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Amina, confined to the house for 25 years by her husband al-Sayyid Ahmad, secretly visits the al-Husayn shrine while he is away in Port Said. A car hits her in the street and breaks her collarbone, so the outing cannot be hidden. When she recovers, he sends her back to her mother's house, showing that in this household the rule's authority mattered more to him than her piety or her injury.
Al-Sayyid Ahmad is feared and humorless at home but witty, generous and pleasure-seeking among friends, singers and mistresses outside. His authority depends on keeping these spheres sealed: the family knows only the severe version, so his hypocrisy never has to be justified. The arrangement starts to fail once grown sons such as Yasin see him in the other world, because the performance of rectitude only works on an audience that has never seen behind it.
The youngest son Kamal publishes an article defending Darwinian evolution and so loses both his inherited religious certainty and his standing with his father. He never adopts a new creed. He drifts through philosophy, unrequited love for the aristocratic Aida Shaddad and bachelor schoolteaching, and he ends as a skeptic who can analyze every commitment but cannot make one.
By the third volume, Khadija's sons have filled the gap left by the patriarch and traditional religion with opposing total systems. Abd al-Munim joins the Muslim Brotherhood, and Ahmad becomes a Marxist writer. Both are arrested and imprisoned together, which suggests that after the patriarch loses his hold, the need for an absolute framework survives and splits into political movements that the state treats as equally dangerous.