Eastern Moonbeams

Jonathan Conlin reviews Nile Green’s “Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah.”

By Jonathan ConlinOctober 26, 2024

• History

• Politics

• Religion

IN 1913, IKBAL ALI SHAH arrived in Edinburgh, Scotland, to study medicine. Although he bore the title of sirdar (lord) and drove a car, his family’s estate back in India was heavily indebted. The British authorities had granted Shah’s ancestor Sayyid Muhammad Shah an estate north of Delhi in gratitude for his assistance in the First Anglo-Afghan War (1838–42), which had seen both driven out of Afghanistan, bag and baggage. The Nawab of Sardhana (as he was now styled) continued to serve the Raj, notably during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Ikbal Ali Shah’s father hoped his son would return from Edinburgh with the qualifications to serve in the upper echelons of the imperial civil service.

Instead, Shah neglected his studies for other pursuits, publishing a slim volume of poetry, Eastern Moonbeams (1918). Taking full advantage of his sirdar status, he became honorary secretary of the university’s Indian Association. Two years earlier, a group of Edinburgh students from Kabul, Afghanistan; Hyderabad, India; and Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt, had issued “the Edinburgh Declaration”: a letter calling on the Muslims of the world to rally to the defense of the Ottoman Empire after Italy’s attack on Ottoman Tripolitania in 1911. Faithful Muslims were instructed to mark the festival of Eid al-Adha by making donations to the Ottoman Navy League, to buy dreadnoughts for the defense of the sultan’s realms. If Muslims permitted the Ottoman Empire to collapse, the declaration argued, all Muslims living under other, non-Islamic governments would suffer humiliation: “The life of the Ottomans is the life of Islam and its decline would mean the decline and disappearance of Islam.” It was a heady time to be a young Muslim at the University of Edinburgh.

Shah’s early poetry invoked Hindu deities as well as Islam, in a style loosely inspired by Walter Scott. He wed a local woman, Elizabeth Mackenzie, who converted to Islam and took the name Saira. Cut off by his parents and in-laws and struggling to support a growing family, Shah would continue peddling syncretist moonshine of one form or another for the next 30 years, packaged as the insights of a well-traveled Afghan prince eager to forge an alliance between the British Empire and Islam. Whether the bogeymen to be resisted were Bolshevik agents in north Afghanistan in 1919 or Indian National Congress Party agents engaged in “disloyal preaching” among Cardiff’s Indian community in 1942, Shah played on the fears of a British public nursed on John Buchan’s 1916 novel Greenmantle.

Buchan’s best-selling thriller presented the Muslim world as a vast tinderbox awaiting a mysterious prophet. Is this prophet (Greenmantle) genuine or a plant masterminded by the Ottoman Empire’s own Svengali—Germany? Like The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol, or any other Dan Brown thriller, the appeal of Buchan’s novel lies in the chase: the ending is neither here nor there. Readers who made it to the end of Ikbal Ali Shah’s travelogue-cum-thriller Afghanistan of the Afghans (1928) found the words “(Usual ending.)” printed at the bottom of the final page. One had been taken for a ride, but it was fun while it lasted, spiced with tall tales of the occult. The ultimate armchair traveler, Shah rarely bothered to make the journeys that he wrote about so melodramatically.

In the first half of Nile Green’s new book Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah, we follow Ikbal Ali Shah’s hand-to-mouth existence in Mitcham, an unprepossessing South London suburb. With the help of self-awarded academic titles, headed notepaper, and a Central London post-office box, Shah badgers the British Foreign Office, the British Council, and the League of Nations for employment as an Afghanistan expert or, more grandly, as “Liaison Officer to the Muslim World.” Having been investigated and marked down as a fantasist by the Indian Office, Shah finds that his services are usually refused. During World War II, Eric Blair (better known as George Orwell) gives him some work producing counterpropaganda for the BBC. Shah knows no Arabic, despite his much-vaunted skills as a linguist, which means his scripts have to be translated. Soon the “Muslim advisor to the BBC” is caught selling the same script twice, to two different parts of the BBC. Sent to Argentina to inspect the production of halal corned beef for the Indian Army, Shah returns to London in the character of a professor at the University of Montevideo.

Although there are the odd surprise coups, such as Shah’s 1928 piece “The Meeting of the East and West” published in T. S. Eliot’s magazine The New Criterion, the lion’s share of the family’s income comes from Shah’s lantern lectures on recent fads, in which Sufism takes its place alongside self-help via autosuggestion. Psychologist Émile Coué de la Châtaigneraie held that one could program oneself to overcome any illness or career obstacle by reciting mantras such as “ça passe, ça passe, ça passe” (“this will pass, this will pass, this will pass”). “Prince Ikbal Ali Shah, the Renowned Oriental Scholar and Mystic,” briefly serves as vice president of London’s Coué Institute.

