Plot Summary [1]:
Ibn Fattouma, also known by his birth name Qindil Muhammad al-Innabi, is a Muslim man disillusioned by the corruption in his home city. When he asks his teacher, a Sufi, why a land whose people obeys the tenets of Islam suffers so, Ibn Fattouma is told the answer he seeks lies far away from the city. Since travel broadens one's horizons, the teacher encourages Ibn Fattouma to seek the land of Gebel, where such problems have been solved. The teacher tried to travel there himself, but civil war in neighboring lands and the demands of family ultimately prevented him from completing the journey. Also, no documents exist about Gebel and no one is known to have traveled there and come back.
Ibn Fattouma says farewell to his mother and proceeds with a camel train out of his home city to the land of Mashriq. In this sexually libertine society (by Ibn Fattouma's standards), the women and men do not marry, they share sexual partners and they share power over their children. Nevertheless, Ibn Fattouma settles in Mashriq with a woman named Arousa and they have five children as husband and wife. Because of Ibn Fattouma's insistence upon teaching his eldest son Islam, he is exiled from Mashriq and prohibited from seeing Arousa or their children again. Ibn Fattouma then travels to the land of Haïra. The invasion of Mashriq by militaristic Haïra further separates Ibn Fattouma from his family, and when the annexation of Mashriq is finished, Arousa is brought to Haïra as a slave. The chamberlain of the god-king of Haïra wants Arousa as his wife and arranges for Ibn Fattouma to be jailed. Twenty years pass in Haïra before the god-king is overthrown, and the chamberlain (who was also jailed) tells Ibn Fattouma to look in the neighboring land of Halba for his wife and son.
In Halba, the freedom of the individual is the greatest good. All religions peacefully coexist and openly encourage freedom of inquiry. The Halbans are also aggressive promoters of their philosophy of life in other nations; preparations are underway as Ibn Fattouma arrives for a war with neighboring Aman. Ibn Fattouma is reunited with Arousa, who thought him lost and had since married a Buddhist. There Ibn Fattouma meets and marries Samia, a pediatrician in Halba's hospital. With his wife's reluctant approval, Ibn Fattouma decides to continue his journey before war makes such travel impossible.
In the land of Aman, justice is held as the greatest good, and every citizen is encouraged to spy on every other to maintain order. He leaves just as Aman and Halba prepare to fight. His next stop, the land of Ghuroub, finds Ibn Fattouma questioned to the depths of his being. Does he earnestly desire to go to Gebel, and why? Ibn Fattouma states as he has many times before that he seeks to learn Gebel's secret of perfection in life and share it with the people of his homeland. He and the other seekers of Gebel are driven from Ghuroub by an invading army from Aman, and after months of travel, they sight Gebel itself from a mountain peak. As Ibn Fattouma descends to continue his journey, the story ends without the reader learning whether he finds the perfection he seeks.
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