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The Book of Khalid
This long-awaited re-publication of the first Arab-American novel—inspiration for Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet—deals with Arab/American relations, religious conflict and the American immigrant experience.
Told with great good humor and worldly compassion, and with illustrations by Kahlil Gibran, The Book of Khalid recounts the adventures of two young men, Khalid and Shakib, who leave Lebanon for the United States to seek their fortune in turn-of-thecentury New York. Together, they face all the difficulties of poor immigrants—the passage by ship, admittance through Ellis Island and the rough immigrant life. Khalid, always the dreamer, tries to participate in the political and cultural life of the teeming city—to often humiliating and comic result.
Tiring of their sojourn, he convinces Shakib they should return to Lebanon. But their heads are now full of New World ideas. And Khalid, trying to improve his brethren, turns his understanding of Western thought into a call for political progress, and religious unity and tolerance in the Arab world. A call that has him, accidentally, almost founding a new religion—and almost becoming its first martyr, when his ideas incite the faithful to riot.
Playing with classical Arabic literary forms, as well as Western literary conventions, Ameen Rihani’s The Book of Khalid is a unique contribution to American and World literature.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Told with great good humor and worldly compassion, and with illustrations by Kahlil Gibran, The Book of Khalid recounts the adventures of two young men, Khalid and Shakib, who leave Lebanon for the United States to seek their fortune in turn-of-thecentury New York. Together, they face all the difficulties of poor immigrants—the passage by ship, admittance through Ellis Island and the rough immigrant life. Khalid, always the dreamer, tries to participate in the political and cultural life of the teeming city—to often humiliating and comic result.
Tiring of their sojourn, he convinces Shakib they should return to Lebanon. But their heads are now full of New World ideas. And Khalid, trying to improve his brethren, turns his understanding of Western thought into a call for political progress, and religious unity and tolerance in the Arab world. A call that has him, accidentally, almost founding a new religion—and almost becoming its first martyr, when his ideas incite the faithful to riot.
Playing with classical Arabic literary forms, as well as Western literary conventions, Ameen Rihani’s The Book of Khalid is a unique contribution to American and World literature.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1911
29 people are currently reading
627 people want to read
About the author
Ameen Rihani
80 books152 followersBorn in Freike, Lebanon, on November 24, 1876, Ameen Rihani was one of six children and the oldest son of a Lebanese Maronite raw silk manufacturer, then a flourishing local industry. His father had commercial ambitions which beckoned him to America. In the summer of 1888, Ferris Rihani, the father, sent his brother and eldest son, Ameen, to the United States and followed a year later.
The young immigrant, then twelve years old, was placed in a school outside the city of New York, a few months after his arrival. There, he learned the rudiments of English. His father and uncle, having established themselves as merchants in a small cellar in lower Manhattan, soon felt the need for an assistant who could read and write English. Therefore, the boy was taken away from school to become the chief clerk, interpreter and bookkeeper of the business. The family continued in this trade for four years.
Ameen had a natural talent in eloquent speaking, and in 1895, the teenager became carried away by stage fever and joined a touring stock company headed by Henry Jewet (who later had his theatre in Boston). During the summer of the same year, the troupe became stranded in Kansas City, Missouri and so the prodigal son returned to his father. However, he returned not to rejoin the business, but to insist that his father give him a regular education for a professional career. They agreed that he should study law. To that end, he attended night school for a year, passed the Regents Exam, and in 1897 entered the New York Law School. A lung infection interrupted his studies, and at the end of his first year, his father had to send him back to Lebanon to recover.
Ameen Rihani first became familiar with Arab and other Eastern poets in 1897. Among these poets were Abul-Ala, whom Ameen discovered to be the forerunner of Omar Khayyam. In 1899 he returned to New York having decided to translate some of the quatrains of Abul-Ala into English. He managed to do this while he was still giving much of his time to the family business. The first version of the translation was published in 1903. During this period, he joined several literary and artistic societies in New York, such as the Poetry Society of America and the Pleiades Club, and also became a regular contributor to an Arabic weekly, "Al-Huda" published in New York. He wrote about social traditions, religion, national politics and philosophy. Thus, he began his extensive literary career, bridging two worlds. He published his first two books in Arabic in 1902 and 1903.
