The Abd-Al-Rahman Mandate

It tells the story of Carlos Lopez, a Latino journalist who on assignment in Baghdad for The Miami Herald, buys from a street vendor an inexpensive copy of the Koran and on his flight back to the US, he finds inserted in its pages an old parchment. It has a text written in an unknown language. He consults with a professor of classical languages that he knows from his university days atFloridaUniversity. The professor informs him it is a very valuable Byzantine document whose text could influence the Islamic world. The professor is murdered and the parchment disappears. There are several probable culprits: a Belgian antiquarian and Iranian, Saudi Arabian and Pakistani agents, all possible murderers and all eager to get hold of the parchment. Carlos Lopez has kept a copy of the parchment. The resolution of its text takes him first to Cairo, where he joins a Coptic policeman, and together they set out to search for the meaning of the parchment. Pursued and threatened by the antiquarian and the agents, Lopez and the Coptic policeman travel toDamascus, then Yemen and finally to Morocco, where the enigma is solved. This document could be Mohammed's testament. It holds the "solution" to the antagonism between the Shiites and the Sunnites.