The Book of Khalid

by Ameen Rihani

  He goes into Najma’s tent. The mother and her child are sound asleep. He stands between the bed and the cot contemplating the simplicity and innocence and truth, which are more eloquent in Najib’s brow than aught of human speech. His little hand raised above his head seems to point to a star which could be seen through an opening in the canvas. Was it his star—the star that he saw in the sand-grave—the star that is calling to him?—

  But let us resume our narration.

  A fortnight after Mrs. Gotfry’s departure Shakib leaves the camp to live in Cairo. He is now become poet-laureate to one of the big pashas.

  Khalid is left alone with Najma and Najib.

  And one day, when they are playing a game of “donkey,”—Khalid carried Najib on his back, ran on all four around the tent, and Najma was the donkey-driver,—the child of a sudden utters a shriek and falls on the sand. He is in convulsions; and after the relaxation, lo, his right hand is palsied, his mouth awry, and his eyes a-squint. Khalid finds a young doctor at Al-Hayat, and his diagnosis of the case does not disturb the mind. It is infantile paralysis, a disease common with delicate children. And the doctor, who is of a kind and demonstrative humour, discourses at length on the disease, speaks of many worse cases of its kind he cured, and assures the mother that within a month the child will recover. For the present he can but prescribe a purgative and a massage of the arm and spine. On the third visit, he examines the child’s fæces and is happy to have discovered the seat and cause of the affection. The liver is not performing its function; and given such weak nerves as the child’s, a torpid liver in certain cases will produce paralysis.

  But Khalid is not satisfied with this. He places the doctor’s prescription in his pocket, and goes down to Cairo for a specialist. He comes, this one, to disturb their peace of mind with his indecision. It is not infantile paralysis, and he can not yet say what it is. Khalid meanwhile is poring over medical books on all the diseases that children are heir to.

  On the fifth day the child falls again in convulsions, and the left arm, too, is paralysed. They take him down to Cairo; and Medicine, considering the disease of his mother, guesses a third time—tuberculosis of the spine, it says—and guesses wrong. Again, considering the strabismus, the obliquity of the mouth, the palsy in the arms, and the convulsions, we guess closely, but ominously. Nay, Medicine is positive this time; for a fifth and a sixth Guesser confirm the others. Here we have a case of cerebral meningitis. That is certain; that is fatal.

  Najib is placed under treatment. They cut his hair, his beautiful flow of dark hair; rub his scalp with chloroform; keep the hot bottles around his feet, the ice bag on his head; and give him a spoon of physic every hour. “Make no noise around the room, and admit no light into it,” further advises the doctor. Thus for two weeks the child languishes in his mother’s arms; and resting from the convulsions and the coma, he would fix on Khalid the hollow, icy glance of death. No; the light and intelligence might never revisit those vacant eyes.

  Now Shakib comes to suggest a consultation. The great English physician of Cairo, why not call him? It might not be meningitis, after all, and the child might be helped, might be cured.

  The great guesswork Celebrity is called. He examines the patient and confirms the opinion of his confrères, rather his disciples.

  “But the whole tissue,” he continues with glib assurance, “is not affected. The area is local, and to the side of the ear that is sore. The strabismus being to the right, the affection must be to the left. And the pus accumulating behind the ear, under the bone, and pressing on the covering of the brain, produces the inflammation. Yes, pus is the cause of this.” And he repeats the Arabic proverb in broken Arabic, “A drop of pus will disable a camel.” Further, “Yes, the child’s life can be saved by trepanning. It should have been done already, but the time’s not passed. Let the surgeon come and make a little opening—no; a child can stand chloroform better than an adult. And when the pus is out he will be well.”

  In a private consultation the disciples beg to observe that there was no evidence of pus behind the ear. “It is beneath the skullbone,” the Master asserts. And so we decide upon the operation. The Eye and Ear specialist is called, and after weighing the probabilities of the case and considering that the great Celebrity had said there was pus, although there be no evidence of it, he convinces Khalid that if the child is not benefited by the operation he cannot suffer from it more than he is suffering now.

  The surgeon comes with his assistants. Little Najib is laid on the table; the chloroform towel is applied; the scalpels, the cotton, the basins of hot water, and other accessories, are handed over by one doctor to another. The Cutter begins. Shakib is there watching with the rest; Najma is in an adjacent room weeping; and Khalid is pacing up and down the hall, his brows moistened with the cold sweat of anguish and suspense.

  No pus between the scalp and the bone: the little hammer and chisel are handed to the Cutter. One, two, three,—the child utters a faint cry; the chloroform towel is applied again;—four, five, six, and the seventh stroke of the little hammer opens the skull. The Cutter then penetrates with his catheter, searches thoroughly through the brain—here—there—above—below—and finally holds the instrument up to his assistants to show them that there is—no pus! “If there be any,” says he, “it is beyond the reach of surgery.” The wound, therefore, is quickly washed, sewn up, and dressed, while everybody is wondering how the great Celebrity can be wrong.…

  Little Najib remains under the influence of anæsthetics for two days—for two days he is in a trance. And on the third, the fever mounts to the danger line and descends again—only after he had stretched his little arm and breathed his last!

  And Khalid and Najma and Shakib take him out to the desert and bury him in the sand, near the tent round which he used to play. There, where he stepped his first step, lisped his first syllable, smacked his first kiss, and saw for the first time a star in the heaven, he is laid; he is given to the Night, to the Eternity which Khalid does not fear. And yet, what tears, Shakib tells us, he shed over that little grave.