He also worked, along with other national leaders, for the liberation of his country from Turkish rule. In 1910 he published Al-Rihaniyat, the book that established him as a forward thinker and a visionary. As a result of the Rihaniyat, the Egyptian media hailed him as "The Philosopher of Freike." The Book of Khalid was written during this same period of mountain solitude and was later published in 1911 after he returned to New York (for the third time) via Paris and London where he met with fellow writers and artists. The illustrations for this book, which was the first English novel ever written by a Lebanese/Arab, were provided by Kahlil Gibran. A reception was held in honor of Rihani for the release of The Book of Khalid and the president of the New York Pleiades Club crowned him with a laurel garland.
Ameen Rihani passed away at age 64 at 1:00 pm on September 13, 1940 in his hometown of Freike, Lebanon. The cause of his death was a bicycle accident which resulted in infectious injuries from multiple fractures of the skull. The news of his death was broadcast to many parts of the world. Representatives of Arab kings and rulers and of foreign diplomatic missions attended the funeral ceremony. He was laid to rest in the Rihani Family Mausoleum in Freike.
The young immigrant, then twelve years old, was placed in a school outside the city of New York, a few months after his arrival. There, he learned the rudiments of English. His father and uncle, having established themselves as merchants in a small cellar in lower Manhattan, soon felt the need for an assistant who could read and write English. Therefore, the boy was taken away from school to become the chief clerk, interpreter and bookkeeper of the business. The family continued in this trade for four years.
Ameen had a natural talent in eloquent speaking, and in 1895, the teenager became carried away by stage fever and joined a touring stock company headed by Henry Jewet (who later had his theatre in Boston). During the summer of the same year, the troupe became stranded in Kansas City, Missouri and so the prodigal son returned to his father. However, he returned not to rejoin the business, but to insist that his father give him a regular education for a professional career. They agreed that he should study law. To that end, he attended night school for a year, passed the Regents Exam, and in 1897 entered the New York Law School. A lung infection interrupted his studies, and at the end of his first year, his father had to send him back to Lebanon to recover.
Ameen Rihani first became familiar with Arab and other Eastern poets in 1897. Among these poets were Abul-Ala, whom Ameen discovered to be the forerunner of Omar Khayyam. In 1899 he returned to New York having decided to translate some of the quatrains of Abul-Ala into English. He managed to do this while he was still giving much of his time to the family business. The first version of the translation was published in 1903. During this period, he joined several literary and artistic societies in New York, such as the Poetry Society of America and the Pleiades Club, and also became a regular contributor to an Arabic weekly, "Al-Huda" published in New York. He wrote about social traditions, religion, national politics and philosophy. Thus, he began his extensive literary career, bridging two worlds. He published his first two books in Arabic in 1902 and 1903.
He also worked, along with other national leaders, for the liberation of his country from Turkish rule. In 1910 he published Al-Rihaniyat, the book that established him as a forward thinker and a visionary. As a result of the Rihaniyat, the Egyptian media hailed him as "The Philosopher of Freike." The Book of Khalid was written during this same period of mountain solitude and was later published in 1911 after he returned to New York (for the third time) via Paris and London where he met with fellow writers and artists. The illustrations for this book, which was the first English novel ever written by a Lebanese/Arab, were provided by Kahlil Gibran. A reception was held in honor of Rihani for the release of The Book of Khalid and the president of the New York Pleiades Club crowned him with a laurel garland.
Ameen Rihani passed away at age 64 at 1:00 pm on September 13, 1940 in his hometown of Freike, Lebanon. The cause of his death was a bicycle accident which resulted in infectious injuries from multiple fractures of the skull. The news of his death was broadcast to many parts of the world. Representatives of Arab kings and rulers and of foreign diplomatic missions attended the funeral ceremony. He was laid to rest in the Rihani Family Mausoleum in Freike.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
November 11, 2013
The first Arab-American novel, though not as cut-and-dried as that may sound: Rihani was born in Ottoman Syria, spent his teens in the U.S., wrote this book in English when back in his native land, and after its 1911 publication wrote a number of books in English and still more in Arabic. But it's far from a mere curiosity: The depictions of the Arab immigrant experience in New York City are interesting as a social and historical document, but the bulk of the book takes place in the Middle East, following the many lives and multiple transformations of the continually conflicted, occasionally heroic Khalid. The novel contains three contrasting texts, principally a hagiography by Khalid's staunch friend, the poet Shakib, with running commentary by unnamed American editors, plus journal entries by Khalid himself... The device allows Rihani to show off his facility at different styles of writing, but more importantly it addresses his main theme: The multiplicity of perspectives on humanity's place in the universe, where they contrast and where they overlap, and the limited validity of each. As Khalid tries on and discards a succession of identities on two continents, he is encouraged and ennobled by what he sees as the particular strengths of the West, the East, Christianity, Islam, commerce, art, women, men - while at the same time he is disappointed and corrupted by the weaknesses and flaws inherent in each of the above. At certain points, and particularly as the novel draws near a close, Khalid's views seems to be a proxy for the author's own, but even so he rejects easy answers: In a world where nothing quite lives up to its billing, certainty and stability are the most illusory of all.
