Adama

Turki al-Hamad

2 ideas

1. A Dammam schoolboy joins a Ba'athist cell

   Hisham al-Abir is a secondary-school student in the Adama district of Dammam in the late 1960s. He reads Marx, Lenin and Arab nationalist writers in secret, is recruited into a clandestine Ba'ath Party cell, and has his first illicit sexual experiences, all while keeping up the life of a dutiful son. The novel follows him until he leaves for university in Riyadh, and it shows how an ordinary provincial boy in a conservative kingdom came to see himself as a revolutionary.

2. Ideological rebellion swaps one orthodoxy for another

   A young person who breaks with religious authority often joins a secular movement that makes the same demands: obedience to doctrine, recited texts, suspicion of doubters and deference to hierarchy. The cell gives him certainty and belonging in place of the faith he left, so the form of submission survives even when its content changes. His rebellion is therefore partly a transfer of loyalty, not an escape from dogma.

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