Outcast

Outcast is narrated by Haroun Soussan, a Jewish convert to Islam. Soussan's character is based on a historical figure, Ahmad (Nissim) Soussa, who converted to Islam in the 1930s and whose work ended up used as a certain kind of propaganda during the era of Saddam Hussein. The narrator is a civil engineer and historian who's just completed his life's work, The Jews and History. The book opens with him getting an award from the Iraqi President during the period of the Iran-Iraq War. The text we are reading, the novel, is his autobiography written at the age of seventy, the book he writes after having completed The Jews and History, and the book where he feels he can explore his own personal and political history more openly, particularly his relationship to his daughter, Butheina, and two friends, Kassem Abd al-Baki, a militant communist in political exile in Eastern Europe, and Nissim Assad, who finds his life distorted by the Arab-Israeli conflict. Soussan's narrative moves in and out of the present, the recent and more distant past, providing a unique and intimate chronicle of Iraq's contemporary political history.