History has an uncanny and depressingly regular way of repeating itself.
The novel, an allegory in which Mahfouz presented his particular philosophy of life and the conflict between science and religion, was branded an insult to Islam and its author an atheist. Not so many years later, the same issue is being dragged into the limelight once again. The novel, first published in Syria and Lebanon in the early 1980s, talks about the tragedy of the Iraqi Communist Party in the 1960s and the changes that took place in Algeria after the war of independence, as seen through the eyes of the protagonist, Iraqi communist Mahdi Jawad. In the novel, Jawad witnesses the massacre of the Iraqi communists in Baghdad and the downfall of the Algerian revolution at the hands of the military and bourgeois elites. It was widely read in Lebanon and Syria and has been reprinted several times since it first came out in 1983.