an annotated "crib" made by Omar Ali-Shah, who asserted that it derived from an old manuscript said to have been in the Shah family's possession for 800 years. L. P. Elwell-Sutton, an orientalist at Edinburgh University, expressed his conviction that the story of the ancient family manuscript was false. Graves believed that the disputed manuscript was in the possession of Ikbal Ali Shah, and that he was about to produce it at the time of his death from a road accident, to allay the growing controversy surrounding the translation. However, the manuscript never was produced. Richard Perceval Graves describes how, in a letter to Robert Graves in 1970, Idries Shah pointed out that "production of the MSS would prove nothing, because there would be no way of telling whether it was original, or whether someone had washed the writing from a piece of ancient parchment, and then applied a new text using inert inks." Shah believed that the critics were "intent only on opposition" and said he agreed with his father, who had been so infuriated by the "hyaenas" that he wanted nothing to do with the controversy. O'Prey (1984) writes that this last point was not entirely true: Ikbal Ali Shah had in fact written to Graves from Morocco, saying the manuscript should be produced; Graves then forwarded the letter to Omar Ali-Shah. Unfortunately, he neglected to take a copy; Omar never received the letter, and Ikbal Ali Shah died a few days later. The scholarly consensus today is that the "Jan-Fishan Khan" manuscript was a hoax, and that the Graves/Shah translation was in fact based on a study of the sources of FitzGerald's work by Victorian amateur scholar Edward Heron-Allen. The affair did considerable damage to Graves' reputation. On 4 November 1969, Ikbal Ali Shah was struck by a reversing Coca-Cola truck in Tangier. He was rushed to hospital unconscious, but died a few hours later. He was buried in England next to his wife. On his gravestone, along with his name, there is only the appellation "Al Mutawakkil", which means "the one who resigns himself to the will of the Almighty." Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah's obituary in The Times of Saturday, 8 November 1969 stated: Writings In keeping with his theme of interpreting the East to the West, Ikbal Ali Shah authored travel narratives of his adventures in Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries, such as Alone