attempt to study medicine at Edinburgh Medical School. 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 President Kemal Atatürk of Turkey, 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 Atatürk). Ali Shah was also a friend of Inayat Khan and involved in an unsuccessful attempt to set up an Islamic branch of the latter's Sufi Movement in London in 1918; after Khan's death, he criticised the Sufi Movement's universalist attitude, writing in Islamic Sufism (1933), "A Sufi must of necessity be a moslem" and adding that Sufism should not be confused with "such non-Islamic movements which due to utter ignorance are styled Sufism". 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