Summary

In Part 1 readers learn of the al-Jafr prison, in the southwestern desert of Jordan, which from the days of British colonization after fall of the Ottoman Empire had housed especially dangerous inmates. Jordan would later use the facility to incarcerate militants and radicals, who were kept in inhospitable conditions and received regular beatings and torture from guards. After abandoning the facility in 1979, Jordan revived it in 1998 to house a group of anti-government forces.

The book tells the story of the facility through the eyes of Basel al-Sabha, a young physician assigned to the facility there. Sabha was initially warned about one inmate in particular: Abu Muhmmad al-Maqdisi, an Islamic scholar who provided the radicals with intellectual justification for their violent acts and whose renowned persuasion skills earned him comparisons to Rasputin, the infamous early twentieth-century mystic who held the Russia royal...