EMPIRE'S SON, EMPIRE'S ORPHAN

A revealing study of two masters of self-invention, “invented by empire, then cultivated in the nostalgic soil of exile.”

In 1913, Ikbal Shah, the son of minor Indian nobility, traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland, to become, as historian Green writes, “entangled in the larger contests of empire and its unraveling.” After treating wounded soldiers from the battlefields of World War I, he abandoned his plans to become a doctor and instead turned to writing. He married a Scottish woman and set to work crafting a literary and journalistic career that coincided with the postwar resurgence of Scottish nationalism, which admitted other nationalisms, as well. According to one journalist, Shah was “an Eastern poet [who] dreams of his Motherland and voices in English the visions of his people.” His people were, it happens, largely invented: For one thing, he positioned himself as an expert on Afghan Sufis, “whom he had actually never encountered,” while claiming himself to be an Afghan nobleman. Moreover, he articulated a Sufism that was detached from Islam, a stance that his son, the better-known writer Idries Shah, broadened. Idries took numerous wandering side paths before positioning himself, like his father, as an authority on Sufism, and he wrote extensively on witchcraft and magic under various names. Both father and son traveled in rarefied literary circles featuring the likes of George Orwell, Doris Lessing, and Robert Graves, but Idries was less shy about creating whole-cloth identities. Though he was exposed several times for charlatan acts, he managed to retain his Gurdjieff-like allure among the metaphysically inclined. Green concludes by noting the modern Near East’s descent into religion-tinged wars, in which “happy talk of dervishes dissolved in the dust of explosions” and the fictive works of the Shahs were suddenly no longer relevant.

A solid, eminently readable work of scholarly detection and high-toned chicanery.