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The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca, by Tahir Shah
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In the tradition of A Year in Provence and Under the Tuscan Sun, acclaimed English travel writer Tahir Shah shares a highly entertaining account of making an exotic dream come true. By turns hilarious and harrowing, here is the story of his family’s move from the gray skies of London to the sun-drenched city of Casablanca, where Islamic tradition and African folklore converge–and nothing is as easy as it seems….
Inspired by the Moroccan vacations of his childhood, Tahir Shah dreamed of making a home in that astonishing country. At age thirty-six he got his chance. Investing what money he and his wife, Rachana, had, Tahir packed up his growing family and bought Dar Khalifa, a crumbling ruin of a mansion by the sea in Casablanca that once belonged to the city’s caliph, or spiritual leader.
With its lush grounds, cool, secluded courtyards, and relaxed pace, life at Dar Khalifa seems sure to fulfill Tahir’s fantasy–until he discovers that in many ways he is farther from home than he imagined. For in Morocco an empty house is thought to attract jinns, invisible spirits unique to the Islamic world. The ardent belief in their presence greatly hampers sleep and renovation plans, but that is just the beginning. From elaborate exorcism rituals involving sacrificial goats to dealing with gangster neighbors intent on stealing their property, the Shahs must cope with a new culture and all that comes with it.
Endlessly enthralling, The Caliph’s House charts a year in the life of one family who takes a tremendous gamble. As we follow Tahir on his travels throughout the kingdom, from Tangier to Marrakech to the Sahara, we discover a world of fierce contrasts that any true adventurer would be thrilled to call home.
From the Hardcover edition.
- Sales Rank: #214330 in Books
- Brand: Shah, Tahir
- Published on: 2006-12-26
- Released on: 2006-12-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.22" h x .64" w x 5.50" l, .89 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 368 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. When Shah, his pregnant wife and their small daughter move from England to Morocco, where he'd vacationed as a child, he enters a realm of "invisible spirits and their parallel world." Shah buys the Caliph's House, once a palatial compound, now heavy with algae, cobwebs and termites. Unoccupied for a decade, the place harbors a willful jinni (invisible spirit), who Shah, the rational Westerner, reluctantly grasps must be exorcised by traditional means. As Shah remodels the haunted house, he encounters a cast of entertaining, sometimes bizarre characters. Three retainers, whose lives are governed by the jinni, have attached themselves to the property. Confounding craftsmen plague but eventually beautify the house. Intriguing servants come and go, notably Zohra, whose imaginary friend, a 100-foot tall jinni, lives on her shoulder. A "gangster neighbor and his trophy wife" conspire to acquire the Caliph's House, and a countess remembers Shah's grandfather and his secrets. Passers-through offer eccentricity (Kenny, visiting 15 cities on five continents where Casablanca is playing; Pete, a convert to Islam, seeking "a world without America"). There is a thin, dark post-9/11 thread in Shah's elegantly woven tale. The dominant colors, however, are luminous. "[L]ife not filled with severe learning curves was no life at all," Shah observes. Trailing Shah through his is sheer delight. Illus. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
In the March 2006 issue of The Atlantic, Terry Castle faced his addiction to the shelter magazines and furnishings catalogues that drive the "billion dollar business of home improvement." These same addicts put books like Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence and Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun atop the best seller lists. Travel writer Tahir Shah (In Search of King Solomon's Mines; Sorcerer's Apprentice) possesses the same idealistic (and some critics say naïve) pursuit of greener grass through domestic upheaval. While critics compare his book with the aforementioned classics of the genre, it is Shah's dark humor and skillful depiction of Casablanca that distinguish The Caliph's House. Though less intrepid souls might not care to live there, reviewers insist a few nights at Dar Khalifa in the company of such a talented writer is time well spent.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
Afghan writer Shah uproots his family from the comforts of London and moves to Casablanca. There he purchases not just any house but the abandoned residence of the caliph. Undeterred by suicide bombers, jinns, and innumerable job applicants, Shah installs his family in the decrepit house and begins to restore its walls, its gardens, and its fountains. Reconstructing the house immerses Shah in Moroccan everyday life. He has to deal with plagues of rats, swarms of bees, and the ever-threatening prospect of organized crime. Shah's picture of Moroccan society, its deeply held Islamic faith, its primitive superstition, and its raucous economy makes for endlessly fascinating reading. Particularly telling is his encounter with the realities of Ramadan, which seems to bring out both the best and worst in people's characters. Shah is cautious not to judge a society different from Western expectations, and he never makes fun of the odd characters who pepper his narrative. Shah's own heritage as both Afghan and Briton blesses him with a unique and penetrating point of view. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Another "domestic" travel book
