The Book of Khalid: A Critical Edition

By Ameen Rihani, Todd Fine, Geoffrey Nash and 7 more

First published in 1911, Ameen Rihani’s Book of Khalid is widely considered the first Arab American novel. The semi autobiographical work chronicles the adventures of two young men, Khalid and Shakib, who leave Lebanon for the United States to find work as peddlers in Lower Manhattan. After mixed success at immersing themselves in American culture, the two return to the Middle East at a time of turmoil following the Young Turk Revolution in the Ottoman Empire. Khalid attempts to integrate his Western experiences with Eastern spiritual values, becoming an absurd, yet all too serious, combination of political revolutionary and prophet. The Book of Khalid offers readers a heady mix of picaresque, philosophical dialogue, and immigrant story.

In this critical edition, Fine includes the text of the original 1911 edition, a substantial glossary, and supplemental essays by leading Rihani scholars. Demonstrating the reach and significance of the work, these essays address a variety of themes, including Rihani’s creative influences, philosophical elements, and the historical context of the novel. Attracting a new generation of readers to Rihani’s innovative work, this edition reveals his continued resonance with contemporary Arab American literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Mar 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9780815653325

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The Book of Khalid

Copyright © 2016 by Syracuse University Press

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First Edition 2016

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Contents

Preface

Introduction TODD FINE

The Book of Khalid

Al-Fatihah

BOOK THE FIRST In the Exchange

To Man

I      Probing the Trivial

II     The City of Baal

III    Via Dolorosa

IV    On the Wharf of Enchantment

V     The Cellar of the Soul

VI    The Summer Afternoon of a Sham

VII   In the Twilight of an Idea

VIII  With the Huris

BOOK THE SECOND In the Temple

To Nature

I      The Dowry of Democracy

II     Subtranscendental

III    The False Dawn

IV    The Last Star

V     Priesto-Parental

VI    Flounces and Ruffles

VII   The Howdaj of Falsehood

VIII  The Kaaba of Solitude

IX    Signs of the Hermit

X     The Vineyard in the Kaaba

BOOK THE THIRD In Kulmakan

To God

I      The Disentanglement of the Me

II     The Voice of the Dawn

III    The Self-Ecstatic

IV    On the Open Highway

V     Union and Progress

VI    Revolutions Within and Without

VII   A Dream of Empire

VIII  Adumbrations

IX    The Stoning and Flight

X     The Desert

Al-Khatimah

List of Emendations

Historical Context

1.The Book of Khalid and Arab American Literature

GEOFFREY NASH

2.Ameen Rihani’s The Book of Khalid in Its Historical and Political Context

CHRISTOPH SCHUMANN

3.Reading The Book of Khalid, Writing Arab American History

HANI J. BAWARDI

Literary Influences

4.The Literary Parentage of The Book of Khalid

A Genealogical Study

LAYLA AL MALEH

5.The Romantic Discourse of Ameen Rihani and Percy Shelley

YOUSSEF M. CHOUEIRI

Themes and Significance

6.Orientalism and Cultural Translation in the Work of Ameen Rihani

WAÏL S. HASSAN

7.Ameen Rihani’s Intercultural Vision

NATHAN C. FUNK

8.The Great City in ar-Rihaniyyat and The Book of Khalid

AMEEN ALBERT RIHANI

9.The Book of Khalid and The Rise of David Levinsky

Comparison as Ethnic Bildungsroman

TODD FINE

Glossary

Works Cited

Contributors

Index

Preface

Immediately after reading the first few pages of the original 1911 edition of The Book of Khalid, in the grand Rose Reading Room of the New York Public Library, I felt a stirring to produce a new edition and to expand the audience for this remarkable work. In a dark period of misunderstanding, confusion, and war, the book showed me an approach to life that was both creative and political, both serious and whimsical. Rihani and his Khalid inspire me each day, and every reading of this work remains relevant, fresh, and moving.

I would like to thank a few key people who helped this critical edition come together. Mary Selden Evans, former executive editor at Syracuse University Press, recognized the importance of this project, and Deanna H. McCay shepherded its long conclusion. Annie Barva did a remarkable job in proofreading, especially in forcing me to consider and justify several deviations from the original text. I would like to thank all members of the Rihani family—Sarmad, Ramzi, May, and Ameen Albert in particular—for their trust and their support over the years. Of course, I would also like to express my gratitude to all of the contributors of the critical chapters. Hani Bawardi and Waïl Hassan were always there for me when I faced any dilemma or had a difficult question. Francesco Medici was a wonderful colleague also interested in clarifying all of the obscure references in the work, and his Italian translation helped me identify some additional needed glossary entries. I would also like to thank my friends Antonio Matias and Ibrahim Azizi for assisting with research, translation, and proofreading. My father, Gary Alan Fine, also kindly helped secure some republication rights.

Finally, I would like to dedicate this new critical edition in memory of one of the contributors, Christoph Schumann, who sadly passed away before its publication. He was an important young scholar of modern Arab politics, and I hope that his interest in Khalid might give his colleagues, friends, and family another insight into his inner life and motivations. There is an automatic camaraderie among the admirers of Ameen Rihani; we feel that in advancing his thinking and his writings we are doing important work, work relevant to the problems of the world today. I assert that Schumann, in his academic pursuits, may have been close to the hidden seed of things.

November 2015

TODD FINE

The Book of Khalid

Introduction

TODD FINE

Although considered the foundational text of Arab American literature (as well as the first Arab American novel and, possibly, the first novel by an Arab in English), Ameen Rihani’s masterpiece The Book of Khalid (1911) has never had a substantial audience—popular or academic. Despite the alignment of its surface narrative with the core American immigration iconography of young men migrating to New York, the work’s unusual style choices and global themes meant the American literary audience of its time could not fully appreciate or embrace it. Rihani’s reputation dissipated in the twentieth century without advocates in academia or the mainstream cultural establishment, so there has been little critical discussion of the work’s merit, especially in the American context. The novel’s very ambition seems a barrier to its complete embrace, even for readers of the highest sophistication, and the reactions of those who do not appreciate its creative influences are frequently confused or negative. In recent years, however, enabled by crucial studies that illuminate the key influence of Thomas Carlyle and Sartor Resartus (1833), a small cohort of scholars of Arab intellectual history have begun to address a diverse array of topics associated with the book and have argued that Rihani’s intellectual project still has tremendous relevance.

