Gibran on His Excommunication by Joseph Nahas edited by Francesco Medici and Glen Kalem It was one evening when I happened to be at the office of His Eminence Archbishop Aftimios Ofiesh, titular head of the Russian Orthodox Catholic Church in North America and its islands, discussing an article written by me on the separation of that church from the Antioch Patriarchate with headquarters at Damascus, Syria. A coterie of writers – Gibran, Naseeb Arida, Abdul-Maseeh Haddad, Nadra Haddad (Abdul-Maseeh’s elder brother), Mikhail Takla, and Mikhail Naimy – arrived. Naseeb Arida was the publisher of an Arabic language magazine, Al-Akhlak, “The Character”; Abdul-Maseeh Haddad was the publisher of an Arabic language newspaper, As-Sayeh, “The Traveler”; Nadra Haddad was an officer in the Bank o...

 by Francesco Medici © Copyright Francesco Medici All Rights Reserved 2019  Indeed, as of today, Gibran’s literary works both in Arabic and English have all but been published, apart from maybe some fragments and other minor contributions. To find unpublished material we have to look above all at his many letters.[1] For example, his extensive correspondence with Mary Haskell Minis (between 1904 and the time of his death in 1931) and her private journal and diaries about him are still waiting to be published in their entirety. Said documents are part of the Minis Family Papers, 1739-1948, held in the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, which also contains Mary’s correspondence and various materials about Gibran, manuscrip...

by Francesco Medici Naoum Antoun Mokarzel (Freike, 1864-Paris, 1932) was a Lebanese political activist, influential intellectual and publisher, who immigrated to the United States where he established ‘Al-Hoda’ (The Guidance, 1898-1971), the largest Arabic daily in North America.

by Glen Kalem