1862 - 1926
British Iranologist.
Born of a wealthy Gloucestershire family, E. G. Browne was educated at Eton and Cambridge, England, where he qualified as a physician. In 1877, his interest stimulated by the Russian - Ottoman War, he began a largely informal study of Turkish, followed by Persian and Arabic. Elected a fellow of Pembroke College at Cambridge, he spent the year 1887 - 1888 in Iran, which he described in A Year amongst the Persians (London, 1893, reprint 1926). On his return he was appointed university lecturer in Persian, then in 1902 Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic. He married in 1906 and remained in Cambridge until his death.
As a rich man holding a virtual sinecure, Browne was able to direct his enormous energy and phenomenal memory into an almost virgin field. In Britain, Middle East studies had formerly been concerned mainly with Arabic. Persian studies, a legacy via the "back door" from the Mogul Empire (of India, which had become part of the British Empire following the Sepoy mutiny of 1857), had been confined to the few literary classics used in examinations for the Indian Civil Service. Browne unlocked the "front door" to post-Islamic Persia (now Iran) and to the full range of New Persian studies - including the modern spoken and literary language, religious history, and politics.
His most important contribution is the four-volume A Literary History of Persia (1902, 1906, 1920, 1924), still a valuable resource for scholars. It quotes extensively from original sources and from information provided by his Iranian friends and correspondents, including major writers and scholars of the time such as Ali Akbar Dehkhoda and Mohammad Qazvini. Apart from his large scholarly output, Browne also promoted Oriental studies at Cambridge by attracting prospective diplomats and administrators to an academic training; these included later historians of the Middle East, such as Laurence Lockhart and Sir Reader Bullard.
Even before his journey to Iran, Browne had taken a sympathetic interest in the Babis movement (c. 1844 - 1853) and its successors, the Azali and Bahaʾi faiths. He wrote a detailed account of these for the Royal Asiatic Society in 1889, met with leading adherents of the sects (especially Azalis), and published some of their works. He is best remembered in Iran for his active support of the constitutional movement from 1905 to 1911, which was characteristic of his liberal sympathies with all aspirants to self-determination. In 1908 he helped found the Persia Committee, composed of prominent members of the British Parliament (MPs); through this pressure group, in lectures, and in letters to the press, Browne sharply criticized his own government's and Russia's machinations in Iran. His book The Press and Poetry of Modern Persia (1914) is not merely a supplement to his Literary History but an avowedly partisan promotion of the democratic ideals he saw in the vigorous free press of constitutionalist Iran.
Browne was awarded the Persian Order of the Lion and Sun and, on his sixtieth birthday, he received accolades from his Iranian admirers and his British colleagues. Both as a scholar and an activist, he did much to present a sympathetic picture of Iran's people and culture to a Western public, whose view of the Middle East was already being shaped chiefly by the dictates of geopolitics, and petroleum.
Bibliography
Arberry, A. J. Oriental Essays. London: Allen and Unwin, 1960.
— JOHN R. PERRY
