Mahjar

The Mahjar (المهجر, one of its more literal meanings being "the Arab diaspora") was a related to Romanticism migrant literary movement started by Arabic-speaking writers who had emigrated to the Americas from Ottoman-ruled Lebanon, Syria and Palestine at the turn of the 20th century and became a movement in the 1910s. Like their predecessors in the Nahda movement (or the "Arab Renaissance"), 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 "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 (الرابطة القلمية / ) 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.