The Book of Khalid

The Book of Khalid

Title page, 1911 edition of The Book of Khalid
Author	Ameen Rihani or Ameen Fares Rihani
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Bildungsroman, Arab-American literature
Publisher	Dodd, Mead and Company
Publication date	1911
Media type	Print
Pages	349

The Book of Khalid (1911) is a novel by Arab-American writer Ameen Rihani. Composed during a sojourn in the mountains of Lebanon, it is considered to be the first novel by an Arab-American writer in English. His contemporary, Khalil Gibran, illustrated the work, and the story is often seen as an influence on Gibran's own well-known book The Prophet.

In his twenties around the turn of the century, Rihani was actively involved in the cultural scene of New York City, and he helped establish some of the earliest Arab-American literary societies. He published a collection of select quatrains of the poet Abul-'Ala into English in 1903 and wrote various essays and poetry in Arabic. In 1905, however, he returned to Lebanon and lived for a number of years in "mountain solitude." Yet he was not completely isolated and during this stay he lectured at local universities and released a number of essays, plays, and poems in Arabic. In 1910, he published Ar-Rihaniyat, a collection of essays that was positively received in the region and gave Rihani a strong reputation as a leading Arab intellectual. During this period, he also worked on The Book of Khalid, which, according to its final page, was finished at his home in Freike on January 12, 1910. The caption reads:

In 1911, Rihani returned to New York and sent the manuscript to publishers. When Dodd Mead and Co. received the text, it reportedly consumed their offices more than another other manuscript received at the time. In an era when the increasingly diverse nature of immigration to the United States was a popular topic, the book was marketed as an evaluation of U.S. institutions by an immigrant that would appeal to "clever readers." Although the novel was not an extraordinary success in terms of sales, it received highly affirming reviews in journals like The Bookman and The Papyrus.

The novel is presented as a "found manuscript," a mechanism that recurs in other Arab-American fictional works. The narrator pieces the history together from an Arabic manuscript found in the Khedivial Library of Cairo and from interviews and the texts of other figures involved. The novel is divided into three books, dedicated in order "to Man," "to Nature," and "to God." Each section begins with an illustration by Gibran and a philosophical statement attributed to the protagonist Khalid.