Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran

K
AHLIL
Gibran is a delight and a surprise and a thoroughly contemporary spiritual guide, and
The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran
represents the most comprehensive volume of his works available. Translated and edited by a noted trio of Gibran scholarsâMartin L. Wolf, Anthony R. Ferris and Andrew Dib Sherfanâthe ten books included in this collectors' volume comprise the major body of Kahlil Gibran's canon.

This enriching collection of his stories, prose poems, personal letters, essays, parables and aphorisms paints an intimate portrait of the man far better than any biography. His writings reflect the wistful beauty and the abiding peace that Eastern wisdom achieves. Yet the author of
The Prophet
sensed the challenge of the old conformity versus the new awakening in the Middle East of his day with startling clarity, and his literary search for beauty and truth led him to stand up against the injustices in his homeland.

For starters, Gibran seems to have understood and cared about women's rights despite the fact that he was a man born in the late 19
^thcentury. Perhaps his passionate advocacy is a result of his close relationship to his strong and caring mother Kamila and to Mary Haskell, his Boston patron and much loved lifelong friend who sent him to Paris to study art. As a child, he'd witnessed the despair of women trapped in loveless arranged marriages in Syria.

Several of his parables in this wondrous collection illustrate the tragic plight of young Middle Eastern women, who have been forced by their families to marry rich, older men. If a young girl rebels and runs away to be with the impoverished young man whom she loves, the woman is cursed and reviled as a whore. Even worse, in Gibran's parable "The Bride's Bed" (based on a true story), the sorrowing young bride named Lyla kills her young beloved Saleem in the garden under a willow tree just hours after she marries her rich old husband surrounded by feasters who soon transform the gay wedding celebration into a coarse and profane orgy of drunkenness. Poor Lyla realizes she had been deceived when she was told her handsome young true love loved another. After killing her young man under the willow tree, she lifts her dagger toward the sky and plants it in her bosom.

Gibran was banished from Lebanon and excommunicated from the Catholic Church as a very young man when he published this account because he ended the tale with a description of a priest's contempt for the bloody young woman and her beloved. The priest shouted to the horrified wedding guests, "Cursed are the hands that touch these blood-spattered carcasses that are soaked with sin... Disperse now, before the flames of hell sting you, and he who remains here shall be cursed and excommunicated from the Church and shall never again enter the temple and join the Christians in offering prayers to God!"

In another parable called "Madam Rose Hanie," he writes passionately of a similar tragedy also set in Lebanon, in which the deserted bridegroom Rashid Bey Namaan becomes bitter, wrinkled and keenly distressed. Nonetheless, once again Gibran sympathizes more with the unhappy young wife:

In the Maronite church, in certain ceremonies, the whole congregation participates, chanting in Syriac, the language Christ spoke. The effect of the Maronite ceremonies remained with Gibran the rest of his life; a letter he wrote in later years acknowledged his debt to the church.

But Gibran does also feel sorry for the miserable rich bridegroom. Gibran had known Rashid Bey Namaan since childhood. Now bitterly suffering, Namaan tells Gibran that he rescued his young beautiful wife from deathly poverty, and made her envied by all other woman for her precious jewels, clothing and magnificent carriages. Why would she betray him to live with another man?

Next Gibran visits the beautiful and sincere Madame Rose Hanie, living in a wretched hovel. 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.

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