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Farid Shawwaf
The person whom the Whatsitsname considers to be his most important assistant is a former member of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government who took part in war crimes. Now devoted to the Whatsitsname’s cause, the Magician is in charge of devising secret routes through destroyed buildings in the city for the creature to travel without being seen. The Magician is also responsible for pointing out that no one is ever entirely criminal or entirely innocent: rather, everyone is capable of taking part in alternatively good and alternatively evil deeds. The Magician’s realistic perspective also allows him to understand that the divisions among the Whatsitsname’s followers are likely to lead to conflict, which soon becomes true. The Magician is later murdered by his rival, the Sophist, who is jealous of the Magician’s influence on their leader the Whatsitsname.
The Magician Quotes in Frankenstein in Baghdad
The Frankenstein in Baghdad quotes below are all either spoken by The Magician or refer to The Magician. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 10 Quotes
I was careful about the pieces of flesh that were used to repair my body. I made sure my assistants didn’t bring any flesh that was illegitimate—in other words, the flesh of criminals—but who’s to say how criminal someone is? That’s a question the Magician raised one day.
‘Each of us has a measure of criminality,’ the Magician said, smoking a shisha pipe he had prepared for himself. ‘Someone who’s been killed through no fault of his own might be innocent today, but he might have been a criminal ten years ago, when he threw his wife out onto the street, or put his aging mother in an old people’s home, or disconnected the water or electricity to a bouse with a sick child, who died as a result, and so on.’
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Chapter 14 Quotes
In his mind he still had a long list of the people he was supposed to kill, and as fast as the list shrank it was replenished with new names, making avenging these lives an endless task. Or maybe he would wake up one day to discover that there was no one left to kill, because the criminals and the victims were entangled in a way that was more complicated than ever before.
“There are no innocents who are completely innocent or criminals who are completely criminal.”
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Chapter 15 Quotes
He told her it would be about the evil we all have inside us, how it resides deep within us, even when we want to put an end to it in the outside world, because we are all criminals to some extent, and the darkness inside us is the blackest variety known to man. He said we have all been helping to create the evil creature that is now killing us off.
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The Magician Character Timeline in Frankenstein in Baghdad
The timeline below shows where the character The Magician appears in Frankenstein in Baghdad. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 10: The Whatsitsname
...explained that he was living with a series of assistants. The most important was the Magician, who claimed to have worked for the old regime. He had been employed to use...
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...executed them in the street. When the Whatsitsname started losing some of his fingers, the Magician encouraged the assistants to use body parts from these recent victims—whose bodies were left in...
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The Magician found these developments worrisome. He argued they made the group much more visible and, therefore,...
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Over time, the Magician began to wonder whether the body parts that composed the Whatsitsname were truly innocent. He...
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The Whatsitsname discussed the matter with the Magician, who told him that there was no doubt he was made up of the body...
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...his assistants would say about this. The Sophist, he concluded, would argue that, as the Magician had predicted, the Whatsitsname had indeed turned into a murderer, killing innocent people. The Magician,...
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...groups in the area, as he had anticipated, but from his own followers. As the Magician had predicted, disagreements among the three madmen’s groups caused violence to erupt. The Whatsitsname found...
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...young madman confirmed the Whatsitsname’s suspicions: it was indeed the Sophist who had killed the Magician and, later, escaped. With his new, innocent eyes, the Whatsitsname saw the young madman as...
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Chapter 14: Tracking and Pursuit
...they can no longer be separated. As he reviews these thoughts, the Whatsitsname recalls the Magician’s comment about the fact that no one is ever completely innocent and criminal. He realizes...
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