Amina Shah

Amina Shah (born 31 October 1918) is a prominent anthologiser of Sufi stories and folk tales, and was for many years the Chairperson of the College of Storytellers. She is the sister of the Sufi writers Idries Shah and Omar Ali-Shah, and the daughter of Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah and Saira Elizabeth Luiza Shah. Her nephew is the travel writer and documentary filmmaker Tahir Shah; her nieces, the writer and documentary filmmaker Saira Shah and Safia Shah.

Shah was born into a distinguished family of Saadat (= Arabic plural of Sayyid) who had their ancestral home at Paghman, not far from Kabul. Her paternal grandfather, Sayyid Amjad Ali Shah, was the nawab of Sardhana, in the North-Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The principality was awarded to his ancestor Jan-Fishan Khan during the British Raj, and had been ruled formerly by the Kashmiri-born warrior-princess, the Begum Samru.

Her career as a folklorist and author spanned seventy years. In that time she travelled widely, collecting stories and studying folklore. Her travels took her through Africa and the Middle East, through the jungles of Sarawak, across the Australian Outback, Afghanistan, and beyond.

Doris Lessing, who became a student of Idries Shah's Sufism in the 1960s, championed the Shah family's efforts to disseminate such teaching stories in the West, and penned an introduction for Amina Shah's The Tale of the Four Dervishes.

• Tiger of the Frontier (1938) (as A.A.Shah)
• Folk Tales of Central Asia (1970)
• The Tale of the Four Dervishes (1979)
• The Assemblies of Al-Hariri (1980)
• Tales of Afghanistan (1982)
• Arabian Fairy Tales (1989)
• Tales From the Bazaars (2002), re-published as Tales from the Bazaars of Arabia: Folk Stories from the Middle East (2009)