“The war raged on,” she later mused. “Trainloads of troops kept leaving. The streets of Edinburgh were full of wounded men.”
For the 16 years old daughter of respectable parents, there was a burning need to escape the solitude of her conventional and cushioned life, to soothe her grief and witness a world beyond the city boundaries.
It would lead her to Afghanistan, where traditions were deeply rooted and women’s roles were defined by a strict social code. Over a century later, as the Taliban’s oppressive regime imposes devastating restrictions on women, her journey continues to resonate.
It was at an Edinburgh University reception – a thank you for her efforts as a volunteer selling flags for the war effort – that she set eyes upon the tall, dashing Afghan noble, with his “finely chiselled features and the air of a swashbuckler… the principal actor on the stage”.
Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, the son of a Pathan chieftain and descended from the 19th century Afghan warlord Jan Fishan Khan, well-mannered and polite, brimmed with mystery, intrigue and allure.
The chance meeting would whisk young Bessie, as she was known, from selling fundraising flags for the war effort into a clash of cultures and forbidden romance.
Despite her family’s disapproval, she converted to Islam, shed her smart city layers for a burka and left early 20th century Edinburgh for the beautiful yet dangerous mountains of the Khyber Pass.
Ikbal Ali Shah was studying medicine at Edinburgh University when he met his Scottish wife (Image: Ikbal Ali Shah – From the book AFGHANISTAN OF THE AFGHANS, Public Domain)
Her story, My Khyber Marriage was published in 1934 under the pen name Morag Murray Abdullah. But it wasn’t simply a romantic tale – part fiction but mostly memoir – of forbidden love between a young Scottish woman and debonair Afghan prince.
Instead, it would help to shine light on the complexities of Afghan society at a crucial time, helping to dispel myths and igniting a more enlightened understanding between the two cultures.
Elizabeth’s journey to Afghanistan’s mountains was during a time of rapid change as its king, Amanullah Khan and his forward-thinking wife, Queen Soraya, embarked on a bold bid to modernise the country, with new laws giving improved rights to women and girls.
Amanullah Khan, King of Afghanistan 1926-1929 introduced new rules to improve the lives of women (Image: Public domain)
Female education was encouraged, forced marriage abolished and new restrictions on polygamy and divorce rights for women.
In a move that outraged some traditionalists, the burka was no longer necessary. Soon women in Kabul were following the lead of Queen Soraya and wearing Western clothes on the city’s streets.
With Syrian roots and a feminist mother, the queen offered a glimpse into a modern Afghanistan which promised a brighter future for women and girls.
Primary schools for girls opened, women’s magazines flourished and organisations were established where women could report mistreatment by husbands, brothers, and fathers.
Crucially, she was often seen at her husband’s side at public engagements, breaking a taboo for Muslin women at the time and a powerful statement against gender segregation.
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None of which impressed the country’s deeply traditional tribal leaders. Before long, the royals’ radical effort to reform the country would ignite civil war.
Yet for a brief moment in time, Afghanistan’s women – now facing unimaginable oppression under the Taliban – had enjoyed a glimpse into exactly the kind of life young Bessie had left behind.
At her husband’s ancestral fort home high in the Hindu Kush mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, however, reforms taking place in 1920s Kabul were a world away.
She had left Scotland with chilling warnings ringing in her ears of what would befall her if she dared to leave her Edinburgh comforts.
“There were wild tales of British girls having been killed mysteriously and never heard of again,” she wrote.
“I was told that all Orientals were married in their cradles and that it was a 99% possibility that (her husband) was married and that once in his country, he would return to the degenerate ways of his clan.
“I would either be given ground glass in my food or be made a slave to his relations, whose womenfolk would be madly jealous of me.”
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In her book, despite his opposition, her father accepts her pleas to marry within just months of the couple’s meeting and the wedding ceremony is performed by three prominent Muslims. In real life, however, it’s been suggested the couple eloped.
Either way, they eventually made the arduous journey from Edinburgh, first to Karachi and then through the Khyber Pass to her husband’s family’s high walled family fort overshadowing the historic Silk Road.
On the fringes of Pakistan and Afghanistan, clan disputes and disagreements had festered for generations. Far from Edinburgh, Bessie was now being escorted from fort to fort by men draped in knives and rifles.
A Pathan tribesman photographed in 1919 as he guards the North West Frontier (Image: National Army Museum/Randolph Bezzant Holmes)
“Clansmen… lived in a state of perpetual war with each other,” she observed. “Some ancient feud made life a precious commodity.”
Yet, she added: “Men who pursued each other and would kill each other at sight would yet, had I required shelter of any one of them, have guarded me, respected my person and ceased warfare until my departure.
“There is indeed much clan warfare, yet to say the entire area is infested with brigands and that pot shooting is their pastime is an injustice to the gallant men of a great race.”
