The Paris AtlasCharting the artists, works, and places worth returning to.

A character in The Queue

The High Sheikh

The High Sheikh is a powerful religious authority whose rulings support the Gate and Violet Telecom.

The book

Cover of The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz
The QueueBasma Abdel Aziz, 2013

An endless queue waits before a bureaucracy that controls permits, medicine, information, and official reality.

View the book

Who they are in the book

Spoiler-free

The High Sheikh is a powerful religious authority whose rulings support the Gate and Violet Telecom. He declares political and economic obedience a matter of faith, giving citizens moral language for accepting surveillance. The man in the galabeya turns those rulings into weekly lessons. The High Sheikh remains distant and institutionally protected; the novel does not narrate a personal fate.

If you like The Queue

Four books that share themes, tone, or setting with this one.

If you like Basma Abdel Aziz

Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.

  • Illustrated portrait of Aldous Huxley

    Aldous Huxley

    English novelist of Brave New World, which he wrote not in Paris but on the Mediterranean coast at Sanary-sur-Mer. His French years ran from a rented house at Suresnes on the western edge of Paris, where he pushed the dying D. H. Lawrence towards the city's presses, to seven years on the Riviera; he then left for California, wrote the best-known modern account of taking mescaline, the hallucinogenic drug made from the peyote cactus, and died on the day President Kennedy was shot.

    View author
  • Illustrated portrait of George Orwell

    George Orwell

    English novelist, essayist and journalist, born Eric Arthur Blair, who wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was an imperial policeman in Burma, a plongeur in Paris kitchens off the rue Mouffetard, and a militiaman shot through the neck in Spain before any of it.

    View author
  • Illustrated portrait of Franz Kafka

    Franz Kafka

    Prague novelist who worked fourteen years as an accident-insurance official, left three novels unfinished, told his friend Max Brod to burn everything, and was disobeyed. His Paris is a holiday, not an exile: he came twice as a tourist with Brod between 1909 and 1912, and never lived there.

    View author