Nile Green, Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah, W.W. Norton, New York, 2024, 369 pp.

This is a good book: the content is interesting and well-researched, the style is clear and even humorous when appropriate: after all, the tale of two shameless villains will invoke a wry smile from time to time. I shall return to this, but first, this volume is the result of substantial work by Green and the team he acknowledges: and they do deserve his thanks for managing to uncover so much about Idries Shah and most especially, his father Ikbal, of whom little had been known.

It is remarkable how often, and aptly, Green selects the quotes which open the book and its chapters from Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son. Perhaps this is a subtle way of intimating how decisive the relationship between Ikbal and his son was, without the need for a direct psychologically-tinged address on the subject. These quotations invite any reader who has read Gosse’s classic to ponder the correspondences in this tale of fraud on a family scale: father, two of his four children, while the wife was a willing accomplice and a minor player in her own right. This adds a certain horrible fascination to the narrative – how could this be?

The book is written in two parts: “Empire’s Son” centred on Ikabl, and “Empire’s Orphan” around Idries. Each has six chapters, thematically titled “Student,” “Journalist,” “Informant,” “Expert,” “Author,” and “Propagandist” for Ikbal; and for Idries, “Apprentice,” “Occultist,” “Amanuensis,” “Mystic,” “Luminary,” and “Warrior.”

And villains they clearly were, and quite shameless – in fact, I could say “conscienceless.” But together with that, there is something rather pathetic: it is pitiful that a father should teach his sons to be frauds, but this the story of two Indians of Afghan descent, Anglophiles if not Anglodoules, who tirelessly sought to enter what they conceived to be English respectability. In my view, their identification with England and fundamental conviction of its superiority is shown in each assertion they made of Eastern cultural and religious priority, in each attack they launched on their better-education critics, by each attempt to pass themselves off as a professor or graduate of Oxford University, and so on. The Idries Shah story has a darker side, because he detached people from the Gurdjieff tradition – a genuine spiritual current. He sold them tin under the name of gold.

The preface sketches some of the leading ideas: both were born in India, and weened on tales of the Afghan ancestors to whom they appealed “in a quest for authenticity” (2). Ikbal lived most of his life in the age of empire – hence he is its “son”, while the collapse of Britain’s empire after WWII left Idries its orphan. But in both cases, I would say, their identity was moulded by that empire, and they sought more than anything else to be received into its heart.

Green is a talented stylist, writing that “their struggle to enter the Anglo-Saxon networks of publishing and politics involved a series of masquerades that incrementally created a make-believe world” (2). Watching the increments add up makes part of the attraction of this book. As he notes, they helped invent the “myth of an Afghan Shangri-La,” (2) and yet, they did so in England, spending little time in Afghanistan. The pertinent story commences with Sayyid Muhammad Shah, also known as “Jan Fishan Khan,” the “Scatterer of Souls.” He was, after all, basically a soldier who joined the English side in their attempted invasion of Afghanistan, and so went into exile in India when the British failed (3). The grateful English gave him a palace and estate at Sardhana, near Delhi. Khan warned the British of what would become the mutiny, and assisted the English in putting it down (4). Th British rewarded him with a pension, and the title nawwab of Sardhana (4). One of his descendants was Ikbal (b. 1894), who inherited the title of sirdar. He was educated at an English-language college, and in 1913, emigrated to Edinburgh, where he was to study medicine (5 and 11).

At the Edinburgh Indian Association, Ikbal offered to teach Hindustani – its members had no common language but English (14-15). English had by now become “also an Indian language” (16), and that was the tongue in which Ikbal would write (almost always for Britons). After six terms of his medical degree he went to Brighton to dress wounds in a hospital for Indians wounded in WWI (19-20).

His early writing efforts gave the first surviving evidence of his proclivity to fraud: he plagiarised an 1832 prose-poem for his “A Tear in a Sapphire Vessel” (21-22). His ten months in the hospital was the only medical work he did. In 1916 he returned to Edinburgh. There he met and married Elizabeth Mackenzie (23-31). He was not a diligent student, and when Elizabeth became pregnant, his best chance of earning money came from writing, not medicine (37). Based on his teaching of Hindustani, he was accepted as a member – not a Fellow – of the Royal Asiatic Society (37). He was now making his Indian identity and language his meal ticket, and began to pose as an insider with expertise on Afghanistan, although he had never been there, and his knowledge came from what he read in the libraries of England (38). He was soon posing as an expert on “The Folk Life of Afghanistan” (42). It would have been good if, by this point, Green had told us which languages Shah knew, and how well.

Events favoured Ikbal, and he met Sir John Shuckburgh, head of the political office of the India Office, to see if he could assist the government, now in need of inside information. Ikbal told him he had not been in Afghanistan for five years; a lie, as he had never been in that country (43-45). Ikbal was shrewd enough to smell out Shuckburgh’s fears, and told him that there were Bolshevik agents in Afghanistan, disguised as Pan-Islamists, while asserting that the Afghans wanted alliance with the Britons, despite the contrary evidence (46). He had himself elected as a member of the Royal Central Asian Society (how, Green does not say, 47). Even then, the British government had doubts about him, but he now had a reputation as an Afghan – whereas he had previously been seen as what he was – Indian, and able to give expert lectures (47).

Three significant factors now emerge. First, although Ikbal was unmasked as a fraud to Shuckburgh by Aziz-ud-din, yet Shuckburgh thought he might be useful (48) and this is a major factor in the Shah story – that people who should know better decide to tolerate the sham.

Second, Ikbal discovered that his exaggeration and imaginative lies were actually making people take notice. This point, he was to teach Idries, who proved to be a more than apt pupil.

Third, we will soon see how conscience-lessness can be spread within a family: Ikbal’s misdemeanours will mature into his son’s felonies.

This review shall be continued.