Al-Jabalawi lives in his large house surrounded by gardens and high walls, and around him his children and grandchildren who dispute over the endowment, while the fatwas control the neighborhood and prevent the sons of Al-Jabalawi from his earthly paradise, as the offspring have settled outside the walls of the big house since the expulsion of Adham and Idris, despite their poverty and the injustice they are exposed to. They lose hope that Jabalawi will emerge from his isolation in order to distribute his estate and rid them of the oppression of the bullies. In every generation a savior appears to whom people cling and rise up against injustice, but greed and ignorance eventually bring them back to what they were. The novel was published in Al-Ahram newspaper in 1959 and caused a great controversy, which caused a delay in publishing it as a book for eight years.
