الأجنحة المتكسرة

The Broken Wings is Kahlil Gibran's early Arabic novella, a lyrical tale of doomed love set in early twentieth-century Beirut. A young man recalls his first, all-consuming love for Selma Karamy, a gentle and intelligent woman whose fate is decided not by her heart but by others.

When Selma is compelled into a marriage of convenience with the nephew of a powerful bishop, the lovers are left to a quiet, sorrowful longing that custom and clerical authority will not allow them to escape. Through their tenderness and their suffering, Gibran mounts a searching critique of arranged marriage, religious power, and the constrained lives of women.

Written in Gibran's characteristically poetic, aphoristic prose, The Broken Wings is a foundational work of modern Arabic literature and an early expression of the spiritual and reformist themes that would later reach the wider world in The Prophet.