Ameen Rihani

Ameen Rihani (born Nov. 24, 1876, Freike, near Beirut, Mount Lebanon, Ottoman Empire [now in Lebanon]—died Sept. 13, 1940, Freike) was an Arab American novelist, poet, essayist, and political figure whose written works examined the differences and intersections between the categories of “East” and “West.”

Rihani was born in a town northeast of Beirut during the period of Ottoman control. He immigrated with his uncle to New York City in 1888; his father joined them a year later. After a few years in school learning English, he began to work as a clerk and bookkeeper for the family merchant business in Lower Manhattan. He was a voracious reader of Western literature, especially the works of Victor Hugo, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Thomas Carlyle.

In 1895 Rihani pursued a career as an actor and traveled for some months with a Shakespearean theatre group. Returning to New York with the wish to acquire a proper education, he entered New York Law School in 1897. A lung infection caused him to withdraw from school, and he returned to Lebanon to recuperate. There he studied the Arabic language and classic Arabic poetry, in particular work by the blind poet al-Maʿarrī, whose poems he later translated into English.

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Back in New York City in 1899, Rihani became active in both the New York avant-garde and the budding Arab American cultural scene, publishing newspaper articles, original and translated poetry, and essays in both English and Arabic. His own early verse was notable for its experimentation, and he introduced the concept of free verse to Arabic poetry. He became an American citizen in 1901.

In 1905 he again returned to Lebanon, this time for a stretch of five years, living at his family home in the Lebanon Mountains. There he completed Al-Rīḥāniyyāt (1910; The Rihani Essays), an Arabic-language essay collection that was well received in the Arab intellectual community, and The Book of Khalid (1911), an English-language novel, considered to be the first by an Arab. The Book of Khalid concerns the immigration of two Lebanese boys to New York City and their subsequent spiritual evolution. It was illustrated by Rihani’s friend Khalil Gibran and has been cited as a major influence on Gibran’s The Prophet (1923).

In the decade after Rihani’s return to New York in 1911, he became increasingly active in political causes while still producing a steady stream of diverse literary works in both English and Arabic. He spoke and wrote extensively in favour of the liberation of Arab lands from Ottoman control, and he expressed concern about the potential for conflict inherent in the Zionist push for a Jewish homeland. Rihani in 1916 married Bertha Case, an American artist and member of the Impressionist social circle.

In 1922 Rihani initiated a series of documentary travels throughout the Arabian Peninsula, recording his encounters and becoming one of the first outsiders to meet and then depict the region’s various leaders. In particular, Ibn Saʿūd, the tribal leader who formed the modern state of Saudi Arabia, received Rihani with honours as a major Arab intellectual, and they began a long correspondence and friendship. Rihani wrote further nonfiction books in English as well as a wide array of poems, articles, and essays for both Western and Eastern audiences until his death following a bicycle accident.

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Throughout his life and work Rihani highlighted what he saw as the essential characteristics of East and West and the possibility of a cultural synthesis. He argued that the benefits of science and political liberalism could be reconciled with traditional religion and virtue, and he advocated political, cultural, and religious reforms as part of the movement for Arab liberation from the Ottoman Empire and Western colonialism. All of his work was intensely spiritual, and he was devoted to the prospect of fully melding and unifying all religions.