Family origins
Ikbal Ali Shah was born into a family of Musavi Sayyids (descendants of the Prophet Muhammad through his daughter Fatimah and also through Musa al-Kadhim, the great-great-grandson of Husayn ibn Ali and seventh Imam of the Twelver Shi'a sect of Islam). The family originated from Paghman near Kabul, Afghanistan. In 1840, Ali Shah's great-grandfather was awarded the title Jan-Fishan Khan for his support of Shah Shuja, a puppet ruler installed by the British. In 1841, following the defeat of the British, Jan-Fishan Khan was forced to leave Afghanistan. The British-Indian government rewarded his loyalty with an estate in Sardhana, Uttar Pradesh, which thereafter became the family seat.
Ali Shah's granddaughter Saira Shah relates that her grandfather "maintained that ancestry was something to try to live up to, not to boast about" and told her that "it is less important who your forebears were than what you yourself become."
Education and marriage
Ali Shah was educated at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College...now the university...at Aligarh and then went to Britain for further studies before the first world war. He met his future wife Saira Elizabeth Luiza Shah (pseudonym: Morag Murray Abdullah, b. 1900) during the war, while engaged in an unsuccessful attempt to study medicine at Edinburgh Medical School. Octagon Press Authors - Morag Murray Abdullah They eloped while she was only sixteen; her family did not approve of the match, and her father never spoke to her again. Ali Shah's own father, asked to give his consent to the marriage, enquired by telegram "whether she was prepared to become a Muslim and whether she would be able to defend a fortress, if required." She answered yes on both counts; satisfied, he gave his blessing. The young couple subsequently had three children, the Sufi writers and translators Amina Shah (b. 1918), Omar Ali-Shah (b. 1922) and Idries Shah (b. 1924).
Traveller, writer, diplomat and publicist
In 1918, Ali Shah became only the second Asian to join the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, contributing articles on Islam to the Society's journal. He travelled widely and became a publicist for a variety of Eastern statesmen such as the Kemal Atatürk, Sharif of Mecca, King Abdullah of Jordan, King Fuad I of Egypt, the Emir Abdul Illah of Iraq and members of the royal family of Afghanistan. He was on friendly terms with both orthodox leaders (like the Rector of Azhar University in Cairo) and reformers (like Kemal Ataturk).
Ikbal Ali Shah believed that Bolshevism's encroachment on the countries of Central Asia would almost inevitably lead to catastrophic results, and by 1921 was reporting in the Edinburgh Review on the methods of propaganda and political influence used by the Bolshevists in Central Asia and Afghanistan, with its consequences for British rule in India.
He was also associated with the British Foreign Office for several decades. James Moore states that his work for the Foreign Office occasionally raised controversy: in 1929, after Ali Shah "tried to compromise" the British Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, Foreign Office investigations concluded that there "was hardly a word of truth in his writings".
Ali Shah was a passionate advocate of the modernisation of Islam. He viewed this as nothing more and nothing less than a return to genuine Islam, an Islam without a priest class, writing in 1929:
"In the New Dark Age of my faith, from which we have just emerged into the sunny vistas of real religion, a curious politico-religious system had grown; and it is indeed by reason of our forebears having been seen so long under that influence that the average European wonders whether we have not definitely divorced Islam by our modernization. The truth is that the organization of the Doctors of Moslem Law, backed by autocratic Eastern monarchs was the very antithesis of the words of the Koran. In Turkey, for instance, no man was permitted to consult the Holy Book of Islam and seek interpretation for himself; despite the fact that the only reason for which the faithful places his book above every other Revealed Law is that any man can have his cue directly from it. The Prophet himself emphasized this fact repeatedly and thereby meant to destroy the human tendency of priestcraft. This particular teaching was so deep that it was not until many political cross-currents amongst the Moslem States had much weakened the spiritual essence that the clergy at last won the battle which they had fought for at least a thousand years."
Justifying Turkey's modernisation efforts under Kemal Atatürk, Ali Shah condemned what Islam had become in Turkey:
"Even the slightest divergence from the established church was considered the highest crime; and the faithful wandered in and out of the four water-tight compartments of schools of theology completely dazed by the priest-made dogma that neither would reconcile with the early teachings of Islam nor ring true to the advancing humanity of the present age. The clergy made every effort to circumscribe the view of every Moslim and placed the right of interpretation beyond the reach of even the intelligent seeker after truth."
