gibran wrote of Haskell in 1914, as cited by Kesting, “You have given me my life in a literal sense…It was not just the money, but the way you gave it, the love you gave it with, and the faith… I wonder sometimes whether ever in history one soul has done for another what you have done for me.”

 

Lebanon supplied the roots from which Kahlil Gibran and his universal voice grew, and from America his branches would extend to reach the furthest edges of the world. The poet’s deep Lebanese origins did not limit his reach but became the foundation from which he drew emotional and imaginative inspiration and material, allowing him to speak to readers across cultures. The memory, landscape, religious culture, imagination, and exposure to suffering that Gibran encountered in Lebanon were just as vital to the writer’s success as the education, artistic networks, English-language development, publication opportunities, and international reach that he met in the United States. Gibran’s universal voice was not born in the West. It grew from a Lebanese childhood intersecting with the Western world, until, soon enough, it became a voice that bypassed all borders.