The Guardian's Care for English

A retelling based on The Priceless Pearl by Rúḥíyyih Khánum, the biography of Shoghi Effendi by his wife, who worked beside him from their marriage in 1937 until his passing in 1957. Words in quotation marks are as that book records them.

In the autumn of 1920 Shoghi Effendi, the eldest grandson of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, entered Balliol College, Oxford, after his studies at the American University of Beirut. The college register gives his age as twenty-three. His classes, which he listed carefully in a notebook, included political science, political economy, logic and economic history. But Rúḥíyyih Khánum records that his avowed purpose in going to Oxford was "to perfect his English in order to better translate the Tablets of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, as well as the other sacred writings, into this language."

He worked at it constantly. In a Persian letter to a friend in London he wrote: "I am engaged in this land, day and night, in perfecting myself in the art of translation...I do not have a moment's rest. Thank God that to some extent at least the results are good." From his Beirut days almost to the end of his life he kept notebooks of English vocabulary and typical phrases, and hundreds of words and sentences are recorded in them. He read the King James Bible and the historians Carlyle and Gibbon, whose style he greatly admired. Rúḥíyyih Khánum remembered that he always had a volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire near him, and there was a copy of part of it beside his bed when he died.

His studies were cut short. On 29 November 1921 a cable reached London with the news that 'Abdu'l-Bahá had passed away. When His Will and Testament was read, it named Shoghi Effendi Guardian of the Cause of God. Years later he wrote of his "sudden and deeply-regretted recall from Balliol."

In the years that followed he translated many of the sacred writings into English. Among them were The Hidden Words and the Kitáb-i-Íqán, which he finished in 1930. In that same year he began translating the first part of Nabíl's narrative of the early days of the Faith, published in 1932 as The Dawn-Breakers. Bayard Dodge, one of his old professors from Beirut, wrote to him about that book: "The quality of the English and the delightful ease of reading the translation are extraordinary, as usually a translation if difficult to read." He also praised the footnotes the Guardian had added.

Rúḥíyyih Khánum saw how carefully he chose his words. Although he had a brilliant command of the language, she writes, he often checked the word he meant to use in Webster's big dictionary, and it was often her task to hand it to him. "Not infrequently his choice would be the third or forth usage of the word, sometimes bordering on the archaic, but it was the exact word that conveyed his meaning and so he used it."

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see The Priceless Pearl by Rúḥíyyih Khánum.

Khánum, R.. (1969). *The Priceless Pearl*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://bahai-library.com/khanum_priceless_pearl