In the early twentieth-century there were roughly 300 Iranian students in AUB.
Iranian students at AUB constituted an eclectic mix of Iranians from Palestine, Iran and other parts of the Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman Arab states although most coalesced around their Baha’i identity through student clubs. Muslim Iranians formed a small minority at AUB but they partook in Iranian student clubs and receptions of visiting Iranian dignitaries. In this article, the category of Iranian has been employed instead of Iranian Baha’i since not all Iranian Baha’is who entered AUB identified as such later in life.*
*A number of these graduates were expelled on the grounds that they disobeyed the Baha’i leadership while others became agnostic or nominal Muslims.
Iranian AUB students’ experiences shed light on the formation of the middle class in the modern Middle East. Many felt an elective affinity with SPC/AUB because of the institution’s moral educational vision, its proximity to Baha’i leaders in Palestine and its non-sectarian and practical orientation.
Why AUB?
Many Iranians chose to study at AUB instead of alternative institutions in other parts of the Ottoman Empire, Europe or America. The most immediate reason for this was because AUB was located in near proximity to the Baha’i leadership in Palestine.
‘Abdu’l-Baha feared Iranian Baha’is studying in secular institutions in Europe might lose their spiritual bearings in such potentially alienating and corrupting settings.
‘Abdu’l-Baha sent several young Iranians from his own family and the circle of Baha’i followers in Haifa to the university, sometimes at his own expense. He often made specific recommendations on what students should study, including topics like medicine and agriculture,...
Sons were preferred by the Afnan family
The over-representation of Iranian Baha’i students at AUB from Shiraz, and especially from the Afnan family, provides a clue to the broader patterns of class formation in the Middle East. (The main member of the Afnan family who lived in Beirut and who sent many of his children [sons] to AUB was Sayyid ‘Ali Afnan.) The Afnans were involved in transnational commercial activities spanning Iran, India and the Persian Gulf. Merchant families sending their children, particularly their sons, into higher education indicates an awareness of the shifting nature of the modern economy, and the perceived need for command over new forms of knowledge in order to thrive in it.
Zia Baghdadi left the AUB because he was forced to attend the church.
Zia Baghdadi, an Arab Baha’i medical student attending SPC at the time, wrote of the college’s heavy-handed policies, most notably when the American Presbyterian missionaries ‘without making any exceptions, gave the students a choice of attending the church or of being expelled’. Baghdadi cited ‘this controversy’ as being ‘one of the causes’ for his leaving the college and ‘completing his studies in a Chicago university’.
Abdul Baha wanted the college to be non-denominational in character
‘Abdu’l-Baha further solidified his relationship with the college when he met with its president, Howard Bliss, and outlined his vision for the college. He believed it should be non-denominational in character, teach moral education and service to humanity, and offer courses that would eliminate ignorance and solve pressing social problems.
Some Baha'i students abandoned their faith
Just as Iranian students founded multiple clubs, they also learned to write for multiple audiences. When they wrote for Baha’i publications, they spoke as committed believers who nevertheless drew on modern thinkers. But when they wrote for a college audience, they adopted an academic tone. In fact, the students’ Masters theses and published articles constituted some of the earliest examples of Iranian Baha’is writing academically about social, cultural and political issues. This was a departure from devotional, hagiographical and apologetical literature that was the mainstay of much of Baha’i publishing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through their exposure to the disciplines of history, political science and economics in classes at AUB, these students grappled with the question of how to simultaneously be a religious believer and an academic. This underlying tension between religious and academic modes of reasoning—one that is commonly found in contemporary Jewish, Christian and Muslim writers as well—left an indelible mark on the lives of many students beyond AUB. Some abandoned their faith and wrote only academic works. Others abandoned aspirations for academic careers and instead wrote hagiographies...
Criticizing West and European civilization
In the 1930s, Iranian students such as Ruhi Afnan and Balyuzi sharply criticized Western modernity, perhaps in part because the ‘barbarism’ of the war itself called into question the ‘civilized’ status of European civilization.
Marriage Patterns
Husayn Afnan, for instance, married Badi‘ah al-Husri, the orphaned niece of the prominent Iraqi nationalist Sati’ al-Husri. That Sati‘ al-Husri, an ardent Arab nationalist, should allow his niece to marry an Iranian Baha’i stands out as an irony of the early 1920s.