He noted with approval that —
"When ecclesiastics frowned upon women parading the streets in Stamboul, the young men were able to silence the objections by quoting the Koran to prove that the Koran enjoined only modesty and not the cruel practice of closing women in the houses."
In the 1930s he was in Geneva, working in collaboration with the League of Nations supporting disarmament, and attending the European Muslim Congress of 1935, promoting Islamic unity. According to Augy Hayter (a student of Ikbal's son Omar Ali-Shah) the Sirdar's connection with the League of Nations began in its early days when he was working with professor Gilbert Murray and the Agha Khan, and records of his contributions and position as a "respected intellectual" of the time can be found in the Unesco archives in Paris.
Ikbal Ali Shah was also a member of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society. By contributing to the work of such organisations, he aimed to bridge the gap between east and west. In 1937, he wrote:
"... since my early days I have striven to interpret the East to the West, and Europe to Asia. Through this, I believe, lies the way of mutual sympathy between the nations; and such can only be accomplished by means of reading the effusions of one another's Great Minds; because if we but endeavour to understand about our fellow men, good will can come as the gentle dawn of peace."
In 1940, the family moved from London to Oxford to escape German bombing. In 1945, Ali Shah and his son Idries travelled to Uruguay as expert advisors on
halalled meat questions for the India Office; a scandal resulted, leading the British ambassador to describe him as a "swindler".
Latter years
Ikbal Ali Shah later taught Sufi "classes" in England, which were the precursors to the Sufi school established by his son, Idries Shah. He was also appointed by Dr. Zakir Hussain as India's cultural representative in all of West Asia.
According to his grandson Tahir, Ali Shah was heartbroken when his wife died in 1960, aged 59; feeling unable to continue living in the places in which they had shared their lives, he moved to Tangier in Morocco, a place they had never visited together, and lived there in a small villa close to the seafront. L. F. Rushbrook Williams, a British scholar bound to Ali Shah through a friendship spanning more than half a century, attributes Ali Shah's move to Morocco to a tightening of British residence regulations and says that Ali Shah, never having acquired British domicile, was obliged to leave behind the study centre for sufism that he had set up in England.
Near the end of his life, Ali Shah was caught up in the controversy surrounding the 1967 publication of a new translation of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat by his son Omar Ali-Shah and the English poet Robert Graves. The translation was based on an annotated "crib" made by Omar Ali-Shah, who asserted that it derived from an old manuscript said to have been in the Shah family's possession for 800 years. L. P. Elwell-Sutton, an orientalist at Edinburgh University, expressed his conviction that the story of the ancient family manuscript was false. Graves believed that the disputed manuscript was in the possession of Ikbal Ali Shah, and that he was about to produce it at the time of his death from a road accident, to allay the growing controversy surrounding the translation. However, the manuscript never was produced.
Richard Perceval Graves describes how, in a letter to Robert Graves in 1970, Idries Shah pointed out that "production of the MSS would prove nothing, because there would be no way of telling whether it was original, or whether someone had washed the writing from a piece of ancient parchment, and then applied a new text using inert inks." Shah believed that the critics were "intent only on opposition" and said he agreed with his father, who had been so infuriated by the "hyaenas" that he wanted nothing to do with the controversy. O'Prey (1984) writes that this last point was not entirely true: Ikbal Ali Shah had in fact written to Graves from Morocco, saying the manuscript should be produced; Graves then forwarded the letter to Omar Ali-Shah. Unfortunately, he neglected to take a copy; Omar never received the letter, and Ikbal Ali Shah died a few days later.
The scholarly consensus today is that the "Jan-Fishan Khan" manuscript was a hoax, and that the Graves/Shah translation was in fact based on a study of the sources of FitzGerald's work by Victorian amateur scholar Edward Heron-Allen. The affair did considerable damage to Graves' reputation.
On 4 November 1969, Ikbal Ali Shah was struck by a reversing Coca-Cola truck in Tangier. He was rushed to hospital unconscious, but died a few hours later. He was buried in England next to his wife. On his gravestone, along with his name, there is only the appellation "Al Mutawakkil", which means "the one who resigns himself to the will of the Almighty."
Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah's obituary in
The Times of Saturday, November 8, 1969 stated:
