Recently, my partner and I placed many of our favorite books on a new bookshelf. She stood the classic Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam face out on a shelf, and I placed Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet next to it. Hours later, while looking at these books, I was able to see that the images on the covers correspond. Specifically, I could see a "face" in the Islamic design on the Rubaiyat, and not just any face; I could see that the face on the cover of The Prophet, if overlaid onto the other book's design, would match up exactly.
In order to demonstrate this fact, I have employed the help of the computer. I scanned each book's cover at 100%, then overlaid the images. What you see here are the superimposed images of these two Middle Eastern classics with no resizing or skewing of either image. They fit together exactly as they appear in the widely commercially available copies.
Those familiar with these books know they have some things in common, including cultural context and mystical allusion. It could also be argued that these books are among the most popular "Middle Eastern" books of all time, at least in the West. All the more, this fact about their covers seems most unlikely. The image of the face that Gibran drew appears on the cover of his book with an arbitrary size, as with the design on the Rubaiyat. Yet, they match. What could account for such a correspondence?