By R. M. Peterson
Until fifty or so years ago, the paradigmatic "travel" book was an account of a solo adventurer's trials and tribulations traveling to and through relatively unknown and often moderately dangerous foreign lands, surviving on a shoestring and his or her wits and character. The best of these books made for exciting reading. As the world has gradually become smaller and more westernized, travel books have gradually become tamer and less exciting, so that by now the paradigmatic "travel" book is practically domestic in nature. It recounts a stretch of time, often a year, during which the author, often with family in tow, actually takes up residence in a foreign city or region -- for example, Peter Mayle in Provence, Adam Gopnik in Paris, and innumerable Brits and Americans in Tuscany. The best of these modern travel books are pleasant and many are instructive, but (alas) they never are exciting. THE CALIPH'S HOUSE: A YEAR IN CASABLANCA is another of these contemporary "domestic" travel books, although the setting, Morocco, is more exotic than Provence, Paris, or Tuscany.
In THE CALIPH'S HOUSE, Tahir Shah tells the story of moving his family (wife and two very young children) from the U.K. to Casablanca and into a dilapidated, rambling old house and compound (rumored to once have been the residence of a caliph), which he then spends a year restoring. The restoration is complicated immeasurably by what seems like the ten plagues of Egypt, including rats, mysteriously appearing slime, hordes of workmen who seem to want to move in rather than finish their work, and (worst of all) jinns. The book is driven by the recurring cultural clashes and misunderstandings between the rational and efficient Tahir Shah and the Moroccans, with their propensity to blame all mishaps and misfortune in the world on jinns, their absurdly byzantine bureaucracy, and their stubborn adherence to traditional, centuries-old ways of doing things. Rather than relying on his own wits to overcome the obstacles he encounters, Tahir Shah gets by on seemingly inexhaustible financial resources and the savvy of his street-wise Moroccan executive assistant, Kamal. Far from the heroic adventurer, Tahir comes across as a bit of a doofus. The only person of heroic or noble character that we are introduced to is Tahir's deceased grandfather, Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, a Pashtun Afghan who lived his last years in Morocco after a career as a diplomat, world-traveller, and writer.
Tahir Shah's writing is above average, but hardly distinguished. THE CALIPH'S HOUSE makes for a pleasant and instructive read, but nothing more. It did, however, end up coloring my view of Morocco. Before reading the book, Morocco was fairly high on my wish-list of places to go; it is now a few slots lower on the list.
45 of 49 people found the following review helpful.
Exotic and charming
By Bundt Lust
I found out about Tahir Shah's "The Caliph's House" in an issue of the International Herald Tribune. Although I've lived in Spain, speak French, and have many friends from Northern Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco), I've not yet had the pleasure of visiting Morocco, where Tahir Shah moved his wife Rachana and children to escape the stale, boring life of London.
Raised by an Afghan father on tribal legends and childhood treks through the Atlas Mountains, Shah is drawn by the sense of exotic beauty and deep-seated cultural values of Morocco, enough so that he purchases a run-down estate in a shantytown. The Caliph's House is filled with traces by bygone beauty: secret gardens in inner courtyards, mysterious locked rooms, and unlimited potential for restoration: the beautiful bejmat mosaics and fountains that Islamic art has been famous for for centuries, carved cedar shelves, grand doors.
Shah quickly realizes that despite its French appearance and legacy, Casablanca is purely North African, governed by age-old ritual and superstition: Jinns that rule his new home and cause accidents and deaths, workmen that never finish a single project, the constant headache of bargaining for every item needed for restoration, living next to seething slums where Arab Gulf Al-Qaeda members are recruiting in the local mosque.
The cast of characters is immensely entertaining, serving to outline the contrasts in modern Morocco: a French countess who was a friend of Shah's grandfather, a pessimistic French diplomat, an elderly stamp collector who trades stamps for stories, three guardians who come with the house but end up causing nothing but headaches, a local gangster and his trophy wife, and the servants that Shah hires to attempt to add rule and order back to his life, but who quickly teach him that to accomplish anything, he needs to think like a true Moroccan.
