The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca by Tahir Shah Review: A Disarming, Jinn-Haunted Relocation Memoir

A travel book with strong personal stakes, The Caliph's House earns its reputation as one of the more substantial entries in the expat-relocation genre, nominated as one of TIME magazine's 10 Best Books of 2006.

The Caliph's House is a work of narrative nonfiction — specifically a travel book — in which Anglo-Afghan writer Tahir Shah documents the year his family uprooted from England and moved to Casablanca, arriving in 2004. The catalyst is personal: Shah was unwilling to raise his two infant children in England, and Morocco held deep family significance. His grandfather, the scholar Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, spent the last decade of his life in Tangier, and Shah's father was drawn to the country because its culture, climate, and geography reminded him of his native Afghanistan. The property Shah acquires is Dar Khalifa — sprawling, long-abandoned, heavy with algae, cobwebs, and termites, and said locally to have once belonged to the city's Caliph. It had stood unoccupied for a decade when the Shahs moved in, and it came furnished, in the most inconvenient sense, with three hereditary guardians whose lives are governed by the belief that jinn inhabit every corner of the house.

The book's animating conflict, as Publishers Weekly describes it, is Shah's position as "the rational Westerner" who must reluctantly grapple with a world of "invisible spirits and their parallel world." The three guardians exert control over daily life and press Shah at every turn to acknowledge the danger posed by the jinn. This tension comes to a head in a grand exorcism involving the slaughter of animals — an event the guardians pursue with evident satisfaction. Shah does not resolve this friction by dismissing Moroccan belief; the book's appeal, as Wikipedia's reception summary notes, lies in the way it imparts a deeper understanding of Arab culture, doing so with humor rather than condescension. The jinn are not a punchline; they are the organizing principle around which local relationships, labor, and domestic life are structured.

A significant portion of the book's energy comes from the parade of figures Shah encounters during the house's restoration. Publishers Weekly enumerates the cast: craftsmen who confound and ultimately beautify the property; a servant named Zohra, whose imaginary companion is a hundred-foot-tall jinn that rides on her shoulder; a gangster neighbor and his trophy wife who scheme to acquire Dar Khalifa; and a countess who holds memories of Shah's grandfather and his secrets. Visitors passing through add further texture — Kenny, who is tracking screenings of the film Casablanca across five continents, and Pete, a convert to Islam in search of "a world without America." This ensemble gives the book a novelistic density unusual for the genre, turning what could have been a straightforward house-renovation memoir into a portrait of a particular Casablanca social world.

The book's recognition is substantial and documented. It was nominated as one of TIME magazine's 10 Best Books of 2006 and was chosen for BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week — a selection that carries particular weight for narrative nonfiction in the UK. It has been translated into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Swedish, and Dutch, reflecting wide international uptake. The book also spawned a sequel, In Arabian Nights, which continues the family's Moroccan story, and has been optioned as the basis for a feature film to be written and directed by Chad and Carey Hayes. The personal dimension — Shah's family history in Morocco, his grandfather's decades there — distinguishes it from generic expat narratives and gives the cultural observations a grounding in lived inheritance rather than tourist curiosity.

Readers drawn to immersive, character-rich travel writing set in the Arab world will find this book well-matched to their interests. Its humor and its genuine engagement with Moroccan belief systems make it accessible without being reductive. That said, the book's very strengths can become friction points for certain readers: the episodic structure — built from encounters, setbacks, and digressions rather than a propulsive single narrative — means the pace is unhurried, and those expecting a tightly plotted renovation story may find the accumulation of eccentric characters and supernatural detours more meandering than immersive. The expat-relocating-to-a-crumbling-mansion premise is also a well-worn subgenre, and readers who have followed Peter Mayle or Frances Mayes into that territory will recognize the scaffolding even as Shah's specific Moroccan and family context gives it distinct coloring.