SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, Western publics have boned up on Saudi Arabia and its strict Wahhabi variant of Islam. In the process, some may have come to think of the Saudi kingdom, with its police-enforced public segregation of the sexes and total absence of religious freedom, as monolithic–a misapprehension for which the sociologist Mai Yamani has produced the antidote.

Her new book Cradle of Islam: The Hijaz and the Quest for an Arabian Identity (I.B. Tauris, London) is the story of a subtle resistance that has developed to the oppressive uniformity that the House of Saud seeks to impose on the country. Rather than a challenge to the Saudi princes’ political power, this quiet defiance takes a cultural form. Yamani calls it Hijazification: a reassertion of regional identity by the elite families of the cosmopolitan western province known as the Hijaz.