Unwilling to raise his two infant children in England, Tahir Shah drags them and his Indian-born wife to Morocco, where he traveled as a child.

It was there that his grandfather, the savant Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, passed the last decade of his life (he moved to Tangier after his wife died in 1960, declaring that he would go to a land where he had never been together).

Shah's father was equally obsessed with Morocco, largely it seems because it reminded him of his native Afghanistan, in terms of the culture, climate and geography.

The Caliph's House was published in 2006 on both sides of the Atlantic, and has been followed by a series of translations in a number of languages, including Spanish, French,[1] German,[2] Italian,[3] Swedish[4] and Dutch.

[7] The book is to be the basis for a feature film, written and directed by identical twin Hollywood writers Chad and Carey Hayes.