March 6, 2012
I heard about The Book of Khalid because last year was the centenary of its publication, and there was a burst of publicity to celebrate it as the first Arab-American novel. There's a fuller biography of Rihani here, but here's the snapshot version: Ameen Fares Rihani was born in Lebanon, but the family moved to New York for business when he was eleven. He moved back to Lebanon at 23 for health reasons [and later back to New York and back to Lebanon again] and he wrote books in both English and Arabic — The Book of Khalid being one of those written in English.
Obviously it occurred to me that I could read The Book of Khalid as my book from Lebanon for the Read The World challenge, and it's out of copyright, so I downloaded the ebook from Project Gutenberg. But there are quite a few contemporary Lebanese writers available in English translation, and I was also considering those. So I didn't get round to reading it until a few days ago when I was looking at my Kindle, wondering what to read, and thought I might as well give it a go.
And I have to say that I was immediately quite impressed; it struck me as more interesting and more modern than I was expecting.
It is the story of Khalid. He grows up as a muleteer in Baalbek in Lebanon, and raises enough money to move to New York; while living there he becomes an autodidact, reading literature and philosophy from second-hand books, and moving in various interesting New York circles; later he moves back to Lebanon and becomes a bit of a philosopher and political activist. Quite a lot of it is clearly somewhat autobiographical from Rihani: self-education in a basement in Brooklyn, and a period of asceticism in the mountains of Lebanon, for example.
The book is written in the voice of someone who has found an autobiographical manuscript written in Arabic by Khalid, but who is also working from another account written by Khalid's friend Shakib. Large chunks of the novel are supposedly directly quoted from these manuscripts, but they are tied together by the unnamed 'Editor', who (i) is presumably responsible for the translation into English; (ii) tells quite a lot of the story as a third person narrative; and (iii) provides a certain amount of running commentary, which is frequently sceptical or at least slightly sardonic.
So you have Rihani writing the 'autobiography' of a character who is clearly a poorer, less sophisticated version of himself, with commentary provided by that character's more conventional, earnest, slightly comical friend, and then commentary on both of them from a worldly and distinctly patronising Editor. You can see why I think it feels modern.
It also makes me unsure how to unpick the prose style. It is distinctly flowery by modern standards; this obviously reflects changing literary fashion, but I wasn't sure whether it was also a stylistic device as part of the characterisation of the Editor. Some of the vocabulary in particular — umbrageous, stivy, nephelococcygia, propylon, steatopygous, edacious — makes it seem like a parody of a certain kind of writing. Or take these little passages. This is commentary from the Editor:
'If they do not, no pabulum ever after, will their indurated tissues assimilate' is a particularly magnificently baroque sentence. This is a bit from Khalid himself:
Now surely it's an intentional bit of mock-heroic styling to counterpose the highflown stuff about 'women of Byblus' and 'altar of Tammuz' and the kvetching about American eggs. Especially since the passage is footnoted thus:
Apart from the tricksy book-within-a-book structure of it, the other modern echo is political. It is an account of a young Arab man visiting the West, becoming disenchanted with it, returning to Middle East and calling for a return to a purer, more spiritual form of Islam: he sees Wahhabism as the great hope, which slightly startled me. Not that Khalid shows any signs of becoming a terrorist or even, really, a religious extremist; but still, that parallel is there. Of course it's a pattern which has repeated many times over the centuries: responding to a decadent society by calling for a purer form of Islam to come out of the desert.
The most striking coincidence comes when he is advocating the overthrow of the oppressors and says "It is the beginning of Arabia’s Spring" — even if in this case the oppressors are the Ottoman Empire rather than Mubarak or Gaddafi or American imperialism.
It's an interesting book. I found it a little hard going in places — there are some long discussions of religio-politico-spiritual-cultural matters where the elaborate prose style really started to drag, and bits where the book loses forward momentum a bit — but there were also bits which were lively and clever and engaging. It was certainly worth reading.
