Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah, by Nile Green
Published by W W Norton & Company
Review published in TLS, No 6354, January 10th, 2025
Anyone who has attempted to inform themselves about Muslim Britain, and how Islam has been perceived in the British Isles over the last hundred years, will have encountered the Shah family. Whether you measure their effect in yards of published books on a library shelf, or the dazzling number of institutes and foundations that they have established, or the lectures they have given, or the seminars and Thursday meetings that they have presided over, or the publishing companies or international prizes that they have set up, they have had an extraordinary and continuous impact. Their influence has been almost entirely benign, introducing Islam (as they perceived it) as a useful spiritual resource that would help reanimate the Western world. Instead of the familiar discourse of a clash of civilisations, and a theologically defined rhetoric of fear, exclusion and hate, the Shah family told folk stories and pasted together anthologies of inspiring mystical poetry. They did not so much preach as offer guidance to those who wished it, in the homely accent of educated English, clad in tweed, seated around a tea table. Nile Green has done a most excellent job, in tracing the various careers, achievements, manipulations and ambitions of Ikbal Shah and his son Idries Shah, who both made enthusiastic use of alternative identities and pen names. My only complaint is that I would have liked more, for this tale of a dynasty of story-tellers at work within modern Britain continues to this day, albeit in a much more open, less fantastical form, through the documentary film-maker Saira Shah (who made the award winning Death in Gaza), the travel writer Tahir Shah and the television journalist Safia Shah. All of them arguably as much inspired by their aunt, the folk historian and storyteller, Amina Maxwell-Hudson (nee Shah) as the more famous, and occasionally infamous, males of their family.
But there are many threads to this fantastical double biography. One of the great virtues of Nile Green’s study of two pivotal members of this dynasty - Ikbal Shah (1894-1969) and his son Idries Shah (1924-1996) – is that he makes it abundantly clear that Ikbal and Idries spoke to an entirely western (and usually ignorant) audience, and were detached from the principal intellectual movements (the Hadith based scholarship of the Salafi and Wahhabi) that were transforming the Middle East heartlands of the Islam. Ikbal and Idries, through class, accent and education, were completely removed from the experience of the millions of Muslims who would migrate to Britain to work over the 20th century. Their effect on how modern Muslims might navigate their way through Western society is negligible, but their influence on how Britain and America might perceive Islam was considerable. Their influence, was often manifested itself through unusual channels, such as the inspirational friendships they achieved with such major literary figures as Robert Graves and Doris Lessing. So far, all good.
Now for the downside.
Neither Idries Shah or his father Iqbal Shah were educated at university, and by the rigorous standards of British academic life (which lives, breathes and navigates itself through the disciplines of citations, source notes, bibliographies, peer reviews and critical book reviews) they were plagiarists. This would be business as usual, if they had been content to remain storytellers and freelance writers, but both men aspired to the authority of original scholarship. Both father and son used fake names, embroidered their family histories and set up bogus institutes and made use of false addresses with a breathless, inventive freedom that often failed but now and then struck gold. It makes a fantastic detective story for Nile Green to unravel, in part because the truth was just as strange as any of their fictions. The Shah family originated in Afghanistan, in the highlands just outside Kabul, where a fighting ancestor (Jan Fishan Khan) became an ally of the Durrani dynasty and their British patrons. He serves as a commander of auxiliary cavalry during (the disastrous) First Afghan War, 1838-42. So in Afghan eyes this warrior Shah might be labelled a traitor, but in the eyes of the British Raj, a loyal (and after his second round of spirited military assistance in the Indian Rebellion of 1857) a most trusted ally. He is made the Nawab of Sardhaba, rewarded with a princely estate assisted by a hereditary pension. Four generations later, the Nawab of his day, sends one of his sons, Iqbal Shah to Edinburgh medical school.
Faced with this sort of very complex back story, Iqbal Shah’s claim to be an expert on Afghanistan and Central Asia, or Idries Shah’s claim to be the heir of a secret spiritual brotherhood hidden in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, can be seen as rich embroidery onto the family tapestry, not complete invention. But time and time again, as you follow Nile Green’s unveiling of the truth, I both chuckled at the audacity of the Shahs, admired their charismatic brilliance as talkers but was oft reminded of The Quest for Corvo and Trevor-Roper’s Hermit of Peking. And to make it more confusing alongside their Walter Mitty stage-craft, there are real achievements, such as Iqbal Shah’s role at the Islamic World Congress that Ibn Saud had staged in Mecca in 1925, and the young Idries Shah’s travel account of the Haj, and his setting up of the Octagon Press in 1956. Idries Shah’s friendship with Robert Graves, was a useful asset for a young writer but was based in their shared delight in the interconnections of mythology and poetry, mysticism and psychology, drugs and spiritual trance, arcane knowledge and secret brotherhoods of scholars, all fuel for Idries Shah’s most successful book, The Sufis.
It is in this environment of youthful success, that his brother Omar Shah becomes the dynamic new organiser (the Agha) of the Paris based followers of George Gurdjieff whilst Idries Shah is anointed the leader of an English group of mystical inquiry, based around two former wartime British intelligence officers (Reginald Hoare and J.G.Bennet) who preside over their Institute for the Comparative Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences) based on the Surrey Manor house of Coombe Springs. Idries Shah is seen to be the living embodiment of Gurdjieff’s command to “be awake”, he was “a breath of fresh air: modern, irreverent and serious all at once.” He and his brother Omar were aware of the desire within these groups to find the so-called Sarmoung Brotherhood, who were imagined as “The Guardians of the Tradition.” So they embroider their family history, drop hints, talk the talk and end up in charge. To give some material substance to their chatter about ancient spiritual lineage and hermetic libraries in the mountains, Omar supplies Robert Graves with an ancient manuscript which is subsequently proved to be a fake. Idries Shah does his best to protect his brother, but thereafter they go their own ways.
It is up to later generations of British Muslims to clear up this mess, compounded of spurious mystery, and fake sheikhs. A Sufi is not a member of an international brotherhood, but just an intensely devout Muslim, who uses the words and prayers embedded in the Koran as a reminder to make themselves better people.
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“Nile Green has done a most excellent job, in tracing the various careers, achievements, manipulations and ambitions of Ikbal Shah and his son Idries Shah, who both made enthusiastic use of alternative identities and pen names. ”