Those Piercing Eyes: Edward Granville Browne in the Presence of Bahá'u'lláh

In April 1890 a young Cambridge orientalist named Edward Granville Browne, who had been studying the Bábí movement for several years, made his way to 'Akká in Ottoman Palestine and was admitted into the presence of Bahá'u'lláh at the mansion of Bahjí. The Bahá'í community had granted Browne — at that time the only Westerner with serious academic interest in their history — an extraordinary privilege. He spent four interviews with Bahá'u'lláh.

Browne returned to Cambridge. He continued his academic work. He never himself became a Bahá'í. But he wrote, in the introduction to his own translation of A Traveler's Narrative, a single paragraph describing what he had seen at Bahjí. That paragraph, preserved by Esslemont in Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era, has become the most quoted sentence ever written by a Westerner about Bahá'u'lláh.

Those piercing eyes seemed to read one's very soul; power and authority sat on that ample brow.

Esslemont reproduces the description with care. Bahá'u'lláh, seated on a low divan against the wall, had risen slightly to greet Browne and had then resumed His seat. He had spoken in a low voice with the dignity, Browne wrote, of a king. Browne captured the few words he was given to record:

The face of him on whom I gazed I can never forget, though I cannot describe it.

Browne's paragraph went on to record the substance of what Bahá'u'lláh said: a summons, addressed not specifically to Browne but to the world the young scholar represented, that the quarrels of nations should be done with, that men should consort together with peace, that the Most Great Peace was the necessary work of the age.

The detail that has caught Bahá'í imagination ever since is neither the words nor even the eyes alone. It is the quality of the witness. Browne was a young academic. He had no doctrinal sympathy for the claim Bahá'u'lláh embodied. He was trained, by the discipline of his Cambridge tutors, to a habit of careful reservation. The paragraph he wrote home — unembellished, lucid, pressed beyond his own scepticism into a register he had not expected to use — is testimony not because it is poetic but because, exactly to the degree that it is unsentimental, it is forced.

Esslemont, sitting in Aberdeen in the early 1920s and trying to explain to British readers what kind of figure Bahá'u'lláh had been, did the right thing. He let Browne speak. The paragraph, in 1923 as in 1891, did its own work.

Source: J. E. Esslemont, Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era (George Allen & Unwin, 1923), Chapter 3, quoting Edward Granville Browne's 1890 account. Public domain text from Project Gutenberg eBook #19241.

Esslemont, J. E.. (1923). *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era*. George Allen & Unwin. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19241