With The Book of Khalid’s description of an Arab American encounter and cultural synthesis, floatation of Arabia’s Spring, and urgent political advocacy near the collapse of the Ottoman order, the book encapsulates a moment of great hope that was almost fully stamped out in the twentieth century, culminating in the horrors of September 11, 2001. The repeated American misadventures in the Middle East as well as the sectarian disasters in modern Lebanon and Syria might almost be seen as personal affronts to Rihani’s life efforts motivated by Khalidian dreams. The uncanny echoes are often overwhelming. Therefore, the attacks of September 11 and their ramifications awakened new interest in Rihani, who made cultural interfacing, primarily between the United States and the Arab world the unifying focus of all of his writings and life’s activity. His novel directly engages Islam, considers the link between spirituality and politics, and offers a dramatic vision of what the ideal relations between the United States and an awakened Arab nation could have been at this key juncture in history. At the moment of the novel’s publication, the last time the United States could pretend to an innocence in the Middle East, Rihani presented a remarkably different path for how Arab–American relations—cultural as well as political—could have developed in a century that was ultimately filled with so much disaster.

Since 2001, there have been several academic conferences on Ameen Rihani in the United States, Europe, Australia, and the Arab countries, and a good number of papers and talks in recent years have specifically analyzed the novel. Although not the most gentle introduction, The Book of Khalid provides an entry into almost all strands of Rihani’s literary and political thinking, and Khalid’s mission, both serious and comical, even offers a basis to measure Rihani’s own intentionally heroic life of dedication. In addition, The Book of Khalid’s influence on Arab American literature is undeniable, especially on Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923), which has become a singular cultural phenomenon.

Yet outside of the literary subset of Arab American studies, Rihani, overall the most prominent Arab American public intellectual of the early twentieth century, remains limited as a cultural reference for Arab Americans and almost completely unknown among Americanist literary scholars and critics as an important ethnic writer. It is difficult to assess why a particular literary reputation is marginalized, but various theories include the thorough assimilation of the Arab immigrant cohort in the early twentieth century; Kahlil Gibran’s eclipsing of Rihani in readership and awareness; the diversity of genre in Rihani’s body of work, which constrains easy categorization and reputational advocacy; his aloofness from other Arab American writers and intellectuals; and Arab intellectuals’ inability to appreciate his Americanism.

Motivated by the centennial anniversary of the novel’s publication in 2011, this edition’s task is to bring key scholarly contributions together to assist new readers and to explicate difficult references in the text. The critical chapters are divided into three groups: the historical and political context (assisting student readers in particular); Rihani’s literary influences; and the work’s themes and significance. Rihani sets a high standard for his audience by including significant foreign vocabulary and numerous obscure political and literary allusions, and easing the reader into the work has been seen as crucial for it to be deployed in introductory Arab American studies classes or ethnic and immigration literature classes. The complexity of Rihani’s style and content, however, should not be mistaken for impenetrable thought, and the value of the critical edition should not be expressed as correcting any flaws. I chose not to change any language or adapt the text, despite occasional recommendations to do so. Rihani acknowledges the highly personal nature of the work and its diversion from the expected interests of his Western audience (especially with the decision to return the characters to Lebanon), and he suggests, in the final paragraph, that the reader judge us not severely (1911, 309; p. 252).¹ After all, the book ultimately exhorts us to write our own book in life, letting all of our creative drives and idiosyncrasies be expressed freely, while even burning other guide books after consuming them.

A key response to the common criticism of Rihani’s style is that the obscurity of his references may be, as a modern technological metaphor suggests, not a bug but a feature. The barrage of obscure references bolsters the book’s purported authenticity as the discovered work of an eccentric foreign author, and understanding all of these references is not required to process the work imaginatively as an unusual found document. Rihani engages many complex themes, sometimes more for his own personal catharsis and for posterity than for immediate American audiences, and he may have wanted to select a style that would not insult commercial readers but rather encourage them to forgive the curious narrative and indulge the writer. Alongside its slabbering of [American] slang (1911, v; p. 17), as Rihani conceded, its complex and archaic vocabulary does not seem overdone when the work is directly compared to its model, Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, as Layla Al Maleh details in chapter 4, looking at both style and themes. Youssef Choueiri in chapter 5 further advances its influence by specific romantic poetry (Percy Shelley’s in particular) that was, like Carlyle, becoming less relevant in Western literary influence yet inspired Rihani and his fellow immigrant (mahjar or exile) writers.

Through its reliance on Carlyle, transcendentalist writers, and romantic poets, the book may represent an ambition to merge Rihani’s work-in-progress Arab philosophical stance and worldview with specific Western philosophical currents that were no longer popular in Rihani’s time. Yet we should not treat its anachronistic elements as indicating intellectual immaturity or invalidity. Rihani was largely and admirably self-taught, and if he were inevitably and patronizingly treated as an exotic foreigner from a land with a different way of thinking, can we blame him for establishing his East–West philosophical synthesis on his own, even passé, terms? Given present-day concerns about technology and excessive symbolic abstraction, Rihani’s focus on authentic, direct experience, following transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, seems quite current. Collecting the strands of scholarship that provide the core stylistic and ideological background to the text offers a basis to treat the work seriously, with the hope that this new edition will stimulate further critical interpretation.

