Like many 1960s hippies Ian Dallas embraced the alternative lifestyle: kaftans, sitars, the lot. He befriended Bob Dylan, had a small role as the magician “Il partner della telepata” in Federico Fellini’s cult 1963 film 8½ starring Marcello Mastroianni and was fascinated by eastern religions. He swung with the swingers and chanted the mantras.
He once gave his friend Eric Clapton a copy of the ancient Sufi parable of Layla, the story of a princess who was married to the wrong man. The story struck a chord with the guitarist, whose unrequited love for the former model Pattie Boyd, married to George Harrison at the time, prompted him to write the song of the same name.
Most hippies eventually cut their hair, got a job and took out a mortgage. Not the Ayrshire-born Dallas. By the mid-1960s he had disappeared into the Islamic world, later emerging as leader of the orthodox Murabitun sect, fundamentalists who believed the Nazis were misunderstood and Jews controlled the world. From a white, three-storey mansion called Achnagairn, near the Beauly Firth northwest of Inverness, Dallas, or Sheikh Abdalqadir as-Sufi as he preferred to be known, consorted with Muslim world leaders and devised plans to destroy western capitalism.
His approach was to advocate the establishment of an Islamic currency that would undermine the US dollar and cause the collapse of the “usurious” western banking system. He and his followers wanted a return to the gold dinar and silver dirham mentioned in the Koran, even producing their own coins. He also called for Britain to be run by a Muslim council and likened the war in Afghanistan to the Holocaust.
Despite his antisemitic and fundamentalist preaching, Dallas claimed to reject terrorism. After 9/11 he condemned Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, describing their actions as horrifying and futile.
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He was a reclusive and mysterious figure, giving away few personal details even to those who had known him for many years. There were rumours of a cult-like reign, even allegations of polygamy. “He likes the good things in life,” one confidante told Scotland on Sunday in 1995. “He lives in a stately home, gets driven around in a Mercedes, wears expensive clothes and always flies first class.”
Ian Stewart Dallas was born in Ayr in 1930, though the exact date is not known. There were suggestions that he was born into a land-owning clan, orphaned at a young age and raised by a great-aunt. He was said to have been married twice in his younger days, but no record appears to exist, nor have any children been heard of.
What is certain is that he had a dramatic flair and by the early 1950s had left for London, studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In his early twenties he wrote a couple of television plays, A Masque of Summer and The Face of Love.
By the mid-1950s he had joined the BBC’s TV script-writing staff and over the next several years his name often appeared in the listings, including as the adapter of Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair. By the time he achieved his 15 minutes of fame in 8½ he was moving in bohemian circles and living in Tite Street, Chelsea, once Oscar Wilde’s address.
All that changed in 1967 on a visit to Fes, the holy city in Morocco. It was there that Dallas, “disillusioned with materialistic western culture”, met Sheikh Abdulkarim Daudi, converted to Islam and took the name Abdalqadir. He joined the Darqawi order and travelled around Morocco and Algeria taking Koranic instruction before founding the Murabitun World Movement. Al-Murabitun was the alternative name of the 11th-century Almoravid dynasty that ruled north Africa and al-Andalus in Spain. He founded an Islamic learning centre in Bristol Gardens, west London, in 1972, and established the Ihsan mosque in Norwich with money from a Gulf benefactor and the great mosque of Granada in Spain.
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In 2003 the journalist Kenny Farquharson went in search of his Highland lair for The Sunday Times. Visitors to Achnagairn had described banks of computers in the old ballroom and grand bedrooms turned into dormitories for activists. Yet when Farquharson arrived “the house had a forlorn look: the harled walls were greying and crumbling and clumps of weeds stuck out from the crowstep gables”.
Eighteen months earlier the Murabitun had shifted their activities to South Africa, where Dallas established the Jumu’a mosque in Cape Town.
To the end this cinematic magician remained an enigma: to some he was a charismatic teacher, a product of the swinging Sixties; to others he was a dangerous and misguided character whose teachings spelled only danger.
Abdalqadir as-Sufi (Ian Dallas), actor and Islamic scholar, was born in 1930. He died on August 1, 2021, aged 91