Dear Susan,
You've caught me on a slow day, so let me respond to your posting.
> There is a reason that the Guardian chose to translate
> this particular work. However, I think those reasons
> were more theological than because it was more
> historically accurate.
If there were some theological reasons, then that needs to be demonstrated. So far, I don't know of any such reason. What aspect of the Dawn-breakers is theological to you? It simply portrays the Babi Faith as a precursor to Baha'u'llah's appearance, but that line of argument was available in lots of other places, such as A Traveler's Narrative.
I think the main reason that Shoghi Effendi translated an edited version of Nabil's Narrative was to remove the effect of E.G. Browne as the main Babi/Baha'i storyteller. That is, if anyone wanted to know the history of the Babis, they had to read something by Browne, who had an agenda of his own and didn't believe in the Babis being the proto-Baha'is, and worried about Azal's role, etc.
So the easiest thing to do was to provide the Baha'i community with an elegantly translated narrative of the Babis (which effectively countered everything that Browne had published), which continued the line of thinking in A Traveler's Narrative, and declare that "the unchallengeable" history. After that, no Baha'i would bother with things like Tarikh-i Jadid or Materials, etc, because they had the "unchallengeable" document.
That worked like a charm. In fact, we saw it very nicely demonstrated during the past couple of days when someone ask for the list of Letters and someone opened the DB and said, "Here you go. This is THE list." The unchallengeable list.
Well, folks, things aren't that simple.
> We can argue how much he edited it but unless someone
> has a copy of the original, I'm not sure we can really say.
I have provided extensive discussion of this very issue in my Nayriz article which I posted on Tarikh a few months ago. I would refer you to that.
> Dr. Banani thought the changes were extensive enough
> to make it an entirely different work.
To my knowledge, Prof Banani has not had the opportunity to examine the original of Nabil's, or engage in critical text analysis that Kavian Milani or I are doing. I suspect what Prof Banani offered was an educated guess, but since the time you heard him speak those words, which must have been some years ago, we've done lot more analysis through Nabil's own text and through proxies, such as, Zuhuru'l-Haqq. All of these were discussed in my Nayriz article. You should really read it some time ;-} I thoroughly enjoyed reading it myself ;-}
> I wouldn't assume the Guardian felt 'ethically bound'
> by those standards of scholarship which binds us academics.
Academics has nothing to do with it. Any ethical person knows that one can't put words in someone else's mouth.
Regards,
ahang.
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