 At 9 years old he was apprenticed to a stone-cutter, but at the age of 17 he managed to attend the American Presbyterian School in Souk El Gharb, catching up on his secondary education in two years of study and briefly becoming a teacher himself.It was here that he became a Presbyterian, in spite of his family's long adherence to the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch.In 1891 Rihbany emigrated to the United States, in the first instance to New York City, where he briefly edited "Kawkab Amirka" (The Star of America), North America's first Arabic-language newspaper.