About book The Caliph's House: A Year In Casablanca (2006)
This is how I reviewed this book in The Washington Post:From The Washington Post’s Book World It’s been 20 years since Peter Mayle wrote his bestseller A Year in Provence, and there’s no sign yet of the “Year In…” franchise flagging. After all, what two-week vacationer could fail to dream of a year in Provence, Marrakesh or Tuscany? These are modern Mediterranean fairy tales, and they’re put together with the simplest ingredients: magical neighbors, hellish builders and much more olive oil than you expected. The Caliph’s House looks like one of those books, but it isn’t. British travel writer Tahir Shah’s highly readable account of moving his young family to Casablanca is constructed with something weirder and sharper: vinegar, perhaps, and ectoplasm.It opens ordinarily enough. Shah is at a Casablanca lawyer’s office, signing the sale contract, taking in the view of the street, ruminating on why he had always wanted to skip the grey skies of England for the warmth and color of Morocco. He picks up the heavy old key. The caliph’s house is his. At that very moment, a car bomb explodes outside the lawyer’s office, covering them both with broken glass. An eerie portent of things to come, perhaps. Shah’s new home, the vast Caliph’s House, has been empty for 10 years and now stands decrepit, if not derelict, on the fringe of a shantytown. With it, Shah finds that he has also acquired staff: three lugubrious and potentially sinister “guardians,” who come “as if by some medieval right of sale.” More medieval still, a vengeful she-jinn called Qandisha haunts the house, they say.Over the next few months she reveals her presence in various grisly ways: stringing cats up in trees and sucking raw meat through the toilet bowl. Children are said to be her favorite target. It may be no coincidence that the local gangster wants them out so he can steal the land. Down in the shantytown an elderly stamp-collector, who will take no money for teaching the author Arabic but likes his foreign stamps, gives him some amiable advice: “You put mannequins in the children’s beds, and tell your children to sleep in the oven each night. Do that, and you will all be safe.” An educated young lady Shah hires to get the renovations underway ultimately claims to have a 300-meter-tall jinn sitting at her shoulder, cleans out Shah’s bank account and reports him as a terrorist to the police. Her replacement – the crafty, efficient Kamal – is a binge-drinker on a perpetual high-wire, a sort of psychopathic Jeeves whose brutal and bizarre history includes a long interlude in the United States, where he made the acquaintance of Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 hijacker.Yet nothing in Casablanca is quite as odd as Shah’s determination to carry on as usual. He and his imperturbable wife want servants, a big house in the sun and a bellyful of local color for their two toddlers. What they get is the local custom of dropping gobbets of raw chicken into the well to appease the jinns, and a bellyful of streptococcus. It’s almost fatal, but they don’t flush the key down the one working lavatory and get a cab to the airport. The thought briefly flits through Shah’s mind, but it doesn’t take hold. Instead, we are led on a darkly comic journey into the North African underworld, with the reckless but thoroughly well-connected Kamal as chaperone to Shah’s dubious Dante.The joke is that Shah, in spite of his Afghan heritage, in spite of his descent from the Prophet, is a man with a rationalist moral gyroscope. He doesn’t believe in jinns, which everyone else seems to have like head lice. He’s bothered by rats, he has servant trouble, he discovers the desperate shifts the poor make to survive — the stealing, the sudden flashes of dignity, the mutual aid networks that underpin the black market, the medieval superstitions. Nothing works quite the way it works in a mature, liberal, democratic capitalist society. Everything has a price, but the routes to that price are devious and surprising. Every explanation raises more questions than it answers: Shah has baffling encounters and warily follows instructions he cannot understand.One night he is taken to a mysterious rendezvous in the desert and expects to be killed, but nothing happens. Another day he gives a lift to an old man who steals his car. Fifteen minutes later, the elderly thief drives back, apologizing that if he took the car for good, no one would ever give an old man a lift again. It’s in this sly side-step from common reality that the Shah persona comes into its own. He doesn’t play it too knowingly, but he doesn’t play himself for a fool, either.If Kamal is a Jeeves on amphetamines, Shah is no woolly-headed Wooster. He finds himself a very good fixer. He gets the house superbly done, with tiling and the tadelakt, so that he and his family can leave the single room they’ve occupied all year. And he finds out a lot about his grandfather, a widower who retired to Morocco because it was the one place he’d never traveled with his adored wife; he lived for years in Tangiers before being struck dead by a Coca-Cola delivery truck. Shah writes an outrageously black comedy with the straightest of poker faces. And in some quiet alchemical way, he finds himself at peace with the guardians and the imam and the gangster down the road and the shanty dwellers on his doorstep and the bank manager at home. He’s living there still.
