Part 2 of a review of Nile Green, Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah, W.W. Norton, New York, 2024, 369 pp. The first part appears here: https://www.josephazize.com/2025/07/13/review-empires-son-empires-orphan/

In the first part we saw three significant points: first, that although influential government figures knew Ikbal to be lying, yet  they continued to associate with him, as they thought he might be useful, i.e. people who should have known better decided to tolerate the sham. Second, Ikbal discovered that his exaggeration and imaginative lies were actually making people take notice (a lesson he taught to Idries). Third, a lack of conscience can be taught within a family.

Ikbal moved his family to Bristol. One advantage of moving from Edinburgh to Bristol was that there he could falsely claim to have been a “Lecturer and Examiner in Oriental Culture” at Edinburgh University (50). For money, he wrote varied articles, such as one claiming to have discovered that flying machines had been used for aerial warfare in ancient India (50-51), another on the powers of Afghan magicians, and a third about Afghan Sufism (51). Interestingly, Inayat Khan had recently founded his Sufi order in the West, inventing a “Universal Sufism” which, as Nile states: “detached Sufism from its Muslim foundations in a way that appealed to a broad church of liberal Christians, Theosophists, and occultists alike.” But Khan himself still saw Sufism as part of Islam, although he did acknowledge that there were diverse opinions on whether advanced Sufis had to obey the Sharia, the Muslim rules and regulations (51-52). This must have been known to Ikbal, and to Idries through him.

In late 1920, Ikbal decided to head to Afghanistan, falsely claiming to have been summoned for matters of “state importance,” (53). He was soon publishing articles about his travels there, trekking into the far north where he saw Russians building roads, and even entering Russia to interview people in Bukhara and Samarkand. He alleged that the Russians were building roads and possibly a secret railway for their intended conquest of Afghanistan then India (54). The British government was concerned: why had their spies in the region not spotted this? But their men on the spot did not believe Shah, or even that he had crossed the border, and the Kabul representative confirmed that Ikbal had not even been to Afghanistan, while his story was “sheer nonsense” (56). His “journalism” was rightly mocked: “His railways cross mountain tops and 12,000 foot passes with supreme disregard of such trivial obstacles” (56). His “photographs” were unmasked as fraudulently stating they showed Russian roads, when in fact they were British (57-58). Worse, he had been spotted in London when he was, on his account, in Afghanistan (58). Despite all this, some in the British government still said ” we are inclined to regard him as well meaning and potentially useful” (59).

Ikbal owed his success to the naivety and foolishness of just enough British. Little wonder than that he got bolder and bolder, even “discovering” an unknown race in “unknown Afghanistan” (59). “Unknown” alright. He began writing for the American press, claiming to be a member of the court of the Amir of Afghanistan (60). The British saw these articles, and their fraudulent nature. This may be why he decided to return to India for a while. His father received him, but Ikbal felt uneasy. He wrote to many, seeking help; among these, Laurence Rushbrook Williams at Allahabad – quite the anti-Communist – thought they might collaborate, and employed him in producing “counter-propaganda” against the Russians (66)  LRW will return in this story. Eventually, he became secretary to the Afghan consulate-general in India (69).

Ikbal acepted an invitation to Ibn Saud’s 1926 Mecca “Congress of the Islamic World.” (74-78) Here, for a while, he live as a Muslim. This visit, where interviewed Ibn Saud, was a big help in making a living as a journalist with expertise on the Middle East, and had visited Mecca, the forbidden city. (83) Yet, he was bedevilled by Englishmen with experience of the area, who disputed his claims about “the unifying spirit seizing hold of Muslims” (85). He would write a book Westward to Mecca to burnish his credentials. (87) His son Idries was to follow him to Mecca, but just as Ikbal told a story about meeting an alchemist turning “base metal” into gold before his very eyes in a “mountain cavern” of the Karakorums (87) just as Idries would meet “Musa the Magician” in Damascus in his Destination Mecca.

It is startling how clearly Ikbal laid out the path Idries would follow. As Green states: “… it was a strange literary style he was developing, for he placed his anecdotes about alchemists and dervishes between dry strategic summaries of the development of Afghanistan’s education system (etc.) … Then he turned to literary criticism in a chapter-long comparative study of the “philosophies” of Omar Khayyam and Shakespeare that demonstrated the intrinsic harmony of East and West.” (88)

Ikbal followed this up with an essay arguing that Rumi, Shelley, Hafiz, Wordsworth, the Upanishads, Swedenborg, the Sufis and Sir Walter Scott were all expressing much the same dispensation – one which hailed from the East. (90) The article received some solid criticism for its lack of method: all its “disoriented” contents did, a gentleman of the Colonial Office said, was “cite information.” (91)

The balance of this chapter on Ikbal Shah’s adventures makes for good reading, even great reading. One almost holds one’s breath at Ikbal’s cheek in presenting his grandiose schemes for a “Grand Muslim Conference” in Jerusalem, to unite all Muslims in “the true spirit of the Quran” (98). When he gave lectures on Coueism (“optimistic autosuggestion”) he was billed as “Prince Ikbal Ali Shah, the Renowned Oriental Scholar and Mystic” (101).

Truly, Idries Shah was this man’s son. I sometimes joke with people that Shakespeare was Lebanese, more often than  not, I say, from my own village; after all the name is Arabic for Shaykh isba3, the Sheikh of the writing finger. But I am only a dilettante. Idries Shah was a fraud and a charlatan two generations in the making.