Empires Son Empires Orphan The Fantastical Lives Of Ikbal And Idries Shah Nile Green by Nile Green 9781324002413, 1324002417 instant download after payment.

A rollicking story of two literary fabulists who revealed the West's obsession with a fabricated, exotic East.

In the highbrow literary circles of the mid-twentieth century, a father and son spread seductive accounts of a mystical Middle East. Claiming to come from Afghanistan, Ikbal and Idries Shah parlayed their assumed identities into careers full of drama and celebrity, writing dozens of books that influenced the political and cultural elite. Pitching themselves as the authentic voice of the Muslim world, they penned picaresque travelogues and exotic potboilers alongside weighty tomes on Islam and politics. Above all, father and son told Western readers what they wanted to hear: audacious yarns of eastern adventure and harmless Sufi mystics—myths that, as the century wore on and the Taliban seized power, became increasingly detached from reality.

Empire's Son, Empire's Orphan follows the Shahs from their origins in...