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In Arabian Nights by
Tahir Shah. Doubleday. THERE comes a time when even travel writers no longer feel like travelling; they return home, exhausted, to explore their roots. Tahir Shah, who has described his exotic adventures in Peru, India and Ethiopia, has reached that stage. His previous book, The Caliph’s House, began the process, describing life in his home in Casablanca. But a recent experience in Pakistan’s North West frontier accelerated it. Arrested with his film crew on suspicion of spying, he was held in an interrogation centre and subjected to weeks of sustained cross-questioning. What sustained him were memories of the stories he was told in Morocco as a child. Tahir Shah is a storyteller’s son; his Afghan father Idries Shah achieved fame in the West with The Way of the Sufi, collected Arab stories. While Tahir has told many a traveller’s tale over 12 books, this is perhaps the first time he comes so consciously into his family’s inheritance. This is a book about the power of memory and the spoken word—particularly the Arab word. The interlaced stories of the Arabian Nights serve as a model for Shah’s wandering minstelry. The fables he finds are as memorable for the closeness with which their custodians treasure them as for the simple parables they tell. For the Sufis, "stories are a kind of key, a catalyst, a device to help humanity think in a certain way, to wake us from our sleep". Only a hair’s breadth divides the inspired Sufi saying and the platitude—and just occasionally, with lines like "the journey is nothing more than a path to a destination," Shah is in danger of crossing it. But in the main this is an inspired and often funny search, told with his usual staccato rhythm. — By arrangement with The
Independent
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