The Qadi and the Fortune Teller

A leather-bound manuscript is found hidden in a wall of a house in the rubble of Beirut in the late 1970s. It is the diary of a Muslim judge in Ottoman Beirut during 1843—a critical time for the Ottoman Empire and the European powers. The judge is Sheikh 'Abdallah bin Ahmad bin Abu Bakar al-Jabburi to the world, but simply Abu Khalid—father of Khalid—to his family and friends. In a sequence of stories and vignettes the diary tells of his work as a judge, the cases he has to deal with amid t...