Book 47: Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet [100 Great Books]

Poems on how to live a meaningful life

Published by Knopf in 1923, The Prophet sold out its first edition within a month and has not been out of print since. It has been translated into more than a hundred languages and sold over 100 million copies.

Khalil Gibran was born in 1883 in Bsharri, a town in present-day northern Lebanon, and emigrated as a child to Boston. He wrote in both Arabic and English and belonged to the mahjar, the diaspora generation of Arab writers who reshaped modern Arabic literature from outside the Arab world. This dual position produced a divided reception that persists to this day. In English, Gibran is read as a writer of popular devotional verse held at arm’s length by serious critics; in Arabic, he is treated as an innovator who helped move the tradition toward a freer, more romantic idiom.

The Prophet is a collection of twenty-six prose poems held within a minimal narrative frame. Almustafa, a man who has lived twelve years in the city of Orphalese, prepares to board the ship that will return him home. Before he departs, people ask him to speak on the subjects that compose a life, and he addresses each in turn.

A woman with a baby at her breast asks Almustafa to speak about children. Gibran says that children arrive through the parent but do not originate in the parent. They belong to a future the parent will never enter. The parent may provide love and care but under no circumstances should try to control how the child thinks. The parent is a bow, the child a living arrow, and God the archer who bends the bow and sends the arrow forward. Independence of thought is a key construct of Gibran’s framing of the parent-child relationship. You will find that successful parents in the 21st century do this rather well.

Anyone who has been in love will find both comfort and shock with Gibran’s framing.

Love has no other desire but to fulfil

itself.

But if you love and must needs have

desires, let these be your desires:

To melt and be like a running brook

that sings its melody to the night.

To know the pain of too much tenderness.

To be wounded by your own under-

standing of love;

And to bleed willingly and joyfully.