Khyber Chiefs and Khans, Jamrud Fort, North West Frontier, pictured in 1878 (Image: National Army Museum/John Burke) Arriving to a welcoming volley of gunshots, warnings she might be thrust into a harem and face a life of servitude dissolved.
Instead, she wrote of the warmth of the welcome, captivated by the intricate embroidery, colours and silks of her new mother-in-law’s clothing, chef’s meals of roast mutton studded with cloves and eaten with pistachio-flavoured rice, and the kindness of her new family.
“The East is not a land of sweet-do-nothing inhabited by handsome, wealthy sheikhs lying in wait to lay hands on white women,” she wrote, debunking the era’s sensationalised myths.
Despite the burkas and purdah, she told how rather than being kept out of sight, she took charge of running her husband’s fort even helping to defend it from attack and shooting at raiders who struck while the men were away.
She was also impressed by the financial independence of the women she met, due to their marriage dowry and precious jewellery they’d received as gifts.
“They have a very considerable amount by the time they reach the marriage age,” she wrote. “This custom completely does away with the feeling of being dependent on a husband.”
Women also had inheritance rights ahead of western custom: daughters were entitled to a share of their late father’s estate. It would be the 1960s before primogeniture – favouring the eldest son in inheritance – would be effectively abolished in Scotland.
While a landowner, she wrote, could not sell any portion of his estate without his wife’s permission.
“I learned the almost ideal law regarding women’s independence,” she added.
Around the same time she was settling in to her new life, Afghanistan’s rulers in Kabul were determined to usher in changes aimed at giving women even more control of their lives.
With the royal harem disbanded, Queen Soraya was the king’s only wife, often by his side dressed in Western clothes – both radical moves that overturned centuries of tradition.
Queen Soraya encouraged women to get education, opened schools and embraced Western dress (Image: Public domain)
Worse, for some, came when she broke off from a rousing speech which urged a greater role for women and improved education to dramatically remove her veil in public.
A decision to send the unmarried daughters of prominent Kabul families abroad to study, set alarm bells ringing among traditionalists.
So outraged were some, that they began to mobilise.
As the Afghan royals enjoyed a six-month tour of European capitals in 1928, civil unrest was brewing at home.
Their tour was seen as an effort to further dilute Afghanistan culture with western principles. With full blown civil war on the horizon, the King announced his abdication and fled into exile to India, then Italy.
Within months their progressive policies – too much, too soon for such a conservative and traditional country – were overturned.
Further ahead would be even stricter regulations: a recent United Nations report highlighted the impact on women’s mental health as Taliban rules erased them from public life and removed access to work and education.
Meanwhile for Bessie and her husband, who had traded training in medicine to become a writer, diplomat, and advocate for the modernisation of Islam and greater rights for women, there would be a lifetime of effort as they tried to build bridges between their two worlds.
Speaking in Edinburgh shortly after Afghanistan had won independence from Britain, Ikbal Ali Shah told the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution of a need to establish “that friendly feeling which must prevail between Great Britain and Afghanistan for the future peace of the world”.
There were “close affinities between the Afghan and the Scottish people because they were both Highland people,” he added.
Meanwhile Bessie, who took the name Saira Elizabeth Louiza Shah, continued to share her experiences. Her second book, The Valley of the Giant Buddhas, described her travels to view the spectacular Buddhas of Bamiyan, which would be destroyed by the Taliban two decades ago.
Within its pages are vivid descriptions of Kabul’s streets, lush gardens and bustling bazaars from when her husband’s diplomatic career took them to the Afghan capital, and thrilling journeys along the country’s mountain roads.
Later, their family would also play a part in forging better understanding between cultures. One son, Idries Shah, became an author and teacher of Sufism, with a circle that included authors Doris Lessing, J. D. Salinger and poet Robert Graves.
His daughter, Saira Shah – Bessie’s granddaughter – risked her life to record Afghan women’s plight under the Taliban in her acclaimed 2001 film Beneath the Veil.
Another daughter, Safia Shah, founded Kashfi’s Children, an organisation which provides books for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and his son, Tahir Shah, wrote The Caliph’s House, which sheds light on Arab culture inspired by visits to his grandfather’s home.
Bessie and her husband were living in England in 1960 when she died from cancer. This August marks 65 years since her death.
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Ikbal Ali declared he could not bear to live in any country where they had shared their lives, and moved to Morocco. He was killed by a reversing truck in Tangiers in 1969, aged 75.
Speaking last year on his YouTube channel about his grandfather, Tahir Shah recalled his deep love for his Scottish wife, known to the family as Bobo.
“They fell madly in love and began this extraordinary marriage of roaming the world through East and West, the guests of kings and queens and heads of state. It was a magical time.
“He wrote scores of books mostly about the East and tried to package it in a way that the Occident – the West – would understand it.
“When she died, he was utterly bereft,” he added.
“My mother commented once it was almost as if the stars had fallen out of his sky and he was unable to exist.”