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Tahir Shah has been held in a Pakistani torture prison, stripped naked and interrogated under floodlights for 16 consecutive nights, while people in the cells around him were killed. He got out by sinking his fingernails into a trainee interrogator's face. A few months later, he went to Afghanistan anyway, to carry on making his documentary.

He is also the man who moved his young family from the East End of London into a supposedly haunted Casablanca mansion in the middle of a shantytown — complete with djinn in the walls, a guardian who refused to open the door to the police, and an exorcist dealer in Meknès who threw in four extra exorcists for free.

This is a conversation about storytelling as survival, Morocco as addiction, and the profound wisdom of Wilfred Thesiger: "What is the point of a mobile phone, with which you may never be lost?"

Chapters

00:00 Tahir Shah, author and storyteller — welcome to Adventure Diaries
02:00 Childhood at Langton House — Baden-Powell, Idries Shah, and the human stew
07:00 The power of stories — writing, filmmaking, and son Timur's first book
16:00 Arrested in Pakistan — 16 days in a torture prison
22:00 The Afghanistan documentary — director shot, lessons learned
24:00 Why Morocco? An Afghan grandfather in Tangier and the move to Casablanca
31:00 Dar Khalifa — djinn, exorcisms, and 12,000 books
40:00 Writing The Caliph's House — Morocco from the inside out
46:00 Casablanca vs Marrakesh — why the commercial heart of Morocco is addictive
52:00 Getting lost — Wilfred Thesiger, smartphones, and the art of going off-map
57:30 Future projects — Living with Djinn and the Scheherazade Foundation
01:01:00 Call to Adventure, Pay It Forward, and where to find Tahir

What You'll Learn:
• What 16 days inside a Pakistani torture prison actually looks, smells, and feels like  and what real fear does to your body chemistry
• Why Tahir's Afghan father recreated Afghanistan inside a Tunbridge Wells house, and how  that eccentric childhood hardwired him as a storyteller
• How he bought a 35-room haunted mansion in a Casablanca shantytown, hired 20 exorcists  from Meknès, and ended up in possibly the original building the city was named after
• Why Casablanca — with no tourists, no safety nets, and some of the most terrifying driving   on earth — is more addictive than anywhere else he has ever lived
• What Wilfred Thesiger said about mobile phones that Tahir cannot get out of his head
• Why getting lost — not found — is the greatest adventure philosophy he knows

TAHIR SHAH | Author, Documentary Maker, Storyteller
Website: tahirshah.com
Instagram: @tahirshah999
Publisher: Secretum Mundi — secretum-mundi.com
Book featured: The Caliph's House — available via tahirshah.com and major retailers
Upcoming: Living with Djinn (sequel to The Caliph's House, in progress)
Foundation: The Scheherazade Foundation — harnessing stories and folklore; empowering women
  and bridging cultures
Pay It Forward: Each One Teach One — eotoindia.org — free education from street-level Delhi
  to university, on a single condition: one day, pay it forward to someone else

ABOUT TAHIR SHAH
Born into an Anglo-Afghan family in 1966, Tahir Shah grew up in a Tunbridge Wells house that also happened to be Lord Baden-Powell's childhood home, filled with visiting Nobel laureates, old army colonels, and Sufi scholars. He has since made documentaries for National Geographic, the History Channel, and Channels 4 and 5; searched for the lost Inca city of Paititi in 16 weeks of dengue-soaked Peruvian jungle; survived imprisonment in Pakistan; and moved his family into a djinn-haunted Casablanca riad that may be the original La Casablanca. He is the author
of more than fifty books and runs Secretum Mundi, his own publishing house.


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The Adventure Diaries Podcast also covers a broad spectrum OF topics withIN the fields of Adventure, Exploration, Micro-adventure, Survival, Mental Resilience, Conservation, Scotland, Hiking, Solo Travel, Cycling, Nature, Storytelling, Mountaineering