Intiqam Alkhadimah

Dr Ahmad Shawqi is doing a course in forensic medicine in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is under obligation to go home to former British Colony Aden to work at the hospital, but he keeps postponing his return to be with Ann, the Scottish woman he loves. However, Ann re-discovers her latent lesbian passion, and dumps him. He reluctantly returns home, but the British colony is now a communist state, under East German influence, and he has to adjust. He is summoned to certify the apparent drowning of a political activist and opponent of the communist regime, but discovers especially from post-mortem examination of his lungs, that the man, a very good swimmer, has been suffocated to death. He refuses to change his diagnosis under threat of dire consequences, and has to flee under disguise in a harrowing journey by car and on foot across the beautiful but rugged and hostile border with North Yemen, made possible by a patient from that border area, one he had cured from a frightening sleep disorder.
Because of his badly needed skills, he easily finds work in Sanaa, capital of North Yemen, ruled by a military dictator within a tribal system. His crooked brother in law, Hasan, happens to be the recently appointed minister of justice there. The two find themselves on opposite sides, and strongly disapprove of each other, while Ahmad's sister and mother are caught in the middle. A very influential, well connected tribal Sheikh, an in-law of the president, shoots dead a black burglar, who comes from a severely marginalized and impoverished ethnic group. The Sheikh claims that it was in self defense, and falsifies the evidence of the murder with the complicity of the police and the turning of a blind eye by the minister of justice. However, the burglar's sixteen year old daughter, who supports her parents with her meager earnings from prostitution, demands justice. In the absence of any forensic pathologists, Dr Shawqi is bullied into preparing a forensic report.
But he prepares one in which he shows, from ballistic evidence, that the Sheikh did not kill the burglar in self defense, since he was never in imminent danger at the time. The burglar's teenage daughter happens to provide regular sex to the minister of justice, and thus gets regular access to him. Dr Shawqi and the prostitute, who falls in love with him, come under serious mounting threat, and make plans to leave town and country in separate directions, but not before planning their revenge. (417w)