Khalil Gibran played down the pursuit of material possessions and things with empty meaning,

in favor of pursuing a mind-bending, extraordinary, hyper-evolved state of love itself. He offered

instruction from the heart on finding and receiving this give-and-take sort of nirvana love that
seemed to always need a loose-hold on love’s wonder in order to survive and flourish.

His emphasis on mystic spirituality surfaced throughout his life and the way he examined spiritual
matters has had a profound influence on a multitude of spiritual “truth-seekers”.

Today, in the Arab world, Gibran is regarded as a literary and political rebel. His Romantic style
was at the heart of a renaissance in modern Arabic literature, breaking away from the classical
school of thought. In “The Prophet”, Gibran is concerned with unifying mankind. His themes of
drawing close to one another, kindness, and forgiveness are communicated in a way that sparks
the senses and causes a sudden understanding.

Inspired poetry, like religion, carries within it the seed of truth. It communicates by inducing
recognition and affirmation: an expression of profound delight at the sheer rightness of the poet’s
words, a joy that makes the soul resonate, like a musical note, with a sense of shared truth. Gibran
enjoys a unique reputation. Very few authors in history can match his achievement of writing
successfully in two languages, Arabic and English. Few have synthesized the best of Christianity
and Islam as he does. And perhaps most important of all, amongst the literature of the twentieth
century, with its fashionable emphasis on cynicism, anxiety and despair, his work stands out like
a beacon of hope and compassion. Gibran’s name, perhaps more than that of any other modern
writer, is synonymous with peace, spiritual values and international understanding.
Events around the globe in recent years have underlined all too clearly the continuing relevance of
Kahlil Gibran today. His passionate belief in the oneness of mankind, and hence the need to
remove man-made barriers, has found a host of reflection in glasnost, the dismantling of the Berlin
Wall, the end of the Cold War, the move towards federalism in Europe, and the growing
effectiveness of the United Nations Organization—to name some of the more encouraging recent
developments.
As the name of Gibran’s best-known work implies, his writings have a prophetic quality. He
appears, for example, to have anticipated with uncanny accuracy the dreadful cloud that would
pass over his own country, Lebanon, in our own times. “Pity the nation divided into fragments,
each fragment deeming itself a nation. But it is not filled with any kind of dogma, it is available to
anyone whether they are Jewish or Christian or Muslim.He offered a dogma-free universal
spiritualism as opposed to orthodox religion, and his vision of the spiritual was not moralistic. In
fact, he urged people to be non-judgmental.

He was looked down upon as, frankly, a 'bubblehead' by Western academics, because he appealed
to the masses. I think he has been misunderstood in the West. He is certainly not a bubblehead, in
fact his writings in Arabic are in a very sophisticated style.

Gibran was a painter as well as a writer by training and was schooled in the symbolist tradition in
Paris in 1908. He mixed with the intellectual elite of his time, including figures such as WB Yeats,
Carl Jung and August Rodin, all of whom he met and painted. Symbolists such as Rodin and the
English poet and artist William Blake, who was a big influence on Gibran, favoured romance over
realism .

He was called 'mad Blake'. He is now a major figure in English literature. So the fact that a writer
is not taken seriously by the critics is no indication of the value of the work. In Lebanon, where he
was born, he is still celebrated as a literary hero.His style, which broke away from the classical
school, pioneered a new Romantic movement in Arabic literature of poetic prose.In the Arab
world, Gibran is regarded as a rebel, both in a literary and political sense.