Un abito per il Profeta. Lettere inedite di Khalil Gibran a Antony Bashir

Abstract

Khalil Gibran’s letters to Archbishop Antony Bashir were unknown and unpublished until November 11th, 2004 when they appeared in the original Arabic in the Lebanese daily newspaper «al-Nahār» («al-Mulḥaq»). According to «al-Nahār», these letters remained hidden among the archives of the Greek Orthodox Diocese in North America. The Lebanese-born Bashir, Archbishop of New York and Metropolitan of All North America, was the ruling bishop of the North American archdiocese of the Church of Antioch from 1936 to 1966. He was a writer and also the translator of many of Gibran’s English works into Arabic, including his masterpiece The Prophet. Archbishop Philip Saliba, the current primate of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, accidentally found the letters in 1966 when he was searching in the old files of his predecessor.