Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East

by Kim Ghattas

double legacy of Ibn Abdelwahhab’s fundamentalist teachings on one side and, on the other, the forgiving, inclusive vision of her ancestor Mufti Dahlan. At school, Sofana learned all about Ibn Abdelwahhab’s unitary version of extreme Salafist, Hanbali Islam. Her parents told her to study it for her school tests and then forget about it—to retain only what she was getting in private tutoring in Shafi’i Islamic teachings. At school, she was taught that you could not be friends with Jews and Christians; at home and on travels, her parents socialized with all kinds of non-Muslims. At school, she was taught that all human representations were a sin, even photographs, which were described as al-shirk al-asghar, the lesser idolatry. But at home, there were family portraits and pictures on the wall. There were too many contradictions for a child to comprehend and reconcile. She was too young to fully grasp this separation of the private from the public, but it produced intense inner turmoil. She would outgrow the confusion and would eventually challenge the system to become one of the first Saudi woman lawyers. But the one teaching that she couldn’t leave behind, that would remain seared in her mind, was the notion that music was haram, forbidden. “Listen to music,” the teacher had told Sofana when she was just six years old, “and you will have melted iron poured into your ears on Judgment Day.” She could never outgrow that frightful image. She would always startle when she heard ...