The Mahjar was a literary movement started by Arabic-speaking writers who had emigrated to America from Ottoman-ruled Lebanon, Syria and Palestine at the turn of the 20th century. Like their predecessors in the Nahda movement, writers of the Mahjar movement were stimulated by their personal encounter with the Western world and participated in the renewal of Arabic literature, hence their proponents being sometimes referred to as writers of the "late Nahda". These writers, in South America as well as the United States, contributed indeed to the development of the Nahda in the early 20th century. Kahlil Gibran is considered to have been the most influential of the "Mahjar poets" or "Mahjari poets".
As worded by David Levinson and Melvin Ember, "the drive to sustain some Arab cultural identity" among the immigrant communities in North America "was reinforced from the beginning when educated immigrants launched Arabic-language newspapers and literary societies in both the New York and Boston areas to encourage poetry and writing, with the aim of keeping alive and enriching the Arabic cultural heritage." Thus, in 1892, the first American Arabic-language newspaper, Kawkab America, was founded in New York and continued until 1908, and the first Arabic-language magazine Al-Funoon was published by Nasib Arida in New York from 1913 to 1918. This magazine served as a mouthpiece for young Mahjari writers.
The Pen League was the first Arabic-language literary society in North America, formed initially by Nasib Arida and Abd al-Masih Haddad in 1915 or 1916, and subsequently re-formed in 1920 by a larger group of Mahjari writers in New York led by Kahlil Gibran. They had been working closely since 1911. The league dissolved following Gibran's death in 1931 and Mikhail Naimy's return to Lebanon in 1932. The primary goals of The Pen League were, in Naimy's words as Secretary, "to lift Arabic literature from the quagmire of stagnation and imitation, and to infuse a new life into its veins so as to make of it an active force in the building up of the Arab nations". As Naimy expressed in the by-laws he drew up for the group:
The tendency to keep our language and literature within the narrow bounds of aping the ancients in form and substance is a most pernicious tendency; if left unopposed, it will soon lead to decay and disintegration... To imitate them is a deadly shame... We must be true to ourselves if we would be true to our ancestors.
Literary historian Nadeem Naimy assesses the group's importance as having shifted the criteria of aesthetic merit in Arabic literature:
Focusing on Man rather than on language, on the human rather than on the law and on the spirit rather than on the letter, the Mahjar School is said to have ushered Arabic literature from its age old classicism into the modern era.
The first Arabic-language newspaper in Brazil, Al-Faiáh, appeared in Campinas in November 1895, followed by Al-Brasil in Santos less than six months later. The two merged a year later in São Paulo. The first Arabic-language literary circle in South America, Riwaq al-Ma'arri, was founded in 1900 by Sa'id Abu Hamza, who was also settled in São Paulo. Shafiq al-Ma'luf "led the major grouping of South American Mahjar poets".
Principles
's book of literary criticismAl-Ghirbal contains the main principles of the Mahjar movement.
