Tahir Shah
Tahir Shah was born in London, and raised primarily at the family’s home, Langton House, in the English countryside – where founder of the Boy Scouts, Lord Baden Powell was also brought up.
Along with his twin and elder sisters, Tahir was continually coaxed to regard the world around him through Oriental eyes. This included being exposed from early childhood to Eastern stories, and to the back-to-front humour of the wise fool, Nasrudin.
Having studied at a leading public school, Bryanston, Tahir took a degree in International Relations, his particular interest being in African dictatorships of the mid-1980s. His research in this area led him to travel alone through a wide number of failing African states, including Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Zaire.
After university, Tahir embarked on a plethora of widespread travels through the Indian subcontinent, Latin America, and Africa, drawing them together in his first travelogue, Beyond the Devil’s Teeth. In the years that followed, he published more than a dozen works of travel. These quests – for lost cities, treasure, Indian magic, and for the secrets of the so-called Birdmen of Peru – led to what is surely one of the most extraordinary bodies of travel work ever published.
In the early 2000s, with two small children, Tahir moved his young family from an apartment in London’s East End to a supposedly haunted mansion in the middle of a Casablanca shantytown. The tale of the adventure was published in his bestselling book, The Caliph’s House.
In recent years, Tahir Shah has released a cornucopia of work, embracing travel, fiction, and literary criticism. He has also made documentaries for National Geographic TV and the History Channel, and published hundreds of articles in leading magazines, newspapers, and journals. His oeuvre is regarded as exceptionally original and, as an author, he is considered as a champion of the new face of publishing.
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“It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa.”
“For me, nature is something you watch on the Discovery Channel, or on the evening news -- as you learn how much more of it's been savaged to make way for the Blackberry realm that is my home”
“Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It's just about as remote as any tourist destination on earth, but one that pays fabulous dividends.”
“Explorers like to pretend that they are a select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship.”
“Visit Cape Town and history is never far from your grasp. It lingers in the air, a scent on the breezy, an explanation of circumstance that shaped the Rainbow People. Stroll around the old downtown and it's impossible not to be affected by the trials and tribulations of the struggle. But, in many ways, it is the sense of triumph in the face of such adversity that makes the experience all the more poignant.”
“Buy a house in a foreign country and, it seems, that anything which can go wrong usually does.”
“In Morocco, before you even get to the matter of the sale, you have to coax the owner to sell.”
“During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide.”
“One senses that, in these conditions, no amount of wet-wiping could bring true hygiene.”
“Everyone knows that even the best exorcism has to be renewed once in a while.”
“The Occident has never found it easy to grasp the strange netherworld of spirits that followers of Islam universally believe exist in a realm overlaid our own.”
“Move to a new country and you quickly see that visiting a place as a tourist, and actually moving there for good, are two very different things.”
“A little imagination goes a long way in Fes.”
“For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.”
“The idea of my heart dancing with delight was far too good to pass up.”
“Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.”
“The pursuit of illusion is not about studying for prizes, or for study's sake. There's no right or wrong, no pass or fail.”
“A journey of observation must leave as much as possible to chance. Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation”
“Where does one go in a tremendous city like Calcutta to find insider information? I recalled India's golden rule: do the opposite of what would be normal anywhere else.”
“Respect was one thing. Survival was another. It was important that I kept my priorities in the right order.”
“A cross between a foreign legion boot-camp and a secret-society initiation ritual, the ordeals were grounded in pain. One thing was obvious: the agenda, which was dedicated to grave discomfort, had been drawn up by a passionate sadist.”
“There is nothing quite as unpleasant as wearing a pair of briefs which have been trailed through a Calcutta courtyard. Nothing, that is, except having one's elbows and knees lacerated by unseen slivers of glass and discarded razor blades.”
“Calcutta's the only city I know where you are actively encouraged to stop strangers at random for a quick chat.”
“Enlightenment, and the death which comes before it, is the primary business of Varanasi.”
“The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.”
“My father looked on in disbelief, overwhelmed that his son had been taught to eat glass and relish it.”
“The backstreet cafe in Casablanca was for me a place of mystery, a place with a soul, a place with danger. There was a sense that the safety nets had been cut away, that each citizen walked upon the high wire of this, the real world. I longed not merely to travel through it, but to live in such a city.”