JIHAD: a contemporary stage adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes

by Raymond Moore

Fatality enters your room one day while your landlady’s away. You come in and find it clothed in flesh and bearing a man’s name. Wearing a brown cloth coat and long boots, it asks you whether the outer door is closed. And you don’t know enough yet to take it by the throat and fling it downstairs. You simply just don’t realize what this crazy twist of fate means. Instead, you welcome it! You ask it to have a seat … and then … then it’s all over. You can’t shake it off anymore, and there’s nothing, nothing you can do about it! Nothing will ever give you back the freedom of your life or the sanity of your thought!Yes, one wintry afternoon in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, a university student, Khalid Baktir Razumov, returns to his room after classes, only to find an unannounced visitor waiting for him – the well-known, radical Islamist student, Saifuddin Hussein. To Razumov’s utter dismay, Saifuddin takes him into his confidence and shares a deadly, astonishing just that morning, through an act of jihadist terror, Saifuddin had assassinated a prominent Uzbek government official and is now on the run. Furthermore, Saifuddin, whom Razumov only knows as an acquaintance, requests aid from Razumov, to make arrangements with a shady taxi driver to meet up with Saifuddin later that night for the getaway. Though seething inside that Saifuddin should presume so much from him, Razumov agrees, hoping that somehow, by granting this small favor, he will be able to loosen himself from this terrorist association. Little does he realize that through this fatal choice, this crazy twist of fate, Razumov’s life will be changed forever.

167 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2021

About the author

Raymond Moore is a retired professor who currently lives in the Philippines with his family. Aside from his academic career, Moore is also a playwright, poet, and song writer. He has adapted Joseph Conrad’s novel, Under Western Eyes, into the full-length stage play JIHAD (currently available on Kindle), and he has written a short play (unpublished), Grandman and Baby Boo. Moreover, Moore is a singer-songwriter (under the pseudonym Ray Houston), and he has written a book of poetry titled My Window, which (along with Grandman and Baby Boo) he plans to publish on Amazon in the near future. Finally, Raymond Moore plans to publish audio books of all his creative works (as well as classic short books in the public domain that have yet to be published as an audio book).