Empire's Son, Empire's Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah

by Nile Green Narrated by Keval Shah

Overview

A rollicking story of two literary fabulists who revealed the West’s obsession with a fabricated, exotic East.

In the highbrow literary circles of the mid-twentieth century, a father and son spread seductive accounts of a mystical Middle East. Claiming to come from Afghanistan, Ikbal and Idries Shah parlayed their assumed identities into careers full of drama and celebrity, writing dozens of books that influenced the political and cultural elite. Pitching themselves as the authentic voice of the Muslim world, they penned picaresque travelogues and exotic potboilers alongside weighty tomes on Islam and politics. Above all, father and son told Western readers what they wanted to hear: audacious yarns of eastern adventure and harmless Sufi mystics—myths that, as the century wore on and the Taliban seized power, became increasingly detached from reality.

Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan follows the Shahs from their origins in colonial India to literary London, wartime Oxford, and counterculture California via the Levant, the League of Nations, and Latin America. Nile Green unravels the conspiracies and pseudonyms, fantastical pasts and self-aggrandizing anecdotes, high stakes and bold schemes that for nearly a century painted the defining portrait of Afghanistan. Ikbal and Idries convinced poets, spies, orientalists, diplomats, occultists, hippies, and even a prime minister that they held the key to understanding the Islamic world. From George Orwell directing Muslim propaganda to Robert Graves translating a fake manuscript of Omar Khayyam and Doris Lessing supporting jihad, Green tells the fascinating tale of how the book world was beguiled by the dream of an Afghan Shangri-La that never existed.

Gambling with the currency of cultural authenticity, Ikbal and Idries became master players of the great game of empire and its aftermath. Part detective story, part intellectual folly, Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan reveals the divergence between representation and reality, between what we want to believe and the more complex truth.

Editorial Reviews

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."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940191675213
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	07/02/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

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