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Edward Granville Browne (1862—1926)

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Edward Granville Browne (1862—1926) EDWARD GRANVILLE BROWNE (1862—1926) Christopher Buck THE BRITISH ORIENTALIST Edward Granville Browne One of the luminaries of Cambridge University, was a public intellectual, with a public. As a Browne had stylistic vigor and verve that, while young man, Browne mastered Turkish, Persian, reserved, lends an “enthusiasm which gives his and Arabic. This linguistic gift was foundational writings a special charm” (Margoliouth, p. 393). to his cross-cultural contributions as a British This charisma of discourse springs from Browne’s writer in travel, literature, religion, and politics. personal interest in his topics—which interest His travel narrative, A Year Amongst the Persians blurs, if not transgresses, the boundaries between (1893), which arguably is his most enduring scholarship and activism, of history and advocacy. work, vividly recounts Browne’s yearlong adven- His energy of style epitomizes Browne as the ture in Persia (now Iran) in 1887–1888. A Year quintessential participant-observer. Browne was Amongst the Persians was published by Adam anticolonialist by conviction and cosmopolitan in and Charles Black in 1893, and at first, the book social outlook; his family’s wealth, beyond drew scant attention. Shortly after Browne’s death providing Browne with financial independence, in 1926, however, the book was issued by also purchased independence of thought. This, in Cambridge University Press in a new edition, turn, enabled Browne to emerge as a voice of with a prefatory memoir by Sir E. Denison Ross. conscience and a bellwether of foreign Britain’s This time, the book enjoyed an enthusiastic policy. As a discoverer of the Babi religion (later reception. The book has remained in print ever succeeded by the Baha’i Faith), Browne was since. A Year Amongst the Persians is widely ac- England’s metaphysical adventurer par excel- claimed as one of the great travel classics and an lence, opening to the Occident new spiritual important contribution to world literature horizons of the Orient, in an intrepid precogni- generally. tion of an increasingly internationalized world. Browne’s claim as a British writer rests on Even prior to the belated appreciation of A his unique legacy in expanding Britain’s cultural, Year Amongst the Persians, Browne’s “public” literary, mystical, religious, political, journalistic, reached beyond the learned readers of his and medical horizons to new vistas in Persia and scholarly publications, During the last two farther abroad, through travel adventure, transla- decades of his life, Browne generated popular tion, activism, personal narrative, and history. interest as a critic of Russian (and British) Browne’s work, often reprinted, continues to be imperialism and colonialism. In focusing on read. His magnum opus, A Literary History of Persia in the areas of culture, religion, literature, Persia (four volumes, 1902–1924), to cite one and politics, Browne’s writings not only expanded example, was reissued in paperback by Cam- Britain’s horizons of interest and knowledge of bridge University Press in 2009. world affairs, but gave pause for national self- Browne was anything but a “dry” academic. reflection in matters of foreign policy. “Persia” He was passionate about “Persia” (the name for stood for the world outside of Britain. Persia, Iran current in English until 1935, when Reza moreover, exemplified how the Great Powers, Shah made “Iran” the official name of Persia). especially Britain and Russia, had taken advan- 17 (c) 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. EDWARD GRANVILLE BROWNE tage of weaker nations in order to exploit them. Turks in their struggle against imperial Russia. Serving as a minority voice in Britain’s national This marks a lifelong pattern in which Browne self-conscience, Browne had much to say regard- characteristically—and perhaps quixotically— ing how Britain should best conduct itself in consistently favored the underdog, even if world affairs and to what “world role” England undeserving. should aspire. Sympathetic to—and idealistically wishing to After reviewing his life, this essay highlights assist—oppressed Turks under siege, Browne some of Browne’s most significant contributions dedicated himself to learning Turkish via the Ori- as a British writer: in travel, literature, religion, entalist William Burckhardt Barker’s A Practical politics, and medicine. This categorization of Grammar of the Turkish Language (1854). His Browne’s works roughly corresponds to the naïveté was such that he was later surprised to characterization of Browne’s major areas of inter- discover that Turkish is written from right to left. est by Reynold Nicholson, the editor of a 1932 Later on, Browne was tutored by an Irish clergy- bibliography of Browne’s manuscript collection. man who had learned Turkish as a private in the Space does not permit a review of Browne’s Crimean War. This prelate was later driven from scholarly articles, of which there are many; the his local parish for his open