The Book of Khalid (36 page)

Rihani was a model for, as well as colleague of, many talented, younger Syrian and Lebanese writers who also worked in New York. Although only Kahlil Gibran is still widely known in United States, this group included a number of writers—among them Elia Abu Madi, Mikhail Naimy, and Nasib Ariba—who are still read in the Arab world today. Believing that Arabic literature required fresh themes and forms, they established a literary society known as “The Pen League” (
Al-Rabitah al-Qalamiyah
), which set out “to lift Arabic literature from the quagmire of stagnation and imitation, and to infuse a new life into its veins so as to make of it an active force in the building up of the Arab nations.”

Rihani’s successes on the American literary scene clearly influenced Gibran’s thinking about his own career. Gibran scholar Suheil Bushrui of the University of Maryland has stated that it is impossible to imagine
The Prophet
without
The Book of Khalid
. Gibran and Rihani first met in Paris in 1910, when Rihani was returning to New York after finishing the novel, and there Gibran agreed to design its illustrations. Rihani’s success in having this and other works published may have suggested to Gibran that a literary career in English
was possible, and the work’s themes of universal spirituality and combining East and West also appear to have influenced him. The two maintained a lifelong friendship and correspondence, and Gibran referred to Rihani as “al-Mualem,” or “the master.”

Rihani felt that he was lucky to have
Khalid
published by a prominent New York press, Dodd, Mead and Co. In a letter to his brother, he wrote that to attract his publisher’s attention he had had the manuscript delivered by an “Arab carrying [a] coffin in which I placed
Khalid
.” Because of its idiosyncrasies and unusual themes, promotion would undoubtedly be a challenge, and the publisher expressed uncertainty about what the market for the book would be. Rihani wrote that they had told him frankly: “We are very much interested in your book, but we do not think it is of the kind that will be a commercial success. We are taking chances in publishing it. We do this because we believe in welcoming every newcomer who has such a work of literature and philosophy.”

The publisher tried to promote the novel as an analysis of American institutions by an immigrant, a work “about America.” Its several reviewers focused on its blending of East and West and on the spiritual and exotic aspects of Rihani as an Arab writer in the United States. The work’s engagement with larger questions of Arab nationalism, along with its nascent and subtle critique of Orientalism, was lost on its initial reviewers, and, perhaps because of its complex themes and stylistic peculiarities, the work did not sell well. In
Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature
, University of Illinois professor Wail Hassan remarks that “only those bi-cultural hybrids like Rihani himself would be able
to decipher the endless cross-linguistic word play, in-jokes, untranslated Arabic vocabulary […] and to follow the large number of meandering allusions across fourteen centuries of Arabic literature and four hundred years of European texts.”

Rihani was part of an emerging international community of Arab writers and intellectuals who were reading and contributing to Arabic periodicals such as the Cairo-based
al-Hilal, al-Muqtataf
, and
al-Manar
and the New York-based
al-Huda, Mir’at al-Gharb
, and
al-Mushir
. Many themes in
The Book of Khalid’
s Ottoman section are grounded in the Arab nationalist discussions and preoccupations in these journals. Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905 triggered a wave of revolutionary activity across Russia, then in Persia in 1906, and, in 1908, within the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman transformations and revolution were led by a group of factional military officers called the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), popularly known as “the Young Turks.” The CUP forced Sultan Abdul Hamid II to return to constitutional authority, reinstate the parliament, and relax the atmosphere of repression and censorship that had marked his reign. These events enter into the novel explicitly, and Khalid’s reactions to these momentous and uncertain developments clearly become proxies for Rihani’s own. Yet, to expect Americans reading
The Book of Khalid
to jump into this political complexity from the New York City setting was perhaps asking too much. Rihani reveals his own anxiety about this shift in the novel when the narrator apologizes for his selfishness and suggests that the reader could stop at Khalid and Shakib’s return to Lebanon.

