In the Land of Jinns

Ever looked out the window on a cold, wet day and dreamed of relocating to a gentler clime, where the sun smiles brightly, exotic flora perfume the air and the prices are forgiving? Tahir Shah did, and the result is The Caliph's House, a wry, energetic account of how the travel writer moved his pregnant wife, Rachana, and young daughter, Ariane, from London to Morocco, which he knew from childhood vacations.

Think you've heard this all before, perhaps in Peter Mayle's best-selling A Year in Provence and its sequels, or Frances Mayes' tales of Tuscan transplantation? They were wimps compared to Shah. In addition to dealing with the usual slothful house-renovation crews and colorful neighbors, he had to dodge gangsters and suicide bombers, bail employees out of jail, fend off municipal bulldozers and police raids, face down customs officials who ordered him to translate his 10,000-book library into Arabic for their perusal, and endure plagues of rats, snakes, locusts, mosquitoes, bees and — as part of a mysterious campaign to force him out — the occasional dead animal dangling from a fruit tree in his garden.

And that stuff was easy. The real problems involved jinns, the spirits that many Moroccans accept as hazards of daily life. Shah's new home — a sprawling, decrepit, Arabian Nights complex in Casablanca once owned by a real caliph — was crawling with them. His ever-expanding workforce was terrified by the spectral invaders, blaming them for every accident, including those dead animals. "They were a back door by which all blame could be neatly sidestepped," writes Shah of the jinns. "Any blunder — from chopping down the wrong tree to setting fire to the lawn mower — could be instantly brushed aside."

So Shah learned to deal with jinns the Moroccan way, sprinkling drops of his blood in the toilet, burying chunks of meat in the garden and, when the usual remedies failed, hiring 24 drum-banging exorcists, led by a hash-smoking pimp in a gold turban, for a two-day expulsion ritual. Unhappily, it involved slaughtering Ariane's pet goat and sprinkling its blood in every room. The Caliph's House ends with most obstacles surmounted — the jinns are gone, the books are allowed into the country untranslated — and the transplanted Londoners are much the better for it all. "There was a feeling of genuine achievement," Shah writes on the last page, "that by embracing the challenge we were stronger and in some way more complete."

But Shah's story didn't end with the book. The family has settled into its mostly renovated house, which adjoins a muddy shantytown. From the master bedroom, where rain is dripping through the ceiling and his son, Timur, now 2, is shouting for attention, the author reflects on his Moroccan adventure. "There's a wonderful balance of life here," he says. "The family is central, and the Moroccans love children — even on trains when mine are vomiting all over. I do encourage people, especially those with children, to get out of a place like London. There's more to life than packaged triangular sandwiches and council taxes."

Shah has exchanged these dreary hazards for more substantial risks. Last July, while filming a travel documentary in Pakistan shortly after finishing the book, he was arrested and held incommunicado for 16 days in military prisons. His sister, British journalist Saira Shah, flew to Pakistan and managed to free him. "I have a U.K. passport and a Muslim-sounding name," says the author, whose grandfather was Afghan, "and it was right after the London bombings, so they must have found me suspicious. It was horrible. They were torturing and killing people all around me. The Islamic world has gone crazy."

That hasn't dimmed his affection for Morocco, or for extolling the good life there. "My intention was never to write a book like Peter Mayle's," he says. "But I feel sad when I see friends back home trapped in their lives and their mortgages." To further encourage defections, he is writing a sequel to the Casablanca book, provisionally titled In Arabian Nights and including his experiences in other Moroccan locales. In truth, Shah's tales of hair-raising hardship may deter newcomers, but he remains undaunted. "A guy came by yesterday and showed me some pictures of these incredible homes down in Fez," he enthuses. "I'm crazily thinking maybe we should renovate another one. You can buy a quite big house there for only $30,000." Jinns included.

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