For Rihani, though, the political themes were deadly serious at this dual turning point—with transformation in the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire due to the Arab Awakening and the Young Turk Revolution and with the rise of the United States as a world power—and he may have felt that Khalid’s fantasy of threading these emergent geopolitical forces (the Arab nation and American global power) through some higher-level, redemptive, and dialectical synthesis was required to prevent an impending disaster. This uncanny feeling of desperate yet comical necessity in the novel and its reassertion in all of Rihani’s writings and advocacy are what may give contemporary Rihani scholarship an echo of his own urgency and advocacy. During the book’s development, Rihani expressed the extraordinary hope that he would offer the world a work he overtly assigned with a purpose no less encompassing than that of the prophet-ancestors of the hero (Rihani 2011, p. 17). The uncertainty Khalid feels and that the fictionalized Editor reports in a sometimes mocking tone may parallel the uncertainty Rihani felt about his own position—in life, in high-level politics, as well as in literary stature. Khalid states that he fears that if he does not speak as his country’s chosen voice, she will be dumb forever (1911, 128; p. 105). Despite Rihani’s subtle and self-doubting philosophical vision, which Geoffrey Nash describes in chapter 1 in comparison to Gibran’s simple and direct prophetic message, his life activities, justified by his declarations in ar-Rihaniyyat (The Rihani Essays) and interest in Carlyle’s study Heroes and Hero Worship (1841), lead us to believe that he felt the need to overcome his fears and steel himself to have a real—both pragmatic and visionary—impact on the world.

As Rihani was writing The Book of Khalid, he was advancing concrete philosophical propositions in Arabic-language essays that Ameen Albert Rihani addresses in a comparative context in chapter 8. Yet while discussing art, spirituality, the role of the intellectual, and nature, he also argued fiercely, in public speeches and in essays in both Western and Middle Eastern newspapers and journals, for specific as well as broad institutional and political changes in the Ottoman Empire, Syria, and Lebanon. In chapter 2, Christoph Schumann thoroughly summarizes the political context in which Rihani was situated, helping readers understand his priorities. Yet although Rihani developed the cultural caché to take on central political and philosophical questions in Arabic, in the American context his writing had to be more oblique. Rihani’s core, quite personal goal with the Khalid book might have been to process and explain the essentially American origins of his emerging position as a unique political philosopher in an Arabic-language cultural scene that bridged Beirut, Cairo, Paris, and New York. A secondary benefit was the production of an independent creative work that would be acknowledged in America as the curious and remarkable accomplishment of a talent, no matter the reception of its ideas. So Rihani refused to ground his themes in his audience’s assumed desires, and this personal facet of his style is quite stubborn.

The work’s carefree disregard, totalizing ambition, and abandonment of social convention mirror the decisions that made Rihani one of the first Arab American figures to lead a creative life, a choice that Khalid echoes in his resolution to renounce business (even burning his peddling cart) and ignore his family’s advice. Ameen Fares Rihani was born in Freike, a small town in Mount Lebanon, in 1876. He immigrated to New York at age eleven with his uncle ‘Abduh and his tutor, Naoum Mokarzel, and was followed by the rest of his family a year later. Their migration was part of a substantial, primarily Christian (Maronite, Melkite, and Antiochian Orthodox) wave from the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century. Various theories have suggested that this migration was driven by a decline in the silk industry owing to Chinese competition after the opening of the Suez Canal, the desire to avoid the conscription of young men into the Ottoman military, and fears of religious conflict sparked by the Maronite–Druze violence of the 1860s. In New York, Rihani’s father, Ferris (Fares), and his uncle used the existing capital from their silk factory in Lebanon to become importer-exporter merchants of jewelry and other dry goods. Ameen went to school at various intervals and learned English, but he also spent a great deal of time serving the family business. They lived and worked on Washington Street in the Syrian Quarter of Manhattan that Rihani mentions in The Book of Khalid.

As a child, Rihani was an avid reader of Western literature, including William Shakespeare, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Washington Irving. And so, just as Khalid denies his dual Syrian and American money-making "êthos (1911, 131; p. 108), the young Rihani decided not to go into his father’s business and left home at the age of eighteen to join a traveling Shakespearean theater group known as the Henry Jewett Players. He returned to New York when the group was stranded in Kansas City and enrolled in law school after determining a new career path in discussion with his father. Yet after one year of study Rihani withdrew from the school and traveled back to Lebanon in 1897—purportedly to recover from a lung illness, though it is clear that a law career would not fit his sensibilities. These bildungsroman-like dilemmas for Rihani—the personal sacrifices of the creative life, the social capital of formal education, the drudgery of normal work" for defiant personalities, and the overwhelming monetary imperative and pressure in the United States—clearly also shape Khalid’s growth in this quite autobiographical work, which is analyzed as a bildungsroman in chapter 9.

While in Lebanon, Rihani taught English at a Maronite Catholic seminary and studied formal Arabic, which awakened in him an interest in Arabic literature and created a foundation for him to participate in the creative expressions of the Arabic nahda (renaissance) cultural movement that thrived in Cairo and Beirut, relative centers of intellectual openness in the Ottoman domain. After returning to the United States in 1899, Rihani began to establish himself as an intellectual within the growing Arab American community, commenting on political, religious, and social questions—for example, religious reform, Arab nationalism, and even feminism—in speeches, pamphlets, and newspaper articles. The penning of an Arabic-language parable that critiqued religious institutions and sectarianism, The Triple Alliance in the Animal Kingdom (1903), caused Rihani to be excommunicated from the Maronite church. The work was even reportedly burned several times by outraged community members.

In his twenties, Rihani published poetry in both English and Arabic, notably introducing free-verse poetry into Arabic in 1905, influenced especially by Walt Whitman. In 1903, he published his first book in English, a translation entitled The Quatrains of Abu’l-Ala, selections from the work of the tenth- and eleventh-century blind Syrian skeptical philosopher and poet Abu al-‘Ala’ al-Ma‘arri. As Waïl Hassan mentions in chapter 6, translating the work of an Islamic advocate of reason and skepticism into English signaled Rihani’s lifelong public project of bridging East and West and of subverting and merging their literary forms and conventions.

