A new life in Morocco

live/study abroad, travel writing — By Bob Riel on March 30, 2006 at 10:02 am

“It’s my duty to give my children an interesting childhood.”

So says Tahir Shah, a British writer who moved his wife and two children to Morocco, renovated a 10-bedroom mansion, began a new life, and then wrote a book (The Caliph’s House) about the whole experience. The New York Times profiled Shah and his new home.

Home is now Dar Khalifa, a walled villa whose rooftop terraces offer not only a cinematic view of the Atlantic Ocean but also the dispiriting sprawl of tin-roofed shacks and fly-blown garbage heaps that is the standard-issue landscape of Morocco’s slums. This dramatically different new life is the alternately comical and alarming subject of Mr. Shah’s 10th book, The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca, published by Bantam in February.