Saira Elizabeth Luiza Shah, née Elizabeth Louise MacKenzie, was a Scottish writer who wrote under the pen name Morag Murray Abdullah.
Background
Her future husband, Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, who was descended from the Sadaat of Paghman, had settled in England before the first world war and she met him in Edinburgh during that war, where he was studying medicine at Edinburgh Medical School.
Career
Saira Jamil Elizabeth Luiza Shah came from a middle-class Scottish family. They had three children, the Sufi writers and translators Amina Shah (b 1918), Omar Ali-Shah (b 1922) and Idries Shah (b 1924). Foreign her, it was a journey from the predictable into the unknown.
The statues referred to in the book are the Buddhas of Bamyan which were blown up by the Taliban.
The Weekend Telegraph described the work as "a book for connoisseurs of the unexpected."
She also wrote a paper, The Kaif System, in New Research on Current Philosophical Systems, London: Octagon Press, (1968). Her husband died on 4 November 1969 in Tangier, Morocco, as the result of a motor accident.