In 1905, Rihani returned to Lebanon for an extremely productive period, living and working in his family home in Freike—inspired especially by its natural setting. There he wrote The Book of Khalid as well as a collection of Arabic essays titled ar-Rihaniyyat, or The Rihani Essays, which deals with many of the same themes as Khalid and was published one year earlier, in 1910. For example, Khalid’s Great City declaration parallels a speech Rihani gave in 1909 that he included in the essay collection. In chapter 8, Ameen Albert Rihani details these links and advances the essential characteristics of Rihani’s ideal.

The Book of Khalid was written in the Middle East during the period of Arab unrest against the Ottoman Empire that accompanied the Young Turk Revolution, and Rihani must have felt compelled to veer away from New York into the politics of the Arab world. In the years after the publication of the novel, with political earthquakes surrounding World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Rihani became an increasingly well-known public intellectual in the United States, writing about Arab politics and culture for major American periodicals and cultivating political contacts for lobbying. In chapter 3, Hani Bawardi details Arab Americans’ political preoccupations in this period as they connect with Rihani’s agenda. Rihani’s overarching creative project was forced to respond to immediate and urgent political developments that he felt uniquely placed to affect, both by promoting grand bargains with the emerging Arab political leaders and by suggesting limited and pragmatic compromises that his knowledge of the American political system could assist in achieving. While he continued to work on several manuscripts of novels and short stories in English, they remained unpublished in the West. Instead, a series of English-language nonfiction travelogues (related to Arabic-language counterparts) about journeys through the Arabian Peninsula and meetings with the Arab emirs met success with publishers and popular audiences in the 1920s and 1930s.

Back in 1911, though, The Book of Khalid, with its idiosyncrasies and personal preoccupations, faced many challenges. The thirty-four-year-old Rihani felt that he was lucky to have the work published at all by a prominent press, and it was his first book-length work in English that was not poetry. The publishers at Dodd, Mead, and Co. reportedly were willing to take a chance on this newcomer because of the work’s unusual and extraordinary content, unlike anything they had ever seen, but they were quite uncertain what its market would be and were willing to risk a loss. Dodd, Mead attempted to promote the novel as an analysis of American institutions by an immigrant, a work about America, although it has rarely been read in this context since the era of its publication.

Summarizing this treatment, the back book jacket advertisement reads:

Americans know, in a general way, what we think of the Immigrant, but what does the Immigrant think of us? For example, if the dark-eyed, swarthy gentleman who presides over a pushcart heaped high with oranges, figs, peaches, etc., were to break forth into excellent English and give a clear, spirited, carefully considered and telling criticism of America, Americans, our manners, habits, institutions, and even our politics and philosophy, wouldn’t we listen? Of course we would. Read then, and enjoy the book of Khalid, who was born, raised and educated on the slopes of Mt. Lebanon, who entered the Land of the Free through the dingy port of Ellis Island, and who learned to know America by the painful but instructive process of beginning at the bottom and working upward. In due course of time he began a book about US, which was finished near the Cedars of Lebanon. It is a book which WE can undoubtedly read with interest and profit—a frank, free and striking criticism of the Occident by the Orient, of the native-born American by the newcomer. More entertaining and profitable by far than most books about foreign countries by American travelers is this unusual and remarkable book about America by a foreign traveler. (Rihani 1911, emphasis in original)

The book’s several reviewers in American newspapers focused primarily on spiritual and exotic aspects of Rihani as an Arab writer in America. No matter what dialogue Rihani might have hoped to prompt, the work’s engagement with larger questions of Arab nationalism as well as its nascent and subtle critique of Orientalism, detailed by Waïl Hassan in chapter 6, were lost on its commentators. Hassan remarks that at the time of the book’s publication it is not clear if there were anyone in the world, besides Rihani himself, truly equipped to appreciate its larger themes and its extensive imported Arabic terminology.

Playing with and combining Western and Arabic literary conventions and styles, Rihani elevated the work’s philosophical objectives and denied that it should be considered a novel at all. When he was interviewed by the New York Sun, he struggled to define its classification:

Just what is the nature of the work? I can scarcely say, and he looks worried at the idea of having to nail down an artistic creation with a literal term. It is a sort of romance in philosophy, if you understand what I mean by that.

It is not fiction, though written in the narrative form. It takes the Khalid through phases of American life, and reveals it as it appears to his Oriental eyes. . . .

And fiction, he was asked, do you ever intend writing that?

Mr. Rihani smiled.

Who knows? he replied. The Khalid at the end of my book meets a lady who belongs to a cult of thinkers in the East: she has her views and he has his views. I have written no novel as yet. But who knows what situation may develop? (A Syrian Poet in New York 1911)

The Editor, when apologizing for not describing the features of Khalid’s adored cousin Najma, states, Gentle Reader, this Work is neither a Novel, nor a Passport. And we are exceeding sorry we can not tell you anything about the colour and size of Najma’s eyes; the shape and curves of her brows and lips; the tints and shades in her cheeks; and the exact length of her figure and hair (1911, 156; p. 124). The work often lacks descriptive detail of particular characters and settings (although the emotional energy of the broad environments are well described, as are the natural locales), and Rihani may have wanted to avoid such details that might distract from his philosophical message. Khalid, by means of his own paltry level of description, becomes a universal figure through whom readers can embody and channel their own idealistic and rebellious impulses. Furthermore, coyly supporting the illusion that The Book of Khalid is indeed a discovered work, not a romance or a novel, supports Rihani’s efforts to make this book seem curious and unique for potential readers, linking it to the picaresque tradition of Don Quixote (1605) and other earlier works. Scholars (as well as the Rihani family’s publishing house) have largely ignored these preferences in classification and have called it a novel, as a book-length narrative that follows fictional characters, and the definition seems to fit well enough for most people. Although the book has didactic elements and explores philosophical issues, it seems to match the novel better than a traditional philosophical dialogue. However, it is such a summation of Rihani’s ideas and own personal development that he may have been reluctant to advance it as just another novel for entertainment.

