A starving academic is hired to write the life story of Abdel Rahman, an Existential philosopher who died in the late 1960s and was acclaimed as the "Sartre of Baghdad."
Father Hanna and his sexy consort, Nunu Bihar, are pragmatic and clear from the very beginning: philosophy is a business, and the narrator's assignment is to create a larger-than-life Iraqi equivalent of the original French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
He is then handed dossiers of documents, photographs, diaries, and letters and assigned a dubious research assistant, who looks more like a pickpocket, to accompany him on interviews with the few remaining friends of the late philosopher.
The charlatans demonstrate an amorality that fascinates the narrator, with their wide latitude for unconstrained heckling, irreverence, and recklessness along with factual discrepancies - not to mention the scandalously seductive nature of Nunu Bihar's overt sexuality.
He finds there were those who admired all the dead: servants overlooked and forgave mistakes, hesitated at admitting domestic scandals, attributing superhuman qualities in hagiographic proportions to those no longer living.
Unable to write in either French or Arabic and incapable of concentrating for long hours or of thinking with any systematic logic, he owned the complete works of Sartre from which he would read a few lines and swoon into day-dreaming.
One of the outstanding characters in Papa Sartre is Ismael Hadoub, he first appears selling pornographic photographs in Baghdad in the mid-1950s, his most enthusiastic customer being a rich Jewish merchant, Saul, who owns a store in al Sadriyah and bargains tirelessly over prices.
The moment Abdel Rahman Sartre returned from Paris and set up shop in the coffee houses of Al-Sadriyah, Ismail teamed up with him and became his "de Beauvoir."
Nausea permeated all Abdel Rahman's activities: sex, voraciously eating a tender steak and washing it down with red wine, smoking expensive cigarettes, even looking at a pair of patent leather shoes - all these things made him nauseous.
Dalal Masabni's night club, where he lovingly hung the portrait of his Existentialist idol and had his reserved "philosopher’s table," exuded overemotional nausea.
What eventually shatters the world of Abdel Rahman Sartre, a week before his suicide, is the sensational scandal of the illicit affair between Ismail Haddub and his wife.
The true nature of the business deal to write the philosopher's biography is revealed when the two charlatans, Hanna and Nunu Bihar, attempt to blackmail no other than Ismail Haddub in his new persona as Sadeq Zadeh.
Sporting a short hair-cut, a loose white shirt covering her ample breasts and tight men's trousers and shoes, with no make-up, she offers him another deal.