“The East is a career,” Benjamin Disraeli wrote in his 1847 novel “Tancred,” two decades before he became the prime minister of the United Kingdom. The dictum rang true for generations of colonial officers and swashbuckling scholars, from Richard Francis Burton to Lawrence of Arabia.
During the sunset of the British Empire, it also rang true for a few entrepreneurial “Easterners” who got rich dispensing tidbits of eternal wisdom to Western readers convinced of their own culture’s spiritual bankruptcy. By 1959, Khalil Gibran’s “The Prophet” had sold its millionth copy and V.S. Naipaul had published “The Mystic Masseur,” a fond satire of the guru grifter.
Nile Green’s “Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan” is a biography of Ikbal Shah and his son Idries, the more famous author of the countercultural best seller “The Sufis.” 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.
In fact, it’s doubtful that Ikbal or Idries ever set foot in Afghanistan, a country they both portrayed as a Shangri-La of noble warriors, wise mystics and fabled treasure. They had a familial link to the place, however: a 19th-century ancestor who had fought alongside the British during the First Anglo-Afghan War and was rewarded with an estate in the Raj.
Ikbal Shah grew up on that estate, just north of Delhi, but was sent to Edinburgh to study medicine in 1913 (he never graduated). He married a Scotswoman and published a book of prose poems called “Eastern Moonbeams,” leveraging his literary persona into a membership with the Royal Asiatic Society and publication in T.S. Eliot’s magazine The New Criterion. He also inveigled his way into the outer circles of imperial policymaking, penning alarmist (and largely fictional) travelogues about Bolshevik encroachments into the high Hindu Kush.
Green, a historian of South Asia and Islam, tracks Ikbal through Britain’s colonial archives, which record his relentless attempts to get hired as a gentleman propagandist (loyalty to empire was a defining family trait).
There are a few too many accounts of rejected job applications, but the British government’s skepticism of Ikbal is charmingly cleareyed: “Doubt has been expressed” as to “the genuineness of his Afghan nationality.” But the establishment kept Ikbal close; during World War II, the Indian Service of the BBC (run by George Orwell) paid him to give talks on Islam and democracy.
Idries was raised in Oxford and served as his father’s research assistant. He too concocted a flamboyantly Eastern identity, made powerful literary friends and wrote books with titles like “A Perfumed Scorpion.” He also dabbled in occultism, folklore and wacky neo-imperialist politics.
But he was the far more successful author. His most popular books concerned a species of sages he called Sufis — “an ancient spiritual freemasonry,” in the words of the poet Robert Graves, who wrote an introduction to “The Sufis” that helped make the book a best seller. (Another supporter was the novelist Doris Lessing, then at the height of her fame. Her adoration of Shah, in Green’s account, is frankly embarrassing.)
Ikbal and Idries are tricky subjects for biography. They kept no diaries and left only scattered correspondence, in which we still sense them playing a role. Green makes impressive use of the government archives, but we never gain an intimate sense of either man’s thoughts or family life. We also get little sense of them as writers. Green quotes sparingly, maybe because both of his subjects were pedestrian stylists at best. Gore Vidal once remarked that Idries’s books were “a great deal harder to read than they were to write.”
Green also struggles to decide what larger story is illuminated by father and son’s serial self-inventions. He finds a historical irony in the fact that Idries’s Sufis were all the rage in the West while real Sufis were being persecuted in the East — chiefly by Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabis — but this feels flimsy, because “The Sufis” has almost nothing to do with Sufis (Shah’s illuminati do not read the Quran and their parables are the nostrums of self-help manuals).
Green also suggests that Ikbal’s life and writings constitute an admirable effort to create mutual understanding between East and West. But this is hard to credit. As Green himself shows, Ikbal’s expertise was a tissue of fabrications, and his fellow Muslims, insofar as they paid any attention, “saw him as utterly untrustworthy.”
The Shahs are probably best understood not in relation to geopolitics, but as colorful case studies in the selling of the counterculture. Ikbal was an immigrant striver and Idries a savvy businessman: A work ethic is probably the most valuable thing he inherited.
More revealing than the dippy koans of his books is what Idries told an interviewer for Psychology Today: Sufism “makes a person more efficient.”
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