The unpublished novel Get Out, You Damned One will not win any literary awards. A forgettable piece of pulp, it features a scheming traitor, an invading army of Zionist-Christian infidels and an Arab liberator. The only thing that sets the novel apart from numerous others like it in Arab bookstores is its author: former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
When Raghad Saddam Hussein, Saddam's exiled daughter, announced plans to publish the 186-page novel in Amman earlier this week, she set off a fierce debate over Saddam's legacy. Jordan's press and publications department quickly banned the book. Bootleg copies then sold out.
Experts said Saddam, long held in high esteem by many people in Jordan, retained his popularity even as evidence against him was being gathered for a trial in Iraq.
"A lot of people still like him, and he still commands popularity," said Suleiman al-Horani, owner of the tiny Horani Kiosk in Amman.
Within hours of the ban on the book, Horani says, he sold 50 bootleg copies.
"His popularity is increasing because of the success the resistance is now having in Iraq," Horani said.
The continued turbulence in Iraq has served to credit his tight grip over the country during his 30-year rule, experts in Amman contend. US missteps, prison scandals and growing corruption have added to his support.
"People are comparing the old regime and the new, and the sense is that things have simply gotten much worse," said Muhammad Abu Hdeib, a member of parliament and chairman of its Arab and international affairs committee. "All this has made people see American propaganda as a flat-out lie."
The novel, which Saddam is said to have completed on the eve of the US invasion in 2003, is seen as a prescient picture of the occupation of Iraq.
Many see Raghad's announcement of her publishing plans as part of an orchestrated campaign timed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the handover of sovereignty and the acceleration of a special tribunal that is to try Saddam for war crimes.
"The goal was to return Saddam to the public eye," said Mousa Barhouma, executive managing editor of Al Ghad, a daily. "This may have been an attempt at raising nationalist sentiment and bringing him back on the stage."
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