An academic who has taught in Arab universities (as well as in the U.S. and Germany), sociologist Alrabaa presents a disturbing collection of accounts of daily life under fundamentalist Islam in Saudi Arabia. Typical of the stories is that of a deaf-mute woman who was picked up on suspicion of prostitution--and later stoned to death--when her real "crime" was waiting for her brother in front of a shop window. While the book's stories of human rights violations by Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist authorities are appalling, it is important to note that the author ascribes those abuses to the nature of Islam itself, not to fundamentalist interpretations of Islamic scripture. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)