Nor was working in the short story genre his only contribution. In an American context, Gibran was a neo-Romantic, influenced by Rousseau, Blake, Shelley, Whitman and Yeats, and by a selective reading of Nietzsche. The Romantic agony may have resonated especially well with the expatriate author’s lived experience of homesickness and cultural ambiguity. In Arabic literature, however, there had been no Romantic movement in the nineteenth century. Partially because of the European colonial challenge to culture and politics, from the mid-nineteenth-century Middle Eastern authors had attempted to revive techniques and concerns of the golden age of the medieval Muslim Caliphate. Against this backdrop of Neoclassicism, the new sensibilities of Gibran and others were refreshing, sensitive, and vibrant, and his work helped provoke an unprecedented vogue for Romanticism that lasted three decades.

These stories often depicted a tragic hero opposing the hypocrisies of a culture mired in tradition, protesting against the treatment of women in a highly patriarchal society, the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and the vicissitudes of love. Students of modern Arabic literature have perceived a shift in the early twentieth century from fantastic and melodramatic tales of an episodic nature, centered on fate-driven heroic protagonists, toward realistic stories, often of victims, with more rounded characters and studies in psychological motivation. Social justice and some realist concerns become important.

This shift can be seen within Spirit Brides itself, as one moves from “The Ash of Centuries and the Immortal Flame” to “Yuhanna the Madman.” Gibran is among those responsible for this reorientation. He also broke out of the confining classical style, developing a lovely prose poetry or poetic prose that employed delicate metaphors and similes and a taut concision of expression, inspiring many imitators, most of whom failed to reach his standard.

Gibran’s Romanticism was increasingly wrought up with a sort of Syrian or Syro-Lebanese nationalism. His idyllic depiction of Seleucid Syria in “Ash of Centuries” as vibrant and affluent, in contrast to the poverty-stricken Arab herdsmen and peasants of the Bekaa valley in his own time, makes an incidental statement about past national glory and present decadence.

Without wanting to argue that there is necessarily a direct connection, I wish to point out that Naguib Mahfouz, the 1988 Nobel Laureate from Egypt, began his career in the 1930s writing Romantic nationalist novels in Arabic that were set in Pharaonic Egypt. There is therefore a thematic link, at least, between the Romantic revolution in Arabic letters that Kahlil Gibran helped launch and one phase in the career of Mahfouz, the writer who ultimately succeeded in making modern Arabic literature an inextricable part of world literature.

Juan R. I. Cole
Ann Arbor, Michigan
6 August 1993

The Ash of Centuries and the Immortal Flame

I

Initiation (Autumn, 116 B.C.)

As night grew quiescent life sought repose in the City of the Sun,¹ and lamps were extinguished in the dwellings strewn around the mighty temples that nestled in groves of olive and laurel trees. The moon rose, spilling its rays upon white marble pillars that, looming like titans in the quiet of the night, stood guard over the sacrificial altars of the gods. The columns gazed with wonder and bewilderment toward the towers of Lebanon, perched among rocky debris on the ridges of faraway hills.