I just finished In Arabian Nights by Tahir Shah. I was aware, when I started, that this book was to be about storytelling in Morocco, and I approached it wondering if it would be a dry collection of stories from a culture that I didn’t I have the tools to comprehend.
Right off I have to say that this book is trully about oral storytelling as in telling stories to other people who are looking at you and at whom you are looking. He describes the importance of oral stories in the past and to the future through his own personal storytelling journey.
Shah weaves his experience as a prisoner suspected of terrorism in a Pakistani torture prison, as a father, as a friend and as a son into his quest to find the story he carries within him. It was the nightmares and dreams after the Pakistani experience that propels the author further into the culture of his adopted homeland and further into the tradition of finding the story that is his own. Tahir Shah is not a man to leave a stone unturned and the search takes him into cafes, which only men can enter, to a city of storytellers, to the best storyteller in the country, to a sorceress and to a 500-year-old house in the city of Fes. As a reader, I followed his quest with my own heart, wishing to hear the voices and smell the smells about which he was writing.
As I said, he does under represent women. At one point, when their house is filled with village people ready to hear the story of the great teller he invited to live with him, his wife, who didn’t know the villagers were coming much less the storyteller, says, “When will this stop?”
Tahir Shah’s personal journey is told so honestly and with such curiosity and respect for the culture around him, that when I was finished I was glad the book was on my Kindle so I could revisit it any time.