Posted on 04/15/2011 7:45:56 PM PDT by BobDobbs1
A century before young men and women took to the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other parts of the Arab world, demanding a new way of life and a new kind of politics, there was young Khalid, calling for a revolution of the spirit, a fusing of Islam and liberalism.
He was the creation of Ameen Rihani, the author of “The Book of Khalid,” the first Arab American novel — and the first English-language novel by any Arab author. Rihani’s masterwork, published exactly 100 years ago, would inspire Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet,” published in 1923 and still one of the best-selling books of all time. (The two authors were friends; Gibran was the illustrator for Rihani’s book.) But “The Book of Khalid,” the uncannily timely story of a young Lebanese immigrant who returns from a life in New York to trigger revolutionary riots in Damascus, has been relegated, along with its author, to relative obscurity in the West.
That is our loss. In the breadth of his literary and political activities, Rihani was the most prominent and influential Arab American cultural figure of the early 20th century. Of Lebanese-Christian descent, he immigrated to the United States in 1888 at age 11,grew up in the Arab quarter known as Little Syria in Lower Manhattan — which eventually became the site of the World Trade Center — and gained American citizenship in 1901. Rihani mastered English and Arabic in his youth and wrote widely in both, publishing essays, poetry, magazine articles, travelogues and novels, many of which are still part of school curricula throughout the Arab world.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Rihani thought that the United States and the Arab world were on the cusp of becoming great powers that would determine the course of global politics.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
BTW, you ignorant piece of troll bait, I own almost all of Gibron’s published works, mostly in hardback, in my personal home “library”.
3,2,1....
That's probably more accurate.
Wahhabism is as democratic as mein kampf
you signed up to post this crap?
Interesting that WaPo is touting the softer ‘intellectual’ side of Islam. If people can hold off long enough to avoid shooting the messenger, maybe you’ll get to discuss the post.
regards,
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