The One About The Prophet

(Originally published in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard,January 2003)

January 6 was the anniversary of the late Khalil Gibran’s birthday; it was exactly 15 years ago that I first read The Prophet, courtesy a Gibran-crazy friend.
The difference that a decade-and-a-half can make is considerable. As a teenager with half-baked intellectual pretensions, Gibran’s florid philosophical musings were part of a required reading list that included Nietzsche at the upper end of the scale, Ayn Rand and Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) towards the middle and Richard Bach at the bottom. (The next level was slightly more complex, involving intellectuals like Franz Fanon and the immortal Calcutta trio of a French literary theorist, a Chilean poet and a Bengali detective—Derrida, Neruda and Feluda!) Today, Gibran’s ripe prose does nothing for me: the lessons he has to teach are dated, like the novels of Ouida or Marie Corelli, once hailed as intellectual mysticism at its best and now almost embarrassingly irrelevant. And while Gibran still commands a huge following, he has almost no credibility among the ranks of thinkers anywhere in the world today.
The lives of modern-day prophets like Ayn Rand and, to a lesser extent, Paulo Coelho, have been subject to so much scrutiny that every true believer has to grapple with a bunch of nay-sayers. But while opinions differ about the worth of Khalil Gibran’s writings, with many seeing them as exoticised Hallmark mottoes in extended prose form, his life has been airbrushed and sanitised beyond belief.
Gibran was born to a Maronite family in Bsharri in Northern Lebanon—his father was by all accounts a feckless man who drove his family into poverty. His name was actually Gibran Khalil Gibran, but was shortened inadvertently on a registration certificate. Accounts of his early years abound in near-mythological references—as a child, he had an accident that required his shoulder to be bound up and held immobile with the support of two sticks in the shape of a cross. The Biblical symbolism has been reinforced with various accounts saying that this was done for forty days—the same amount of time that Christ spent wandering in the wilderness. Gibran’s family migrated to the US when he was about 12 years old—his father elected to stay behind in Lebanon.
He began as an artist: he had his first exhibition in 1904, and spent several years studying with the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Gibran’s first work in English was published in 1918—five years later, he wrote The Prophet, a collection of 26 prose poems that has been translated into more than 20 languages and that he had been ruminating over since his teenage years. It met with a modest success that eventually became a classic word-of-mouth bestseller, taking several years to find its audience. Gibran—whose earlier work, The Madman, had been compared to Tagore’s writings—was reticent by nature and rarely spoke of his background, and was amused to be cast as the mystic oriental. By the time he died in 1931, his fame had spread, and the funeral procession in Lebanon, where his body was finally taken, was described as more of a “triumphal” occasion.
It’s hard to explain the enduring appeal of The Prophet, with its baroque phrases and its somewhat overwrought mysticism. But for every student at an elocution competition who recitesThe Highwayman, an Alfred E Noyes poem practically forgotten in England, and enshrined only in our dull syllabi, there is always someone else gravely reciting from one section or another of The Prophet. Two responses culled from the Internet sum up the contemporary reaction to Khalil Gibran. One was a query posted in all seriousness by a neophyte online, who asked: “I am new to internet travelling, and I am wondering what the mystic view on electrical communication is...what would Khalil Gibran have had to say about this new form of communication?” The other response, from the amazon.com website, deserves to be quoted too: “I keep my copy of The Prophet on the shelf, near my VHS copy of Dirty Harry, starring Clint Eastwood, for a balanced perspective…”
If Gibran has something in common with the late Ayn Rand, it is that their appeal has lasted down the decades. Richard Bach is the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a mushy modern-day fable of self-realisation via the flying lessons of seagulls. He’s also the kind of writer who serves as a touchstone of who you are as a reader. Either you read Bach only at a certain stage of your life and move on to better things, or you progress via Bach to a steady diet of F Scott Peck, Lobsang Rampa, Carlos Castaneda and Erich von Daniken. Bach, like Pirsig or the equally bestselling Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, is a publisher’s dream come true—but even the most ardent fans of their works wouldn’t place them in the same bracket as Plato or Wittgenstein. Rand and Gibran attract an altogether different breed of follower. Gibran’s devotees have often reached him via the more academic slopes of Sufi writing; Rand’s devotees include Alan Greenspan and a whole host of corporate bigshots who find in her work a vindication of their lives. And like The Prophet, Rand’s The Fountainhead got off to a slow start: the first indication that it was going to be a runaway bestseller came a good two years after its publication, when sales finally began gathering momentum.
I have only one quibble with all these widely disparate authors, and that has to do with the recurring nightmare provoked by the reading that went into this article. For the last four nights, I have dreamed that a large seagull clad in a prophet’s flowing robes have pursued me down a long corridor to a balcony where a man stands, his hands clenched on the railing, his head thrown back in triumph. “To love oneself is the beginning of all understanding,” says the seagull; “Capitalism rules, OK,” says the man in the dream. Frankly, I preferred Poe’s raven and plan to follow its admirable lead. Will I ever read these long-forgotten gods of my youth again? Nevermore.