Edward Granville Browne and the Writing of Babi Narratives

One of the foremost experts of the early twentieth century on the religious faiths and politics of Iran, E.G. Browne cut his teeth as an orientalist by travelling through the country as a young man and reporting on its most recent religious manifestation, the Babi movement. This chapter explicates Browne’s enthusiasm for Babism and his involvement in its eventual schism. Considering this, and the effect his later advocacy of Persian nationalism against the policy of the British Government had on his subsequent career, Browne’s might be called a ‘peculiar’ type of orientalism. Under Azali influence Browne published material which would provide ammunition against the Baha’i faith for their Ahmadi competitors as well as hostile Christian missionaries. In spite of all this, through incorporating orientalist writing like Browne’s and eastern traveller George Nathaniel Curzon’s, orientalist features became deeply engraved into Baha’i literature. Nevertheless in the long run, in comparison with Ahmadism, interest in the Baha’i faith seems to have subsided.