The Studious Years at Oxford: Shoghi Effendi at Balliol

In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum devotes a chapter to the preparation of the young man who would one day be the Guardian. She is keen, in writing it, to record what was actually in his mind during the months he spent in England — and what was not.

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Shoghi Effendi arrived at Balliol College, Oxford, in the autumn of 1920, after a period of study at the American University of Beirut and a long-cherished hope of perfecting his command of English. He was twenty-three years old. He had no notion of the office that, fourteen months later, would fall to him.

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His project at Oxford, his cousin and biographer records, was narrowly focused. He was reading economics and political science in the formal university programme, but his real work was private. He sat in his rooms at Balliol with English literature and a dictionary and a notebook, and he taught himself the language to a precision that surprised even his English tutors. He wished to serve ‘Abdu’l-Bahá as a translator. He had carried the wish since boyhood. Oxford was where he meant to perfect it.

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He read Carlyle, Gibbon, the King James Bible, Shakespeare. He underlined, copied, looked up. The English in which he would later render *The Dawn-Breakers,* *The Hidden Words,* the *Kitáb-i-Aqdas* — the cadenced, slightly archaic, faintly Biblical English by which a generation of Western Bahá’ís came to know the Sacred Writings — was being formed in those quiet Oxford rooms.

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Rúḥíyyih Khánum is careful to note that he was not idle in the ordinary university sense; he sat his terms, attended lectures, made friends among the British students. But the centre of gravity of his Oxford months lay elsewhere — in a small private discipline aimed at a service he expected to render in Haifa, under the eye of his Grandfather, for many years to come.

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The cable that arrived in Major Tudor Pole’s London office in late November 1921 ended that expectation. The English he had been quietly perfecting for the Master’s service became, overnight, the English in which the Cause itself would be written to the Western world. Oxford had not known what it was training. He had not known either.

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*Paraphrased from The Priceless Pearl (Rúḥíyyih Khánum, Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1969); see original for full text.*

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