Publishers Weekly
05/13/2024
UCLA historian Green debuts with a captivating biography of father and son literary fabulists Ikbal and Idries Shah. Born in 1894 into a wealthy Muslim family in colonial India and sent to Britain for his schooling, Ikbal eventually abandoned his studies, instead indulging his literary aspirations by publishing poetry. Capitalizing on British popular interest in the region due to ongoing conflict, he positioned himself as an expert on Afghanistan (he was descended from an Afghan chieftain), penning several guidebooks. He went on to fabricate many more bestselling travelogues for places he’d never visited, along the way inventing stories about Eastern mysticism. Idries followed in his father’s footsteps, presenting himself as an authority on Sufism, though much of what he wrote on the topic was fanciful; he earned a devoted following in the 1960s, which included Doris Lessing. In a famous episode, Idries convinced classicist Robert Graves to translate a manuscript by the medieval mystic Omar Khayyam—purportedly a Shah family heirloom—that turned out to be fake. Green’s finely wrought narrative presents father and son as, in some ways, boxed into their grift by the strictures of Britain’s racist society and its Orientalist expectations; at the same time, the duo’s genuine love of poetry and spiritualism is palpable. This nuanced and erudite account dives headfirst into the messy contradictions of life under British imperialism for colonial subjects. (July)
Miranda Seymour
"Rarely has the literary world been more successfully hoodwinked than by Ikbal and Idries Shah . . . I was hooked from the first page."
New York Times - Robyn Creswell
"Green shows how, by dint of hard work, brazen fraud and a mastery of ‘the occult energies of identity,’ over the course of the 20th century, first father and then son became recognized as experts on the East in general and Afghanistan in particular, helping to shape how those places were viewed on both sides of the Atlantic."
Literary Review - Fitzroy Morrissey
"[A] superb book… it highlights the pervasive influence of esoteric religion—often of a Sufi tinge—in the increasingly post Christian West."
Peter Theroux
"This scholarly and hilarious tale of the Shahs, father and son, and their decades of fabrications, is one of a kind. Nile Green is an exquisite writer, and his book is more droll, erudite, and delightful than anything the Shah family ever came up with."
Shahan Mufti
"This rollicking tale of the beguiling father and son duo Ikbal and Idries Shah is a thrilling exploration of the space that Islam occupied in the western imagination over the span of the twentieth century. Some of the Forrest Gump-like encounters will leave your jaw on the floor and the Catch Me If You Can intrigue of it all will keep you turning the pages. Nile Green, one of the world’s foremost scholars on Islam, has written a truly extraordinary, accessible, and timely book"
Deborah Baker
"In this dual biography of the father and son shapeshifters Ikbal and Idries Shah, Nile Green has given us a funhouse mirror of Great Britain’s alter ego as its empire unraveled. Green chronicles the Shahs’ ever-multiplying monikers, mythical backstories, prolific spinning of tales of derring-do, royal lineage, and esoteric mysticism with unflappable flair. And when you think it can’t get any more fantastic, Doris Lessing pops up in Peshawar, following her Sufi master Idries in shilling for the mujahideen just as the Holy War is getting underway. In an age when identities aspire to be fixed, cultural appropriation is frowned upon, and borders are locked shut, the Shahs perfected the art of trespass."
Booklist
"[A] remarkable father-and-son biography."