Danshmand

Last month, International Prize for Arabic Fiction judges announced that Mauritanian writer Ahmed Vall Dine had been shortlisted for the 2025 prize for his Danshmand, a fictionalized biography of the renowned scholar Imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali (d. 1111). Vall Dine talks about his journey as a writer, the challenges that face Mauritanian writers, and why “any writer who takes on the challenge of portraying a historical Muslim scholar is actually fortunate.”