 Her nephew is the travel writer and documentary filmmaker Tahir Shah; her nieces, Safia Shah and the writer and documentary filmmaker Saira 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.