Because of his intermingling of Western and Arabic literary conventions and styles, Rihani was uncertain whether
The Book of Khalid
should be defined as a novel at all.
Stylistically, as Kuwait University’s Layla Al-Maleh has detailed, it borrows a great deal from Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus
, which also uses the device of a “found book,” stitches together several characters’ accounts, and has a meandering, philosophical style that comments ironically on its own formal structure. In
The Book of Khalid
, a work whose surface narrative matches conventional realist immigration fiction, many of these core devices can seem out of place.

However,
Khalid
does indeed share many of the key characteristics of American ethnic immigration literature. The basic framework of the novel—the tale of a young man who comes to the United States and endures the travails of immigration to come of age in the teeming city—matches the classic immigrant narrative. The American themes of advancement or betterment contained in this narrative form hark all the way back to Benjamin Franklin’s
Autobiography
. Yet Khalid, with his lackadaisical attitude toward work, his effortless assimilation into the American scene, and his eventual reverse migration to Lebanon, subverts the genre in ways that have yet to be explored by scholars of American immigration fiction, despite the book’s similarities to contemporary, but more prominent, Jewish-American fiction by such writers as Abraham Cahan.

In searching for contemporaneous work about the immigrant experience that may have influenced
The Book of Khalid
, some have considered Israel Zangwill’s
The Melting Pot
(1905), a play that asks whether conflicts of the past and in the homeland can be divorced from the American setting. Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
(1906), a tale of Lithuanian immigration that became the subject of explosive political debate in the years just before
The Book of Khalid’
s publication, is another possible influence. Rihani certainly shared
Sinclair’s critique of the soul-destroying effects of materialism and capitalism in the United States.

The use of an American context to develop a separate ethnic nationalism is also found in other ethnic bildungsromans. In his book
Growing Up Ethnic
, Martin Japtok argues that American coming-of-age works “try to establish the ethnic individual while maintaining group coherence and attempt to counter stereotypes by forming a positive, while often normative, image of ethnicity. They describe, circumscribe, and define the ethnic nation and call for ethnic commitment.” This function of ethnic literature is taken to an extreme in Khalid’s return to the Ottoman Empire to become a quasi-prophet and a revolutionary, yet Khalid also directly engages American ethnic politics both in his fleeting role as a ward for the Tammany Hall machine and by his comparisons of the Arab peddlers on Manhattan’s West Side with the Jews on the East Side.

The section in which Khalid lives with Jewish peddlers on the Lower East Side contains language that is offensive to the modern ear, evoking pernicious defamation of Jews. Rihani was almost certainly attempting to differentiate, for the novel’s American readership, New York Syrians from then ubiquitous stereotypes of Jews; ethnic stereotypes were casual and endemic in this period. But while modern readers will recoil from this rhetoric, to anachronistically conflate the novel’s record of past ethnic politics with modern-day political divisions between Arabs and Jews would cause us to condemn Rihani too harshly here.

More than one hundred years later, an impressive and growing body of scholarship addresses
The Book of Khalid
. Themes of published academic work include: the influences of Thomas Carlyle, American Transcendentalism, and
Romantic poetry;
Khalid
’s engagement with Orientalism as advanced by Edward Said (sometimes described as a double Orientalism); its conception of a universal spirituality; its cosmopolitanism and cultural blending; and the philosophical construction of certain aspects, including its notion of “The Great City.” Scholars have also variously assigned the marginalization of the work and its author to: the assimilation of the Syrian and Lebanese American immigrants; Rihani’s eclipsing by Kahlil Gibran in the popular consciousness; the diversity of genres in which Rihani worked, which prevents easy categorization; Rihani’s inclination to remain somewhat aloof from other Arab-American writers and intellectuals of his day; and a failure of the Arab intellectual world to appreciate Rihani’s Americanism.

Despite
Khalid
’s limited commercial success, Rihani was confident in the power of his book’s message, suspecting that it would get him into future “scrapes” because of its provocative political, religious, and philosophical content. The book seems directed toward some future moment. With the world now consumed by issues of Arab-American relations and Arab political revolution, many have the sense that its moment is now.

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