الراعي

Wafaa and Faten arrive at the Shepherd by different roads — one reasoning her way in, the other carried by feeling — and both end up inside a Sufi order run by Sheikh Salim al-Ra'i, where devotion is measured in obedience and the price of belonging keeps rising. It begins with money and secrecy and reaches the women studying at the order's school of Sharia sciences, licensed at every step by rulings the Shepherd issues himself.

Moving between Egypt and Morocco and alternating between its two narrators, Hanan Suleiman's debut novel is a close, near-documentary account of spiritual abuse: how a religious authority is built, how it holds, and what it takes to leave it. Written in refined Arabic that shifts into Egyptian and Moroccan dialect as the story crosses between the two countries, الراعي was shortlisted for the first Bait Al-Ghasham–DarArab translation prize (2023–24) in a translation by Dr Sarah Enany.