Obviously it occurred to me that I could read The Book of Khalid as my book from Lebanon for the Read The World challenge, and it's out of copyright, so I downloaded the ebook from Project Gutenberg. But there are quite a few contemporary Lebanese writers available in English translation, and I was also considering those. So I didn't get round to reading it until a few days ago when I was looking at my Kindle, wondering what to read, and thought I might as well give it a go.
And I have to say that I was immediately quite impressed; it struck me as more interesting and more modern than I was expecting.
It is the story of Khalid. He grows up as a muleteer in Baalbek in Lebanon, and raises enough money to move to New York; while living there he becomes an autodidact, reading literature and philosophy from second-hand books, and moving in various interesting New York circles; later he moves back to Lebanon and becomes a bit of a philosopher and political activist. Quite a lot of it is clearly somewhat autobiographical from Rihani: self-education in a basement in Brooklyn, and a period of asceticism in the mountains of Lebanon, for example.
The book is written in the voice of someone who has found an autobiographical manuscript written in Arabic by Khalid, but who is also working from another account written by Khalid's friend Shakib. Large chunks of the novel are supposedly directly quoted from these manuscripts, but they are tied together by the unnamed 'Editor', who (i) is presumably responsible for the translation into English; (ii) tells quite a lot of the story as a third person narrative; and (iii) provides a certain amount of running commentary, which is frequently sceptical or at least slightly sardonic.
So you have Rihani writing the 'autobiography' of a character who is clearly a poorer, less sophisticated version of himself, with commentary provided by that character's more conventional, earnest, slightly comical friend, and then commentary on both of them from a worldly and distinctly patronising Editor. You can see why I think it feels modern.
It also makes me unsure how to unpick the prose style. It is distinctly flowery by modern standards; this obviously reflects changing literary fashion, but I wasn't sure whether it was also a stylistic device as part of the characterisation of the Editor. Some of the vocabulary in particular — umbrageous, stivy, nephelococcygia, propylon, steatopygous, edacious — makes it seem like a parody of a certain kind of writing. Or take these little passages. This is commentary from the Editor:
This leisure hour is the nipple of the soul. And fortunate they who are not artificially suckled, who know this hour no matter how brief, who get their nipple at the right time. If they do not, no pabulum ever after, will their indurated tissues assimilate. Do you wonder why the world is full of crusty souls? and why to them this infant hour, this suckling while, is so repugnant? But we must not intrude more of such remarks about mankind. Whether rightly suckled or not, we manage to live; but whether we do so marmot-like or Maronite-like, is not the question here to be considered.
'If they do not, no pabulum ever after, will their indurated tissues assimilate' is a particularly magnificently baroque sentence. This is a bit from Khalid himself:
“Here, where my forebears deliquesced in sensuality, devotion, and grief, where the ardency of the women of Byblus flamed on the altar of Tammuz, on this knoll, whose trees and herbiage are fed perchance with their dust, I build my athafa (little kitchen), Arab-like, and cook my noonday meal. On the three stones, forming two right angles, I place my skillet, kindle under it a fire, pour into it a little sweet oil, and fry the few eggs I purchased in the village. I abominate the idea of frying eggs in water as the Americans do.1 I had as lief fry them in vinegar or syrup, where neither olive oil nor goat-butter is obtainable. But to fry eggs in water? O the barbarity of it! Why not, my friend, take them boiled and drink a little hot water after them? This savours of originality, at least, and is just as insipid, if not more. Withal, they who boil cabbage, and heap it in a plate over a slice of corn-beef, and call it a dish, can break a few boiled eggs in a cup of hot water and call them fried. Be this as it may. The Americans will be solesistically simple even in their kitchen.
Now surely it's an intentional bit of mock-heroic styling to counterpose the highflown stuff about 'women of Byblus' and 'altar of Tammuz' and the kvetching about American eggs. Especially since the passage is footnoted thus:
1. Khalid would speak here of poached eggs, we believe. And the Americans, to be fair, are not so totally ignorant of the art of frying. They have lard—much worse than water––in which they cook, or poach, or fry—but the change in the name does not change the taste. So, we let Khalid’s stricture on fried eggs and boiled cabbage stand.—Editor.
Apart from the tricksy book-within-a-book structure of it, the other modern echo is political. It is an account of a young Arab man visiting the West, becoming disenchanted with it, returning to Middle East and calling for a return to a purer, more spiritual form of Islam: he sees Wahhabism as the great hope, which slightly startled me. Not that Khalid shows any signs of becoming a terrorist or even, really, a religious extremist; but still, that parallel is there. Of course it's a pattern which has repeated many times over the centuries: responding to a decadent society by calling for a purer form of Islam to come out of the desert.
