Shah was born into a distinguished family of Saadat (= Arabic plural of Sayyid) who had their ancestral home at Paghman, not far from Kabul.

 Her paternal grandfather, Sayyid Amjad Ali Shah, was the [[nawab]] of [[Sardhana]], in the North-Indian state of [[Uttar Pradesh]]. The principality was awarded to his ancestor [[Jan-Fishan Khan]] during the [[British Raj]], and had been ruled formerly by the Kashmiri-born warrior-princess, the [[Begum Samru]].

Her career as a folklorist and author has spanned seventy years. In that time she has travelled widely, collecting stories and studying folklore. Her travels have taken her through Africa and the Middle East, through the jungles of Sarawak, across the Australian Outback, Afghanistan, and beyond.

Doris Lessing, who became a student of Idries Shah's Sufism in the 1960s, championed the Shah family's efforts to disseminate such teaching stories in the West, and penned an introduction for Amina Shah's The Tale of the Four Dervishes.