Unlike the myriad of home restoration shows on the BBC and HGTV, Shah's project is plagued by disaster from the beginning: a phony architect and his bungling workers knock down walls with glee, Shah's black market sand provider is jailed on prostitution charges, his mail-order furniture from India (ordered after several glasses of wine)and personal library of 10,000 books is held hostage by Moroccan customs, and the supposed haunting by Jinns is enough to nearly drive Shah and family from Dar Khalifa, but cooler heads and a new cultural awakening prevails. Shah learns to admire the wealth of cultural traditions that guide Morocco, reconnects with his famous grandfather, who spent the last years of his life in Casablanca, and finds the journey ultimately rewarding.
Full of sharp humour, eagle-eyed observations gleaned from a lifetime of travels, and an eye for beauty, "The Caliph's House" is a delightful, exotic journey into the cultural heart of Morocco, full of whispering fountains, lush secret gardens, the glitter of glazed tile mosaics, the muezzin's chant, and the call of the unknown.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
A Room with a View -- The Vista from "The Caliph's House"
By Roseanne E. Freese
The Caliph's house is a wonderful romp through a year spent doing the mundane in the most unusual of circumstances. Tahir Shah, with the heart of a poet, peels back the layers and layers of Moroccan culture that hold his 400-year old mansion in Casablanca together. He has sought out this exotic locale partly to get away from the predictability of English life and to reconnect with his past. His grandfather, an Afghani scholar, diplomat and adventurer, had found peace in the endless North African skies of Morroco.
I loved Shah's fascination with the architectural and social arts of Morrocan life. I have never been anywhere in Africa or the Middle East, but his descriptions of the intricacies of tile inlay and the black market efforts needed to acquire both the workmen and the materials glow and shimmer. In contrast to Men of Salt, a masterful work on the salt caravans of Timbuktu, the Caliph's House reveals an entirely different culture. Casablanca is an urban place infested with all manner of malevolent energies, human and divine, as opposed to a wild, open desert of Mali, where the lack of internal strength and comradely fortitude can become one's greatest enemies.
Tahir Shah's writing is marvelous -- his descriptions flow lightly across the pages but with a marvelous, limpid accuracy. One moment the reader is adrift in the crowds at the souk or bazaar, but there's a girl selling chicks died pink. In another moment, an old beggar, to whom Shah offers a lift, makes off with his car. While The Caliph's House is about the trials of restoring an old dilapidated property on the edge of a shanty town, the book is really about the inner and outer rhythms that shape Morrocan life -- especially the geniis.
Coming from the same Indo-European root that became "Divine" in English, the pre-Islamic word, Djinn or Jnun, meant a magical being who was capable of all kinds of mayhem but, if managed appropriately, could be tricked into providing protection and assistance. With great humor, Tahir Shah reveals himself to be a man of the industrial era who cannot "see" what his Morrocan friends and household help believe to be utterly "true" -- that his house is also the home of a very upset genii called Qandisha. It is only when he realizes that he must hire a band of exorcists that he sees that his dreams are more than a question of ownership and skill.
Like a great panomaric movie, Shah's book opens a vista of dazzling romance and beguiling exoticism. I heartily agree with the other reviewers that if Shah had written more, I would have greedily read every page. Like a lovely Mediterranean meal, his story refreshes but does not weigh down the stomach. However, I would have loved to have seen his people evolve. He has dozens of fascinating challenges. There are his three house guardians -- who see it as their mission to protect him from his own house; the police and courts -- who can neither affirm nor deny that he owns his mansion; and, there are the architects and artisans -- who can only begin but never finish projects. When Shah occassionally pauses from his magnificent choreography to let his subjects speak for themselves and the motives that fill their hearts, his writing is at its best.
Indeed, while Shah's pulls away a veil of mystery in Morrocan life and his family's past, he himself remains something of a mystery. Other people would have quit far sooner and other wives would have walked out. After all, who wants to live in a house with rats, roaches and locusts and only one bathroom for 11 adults? Perhaps, it is the genii of Shah's humor that says there's something more to life than projects, deadlines, and trying to control things that can't be controlled. Enjoy and wonder!
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