The most striking coincidence comes when he is advocating the overthrow of the oppressors and says "It is the beginning of Arabia’s Spring" — even if in this case the oppressors are the Ottoman Empire rather than Mubarak or Gaddafi or American imperialism.
It's an interesting book. I found it a little hard going in places — there are some long discussions of religio-politico-spiritual-cultural matters where the elaborate prose style really started to drag, and bits where the book loses forward momentum a bit — but there were also bits which were lively and clever and engaging. It was certainly worth reading.
October 6, 2012
Not an easy read, the plot is very slow, but it's kind of difficult to abandon it.
Read
October 17, 2023Written by a Lebanese immigrant (who later returned back to Lebanon) the 'first Arab-America novel' proves to be a philosophical satire of a kind distinct to the early 20th century, deeply indebted to Emersonian optimism and pregnant with sadly unrealized hopes for the Arabic and modern world. It's interesting as a historical object but particularly given the tragic events of the last few weeks Rihani's grand thesis, that Western industry married with Eastern spiritualism would result in a world-wide renaissance, seems too obviously phantasmic to grapple with seriously.
September 26, 2017
I enjoyed this, but be warned - it's pretty opaque when it comes to some specific historic and religious/cultural references that run throughout (especially the latter half of the book). If you take time to read the afterword first, and then do some reading on Wahhabism and related topics, as well as early 20th century Arab nationalism, you'll get a lot more out of this than if you know nothing about those topics and just read to the end with brute force.
December 9, 2022
I love a good frame narrative. This book has immense historical significance as basically THE first work of Arab American literature but honestly the more metaphysical it got, the less invested I got. The critical edition with a bunch of accompanying essays is what I'd recommend for folks who want to study it.
Want to read
January 19, 2024ملاحظة لي: لم اقرا الكتاب بعد - اقتني نسخة المؤسسة لاعربية للدراسات والنشر
July 8, 2013
كتاب يستحق المطالعة. انه احد الكتب التي تترك لدى القارئ انطباعاً مختلفاً، لان الكتاب بكافة تفاصيله مختلفة عن السائد ولان شخصياته غير متطابقة مع ما يمكن مقابلته في صفحات الكتب الأخرى.
خالد، هو شخصية الكتاب الأولي والتي حولها تدور قصته؛ من على رفوف مكتبة الخديوي في القاهرة ينبش الكاتب الماهر امين الريحاني قصة خالد، اللبناني- السوري في ذلك الوقت، ابن بعلبك مدينة الشمس، يكشف أحلامه الطفولية والمراهقة ورعونة أفكاره المبهمة، وكيف يهاجر - كمعظم اللبنانيين والسوريين - إلى أميركا، ارض الأحلام "الضائعة"، بصحبة رفيق دربه وصديقه الوحيد، شكيب. في أميركا ، ينتقل صاحبنا من العمل كبائع متجول إلى قارئ نهم بينما يبقى شكيب في عمله مقتنعا به وبمردوده؛
اقرأ الكتاب وأشعل النار فيه.... تلك كانت نظرية خالد، وهل من فكرة أثقل وأشد أنانية وتعصب تجاه الكتاب من تلك الفكرة؟؟؟ تلك كانت ممارسة خالد ...
ومن مصيبة إلى أخرى يعود أصحابنا إلى بعلبك حيث يحاول خالد، المهاجم الشرس للرجعية الدينية والسياسية بعد متابعته للمطالعة في الاغتراب، وإذ يصطدم بالكنيسة والحرم الكنسي الذي يحرمه الزواج من ابنة عمه وحبه الأول....
من بعلبك إلى جبال لبنان للعلاج في الطبيعة وعلى الطبيعة، يعيش خالد في بيروت مدة حتى يجد تركيا وقد أصدرت دستورا جديدا، فيهلل خالد للإنجاز ويبدأ حياته السياسية التي تنتهي بملاحقته من قبل الأتراك حيث يهرب وابنه عمه وصديقه شكيب وصديقته الأميركية إ��ى مصر....
كل تلك التفاصيل أوردها الريحاني بقالب قصصي مميز، إذ يعرض قصة خالد من خلال كتابه، كتاب خالد، ومن خلال كتاب صديقه الحميم، شكيب، كتاب التاريخ الحميم. وفي معرض سرد الكتابين المذكورين يقوم الريحاني بنقد وشماتة والتهكم على خالد وشكيب من خلال ذم او مهاجمة أفكار الأول وطموح الثاني الشعري.