Rihani’s success in having the novel published set the stage for a wider movement of Arab American writers to publish analogous book-length works in English. In 1914, Syrian minister Abraham Mitrie Rihbany published an autobiography called A Far Journey, which more closely met the American interest in authentic descriptions of life in the Holy Land and of the iconic journey to America. And Kahlil Gibran, with The Madman (1918), The Forerunner (1920), and The Prophet (1923), channeled the purported spiritual wisdom of the East into didactic works that fit Western sensibilities and gave reinterpreted Christian ideals an exotic imprint. Before Rihani returned to New York in 1910, Gibran and Rihani had met in Paris and London (leading to Gibran’s agreement to illustrate The Book of Khalid). Gibran considered Rihani an important mentor, and Gibran scholars such as Suheil Bushrui have argued that The Prophet is hard to imagine without The Book of Khalid; in chapter 1, Geoffrey Nash details the comparison. Rihani’s own ideas about the East–West and Arab–American cultural, religious, and philosophical encounters are advanced more programmatically in The Path of Vision, an essay collection published in 1921.

The Book of Khalid, even as a quite early work, is an Arab American text that may thwart the Orientalism discourse, illuminated by Edward Said (1978), that has tarred some contemporary academic reception of the mahjar literature, although Gibran has taken a larger hit than Rihani. In chapter 6, Hassan concludes that Rihani, because of his acceptance of the essentialized East–West binary, does not escape Gibran’s more blatant Orientalist failures. The Book of Khalid is complicated because these stereotypes are stretched to the point of absurdity, so Rihani did subvert these categories even as he was trapped by their overwhelming power in Western discourse. Moreover, he did believe that an aggressive materialism was out of control in the United States and its great metropolises, and throughout his life he sought to express how his Eastern sensibilities, aware of the fall of many past empires, might temper this excess. However, such positive Orientalisms are still problematic even as a globalized and cosmopolitan world embraces cultural exchange. In chapter 7, Nathan Funk assesses whether Rihani succeeds in defining his own cosmopolitan vision of cultural synthesis.

Rihani’s novel also provides a unique document of early Arab immigration to the United States. The eventual proximity of the World Trade Center complex to the district of Lower Manhattan known as Little Syria or the Syrian Quarter, where much of the first section of the novel takes place, has generated new interest in this neglected history. The Book of Khalid is one of the few English literary works that depicts the early history of Arabs in the United States, and therefore it offers an educational window into the past with its imagery of entry to Ellis Island and of passage by ship. Although sociological observation is not the novel’s focus, Rihani does offer some interesting details about the route to the United States (referred to as the Via Dolorosa in chapter 3 of book 1), the worries of being excluded from Ellis Island because of disease, and the flooding of the immigrants’ cellar abodes in Lower Manhattan. These aspects of The Book of Khalid are important given the general lack of scholarship on Arab American immigration. Chapter 9 explores whether this immigration focus might enable some comparative treatment of the novel with Jewish and other ethnic fiction.

Unlike most classical immigration fiction, the novel does not problematize the issue of assimilation. Khalid is willing to experience America fully in all of its variety, even, we might say, assimilating it quickly and entirely in his own way. He refuses to instrumentalize America as a means to a financial end, as his friend Shakib does, and he wants first to engage and understand it. Irfan Shahid has argued that it was the very Americanism of Rihani’s work that set him somewhat apart from the other Lebanese and Syrian writers in the Pen League literary society of New York (1988, 5–7). Rihani felt, perhaps similarly to Khalid, that it was his becoming one hundred percent [American] that could enable him to engage the problems of the nation of his birth without guilt or feelings of divided loyalties (1975, 8, translation by Ameen Albert Rihani).

Finally, with Khalid announcing the beginning of Arabia’s Spring (1911, 316; p. 230), Rihani articulates a vision that revolution ultimately requires a spiritual transformation, supported by proper education, to succeed. This path is hard to accept in our cynical age, but, with the disastrous setbacks of the still-unfolding Arab Spring, some admirers of Rihani nevertheless see his views as persuasive. Suheil Bushrui of the University of Maryland, well-known scholar of Kahlil Gibran, cautions readers of the novel not to focus excessively on political allusions to contemporary concerns but first to take Rihani’s promptings on spirituality to heart (2013, 28). The Book of Khalid is not a programmatic or ideological call for explicit action, but it encourages the reader to undertake, like Khalid, an introspective journey to foster, as the result of many individual transformations, a new civilization based on fundamental principles of Light, Love, and Will (1911, 247–48; pp. 183–84). Rihani’s call for a return to moral and spiritual principles and basic virtue, grounded in our natural souls, is still relevant, and it is striking that Rihani situates his dream precisely at the point of contact between the United States and the Arab world.

In a globalizing world that values hybridity and cosmopolitanism, The Book of Khalid has become uncannily relevant and contemporary. Khalid’s temporary stay in a flooded cellar in the great global symbol that is New York City could even be said to be a metaphor for globalization itself. Today we might say that all young people, satellite-television-watching Arabs in particular, visit America and New York as symbolic destinations with their simultaneous cultural and economic attraction and repulsion. And the United States can still maintain the claim to have a universal message—for good or ill.

The apparent march toward apocalyptic disaster after September 11, 2001, and the dearth of global leadership that has any historical perspective have led scholars to return to Rihani as a crucial figure whom Georgetown professor Irfan Shahid calls the apostle of the Arab-American relationship (2010). Although we might be tempted to instrumentalize Rihani’s legacy for political objectives, the most important favor a society can do for a writer, as Rihani requests of us in several essays on the role of the author and intellectual, is first to engage his work honestly and seriously. Admirers of The Book of Khalid pray that Khalid’s vision of an Americanism based in cultural synthesis, creativity, courage, and universal love might still become a balm for the world and for Arab–American relations in particular. We are not ready to burn this book.

1. Citations to The Book of Khalid in this introduction and in the critical essays include both the page number in the 1911 edition and the page number in this new edition. The few differences between this edition and the 1911 edition are noted in List of Emendations, following The Book of Khalid.

