الزيني بركات

Set in Mamluk-era Cairo on the eve of the Ottoman conquest, this novel traces the rise of Al-Zayni Barakat ibn Musa, the city's puritanical and ruthless wali (governor), who rules through a sprawling network of spies and informers. Told through multiple narrators — among them a Venetian traveler and several native Cairenes — and blending diary extracts, police reports, legal decrees, and religious discourse, Gamal al-Ghitani's 1974 novel builds a portrait of surveillance and control that doubles as an allegory for Nasser-era Egypt and the mass arrests of the 1960s.