What We Forget, Tales Remember: An Interview with Tahir Shah on Moroccan Storytelling

This interview presents Tahir Shah’s perspective on the intersection of Moroccan storytelling with written tradition, translation, and cultural preservation. For Shah, stories function as essential sustenance for human civilization, not mere entertainment. Central to his view is the belief that translation does not reproduce stories. Rather, it creates new variants that keep them alive as they move across languages and cultures. This interview also draws upon Shah’s encounter with Moroccan storyteller Mohammed Mrabet, offering a window into the literary collaboration between Mrabet and American writer Paul Bowles. Through this project, Shah questions conventional assumptions about authorship and ownership, noting that oral stories must remain free to circulate beyond the page. He further contends that understanding Moroccan narratives requires years of immersion in language, place, and cultural context—a depth that written tradition alone cannot fully capture. The interview concludes with Shah’s assertion that every person is a potential storyteller, celebrating the power of tales as cultural inheritance.