THE BOOK OF KHALID

Al-Fatihah

In the Khedivial Library of Cairo, among the Papyri of the Scribe of Amen-Ra and the beautifully illuminated copies of the Korân, the modern Arabic Manuscript which forms the subject of this Book, was found. The present Editor was attracted to it by the dedication and the rough drawings on the cover; which, indeed, are as curious, if not as mystical, as ancient Egyptian symbols. One of these is supposed to represent a New York Skyscraper in the shape of a Pyramid, the other is a dancing group under which is written: The Stockbrokers and the Dervishes. And around these symbols, in Arabic circlewise, these words:—"And this is my Book, the Book of Khalid, which I dedicate to my Brother Man, my Mother Nature, and my Maker God."

Needless to say we asked at once the Custodian of the Library to give us access to this Book of Khalid, and after examining it, we hired an amanuensis to make a copy for us. Which copy we subsequently used as the warp of our material; the woof we shall speak of in the following chapter. No, there is nothing in this Work which we can call ours, except it be the Loom. But the weaving, we assure the Reader, was a mortal process; for the material is of such a mixture that here and there the raw silk of Syria is often spun with the cotton and wool of America. In other words, the Author dips his antique pen in a modern inkstand, and when the ink runs thick, he mixes it with a slabbering of slang. But we started to write an Introduction, not a Criticism. And lest we end by writing neither, we give here what is more to the point than anything we can say: namely, Al-Fatihah, or the Opening Word of Khalid himself.

With supreme indifference to the classic Arabic proem, he begins by saying that his Book is neither a Memoir nor an Autobiography, neither a Journal nor a Confession.

Orientals, says he, "seldom adventure into that region of fancy and fabrication so alluring to European and American writers; for, like the eyes of huris, our vanity is soft and demure. This then is a book of travels in an impalpable country, an enchanted country, from which we have all risen, and towards which we are still rising. It is, as it were, the chart and history of one little kingdom of the Soul,—the Soul of a philosopher, poet and criminal. I am all three, I swear, for I have lived both the wild and the social life. And I have thirsted in the desert, and I have thirsted in the city: the springs of the former were dry; the water in the latter was frozen in the pipes. That is why, to save my life, I had to be an incendiary at times, and at others a footpad. And whether on the streets of knowledge, or in the open courts of love, or in the parks of freedom, or in the cellars and garrets of thought and devotion, the only saki that would give me a drink without the asking was he who called himself Patience. . . .

"And so, the Book of Khalid was written. It is the only one I wrote in this world, having made, as I said, a brief sojourn in its civilised parts. I leave it now where I wrote it, and I hope to write other books in other worlds. Now understand, Allah keep and guide thee, I do not leave it here merely as a certificate of birth or death. I do not raise it up as an epitaph, a trade-sign, or any other emblem of vainglory or lucre; but truly as a propylon through which my race and those above and below my race, are invited to pass to that higher Temple of mind and spirit. For we are all tourists, in a certain sense, and this world is the most ancient of monuments. We go through life as those pugreed-solar-hatted-Europeans go through Egypt. We are pestered and plagued with guides and dragomans of every rank and shade;—social and political guides, moral and religious dragomans: a Tolstoy here, an Ibsen there, a Spencer above, a Nietzche below. And there thou art left in perpetual confusion and despair. Where wilt thou go? Whom wilt thou follow?

"Or wilt thou tarry to see the work of redemption accomplished? For Society must be redeemed, and many are the redeemers. The Cross, however, is out of fashion, and so is the Dona Dulcinea motive. Howbeit, what an array of Masters and Knights have we, and what a variety! The work can be done, and speedily, if we could but choose. Wagner can do it with music; Bakunin, with dynamite; Karl Marx, with the levelling rod; Haeckel, with an injection of protoplasmic logic; the Pope, with a pinch of salt and chrism; and the Packer-Kings of America, with pork and beef. What wilt thou have? Whom wilt thou employ? Many are the applicants, many are the guides. But if they are all going the way of Juhannam, the Beef-packer I would choose. For verily, a gobbet of beef on the way were better than canned protoplasmic logic or bottled salt and chrism. . . .

"No; travel not on a Cook’s ticket; avoid the guides. Take up thy staff and foot it slowly and leisurely; tarry wherever thy heart would tarry. There is no need of hurrying, O my Brother, whether eternal Juhannam or eternal Jannat await us yonder. Come; if thou hast not a staff, I have two. And what I have in my Scrip I will share with thee. But turn thy back to the guides; for verily we see more of them than of the ruins and monuments. Verily, we get more of the Dragomans than of the Show. Why then continue to move and remove at their command?—Take thy guidebook in hand and I will tell thee what is in it.

No; the time will come, I tell thee, when every one will be his own guide and dragoman. The time will come when it will not be necessary to write books for others, or to legislate for others, or to make religions for others: the time will come when every one will write his own Book in the Life he lives, and that Book will be his code and his creed;—that Life-Book will be the palace and cathedral of his Soul in all the Worlds.

BOOK THE FIRST

In the Exchange

To Man

To Man

No matter how good thou art, O my Brother, or how bad thou art, no matter how high or how low in the scale of being thou art, I still would believe in thee, and have faith in thee, and love thee. For do I not know what clings to thee, and what beckons to thee? The claws of the one and the wings of the other, have I not felt and seen? Look up, therefore, and behold this World-Temple, which, to us, shall be a resting-place, and not a goal. On the border-line of the Orient and Occident it is built, on the mountain-heights overlooking both. No false gods are worshipped in it,—no philosophic, theologic, or anthropomorphic gods. Yea, and the god of the priests and prophets is buried beneath the Fountain, which is the altar of the Temple, and from which flows the eternal spirit of our Maker—our Maker who blinketh when the Claws are deep in our flesh, and smileth when the Wings spring from our Wounds. Verily, we are the children of the God of Humour, and the Fountain in His Temple is ever flowing. Tarry, and refresh thyself, O my Brother, tarry, and refresh thyself.

KHALID.

