Last year a group of young bearded Salafi men drove to the mountains for a picnic, stopping on the way in a small town where they were attacked by local Sufists.

And his favourite passages in history are the bits where believers (often courageous Sufi mystics) spoke truth to power, not the instances when pliant greybeards did favours to the sultan.

The result, according to Julien Jalal Eddine Weiss, an expert on classical Arab and Sufi music, was like “using African bongos in a Mozart sonata”.