NAIMY, Mikhail. The Book of Mirdad. A Lighthouse and a Heaven. Mumbai, N. M. Tripathi Ltd., 1954.
8vo. Original black glossy cloth, front cover lettered in gilt; dust-wrapper; pp. 208, [2], portrait frontispiece; wrappers with a few repaired flaws; otherwise very good.
Very rare first Indian edition, after a London publisher had refused to publish this spiritual work as being not Christian enough and a 1948 Beirut edition. According to the inside flap this book 'is teaching the essence of religion, yet wholy free from dogma. Only poetry or music […] could adequately convey the almost inexpressible ideas' (Gordon Muirhead). 'Poet and philosopher Mikhail Naimy was born in Lebanon in 1889. He lived in Palestine as a child and attended the Theological Seminary in Poltava, the Ukraine, from 1906 to 1911. In 1911 he moved to the United States, where he attended the University of Washington-Seattle before moving to New York City. He returned to Lebanon in 1932. In New York, he was associated with Khalil Gibran, a fellow member of the New York Pen League, an organization promoting Arab writers and writing. Author of the spiritual work Book of Mirdad: The Strange Story of a Monastery Which Was Once Called the Ark (1948), Naimy also wrote a biography of Khalil Gibran' (Poetry Foundation, online).
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