Brown Pundits

Idries Shah (1924-1996), a British citizen of Afghan and Indian origin, became world famous with his books about Sufi-ism (especially his magnum opus, “The Sufis”), selling over 15 million copies worldwide. In the course of this career, he also hinted (more than hinted, he wrote several books under other names in which he built up these claims about himself) that he was a sufi master himself, descended from an ancient and aristocratic family of Afghan Sufis who trace their descent to the Prophet Mohammed and are now bringing this ancient wisdom to the western public. His father, Syed Ikbal Shah, had settled in England and written several books about the esoteric east, but the careers of both father and son were dogged by accusations of making up stories and exaggerating their depth of knowledge about these matters. Professor Niles Green (who is the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at UCLA) has spent a long time researching both father and son and has now written a biography to settle this controversy and tell us who they really were.

So we learn that Ikbal Shah was a descendant of Jan Fishan Khan (famous indian actor Naseeruddin shah and retired general Zamiruddin Shah are also descended from him), an afghan who had sided with the British expedition to Kabul in the first Afghan war, and who escaped to india with the survivors of that expedition. For his loyalty, he was given a small estate in Sardhana, near Delhi. In 1857 Jan Fishan Khan again proved loyal to the British and was rewarded with the title of Nawab. It is here that Ikbal Shah grew up, and somehow decided to travel to Edinburgh to study medicine just before the first world war.

In Scotland, Ikbal fell in love with a Scotswoman and they married against the wishes of his dad, who therefore cut him off. Ikbal Shah proved to be a capable and energetic person who managed to make a life for himself in England as an expert on Afghanistan (where he had never been) to various branches of British academia and the British govt. Nile leaves us in no doubt that Ikbal Shah was a serial fantasist who made up wild stories about Bolsheviks and their operations in Afghanistan to British officials who sort of knew he was fake, but found him useful. To his credit, he was able to sell enough stories about the exotic east to survive in England and even joined the BBC during WW2 to make propaganda broadcasts for the British empire.

Ikbal Shah had three children (Omar Ali Shah, Idries Shah and Amina Shah) who grew up in the UK and Idries Shah followed in his dad’s footsteps to become an expert on the mysterious east (Omar Ali Shah also sold himself as a sufi teacher). Starting as an expert on “oriental magic”, he soon invented himself as a Sufi master and acquired several high profile fans, including the poet Robert Graves and the writer Doris Lessing. His book on sufism remains a bestseller and he wrote dozens of other books on various aspects of sufi-ism, all of which continue to sell. Nile Green regards this as more or less the result of gullible people being fooled by Shah, but the fact is that if you read the books in question (I have read several of them), they do seem to have genuine insights into human psychology and the various “teaching stories” Idries Shah claimed to have collected do indeed have the capacity to teach useful lessons for life. From within his own world, he can claim that what looks like fakery is just how this esoteric knowledge works in this world. After all, we are talking about sufi-ism and it is by no means clear how one can distinguish a sufi charlatan from a real sufi, since “genuine sufi-ism” itself thrives on mystery and misdirection, almost by design.

The fact that the brothers Idries and Omar Ali Shah falsely claimed at one point to have the oldest manuscript of the rubayat of Omar Khayyam (Professor Green makes a solid case that they made up the whole story) is itself enough to condemn them as charlatans, but as Professor Rawlinson once said ” Shah cannot be taken at face value. His own axioms preclude the very possibility.” If Sufis are enlightened beings who possess some esoteric knowledge that is not available to ordinary mortals, and if they are supposed to help you by telling you what you need, not what is “true” or false, it is by no means clear that this book and its careful examinations are the end of the matter. As Idries Shah’s epitaph states: “Do not look at my outward shape, but take what is in my hand”.  The story continues..

By the way, the title “empire’s son, empire’s orphan” is a good indicator of the fact that the professor also has to labor under the limitations of his own field. Basically, it means nothing, but if you are into postcolonial writing then it is the fashion to connect every biography to “empire” and its discontents. It adds nothing to the story, but luckily it also takes nothing away.