by Ameen Rihani
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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AFTER MIDNIGHT
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THE ETERNAL PHILISTINE
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THE TRAIN
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FAITHFUL RUSLAN
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THE DEVIL IN THE FLESH
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THE MADONNA OF THE SLEEPING CARS
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THE BOOK OF KHALID
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YOUTH WITHOUT GOD
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From Concord to Syria
Change and Exchange
The Path of Vision
Mysticism of Reality
The Lying Oriental
The Oriental Heritage
The Crisis of Islam
My Native Horizon
Minds and Monominds
Artists In Wartime
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