3 ideas
The protagonist, Rashid, is a former opposition activist and political prisoner who, once released, grows rich through corrupt dealings tied to his security-officer brother-in-law. As an epidemic of physical resemblance spreads and people can no longer tell each other apart, he exploits the confusion instead of resisting it. His arc shows a victim of repression reproducing its methods once he gains access to power and money.
When people begin to look identical, faces can no longer confirm who anyone is, so no one can verify whether a person is a friend, a spouse or an impostor. Every encounter becomes a possible deception, and suspicion turns into preemptive violence. The novel uses physical sameness to show that social order depends on being able to tell people apart, and that erasing difference produces paranoia rather than solidarity.
Nasrallah sets the story in a near future and pushes present tendencies such as sectarian hatred, extremism, commodified bodies and security-state collusion to grotesque extremes. The distortion makes the mechanisms of the present visible. Read this way, the absurd events are literal descriptions of moral collapse already under way after the Arab Spring, not fantasy.