I

Probing the Trivial

The most important in the history of nations and individuals was once the most trivial, and vice versa. The plebeian, who is called to-day the man-in-the-street, can never see and understand the significance of the hidden seed of things, which in time must develop or die. A garter dropt in the ballroom of Royalty gives birth to an Order of Knighthood; a movement to reform the spelling of the English language, initiated by one of the presidents of a great Republic, becomes eventually an object of ridicule. Only two instances to illustrate our point, which is applicable also to time-honoured truths and moralities. But no matter how important or trivial these, he who would give utterance to them must do so in cap and bells, if he would be heard nowadays. Indeed, the play is always the thing; the frivolous is the most essential, if only as a disguise.—For look you, are we not too prosperous to consider seriously your ponderous preachment? And when you bring it to us in book form, do you expect us to take it into our homes and take you into our hearts to boot?—Which argument is convincing even to the man in the barn.

But the Author of the Khedivial Library Manuscript can make his Genius dance the dance of the seven veils, if you but knew. It is to be regretted, however, that he has not mastered the most subtle of arts, the art of writing about one’s self. He seldom brushes his wings against the dust or lingers among the humble flowers close to the dust: he does not follow the masters in their entertaining trivialities and fatuities. We remember that even Gibbon interrupts the turgid flow of his spirit to tell us in his Autobiography that he really could, and often did, enjoy a game of cards in the evening. And Rousseau, in a suppurative passion, whispers to us in his Confessions that he even kissed the linen of Madame de Warens’ bed when he was alone in her room. And Spencer devotes whole pages in his dull and ponderous history of himself to narrate the all-important narration of his constant indisposition,—to assure us that his ill health more than once threatened the mighty task he had in hand. These, to be sure, are most important revelations. But Khalid here misses his cue. Inspiration does not seem to come to him in firefly-fashion.

He would have done well, indeed, had he studied the method of the professional writers of Memoirs, especially those of France. For might he not then have discoursed delectably on The Romance of my Stick Pin, The Tragedy of my Sombrero, The Scandal of my Red Flannel, The Conquest of my Silk Socks, The Adventures of my Tuxedo, and such like? But Khalid is modest only in the things that pertain to the outward self. He wrote of other Romances and other Tragedies. And when his Genius is not dancing the dance of the seven veils, she is either flirting with the monks of the Lebanon hills or setting fire to something in New York. But this is not altogether satisfactory to the present Editor, who, unlike the Author of the Khedivial Library MS., must keep the reader in mind. ’Tis very well to endeavour to unfold a few of the mysteries of one’s palingenesis, but why conceal from us his origin? For is it not important, is it not the fashion at least, that one writing his own history should first expatiate on the humble origin of his ancestors and the distant obscure source of his genius? And having done this, should he not then tell us how he behaved in his boyhood; whether or not he made anklets of his mother’s dough for his little sister; whether he did not kindle the fire with his father’s Korân; whether he did not walk under the rainbow and try to reach the end of it on the hill-top; and whether he did not write verse when he was but five years of age. About these essentialities Khalid is silent. We only know from him that he is a descendant of the brave sea-daring Phœnicians—a title which might be claimed with justice even by the aborigines of Yucatan—and that he was born in the city of Baalbek, in the shadow of the great Heliopolis, a little way from the mountain-road to the Cedars of Lebanon. All else in this direction is obscure.

And the K. L. MS., which we kept under our pillow for thirteen days and nights, was beginning to worry us. After all, might it not be a literary hoax, we thought, and might not this Khalid be a myth. And yet, he does not seem to have sought any material or worldly good from the writing of his Book. Why, then, should he resort to deception? Still, we doubted. And one evening we were detained by the sandomancer, or sand-diviner, who was sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk in front of the mosque. I know your mind, said he, before we had made up our mind to consult him. And mumbling his abracadabra over the sand spread on a cloth before him, he took up his bamboo-stick and wrote therein—Khalid! This was amazing. And I know more, said he. But after scouring the heaven, he shook his head regretfully and wrote in the sand the name of one of the hasheesh-dens of Cairo. Go thither; and come to see me again to-morrow evening. Saying which, he folded his sand-book of magic, pocketed his fee, and walked away.

In that hasheesh-den,—the reekiest, dingiest of the row in the Red Quarter,—where the etiolated intellectualities of Cairo flock after midnight, the name of Khalid evokes much resounding wit, and sarcasm, and laughter.

You mean the new Muhdi, said one, offering us his chobok of hasheesh; smoke to his health and prosperity. Ha, ha, ha.

And the chorus of laughter, which is part and parcel of a hasheesh jag, was tremendous. Every one thereupon had something to say on the subject. The contagion could not be checked. And Khalid was called the dervish of science by one; the rope-dancer of nature by another.

Our Prophet lived in a cave in the wilderness of New York for five years, remarked a third.

And he sold his camel yesterday and bought a bicycle instead.

The Young Turks can not catch him now.

Ah, but wait till England gets after our new Muhdi.

Wait till his new phthisic-stricken wife dies.

Whom will our Prophet marry, if among all the virgins of Egypt we can not find a consumptive for him?

And when he pulls down the pyramids to build American Skyscrapers with their stones, where shall we bury then our Muhdi?

All of which, although mystifying to us, and depressing, was none the less reassuring. For Khalid, it seems, is not a myth. No; we can even see him, we are told, and touch him, and hear him speak.

Shakib the poet, his most intimate friend and disciple, will bring you into the sacred presence.

You can not miss him, for he is the drummer of our new Muhdi, ha, ha, ha!

And this Shakib was then suspended and stoned. But their humour, like the odor and smoke of gunjah (hasheesh), was become stifling. So, we lay our chobok down; and, thanking them for the entertainment, we struggle through the rolling reek and fling to the open air.

In the grill-room of the Mena House we meet the poet Shakib, who was then drawing his inspiration from a glass of whiskey and soda. Nay, he was drowning his sorrows therein, for his Master, alas! has mysteriously disappeared.