defense of the Turks, eighteen articles that Browne published in the who were disfavored in the eyes of the British Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1889–1908; public because of the 1876 Batak massacres, in cited in the bibliography below) offer a fair which Ottoman troops murdered thousands of representation of Browne’s further contributions Bulgarian civilians. Browne’s mastery of Turkish as a scholar. was augmented by study with Sir James Red- house, the sole Ottoman Turkish scholar in Great Britain. LIFE With no interest in his father’s field of engineering, Edward agreed to Sir Benjamin’s Edward Granville Browne, born February 7, recommendation to study medicine at Cambridge; 1862, was the eldest son of his illustrious father, he began his studies in October 1879. During his Sir Benjamin Chapman Browne, who from 1886– first year there, Browne took up the study of 1916 ran a successful firm of shipbuilders and Arabic under Professor E. H. Palmer, Lord engineers, R. & W. Hawthorn, Leslie & Co., in Almoner’s Professor of Arabic. In 1880, Browne Newcastle upon Tyne, where he served as mayor began learning Persian, and he continued his (1885–1887) and was knighted for his success in study of Arabic and Persian over the next two overseeing the Royal Jubilee Exhibition and years. Browne’s first instructor in Persian was an Royal Agricultural Show in Newcastle-upon-Tyne eccentric East Indian undergraduate who tutored in 1887. After Sir Benjamin’s death in 1917, Edward in the Gulistan (English trans., The Rose Edward Browne inherited his father’s wealth. Garden) of the thirteenth-century Persian poet The young Edward was sent to Glenalmond Sa’di (considered the single most influential work College, a leading boarding school in Perthshire, of Persian prose and poetry) in exchange for Scotland, and from there to Eton College, another humoring his tutor by listening to him play his boarding school, located near Windsor, Berkshire. fiddle. These stultifying Scottish and English schools, In June 1882, Edward Browne passed the where the classics predominated in dulling rote Natural Sciences Tripos, Part 1 (second class), pedagogy, did nothing to arouse passion for learn- and earned his second M.B. For this, he was ing or to quicken young Edward’s intellect. rewarded by his father with a summer trip to Browne quit school in 1887, when he was fifteen. Constantinople (modern Istanbul) in July and At that impressionable age, Browne read, with August. On his return, Browne took the Indian great interest, of the Russo-Turkish (or Russian- Languages Tripos, in the course of which he Ottoman) War, and became sympathetic to the studied, as required, Hindustani, Sanskrit, Arabic, 18 (c) 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. EDWARD GRANVILLE BROWNE and Persian—all languages of the Indian the College of Physicians, and the University of subcontinent. Browne passed his exams admira- Cambridge (where he took the Conjoint Board bly and, in February 1884, obtained his first-class exams). Arrangements were made for Browne to honors degree in the Indian Languages Tripos. practice medicine as a house physician, for one After leaving Cambridge, Browne returned to year, under Dr. Samuel Gee, starting on April 1, medicine by commencing, in October 1884, his 1888. Then, on May 30, 1887, Browne received clinical training at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in a telegram announcing that he had been elected a London, where he was mentored by Sir Norman fellow at Pembroke College. This enabled him to Moore, to whom Browne later dedicated his Fitz- travel to Persia for the next year, beginning in patrick Lectures (1919–1920) on Arabian September 1887—the experience that led to the medicine. Meanwhile, Browne furthered his study writing of his travel classic, A Year Amongst the of Persian apace (tutored at that time by a “very Persians. learned but very eccentric old Persian”—that is, In October 1888, on his return from the “Mirza Muhammad Bakir, of Bawanat in Fars, yearlong sojourn in Persia, Browne took up his surnamed Ibrahim Jan Mu’attar” (A Year Amongst position as Cambridge University’s first lecturer the Persians, 1893, p. 12); in the course of this in Persian, a five-year initial appointment, and pursuit he became attracted to Sufism (Islamic during the next decades he shaped a career as a mysticism) and was even given a Sufi name, scholar of considerable prestige. In 1902, Browne Mazhar-’Ali, by Haji Muhammad-’Ali Pirzadih. succeeded Charles Rieu as Sir Thomas Adams Trained in medicine, and now versed in lan- Professor of Arabic at Cambridge, and in 1903, guages, Browne continued to pursue an interest he was appointed a fellow of the British Academy. in Sufism that evolved toward scholarship in the On January 26, 1911, he was elected to the Royal Babi religion—that is, “of Babi doctrine and his- College of Physicians of London—under a tory which first won for me a reputation in special bylaw enabling those trained in medicine, Oriental scholarship” (Literary History of Persia, yet not practitioners, to be elected to the College vol.
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