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

A rollicking story of two literary fabulists who revealed the Wests obsession with a fabricated, exotic East. 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. Nile Greens [A] superb book& it highlights the pervasive influence of esoteric religionoften of a Sufi tingein the increasingly post Christian West. One had been taken for a ride, but it was fun while it lasted, spiced with tall tales of the occult& The story of how father and son spun yarns from a web of aliases, concocted titles, and Orientalist fantasies has its pleasing ironies. Rarely has the literary world been more successfully hoodwinked than by Ikbal and Idries Shah . . . I was hooked from the first page. In this dual biography of the father and son shapeshifters Ikbal and Idries Shah, Nile Green has given us a funhouse mirror of Great Britains 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 cant 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. 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. This rollicking tale of the beguiling father and son duo Ikbal and Idriel³,