As the twentieth century wore on, the Ottoman Empire started falling apart, leading to a scramble for its Balkan states. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the “sick man of Europe”, as the Europeans termed the declining empire, had been shored up by Western nations for many years to prevent just such an event. However, unlike during the Crimean War, the threat to so-called Western hegemony in the second decade of the twentieth century came not just from Russia as expected, but from an increasingly pugnacious, recently united Germany. As the war machine began cranking into action, its effect spreading to the furthest reaches of the East -  into British colonies, where subjects were summoned to serve their colonial masters’ imperial interests - the demand for information on “the East” exploded in Europe. A vague, Orientalist term that encompassed diverse and geographically vast areas like India, Burma, Indochina, Afghanistan and the splintering Arab and Turkish regions,  the East quickly became a business enterprise. One of the most valuable - and therefore, lucrative - commodities was information about the region. Into this vacuum stepped many writers, journalists, advisers and self-styled experts. Nile Green’s ‘Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan’ is about two such writers, Ikbal and Idries Shah, father and son, whose collective careers  spanned almost the entire twentieth century, from the zenith of the British Raj to its downfall and its post-Empire aftershocks. 

Ikbal Shah’s story starts with his grandfather, Sayyid Muhammad Shah, given the moniker Jan Fishan Khan, who helped the British during their brief occupation of Kabul and subsequent bloodied withdrawal. He was rewarded for his loyalty (and insulated from repercussions) by being titled the Nawab of Sardhana, and was given an estate/jagir in neighbouring India. He aided them again during the 1857 Indian War of Independence, after which the British government consolidated its control over India and officially replaced the East India Company. This changing India saw the rise of local intellectual leaders like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan who called on Muslims to learn English, become better educated in science and apply for government jobs. Thus it was that Ikbal Shah, born at the turn of the century, had the privilege of being educated at some of the best emerging educational institutions in India, like the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, and was then shipped to Edinburgh to take up medicine at its university. It was there that he met his future Scottish wife. Once he married her, the couple was cut off by both sets of parents, and Shah started dabbling in writing to earn money to support his growing family. In what may be termed today as hustling or entrepreneurship, Ikbal wrote to politicians, newspapers and various royal societies, promoting himself as an expert in the region he was from. He placed an emphasis on Afghanistan, feeling perhaps that he had the right to do so based on his ancestry, while never being quite clear about whether he had actually visited the country. 

The inter-war years were distinguished by a cultural outpouring, sped up by radio broadcasts, multiplying newspapers and magazines, and an increasing publication of books. The last was made more diverse still by the establishment of several independent publishers who were looking for original works to publish. And Ikbal had many original works to offer them: he did not just present himself as an expert on Afghanistan, a place notoriously difficult for the British to access, but also wrote of his experience of Hajj and meeting Ibn Saud shortly after the latter deposed the pro-British Sherif of Mecca. His additional works included those about India, the nascent Muslim community in Britain, as well as on magic, the occult, and Muslim opinions about British policies. As a contemporary of adventurers like T. E. Lawrence, and writers like Yeats, T. S. Eliot and the Bloomsbury set that were dabbling in “Eastern” occult practices, Ikbal was writing in a literary tradition that glorified the exoticism of far-off places  deemed  difficult to access  or understand for his intended audience. Nile Green’s narrative portrait of this era is comprehensive as far as mentioning all of these writers goes. He chooses, however, to take a derisive path by excoriating Ikbal for choosing  subjects based on whatever was trendy at that moment. He also alleges  that Ikbal never set foot in Afghanistan, and that several more of his accounts were fabricated. It is clear that he prefers to present British and American writers as experts on the subjects that Ikbal wrote about, and where a writer’s reputation is indefensible, such as Talbot Mundy’s who settled in America later, the literary output is classified as “low-brow adventure” as opposed to Ikbal’s work that he outrightly labels as fraud. 

Ikbal Shah’s son, Idries Shah’s massively popular work on Sufism is dealt with in a similar manner. Green is at pains to emphasise both writers’ lack of credentials and that they implied institutional affiliations that did not exist. However, when confronted with the fact that Ikbal was in fact enrolled in a degree programme at Oxford, albeit in his middle age, when he presented himself as an Oxford student, Green chooses to mock him for using the university’s name without having graduated. As a Professor of history himself, one is surprised at this statement since standards for university affiliations have not changed so much over the past hundred years as to make them inexplicable to an academic today. Green’s book presents an interesting portrait of Britain in the first decade of the twentieth century, before its Empire splintered, one that he did not really intend to paint: in a racist, classist society that looked down on its colonial subjects, it was almost impossible for many of its subjects to make their way in the motherland. Ikbal, raised as an aristocrat and then cut off for marrying outside his religion and race, was unable to see a lifetime spent doing menial jobs. Instead, he set out to make a living writing because he could not finish his medical degree without the parental support that had paid his tuition and living costs. However, in a racist society that looked down upon people like him, he could not get through the doors leading to respectable jobs as writers, journalists or advisers, without the respectability conferred by a string of alphabets after his name. Iqbal, therefore, jumped at any opportunity that would give him even the slightest excuse to write “Royal Fellow” or “Secretary” of so-and-so society next to his name. 

In a society as rigid about gatekeeping as the stratified one created by the British everywhere they went, it was hard to make one’s way and even harder to recover from a faux pas. The British used all the new technologies available to them, from radio to telegraph, to maintain extensive bureaucratic records that were compiled and consulted to deal effectively with colonial subjects. It is these that Green seems to have relied upon heavily for his would-be exposé of a book. His arguments are based on the files kept by the War, Home, India and other departmental offices and the memos they shared with each other about Ikbal being an untrustworthy and unreliable source of information. But choosing to rely on the prejudiced estimations of the British is a perilous move: one famous example of such estimations, after all, is Winston Churchill’s remark about Gandhi, calling him a “Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a half-naked fakir,” a comment dripping with snobbery and derision. Green follows in these footsteps by terming Mulk Raj Anand, later acclaimed author of “The Untouchable” and “Coolie”, who worked as a literary editor in London, “the erstwhile errand-runner for T. S. Eliot”. Basing his entire critical thrust on the words of colonial officials trained to treat the Empire’s subjects suspiciously is a curious choice. Ikbal’s books were read and responded to by several contemporary members of the cognoscenti, including Gramsci; one of his books had a foreword from the Aga Khan; and he worked in radio with Zulfiqar Ali (Patras) Bukhari as well as George Orwell. According to Green, however, Gramsci sneered at him, the Aga Khan must not have really read the book and wrote the review as a personal favour, and Orwell had his hands tied by the dearth of Indian expert advisors during the Second World War and had to settle for Ikbal. 

Green seems to enjoy tilting at windmills and arguing for the sake of it. For example, while referring to the Pakistan Movement during 1944, he is so zealous in his commitment to tarnishing Ikbal that he dismisses the entire Movement as a nonsensical fad for a country that they had just thought of. This country was created a mere 3 years later, and even a cursory glance at a history book will confirm that the Movement was pretty advanced by 1944. With the same zeal, Green also writes that some great Indian figures had, by 1944, also been won over by this Movement, including Allama Iqbal. Unfortunately for Green however, Iqbal had not only been one of the Movement’s most prominent leaders, he was also no longer part of it in 1944, having already died in 1938.