Abd al-Masih Haddad was a Syrian writer of the Mahjar movement and journalist. His magazine As-Sayeh, started in 1912 and continued until 1957, presented the works of prominent Mahjari literary figures in the United States and became the "spokesman" of the Pen League which he co-founded with Nasib Arida in 1915 or 1916. His collection Hikayat al-Mahjar, which he published in 1921, extended "the scope of the readership of fiction" in modern Arabic literature according to Muhammad Mustafa Badawi.

The Mahjar was a movement 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, 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".