Yamani (Royal Institute of International Affairs, London) tells a story of the people closest to the holiest sites of Islam in her native Saudi Arabia, of their alienation and subjugation at the hands of the Saudi state, and of the attempts to extinguish their pride and their cultures. Among her topics are cultural resistance, the preservation of Hijazi identity, the political awakening, rites of passage, and the social arts. She has not indexed her work. Distributed in the US by Palgrave. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR Biography: Mai Yamani is a research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London and has written and broadcast widely on her native Saudi Arabia. She was the first Saudi woman to receive a D. Phil from Oxford University where she conducted the research for this book. She studied at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and taught at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah and the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University.