I have not seen him for ten days, said the Poet; and I know not where he is.—If I did? Ah, my friend, you would not then see me here. Indeed, I should be with him, and though he be in the trap of the Young Turks. And some real tears flowed down the cheeks of the Poet, as he spoke.

The Mena House, a charming little Branch of Civilisation at the gate of the desert, stands, like man himself, in the shadow of two terrible immensities, the Sphinx and the Pyramid, the Origin and the End. And in the grill-room, over a glass of whiskey and soda, we presume to solve in few words the eternal mystery. But that is not what we came for. And to avoid the bewildering depths into which we were led, we suggested a stroll on the sands. Here the Poet waxed more eloquent, and shed more tears.

This is our favourite haunt, said he; here is where we ramble, here is where we loaf. And Khalid once said to me, ‘In loafing here, I work as hard as did the masons and hod-carriers who laboured on these pyramids.’ And I believe him. For is not a book greater than a pyramid? Is not a mosque or a palace better than a tomb? An object is great in proportion to its power of resistance to time and the elements. That is why we think the pyramids are great. But see, the desert is greater than the pyramids, and the sea is greater than the desert, and the heavens are greater than the sea. And yet, there is not in all these that immortal intelligence, that living, palpitating soul, which you find in a great book. A man who conceives and writes a great book, my friend, has done more work than all the helots that laboured on these pyramidal futilities. That is why I find no exaggeration in Khalid’s words. For when he loafs, he does so in good earnest. Not like the camel-driver there or the camel, but after the manner of the great thinkers and mystics: like Al-Fared and Jelal’ud-Deen Rumy, like Socrates and St. Francis of Assisi, Khalid loafs. For can you escape being reproached for idleness by merely working? Are you going to waste your time and power in useless unproductive labour, carrying dates to Hajar (or coals to Newcastle, which is the English equivalent), that you might not be called an idler, a loafer?

Indeed not, we reply; for the Poet taking in the sea, or the woods, or the starry-night, the poet who might be just sharing the sunshine with the salamander, is as much a labourer as the stoker or the bricklayer.

And with a few more such remarks, we showed our friend that, not being of india-rubber, we could not but expand under the heat of his grandiosity.

We then make our purpose known, and Shakib is overjoyed. He offers to kiss us for the noble thought.

"Yes, Europe should know Khalid better, and only through you and me can this be done. For you can not properly understand him, unless you read the Histoire Intime, which I have just finished. That will give you les dessous de cartes of his character."

"Les dessous—and the Poet who intersperses his Arabic with fancy French, explains.—The lining, the ligaments.—Ah, that is exactly what we want."

And he offers to let us have the use of his Manuscript, if we link his name with that of his illustrious Master in this Book. To which we cheerfully agree. For after all, what’s in a name?

On the following day, lugging an enormous bundle under each arm, the Poet came. We were stunned as he stood in the door; we felt as if he had struck us in the head with them.

"This is the Histoire Intime," said he, laying it gently on the table.

And we laid our hand upon it, fetching a deep sigh. Our misgivings, however, were lighted with a happy idea. We will hire a few boys to read it, we thought, and mark out the passages which please them most. That will be just what an editor wants.

And this, continued the Poet, laying down the other bundle, is the original manuscript of my forthcoming Book of Poems.—

Sweet of him, we thought, to present it to us.

It will be issued next Autumn in Cairo.—

Fortunate City!

And if you will get to work on it at once,—

Mercy!

You can get out an English Translation in three months, I am sure—

We sink in our chair in breathless amazement.

The Book will then appear simultaneously both in London and Cairo.

We sit up, revived with another happy idea, and assure the Poet that his Work will be translated into a universal language, and that very soon. For which assurance he kisses us again and again, and goes away hugging his Muse.

The idea! A Book of Poems to translate into the English language! As if the English language has not enough of its own troubles! Translate it, O Fire, into your language! Which work the Fire did in two minutes. And the dancing, leaping, singing flames, the white and blue and amber flames, were more beautiful, we thought, than anything the Ms. might contain.

As for the Histoire Intime, we split it into three parts and got our boys working on it. The result was most satisfying. For now we can show, and though he is a native of Asia, the land of the Prophets, and though he conceals from us his origin after the manner of the Prophets, that he was born and bred and fed, and even thwacked, like all his fellows there, this Khalid.

II

The City of Baal

The City of Baal, or Baalbek, is between the desert and the deep sea. It lies at the foot of Anti-Libanus, in the sunny plains of Coele-Syria, a day’s march from either Damascus or Beirut. It is a city with a past as romantic as Rome’s, as wicked as Babel’s; its ruins testify both to its glory and its shame. It is a city with a future as brilliant as any New-World city; the railroad at its gate, the modern agricultural implements in its fields, and the porcelain bath-tubs in its hotels, can testify to this. It is a city that enticed and still entices the mighty of the earth; Roman Emperors in the past came to appease the wrath of its gods, a German Emperor to-day comes to pilfer its temples. For the Acropolis in the poplar grove is a mine of ruins. The porphyry pillars, the statues, the tablets, the exquisite friezes, the palimpsests, the bas-reliefs,—Time and the Turks have spared a few of these. And when the German Emperor came, Abd’ul-Hamid blinked, and the Berlin Museum is now the richer for it.

Of the Temple of Jupiter, however, only six standing columns remain; of the Temple of Bacchus only the god and the Bacchantes are missing. And why was the one destroyed, the other preserved, only the six columns, had they a tongue, could tell. Indeed, how many blustering vandals have they conquered, how many savage attacks have they resisted, what wonders and what orgies have they beheld! These six giants of antiquity, looking over Anti-Lebanon in the East, and down upon the meandering Leontes in the South, and across the Syrian steppes in the North, still hold their own against Time and the Elements. They are the dominating feature of the ruins; they tower above them as the Acropolis towers above the surrounding poplars. And around their base, and through the fissures, flows the perennial grace of the seasons. The sun pays tribute to them in gold; the rain, in mosses and ferns;