Tahir Shah has a lot of good reasons for moving to Morocco. He wants to escape England and the rat race. He wants to recapture the magic of his own childhood vacations in Morocco. He wants to learn more about the grandfather that had died there years ago. He wants a house to renovate, one that will allow his delusions of grandeur to run wild. Shah gets all of that and more when he buys a crumbling palace, Dar Khalifa (The Caliph’s House) in Casablanca. He also gets three guardians (they come with the house). He gets an architect with a zeal for destruction and little interest in renovation. He gets an assistant, Kamal, that he doesn’t trust and doesn’t particularly like, but needs desperately. But mostly, he gets Jinns. Lots of them. And it turns out that jinns, invisible and usually malign spirits, can cause a lot of problems. Whether you believe in them or not is irrelevant.The resulting (nonfiction!) book, The Caliph’s House, is a delight, a thoroughly entertaining description of Shah’s first year in Morocco. The characters he meets are almost unbelievably eccentric, like those in a zany comedy movie but all the more interesting because they’re real. His adventures are often laugh-out-loud hilarious. His first night in his new home, Shah has his very first run-in with jinns…in the toilet. Kamal manages to obtain a refund from the useless architect by throwing a feast. Shah’s world map is condemned by the censorship police because Western Sahara isn’t in the same color as Morocco. I laughed so much that my husband forbade me to read in bed when he was trying to sleep.Best of all, the whole time I was laughing, I was learning. This book was, for me, a fascinating glimpse into a culture very different from our own. Moroccans have rich superstitions and traditions that infuse every aspect of their lives. Shah skillfully illuminates facets of Arab culture that, in this era of post-9/11 paranoia, we seldom see or bother to consider. He doesn’t ignore the fanatics; they’re there, lurking in the fringes of his narrative, but they don’t seem to have much of an influence on daily Casablanca life. I, for one, didn’t miss them.In spite of frustrations and challenges, Shah comes to love Morocco and its people, warts and all. He lives there to this day. Having read this book, a part of me (a very, very small part of me) longs to join him.This book does have some objectionable words, but in the context in which they appeared, they were usually pretty darn funny.
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The book is scenty. It scents of curcuma, ripe oranges, fresh ocean breeze, strong coffee, thick cigarette smoke, dead rats, broken drainage and donkeys. The book is loud. Loud with harsh and so unique arabic speech, crazy squeal of wheels here and there, people yelling at each other, imam calling for a prayer in the middle of the night, children playing outside.. The book is beautiful. Beautiful with dark-skinned men, women wrapped in veils, snow-white carved arabic palaces, blue mosques, dusty roads, colourful markets, dirty slums and amazing gardens. The insane mixture of everything is a totally new culture, so wild and insane for a person born and raised in Europe.In Morocco everyone follow the Koran, believe in genies, everyone are full of superstitions, everything can be bought on a black market and a third uncle's cousin is considered a close relative. In Morocco people have their own timetable for working, they never apologize for their faults, in Morocco you never pay in advance, you bargain to death and never to ask the price before purchasing, in Morocco a world map image can be censored, in Morocco a sheep is a deficite item to get on a certain day of the year, in Morocco everything has its own rules which can be stupid, ridiculous, funny, insane, vicious or just shocking, but that's Life there. The writer who got sick and tired of rainy London decided to move there all at once with his family and he's experiencing the culture slowly. All his impressions, feelings, anger, surprise, hesitation, everything is here, within 450 pages, not a single lie (at least he's claiming so :)). Brilliant.P.S. The only thing i didn't really get is how a writer with obvious financial difficulties could buy a palace in Casablanca, afford costly renovation works, expensive antique furniture, all house servants keeping, his daughter's education, nevermind food, a car and a bunch of money he has lost in unawareness in the beginning of his moroccan adventure :)
—Synnin
Moving to a new country is never easy – but when it’s moving from Britain to Morocco – that’s quite a bit of an adjustment. The book captures a year’s worth of experiences shared by British travel writer Tahir Shah and his family as they wrestle with life in Casablanca – starkly different and exotic from the staid and predictable one they’ve just left. From the Jinns to the endless parade of workers pressed into service to remodel the caliph’s house, to the way business is conducted over mint tea, several hours of negotiations and through nefarious means, The Caliph’s House is funny, informative and provides a snapshot of what it’s like to live in Casablanca and the adaptation and adjustment required to fully appreciate Moroccan life and culture – when in Rome, do as the Romans. I would like to know whatever happened to Kamal, however! All in all, a good read.
—Lilisa
Tahir Shah writes a fascinating, non-fiction account of the year when he takes his family from the hustle and bustle of London to Moracco where they buy a dilapidated old mansion to renovate. It is an amusing look at the clash of cultures as Shah navigates through Moraccan society, a fusion of Islamic, European and African cultures, to restore the Caliph's House to its original grandeur. Along the way, he learns how to do things the Casablancan way, from buying building materials on the black market, getting his London library past the Islamic censors and dealing with is household staff who regard the home's Jinns (genies) as more powerful than their new human boss. In the end, Shah must try to exorcise the Jinn's from the house and make it his ownThough autobiographical, Shah's writing style is pleasant and humorous, reading like an engaging novel. I missed his family, though, as his wife and two very young children stay in the background as builds his dream house. Rachana is a very patient and adventurous wife, I would have packed my family back to London in the first chapter! added 09/08Reread this book for book club and I'm adding another star. It has stayed with me over the last year, haunting the edge of my thoughts like a Jinn. I enjoyed revisiting it, especially after reading the "sequel", In Arabian Nights and some of the original 1001 Arabian Nights tales. Also found some great images of the Caliph's House, which really brought the story to life:http://www.pixagogo.com/0007895877
—Floramanda
