The Schoolboy in Beirut: Shoghi Effendi's Studies at the AUB

In *The Priceless Pearl* Rúḥíyyih Khánum gives a careful account of her husband’s school years. They explain a great deal about the man he became.

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Shoghi Effendi had been born in 1897 in the prison-city of ‘Akká, a grandson of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and a great-grandson of Bahá’u’lláh. His earliest education had been at home, in Persian and in Arabic, from family tutors. By the age of about eleven he was sent — at the Master’s wish, Rúḥíyyih Khánum records — to school in Haifa; from there, in due course, to the Collège des Frères in Beirut, and finally to the Syrian Protestant College, the institution that would later become the American University of Beirut.

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The choice was deliberate. The Master, looking forward, foresaw a Cause that would speak to the West. He wanted His grandson to grow up able to read its books, follow its arguments, and meet its representatives in their own idiom. Shoghi Effendi accordingly sat through the Western university curriculum of the period — English literature, European history, political science, the sciences — alongside Druze, Maronite, Sunni, and Greek Orthodox classmates from across the Levant.

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Rúḥíyyih Khánum is honest that he was not in every respect a typical undergraduate. He was visibly devoted to the Master; he prayed regularly; he kept the Bahá’í fast among classmates who did not know what he was doing. He was, in his peers’ recollection, conspicuous more for moral seriousness than for brilliance — though his examination results were uniformly strong. He kept a private notebook of English vocabulary; he wrote letters home in three languages; he was, in his quiet way, already in training.

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The boy who returned from Beirut to Haifa each summer brought back a steadily widening competence in the languages and the intellectual habits of the Western world. The Master watched this with quiet approval. Neither of them, Rúḥíyyih Khánum emphasises, knew that the schooling was preparing him for the Guardianship. The Master’s Will and Testament, in which Shoghi Effendi was named His successor, was not opened until 1921. Until that day the schooling had simply been a grandson’s education — disciplined, broad, devotional, and quietly formidable.

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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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