كتاب يستحق المطالعة لكونه يحمل سرد مختلف ويعرض للحياة في لبنان، سوريا، مصر ونيويورك بطريقة جميلة ومفيدة، كما لكونه اول رواية عربية صادرة باللغة الإنكليزية.
خالد، هو شخصية الكتاب الأولي والتي حولها تدور قصته؛ من على رفوف مكتبة الخديوي في القاهرة ينبش الكاتب الماهر امين الريحاني قصة خالد، اللبناني- السوري في ذلك الوقت، ابن بعلبك مدينة الشمس، يكشف أحلامه الطفولية والمراهقة ورعونة أفكاره المبهمة، وكيف يهاجر - كمعظم اللبنانيين والسوريين - إلى أميركا، ارض الأحلام "الضائعة"، بصحبة رفيق دربه وصديقه الوحيد، شكيب. في أميركا ، ينتقل صاحبنا من العمل كبائع متجول إلى قارئ نهم بينما يبقى شكيب في عمله مقتنعا به وبمردوده؛
اقرأ الكتاب وأشعل النار فيه.... تلك كانت نظرية خالد، وهل من فكرة أثقل وأشد أنانية وتعصب تجاه الكتاب من تلك الفكرة؟؟؟ تلك كانت ممارسة خالد ...
ومن مصيبة إلى أخرى يعود أصحابنا إلى بعلبك حيث يحاول خالد، المهاجم الشرس للرجعية الدينية والسياسية بعد متابعته للمطالعة في الاغتراب، وإذ يصطدم بالكنيسة والحرم الكنسي الذي يحرمه الزواج من ابنة عمه وحبه الأول....
من بعلبك إلى جبال لبنان للعلاج في الطبيعة وعلى الطبيعة، يعيش خالد في بيروت مدة حتى يجد تركيا وقد أصدرت دستورا جديدا، فيهلل خالد للإنجاز ويبدأ حياته السياسية التي تنتهي بملاحقته من قبل الأتراك حيث يهرب وابنه عمه وصديقه شكيب وصديقته الأميركية إ��ى مصر....
كل تلك التفاصيل أوردها الريحاني بقالب قصصي مميز، إذ يعرض قصة خالد من خلال كتابه، كتاب خالد، ومن خلال كتاب صديقه الحميم، شكيب، كتاب التاريخ الحميم. وفي معرض سرد الكتابين المذكورين يقوم الريحاني بنقد وشماتة والتهكم على خالد وشكيب من خلال ذم او مهاجمة أفكار الأول وطموح الثاني الشعري.
كتاب يستحق المطالعة لكونه يحمل سرد مختلف ويعرض للحياة في لبنان، سوريا، مصر ونيويورك بطريقة جميلة ومفيدة، كما لكونه اول رواية عربية صادرة باللغة الإنكليزية.
June 11, 2013
I had to read some of it for one of my first semester classes. I remember I enjoyed the style of writing, but some things were very difficult for me to interpret or understand. Had the class not had the help of the professor guiding us along the storyline, I think I would have gotten too frustrated and tossed the book aside. I appreciate it for the historical sense of it, but it might not be for everyone to enjoy.
January 5, 2014
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Amazing a book written over 100 years ago still addresses so many of the same East/West issues. Down to Khalid's vision of an Arab Spring with much the same consequences. An engaging, funny book as well as a little depressing when one realizes all of the wasted opportunity on both sides.
June 30, 2021
I am here after reading "The Prophet" by Rihani's friend "Jibran" inspired by "The book of Khaled".
Both helped me to understand in a deeper way the real sense of life on this Earth, away from the chaos we created and surround ourselves with.
To go back to Nature, to our human nature, our instinct that exists in each one of us.
Both helped me to understand in a deeper way the real sense of life on this Earth, away from the chaos we created and surround ourselves with.
To go back to Nature, to our human nature, our instinct that exists in each one of us.
Want to read
April 9, 2011i feel like i've read this before....need to get my hands on it.
March 14, 2015
Couldn't finish it....too dated.
March 5, 2016
I couldn't continue this book!!!
Read
September 4, 2016This book was featured in the Nota Benes section of the Sept/Oct 2016 issue of World Literature Today Magazine.
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2...
Currently reading
May 24, 2018جميل جدا
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews