The Madman and Sand and Foam. Gibran was influenced by his own religion as well as by the mysticism of the Sufis and, in particular, by the Bahá'í Faith, a religion that stresses the spiritual unity of all mankind and recognises that we were all created by the same God. The Madman is the voice of a mystic whose masks, or personae, have been "stolen." It is a distillate, in parable form, of the "true self" - full of the wonder of God and yet, at times, troubled with sardonic questions about man's spiritual path. The narrator - no doubt Gibran himself - is the impassioned seeker, who expresses himself through the thirty-four parables and poems of The Madman. Its bitter tones and dark spaces are not for the faint-hearted spiritual traveller but it is without doubt an honest and potent expression of a true seeker