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