The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca by Tahir Shah Review: A Rich, Eccentric Memoir of Morocco

The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca is a work of narrative nonfiction in which travel writer Tahir Shah — author of Sorcerer's Apprentice and Trail of Feathers — relocates his pregnant wife and small daughter from England to Morocco, a country where he had holidayed as a child. The catalyst is Dar Khalifa, a sprawling compound on the edge of Casablanca's shantytown that, according to local rumour, once belonged to the city's Caliph. Shah buys the property, long unoccupied and heavy with algae, cobwebs, and termites, and the book charts the year-long ordeal of restoring it. Childhood memories of a grandfather he barely knew also draw Shah toward Morocco, lending the project a personal undertow that runs beneath the renovation chaos.

Central to the memoir is Shah's collision with Moroccan belief in the unseen. The Caliph's House harbours a willful jinni — an invisible spirit — and three retainers who have attached themselves to the property govern their lives entirely around the jinn's presence. Shah, positioned throughout as the rational Westerner, reluctantly comes to understand that the jinni must be exorcised by traditional means before any real restoration can proceed. Publishers Weekly describes him entering "a realm of invisible spirits and their parallel world," a phrase that captures how thoroughly the supernatural structures daily life in the house. The book is populated by a cast Publishers Weekly calls "entertaining, sometimes bizarre": craftsmen who confound before they beautify, servants who come and go (including Zohra, whose imaginary companion is a hundred-foot-tall jinni she carries on her shoulder), a gangster neighbour and his trophy wife scheming to take the house, and a countess who surfaces memories of Shah's grandfather and his secrets. Passing visitors deepen the texture further — Kenny, who is visiting cities across five continents wherever the film Casablanca is playing, and Pete, a convert to Islam searching for what he calls "a world without America."

The memoir's primary engine is Shah's gift for rendering a bewildering situation with self-deprecating wit. The renovation plot alone generates sustained comic momentum: craftsmen who arrive, disappear, reappear, and eventually produce something beautiful provide a structural rhythm that keeps the narrative moving. Shah's prior books established him as a writer drawn to extreme, often absurdist experience — a sensibility that serves the material well here, where the real and the supernatural sit side by side without apology. Publishers Weekly, reviewing the book, notes the cast of characters that plague and eventually enrich Shah's household, and the accumulation of those encounters — each with its own register of strangeness — gives the memoir both density and variety. The grandfather thread and the echoes of Shah's own childhood add a layer of personal excavation that lifts the book beyond pure travel comedy.

The memoir's strengths are also the source of its friction for some readers. The episodic structure — new character arrives, incident unfolds, Shah reflects — can feel loosely assembled rather than tightly plotted. Readers who come expecting a conventional house-renovation narrative or a sociological portrait of modern Morocco may find themselves surprised by how much weight the book places on jinn lore and folkloric belief; those open to that frame will find it integral, while those who are not may experience it as repetitive. The book's focus is firmly on Shah's personal and domestic world rather than on Casablanca's broader social or political landscape, which means the city itself functions more as atmosphere than subject.

The Caliph's House occupies a well-defined place in the tradition of British writers uprooting themselves to foreign homes and writing about the culture shock that follows — a genre with a long shelf life. What distinguishes Shah's contribution is the specific texture of Moroccan popular belief and the genuinely unusual property at the memoir's centre. Readers drawn to Peter Mayle's Provence books or Frances Mayes's Tuscany will find a spiritual cousin here, though Shah's Casablanca is considerably stranger and less culinarily comforting. The book is published by Bantam in a paperback reprint edition and is catalogued under travel writing, biography, and Moroccan social life and customs — a range that reflects how fluidly it moves between those modes. Anyone with an appetite for eccentric characters, cross-cultural misunderstanding treated with warmth and honesty, and the particular pleasures of a crumbling house being slowly coaxed back to life will find The Caliph's House substantial, funny, and genuinely transporting.