  But about the time the second calamity approaches, when Najma begins to decline and waste away from grief, when the relapse sets in and carries her in a fortnight downward to the grave of her child, Khalid’s eyes are as two pieces of flint stone on a sheet of glass. His tears flow inwardly, as it were, through his cracked heart.…

  Like the poet Saadi, Khalid once sought to fill his lap with celestial flowers for his friends and brothers; and he gathered some; but, alas, the fragrance of them so intoxicated him that the skirt dropt from his hand.…

  We are again at the Mena House, where we first met Shakib. And the reader will remember that the tears rushed to his eyes when we inquired of him about his Master and Friend. “He has disappeared some ten days ago,” he then said, “and I know not whither.” Therefore, ask us not, O gentle Reader, what became of him. How can we know? He might have entered a higher spiritual circle or a lower; of a truth, he is not now on the outskirts of the desert: deeper to this side or to that he must have passed. And passing he continues to dream of “appearance in the disappearance; of truth in the surrender; of sunrises in the sunset.”

  Now, fare thee well in either case, Reader. And whether well or ill spent the time we have journeyed together, let us not quarrel about it. For our part, we repeat the farewell words of Sheikh Taleb of Damascus: “Judge us not severely.” And if we did not study to entertain thee as other Scribes do, it is because we consider thee, dear good Reader, above such entertainment as our poor resources can furnish, Wassalmu aleik!

  IN • FREIKE • WHICH • IS • IN • MOUNT • LEBANON SYRIA • ON • THE • TWELFTH • DAY • OF JANUARY • 1910 • ANNO • CHRISTI • AND • THE FIRST • DAY • OF • MUHARRAM • 1328 • HEGIRAH THIS • BOOK • OF • KHALID • WAS • FINISHED

  AFTERWORD

  BY TODD FINE

  The Book of Khalid, the first Arab-American novel, stands as the foundat
ional text of Arab-American literature, despite having been out of print in the United States since its first publication in 1911. Wholly unique and difficult to classify, the novel contains diverse political and philosophical themes, including Arab immigration to New York City, Arab-American relations, the politics of the Ottoman Empire, sectarianism and universal spirituality, and the experimental combination of Arabic and Western literary forms.

  Its author, Ameen Rihani, was the most versatile and widely respected of a talented group of Arab writers working in New York City in the early twentieth century. An Arab-American innovator and trailbreaker, Rihani significantly influenced other slightly younger figures, including Mikhail Naimy, author of The Book of Mirdad, and Kahlil Gibran, whose extraordinarily popular work The Prophet shares key themes with The Book of Khalid.

  Rihani was born in Freike, a small town in Lebanon, in 1876. He emigrated at age eleven with his uncle to Manhattan; the rest of his family followed a year later. The Rihanis were part of a late-nineteenth-century migration of mostly Christian Syrians and Lebanese from the Ottoman Empire that was triggered by a decline in the silk industry and by fears of religious conflict. In New York, Rihani’s father, Ferris, who had owned a silk factory in Lebanon, became an importer-exporter of jewelry and other products. The family first settled on Washington Street in “Little Syria,” the colorful Syrian Quarter on Manhattan’s lower west side that Rihani would describe in The Book of Khalid.

  A precocious reader of Shakespeare, Thoreau, Emerson, Carlyle, and Washington Irving, the young Rihani rebelled against clerking in his father’s store and, at the age of eighteen, ran away to join a traveling Shakespearean theater company called the Henry Jewett Players. He returned to New York the same year, and, after discussions with his father, he entered law school. But in 1897, after only a year of study, Rihani withdrew and returned to Lebanon—purportedly to rest because of a lung illness, though it is clear that a law career did not suit him.

  In Lebanon, Rihani taught English at a Maronite Catholic seminary and studied formal written Arabic, awakening an abiding respect for classical Arabic poetry which took its place alongside the Western literature that he prized. He returned to the United States in 1899 and began to establish himself as a provocative intellectual within the budding Arab-American cultural scene, commenting on political, religious, and social questions—for example, religious reform, Arab nationalism, and even feminism—in speeches, pamphlets, and newspaper articles. His 1903 Arabic-language critique of religious institutions and sectarianism, The Triple Alliance in the Animal Kingdom, was burned after its publication and led to Rihani’s excommunication from the Maronite Church.

  Still in his twenties, he published poetry in both English and Arabic. And he introduced free verse poetry into Arabic in 1905, especially influenced by the work of 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 Al-Ma’arri. Translating this Islamic advocate of reason and skepticism into English was a bold start to 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 his family home in Freike for an extremely productive period of several years, during which he wrote The Book of Khalid, as well as a collection of Arabic essays called Ar-Rihaniyyaat, or “The Rihani Essays,” that was published in 1910 and deals with many of the same themes as Khalid in a more programmatic way. For example, Khalid’s “Great City” passage parallels a speech Rihani gave in 1909 that he included in the essay collection.

  Since The Book of Khalid was written in Lebanon during a period of Arab protest against the Ottoman Empire, it is not surprising that the work veers away from New York into the politics of the Arab world. In the years immediately following the publication of the novel, political issues precipitated by World War I and the decline and collapse of the Ottoman Empire increasingly consumed Rihani’s energies. He became an increasingly well-known public intellectual in the United States, writing about Arab politics and culture for major American periodicals and developing political contacts. And although he criticized American materialism, he was optimistic about America’s potential role in the world. Rihani felt, like his character Khalid, that becoming “100% American” allowed him to engage the problems of the Arab world without guilt or feelings of divided loyalties.

  After World War I, Rihani merged his political and creative impulses and undertook an extraordinary journey through the Arabian Peninsula in 1922, where he met all of the emirs and other major leaders and subtly advanced his own vision for Arab national unity. These travels provided the content for a series of published travelogues in both Arabic and English, and the books became his most commercially successful. Until his untimely death in 1940, in Freike, following a bicycle accident, Rihani alternated between New York City and his home in the mountains of Lebanon, remaining an influential presence in both worlds.

  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.