Spirits Rebellious
by Kahlil Gibran
When this book was first published in the original Arabic, it caused significant agitation and intrigue. In the Beirut market, he was publicly burned by angry church and government officials, who denounced him as poisonous and dangerous to the peace of the country. Gibran himself was exiled. But this was a time when Lebanon was in virtual slavery from oppressive Turkish rule. Years later, his exile was detained, and the church embraced him without compromise on his part. And yet the chronicle remains as Gibran writes here: he felt deeply outraged and outraged by the protest against the brutal inequality of a man and a woman in marriage — a miserable failure of the principles of law and justice and the corrupt, thieving practice of religious rule in the Middle East of his time.