A number of Iranian Baha’i graduates from AUB married European and North American women, perhaps because of their religion’s emphasis on inter-racial harmony. In many ways, their marriage patterns also match those of Iranian intellectuals from Muslim backgrounds, such as Muhammad Qazvini and Hasan Taqizadah, who similarly took European brides after years of travelling or living outside of their native country. Within Iran, Iranian feminists like Sadiqah Dawlatabadi lambasted Iranian men for taking European wives since this constituted a demographic threat to national unity.88 Iranian graduates of AUB may have been motivated by any number of these factors, but clearly having lived (and often been born) abroad shaped their thinking. Shoghi Effendi was a prime example of this: he married the Canadian May Maxwell. His brother Husayn Rabbani similarly married a German woman. Hasan Balyuzi married Mary Molly Brown while residing in England. The notices in Al-Kulliyah demonstrate that many Iranians married European or American women. Aflatun Mirza was engaged to Miss Annie Joseph while he was in Iraq. ‘Ali Yazdi, who moved to America after his studies, married Marion Carpenter. Zeine Zeine married Miss Mary Howie, a fellow graduate of AUB. Finally, ‘Abd al-Husayn Iqbal married Miss Francine-Jeanne Simonot of France in Nanterre, France.
AUB graduates in the service of the Baha'i leadership
Among the most difficult category to classify were the AUB graduates who entered the service of the Baha’i leadership in Haifa as secretaries and assistants. Their day-to-day tasks included corresponding with the Baha’i international community (usually in English), translating texts, acting as informal ambassadors to Baha’i communities through tours and trips abroad, and serving as liaisons for visiting pilgrims. Several AUB graduates went on to pen literary and scholarly works in the form of histories, biographies, philosophical texts and lexicons, and works of fiction.
Graduates did not help Iran
Iranian students returning to Iran sometimes served in government and bureaucratic positions and public education. Discriminatory hiring practices against religious minorities, coupled with resentment against a Baha’i holding a position instead of a Shi‘i Muslim, hampered some graduates from entering into the public sector as teachers, doctors, nurses and lawyers. Since many of these graduates had been born and raised in Palestine, they appear to have preferred jobs in post-Ottoman Arab states rather than in Iran. Graduates who did return to Iran gravitated towards the Iranian private sector. The situation in Iran might explain why many graduates sought public sector employment in newly established secular Arab countries where there were fewer barriers than in their homeland, while still others left the Middle East altogether.
School for Baha'i children in Palestine
Bushrui, who held both a BA and a MA from AUB, established a school for local Baha’i children in addition to assisting Habibullah Khan, who was understaffed, when performing medical procedures.
AUB graduates in Government positions and politics
AUB graduates worked in official government positions in Iran during the first half of the twentieth century. Among the earliest Iranian graduates of SPC to have reached a level of prominence in the Iranian bureaucracy was Habibullah ‘Ayn al-Mulk Huvayda [father of Amir-Abbas Hoveyda]. ‘Ayn al-Mulk was the son of Mirza Riza, one of the personal secretaries of ‘Abdu’l-Baha. A notice in 1921 mentions he had attended AUB as a student nearly 30 years ago, suggesting he began his studies there around 1891. From Beirut, Habibullah left for Paris where he entered the service of the Bakhtiyari tribal chief Sardar Asad as a tutor for his children. Sardar Asad rose to prominence as a national leader during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1906–1911). Sardar Asad requested that the Shah of Iran, Ahmad Shah, grant Habibullah the title ‘Ayn al-Mulk, which apparently launched his diplomatic career. In 1921, he was appointed as the Iranian consul in Damascus. Later he became the Iranian Consul General in Beirut. Throughout the 1920s, ‘Ayn al-Mulk repeatedly visited his alma mater, including when he received the body of the late Muhammad ‘Ali Shah and attended the 1928 commencement. Occasionally Iranian graduates obtained government posts. Several graduates served in governmental posts in their hometown of Abadah in the mid-1920s. A much more high-profile case was Qasim Ghani, who became a member of Iranian parliament in the mid-1930s as a representative of Mashhad. Mirza Malidi Maraki found employment in the Customs Administration in Iran in Bandar Abbas. A holder of a BA, ‘Ali Allah’ Ali Akbar Nakhjavani worked for the Imperial Bank of Iran.
Most Iranian humanities graduates rose to prominence in British mandatory states such as Palestine, Iraq and Egypt. The Iranian graduates’ fluency in both English and Arabic, their higher education in a modern school and the persistence of intermittent discrimination in Iran all contributed to their desire to seek positions within the Arabic-speaking Middle East. Many had been born and raised in Ottoman Palestine and hence they probably felt more at home in the post-Ottoman Arab states than in Iran. Badi‘ Bushrui was a case in point. After his stint as a teacher in Abu Sinan, Badi‘ Bushrui gained several governmental positions in mandatory Palestine as the private secretary to the governor of Phoenicia, the secretary of the local Food Commission, district officer in Tiberius, and the mayor of Nablus.