There is no doubt that Shah was a prolific writer and charismatic lecturer who made the most of his name and appearance to give his otherwise unremarkable writings on “Oriental Lore” and the occult a veneer of authenticity. Ikbal Ali Shah’s son Idries achieved a far greater profile in the 1960s and 1970s, however, peddling a de-Islamicized Sufism through self-published bestsellers such as The Way of the Sufi (1968) and The Book of the Book (1969), full of gnomic fables and countercultural bromides allegedly culled from lost wisdom literature or received by inspiration.

The poet Robert Graves and novelist Doris Lessing were the younger Shah’s most influential gulls, providing introductions to agents, editors, and publishers in the United States, as well as fawning reviews. In 1968, Idries Shah’s older brother Omar roped Graves into co-editing The Original Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam, which, Omar claimed, was based on a previously unknown manuscript of 1233 passed down in secret across generations of his ancestors in a remote Afghan valley, two exits north of Shangri-La. Even as Persianists such as Laurence Elwell-Sutton circled, Graves continued to stick by Omar. Perhaps the shrooms helped. During the Age of Aquarius (which dawned in 1967, according to the musical Hair), pettifogging about philology and provenance was a buzzkill.

At this point in Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan, part of me was anticipating the assumption of Idries Shah in George Clinton’s Mothership. Shah’s wardrobe ran to turtlenecks and tweeds, however, rather than Day-Glo ponchos, or even the Afghan robes sported by his father on the frontispiece to Afghanistan of the Afghans. Unlike his brother, Shah rarely smoked anything stronger than Rothmans. The acolytes that gathered at Langton House, Shah’s Kent estate (which had its own nuclear bunker), were white, and his final years were spent in a book-lined study writing a trilogy set in Little England. As Green demonstrates, father and son alike displayed a snobbish distaste for fellow Muslim migrants they considered of humbler stock. They had little interest in using their talents to advocate for persecuted Sufis in the Middle East.

The story of how father and sons spun yarns from a web of aliases, concocted titles, and Orientalist fantasies has its pleasing ironies. But there was little original to Ikbal Ali Shah’s writing on, say, the prophet Muhammad, Kemal Atatürk, or Ibn Saud. The 1980s saw Idries Shah respond to a new fad for “among the Mujahideen” thrillers, including the Dan Brownish Kara Kush (1986). But this Afghanistan was “the same Shangri-La that Ikbal had conjured in his articles on magic and folklore nearly seventy years earlier.” Green suggests that Idries Shah’s fictions helped the West overlook the nastier aspects of Wahhabi-funded “holy warriors” (or “the Resistance,” as Lessing preferred to call them), with consequences we are still seeing today.

Ikbal Ali Shah’s claim to be the voice of Islam met with short shrift from fellow Muslims. Delegates to the European Muslim Congress co-organized by Rashid Rida in Geneva in 1935 shunned Shah, suspecting him of being a British spy. Were the Shahs taken in by their own visions? Though he was perfectly capable of forging the memoirs of Habibullāh Kalakāni, who briefly ruled Afghanistan in 1929, Shah seems as much victim as perpetrator of Orientalist fantasies. When he visited Istanbul, he was disappointed at how little it resembled the “old Stamboul” fantasy he read about in the novels of Pierre Loti. Idries Shah and particularly his brother Omar seem genuine charlatans, enabled by a large Anglophone audience hungry for “Eastern wisdom,” who believed the tall tales they told of themselves.

Whereas his father enjoyed a relaxed retirement in Tangier, however, Idries Shah continued to slave away at his books and motivational tapes. Had the pursuit become an end in itself? Green lets us reach our own conclusions. Unlike A. J. A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (1934) or Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse (1976), Green’s Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan does not narrate the author’s pursuit of his slippery fabulists.

Although far from offering a “usual ending,” Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan does end somewhat abruptly. In the acknowledgments, Green explains that he originally intended to tell the Shahs’ story as one of Sufi semioticians. “[I]n those days [the 1990s], the stakes of literary play seemed so low,” he writes. In the following years, he learned more about Afghanistan from those who had (unlike the Shahs) actually lived there, and he thereby encountered “a place that didn’t feature in the writings of Idries Shah. […] A “celebration of Derridean play in the lands of Islam [therefore] seemed morally and intellectually untenable.”

Green could have developed these thoughts further, as well as explored some of the uncomfortable analogies between the “truthiness” of Ikbal and Idries Shah’s visions and those of our own age. The elder Shah’s 1920 account of derring-do in remotest northern Afghanistan, spying out Bolshevik preparations for the invasion of India, is illustrated with a photograph captioned “White Tents of a Bolshevist Outpost.” Not only had he never left England—the image was also a stock photograph showing a British infantry camp, located hundreds of miles south of the border. We all know where that sort of moonbeam leads.