Book of the Month: In Arabian Nights, by Tahir Shah

Just like a great journey, a great travel book enacts an exploration at once inward and outward. Tahir Shah's mesmerizing new memoir is just such a journey: It brings the sights, sounds, and smells of modern Morocco to vibrant life, and at the same time, it indelibly evokes the country's heart and soul. Inspired by and grounded in that exemplary collection of Arab tales, The Thousand and One Nights—also known as the Arabian Nights—Shah interweaves descriptions of his adventures and encounters in his adopted Casablanca and around the country as he pursues a time-honored Berber quest: to find the story in his heart.

In Arabian Nights, Shah's follow-up to the acclaimed The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca, is steeped in the storytelling tradition. On the one hand, Shah's father appears and reappears throughout the book, telling favored folk tales and teaching his children that such stories are "an instruction manual to the world," all the while grooming his son Tahir to carry on the family's storytelling responsibilities; on the other hand, the contemporary Moroccans Shah encounters all affirm the central educational role of the storyteller and bemoan the waning power of storytelling in their own culture.

Woven around this frame, Shah's search for the story in his heart takes him from the teeming streets of Tangier in the north, through the medieval medinas of Marrakech and Fez, to the solitary sands of the Sahara in the south. Along the way he meets a succession of colorful characters and hears their tales, from the cobbler who reverently recites "The Tale of Maruf the Cobbler" to the near-blind storyteller who entrances him with the story of Mushkil Gusha, the remover of obstacles.

Simply as a work of art and imagination, In Arabian Nights is an enthralling triumph, but in our lamentably divided modern world, it assumes an even greater importance, for Shah's account poignantly humanizes Arab culture, penetrating deep into usually unseen social and psychic layers. Like the bearer of a precious key, Shah leads us along meandering alleyways to an ancient door, which he unlocks and throws open onto the rich courtyard of traditional Arab custom and belief.