By Karima Rhanem
Morocco World News
Rabat, May 22, 2012
While heading for Morocco, Tahir Shah and his family did not know they would live with an ‘army of invisible spirits’, the Jinns.
Dar Khalifa, the Caliph’s House, had been empty for almost a decade. In Morocco, everyone is quite well aware that an empty house is a magnet for the wicked.
Inspired by the Moroccan holidays of his childhood, Tahir Shah dreamed of making a home in that marvelous country.
At the age of thirty six, he bought Dar Khalifa, a crumbling ruin of a mansion by the sea in Casablanca that once belonged to the city’s caliph, or spiritual leader. He then traveled to Casablanca with his wife Rachana and his children to live in the house.
The property they bought was exceptional: a maze of interconnected rooms and secluded courtyards, mature walled gardens, an orange grove and a swimming pool.
There were only two problems with it: first, the remarkable state of ruin — walls discolored with algae, birds nesting in lamps, flooded bedrooms; second, the fact that it was haunted by jinn.
Many Muslims believe that when God created mankind from clay, He fashioned jinn — or genies — from fire. The existence of these evil spooks is accepted by everyone in Morocco, except by Shah. Unfortunately for him, there seemed to be dozens of them in the building. And they all wanted him and his family out.
Shah finds it insane to go to the hotel while he had his own house. So he decided to stay. But the house guardians warned him not to sing, laugh, or speak in anything but a whisper so as not to anger the Jinns.
“The guardians recapped the list of warnings: “No laughing, talking, walking around, or thinking impure thoughts, and especially going near the toilet at night,” writes Shah in the Caliph’s House.
Shah left the lights and noise of London to find himself in an old house in Morocco with no electricity and full of evil spirits.
The Caliph’s House is a story of home-ownership abroad, of wrecking-crew builders, haunted nights, hidden rooms, stolen title deeds and a plague of bees. The Caliph’s House charts a year in the life of one family who take a tremendous gamble.
The book romps between western skepticism and Casablancan superstition. Shah assails mystic tradition on one hand, and then, on the other, pricks a finger and drops his blood into a lavatory to please the Jinns. He buys a tortoise with a divine spirit. He learns to guard against house fires by hanging a salted frog outside the front door.
The conclusion is clamorous and hilarious; he employs 24 exorcists, marshaled by a pot-smoking pimp in a gold lamé turban and accompanied by a huge goat with good karma, to rid his house of evil.
Then, over the course of a year, the Caliph’s house changes the way in which Shah perceives the world.
The Jinns, however, were only the start of his troubles. In the next few months he was assailed by an incompetent architect and builders, his assistant cleaned out his bank account and vanished, and the police took to raiding the house and had to be fought off by his army of builders. Gradually, he won the battle for control of the house, solved the mysteries of his grandfather’s last years and exorcised the Jinns.
Karima Rhanem is a Moroccan Communications and social media Specialist, researcher on Governance & Public Policy, former journalist and a social activist with over 10 years of experience in civil society & youth issues. She is currently president of the Moroccan Association for development and Alternative Diplomacy. Ms Rhanem holds a BA in communications and Leadership studies, and preparing an MA in Governance and Public policies at Mohammed V University, Rabat.
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