‘Is there a difference between paranoia with and without quotation marks?’ The question is posed by Svetlana Boym in an insightful article on the sundry mutations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in European literature, across the presumed boundaries of fact and faction. Boym traces the textual evolution of this central conspiracist tract from the gothic novels and detective thrillers of the nineteenth century, to ‘a fictional political pamphlet’ originally directed against Napoleon III, to the anti-Semitic polemic proper, and on to the ‘self-conscious’ conspiracist novels of Umberto Eco and Danilo Kiš. In doing so, Boym not only casts a critical eye on the notorious acts of plagiarism and ‘deadly intertextuality’ that birthed the The Protocols – that is to say, the reliance of an ostensibly non-fictional work on fictional predecessors – but examines how later works of fiction, through ironical appropriation (‘paranoia with quotation marks’), serve to undermine that text's enduring influence. Specifically, a novel like Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, in dramatising the paranoid exploits of three book editors in Milan, offers ‘ethical insights into, and unique heuristic tools for understanding’ (and critiquing) conspiracy theory.

This chapter directs Boym's question to three recent novels that put conspiracy theory within quotation marks: Kitāb al-Ṭughrā: Gharāʾib al-Tārīkh fī Madīnat al-Mirrīkh (2011) (The Book of the Sultan's Seal: Strange Incidents from History in the City of Mars, trans. 2015) by Youssef Rakha; ʿĀm al-Tinnīn (The Year of the Dragon) (2012) by Mohammad Rabie; and Istikhdām al- Ḥayā (2014) (Using Life, trans. 2017), written by Ahmed Naji and illustrated by Ayman Al Zorkany (Ayman al-Zurqānī). Each of these novels deploys conspiracist tropes and themes, not as expressions of strongly held convictions or acts of political posturing, but as experiments in irony, or parodical imitations of predecessors and contemporaries in literature and society. This is not to say that each unequivocally condemns or departs from conspiracy theory as a critical practice. At its simplest, ‘irony’ may be understood as ‘the intentional transmission of both information and evaluative attitude other than what is explicitly presented’. The ‘evaluative attitude’, Hutcheon explains, is where irony gets most tricky.