A prominent political figure to emerge from the circle of AUB Iranian graduates was Husayn Afnan. Afnan initially taught at the government secondary school in Shebin el-Kom in Egypt in 1912. During the war, he was given charge of a prisoners’ camp in British India. Shortly after the war, he appears to have travelled to Syria from where he accompanied Faisal to Iraq. Having settled in Iraq, Afnan co-founded the newspaper Al-Sharq and a moderate political party along with Sayyid Talib al-Naqib. The newspaper was one of the few Iraqi newspapers critical of the 1920 revolt; it published the petitions of tribes in favour of a British mandate. Afnan became the Secretary of the Council of State in King Faisal’s Iraq. He famously read a proclamation during Faisal’s coronation stating the popular support for the king among the Iraqi population. As part of his duties, he was charged with translating texts from English into Arabic. He later held posts as an Iraqi diplomat in London and Ankara and the Secretary of Western Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
House of Baha'u'llah in Baghdad and expulsion of Husayn Afnan
Afnan’s Baha’i affiliation made him the target of Shi‘i clerics who resented Baha’is owning property in the environs of Baghdad. Baha’i ownership of the house of the Baha’u’llah in Baghdad led to protestations by Shi‘i mujtahids that they were heretics without property rights. By 1924, the case was taken to the Iraqi Court of First Instance; the court ruled in favour of the Baha’is. It did not take long for King Faisal—with the full support of the Council of Ministers—to overturn the ruling...
This time Shoghi Effendi asked Afnan to resign from his government post ‘so that he would not be placed in the position of endorsing that government’s actions in the case’. When Afnan refused, he was expelled from the Baha’i religion.
The Role of AUB
In the religious sphere, many Iranian graduates played a pivotal role in the leadership and administration of the Baha’i Faith. The most prominent Iranian Baha’i graduate of AUB was Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Baha’i Faith (1921–1957). Shoghi Effendi elaborated on Baha’i history, administrative structures and procedural guidelines for institutions in his large corpus of mostly English-language books. He also was responsible for translating Baha’u’llah’s central texts into English, thereby further canonizing and making readily available these works to a broader reading Baha’i audience. His own English-language education at AUB and later Oxford undoubtedly factored into English becoming the de facto language of official communications within the Baha’i world community. He elaborated on the Baha’i administration system, which was democratic and non-clerical in nature, having benefited from studies of European and American institutions. Over the course of the early twentieth century, many Iranian graduates of AUB became part of a growing cadre of secretaries in the service of the Baha’i leadership. Before becoming the Guardian of the Baha’i Faith, Shoghi Effendi served as a secretary to ‘Abdu’l-Baha. Similarly, Azizullah Bahadur, his fellow graduate from SPC, was also ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s secretary and later a Persian secretary of Shoghi Effendi. Once Shoghi Effendi became the Guardian, this tradition continued. Many of his male relatives graduated from AUB, such as his own brother Husayn Rabbani in addition to his cousins Soheil and Ruhi Afnan, both of whom served as secretaries in the 1920s and 1930s.
Qasim Ghani
Qasim Ghani, who distanced himself from any Baha’i connection shortly after graduation, wrote on a diverse range of literary and scholarly topics. Among his earliest published works were translations of the French novels of Anatole France.
Ruhi Afnan
Ruhi Afnan composed both religious and academic works. Earlier in his life, Afnan co-authored an introductory English book on the Baha’i Faith with Horace Holley. In the mid-1930s, he authored a book on mysticism and the Baha’i Faith. After his expulsion from the Baha’i community, Ruhi’s scholarship dealt with broader academic themes and more philosophically oriented studies of the Babi and Baha’i religions.
Balyuzi
From among the group of graduates who remained a part of the Baha’i community, Hasan Balyuzi became the most prominent semi-official historian of the Baha’i Faith. His biographies of the central figures of the Babi and Baha’i religions were semi-hagiographical...
Conclusion
Iranian Baha’i graduates from AUB became the core intermediaries between a more established Baha’i community in the Middle East and a growing community in English-speaking countries. Methodologically, Iranian Baha’i historians affiliated with AUB incorporated a measure of critical textual analysis and citations into their community-oriented histories and biographies, signalling a departure from earlier Persian chronicles and hagiographies. Given the high number of Iranian graduates who either left the Baha’i religion or were expelled from it, the exposure to these new modes of thinking may have altered their attitude towards religious authority and paved the way for a more secular sensibility
(Farzin Vejdani, The Iranians of AUB and Middle Class Formation in the Early Twentieth-Century Middle East)
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