Idries Shah was born 100 years ago

A hundred years ago - on 16th June 1924 - Sayed Idries Shah was born in Shimla, India.

As a kid I remember him joking: ‘I was born at an altitude of seven and a half thousand feet - everything since is an anticlimax!’

His Scottish mother would have travelled with her daughter Amina to this popular hill-station in British India to have her baby out of the terrible heat of the plains in June.
There’s a family story handed down that, shortly after Idries was born, while they were still in Shimla, Amina and he both caught smallpox. Amina was sent to a sanatorium but his mother insisted on keeping her infant son with her - and in doing so certainly saved his life, since in those days it’s unlikely a baby so young would have survived without her.

This picture was taken six years later in 1930 by his father Ikbal Ali Shah when the ever-itinerant family was staying in Oxford. Idries, aged six, is on the right. His mother, Saira Elizabeth, always known in the family as Bobo, has an affectionate hand on his shoulder. His older sister Amina (who would have been eleven) is on the left and an Ayah is holding his baby brother Usman.

And here’s a little poem Bobo wrote to Idries as she lay dying. It always brings a tear to my eye - a scrap of love handed down through the generations to remind us that - long before he was a thinker, writer, father, leader, philosopher and friend - Idries was a son, to a mother who would do anything to protect him.

Happy birthday Baba!
Saira Shah

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