‘There is not a people on earth whose power once waxed great, but misfortune swept them away in its flood …’
Wahb ibn Munabbih (d. AD 732)
HIGH NOON at Sa’dah qat market. I was on my way in when a man grabbed me by the arm and gestured to a line of cobblers, their corkscrew curls bouncing as they hammered. ‘These’, he said, ‘are Jews.’ There was a pride in his voice. It was like the people of an English village pointing out a pond containing the last examples of a rare species of newt – no one would have thought twice about them had they not been in danger of extinction. The danger is real: the Jews of Yemen used to number perhaps 75,000, scattered across the country. After five decades of emigration, there are now a few thousand at most, living in communities around Sa’dah and Raydah. The last resident Jew of San’a died in 1992. An eccentric, he spent his final years in a packing case.
In the thick of the qat market, I squatted to inspect a pile of green bundles. A Jew, indistinguishable from the other suq-goers except for his sidelocks, came and squatted next to me. In no time at all the three People of the Book – Muslim, Christian and Jew – were going hammer and tongs at their ancient rivalry: trying to get the best price.
Wandering around with my qat under my arm, I realized that Sa’dah is a true architect’s city. The noble, tapering forms of the buildings recall Lutyens’s Whitehall Cenotaph but are dictated by materials, not aesthetics. Houses are constructed rather like coil pots, but on a huge scale: a complete course is slapped down and left to dry before the next one, slightly thinner in section, is added. Each course is a seamless band of mud, and the technique gives a sinuous, plastic quality to the buildings. Small towers with loopholes and projections have the appearance of faces – Easter Island faces. Sa’dah buildings are inhabited sculpture, mud at its most glorious.
Near Sa’dah’s Bab al-Yaman – as in San’a, al-Yaman here means ‘the south’ – I was taken aback by a strange sight: the Great Mosque, a sober, blank-faced building, has erupted on its southern side into a rash of domed tomb chambers, some sprouting trefoil parapets, some ribbed like lemon-squeezers or jelly-moulds. Among all the tapering cuboids these tombs are an alien arrival – appropriately so, as they include the resting place of an incomer whose successors, although they were to dominate much of Yemen for over a millennium, were always set apart.
Yahya ibn al-Husayn was a descendant of the Prophet through his daughter Fatimah, who married the Prophet’s cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib; he was therefore not of Qahtan but of Adnan, traditionally the founder of the Northern Arab line. Born and raised in al-Madinah, he was summoned, in AD 897, to arbitrate in a tribal dispute which had been raging around Sa’dah for three hundred years. Thus the two markedly different elements, tribes and imam, embarked on a contrapuntal relationship based on mutual need. Yahya adopted the title ‘al-Hadi ila al-Haqq’, the One Who Leads to Truth, and struck coins bearing the Qur’anic verse: ‘Truth has come and falsehood has vanished, verily falsehood is a vanishing thing!’ The first Zaydi Imam of Yemen left no doubt that he ruled by divine right.
Al-Hadi was in his late thirties when he arrived in Sa’dah: he was to die only thirteen years later. Often strapped for cash, his rule was limited to the northern city, with San’a under his control for short periods; but he attracted an immensely loyal following. Biographers tell of his great physical strength – of how, for example, he could stand his ground hanging on to the tail of a camel while its front end galloped over the horizon, and of how he could rub the inscription off a coin with his fingers: he impaled enemies on his lance ‘as one spits locusts on a twig’. He was endowed too with healing powers, and the seals from his letters were said to have cured dumbness, quinsies and chronic diarrhoea. Al-Hadi, it is said, also fought with Dhu al-Fiqar, the sword of his ancestor Ali ibn Abi Talib,* and like Ali he was both a warrior and a scholar, the ideal for holders of the imamate.
The Zaydi sect, which al-Hadi led, was named after Zayd ibn Ali ibn al-Husayn ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib, who was killed in Iraq in AD 740.† Like other Shi’ah groups it has its origins in the rise of opposition to the caliphate in the eighth century AD. The Zaydis first achieved political power in AD 864 in Tabaristan on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, and although Zaydism originally dictated that there should be only one imam, a special dispensation was made because of the great distance between there and Yemen. In theory the imam could be chosen from any of the sayyids – descendants of the Prophet – providing he possessed various qualities including justness, soundness in mind and limb, and courage. The imamate was not hereditary; neither was it elective – a prospective imam had to proclaim himself in a process known as da’wah, then be confirmed by the other sayyids. That Imam Yahya and Imam Ahmad both appointed crown princes was to be a bone of contention among their peers and a major factor in the final collapse of the imamate.
The old Sa’dah of the Zaydi imams is now, like most Yemeni towns, ringed by a belt of sprawling development. At first sight, the place seems to consist entirely of mechanics, oil changers and bansharis (puncture repairers). All the paraphernalia of transport make it look like one huge truck-stop.
The history of Arabia is one of perpetual motion, and the settled Yemenis have from time to time been caught up in this as much as have the desert nomads. In pre-Islamic emigrations and Islamic conquests, and as migrant workers, Yemenis have always been on the move. Compare Arabia as a whole with medieval Europe: while the Arabs were covering phenomenal distances, the West, from the end of the Roman Empire until the end of the fifteenth century, tended to stay at home.
Thus, roads have a significance for the Arabs verging on the sacrosanct, and in Arabia one of the most important rights is the right of passage. The Islamic era begins with a journey – that of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to al-Madinah; pilgrimage is one of the Pillars of Islam; sabil Allah, the Road of God, is shorthand for all the exertions expected of a good Muslim. The English antonym to journeying, ‘home’, encrusted as it is with semantic barnacles, is not that far from the Arab’s a’ilah, his dependants – an inviolable repository of honour; except that the Arab’s home is movable.
All the more extraordinary, then, that despite all the comings and goings we still find Yemenis where they were centuries – often millennia – ago. The tribes al-Hadi mediated between, for example, still live in the same places eleven hundred years on. Few Englishmen can prove continuous occupation of one spot since Saxon times.
At a place where the puncture repairers are most densely concentrated, a turning marked by an oildrum leads north, following the old pilgrimage route towards the Hijaz and the birthplace of al-Hadi. We will follow instead the highway heading south down the backbone of the mountains. It is Yemen’s spinal cord, and wherever the head has been sited, this road has ultimately controlled communications with the body of the country.
The journey begins with the emergence of the imamate in Sa’dah and ends with its eclipse in Ta’izz. As a ruling institution, its power was intermittent and often localized. It was under almost constant pressure from shorter-lived dynasties and foreign powers. But this pressure produced some outstanding leaders, like Abdullah ibn Hamzah, who fought the Kurdish Ayyubids, and al-Qasim, who defeated the Ottoman muskets with stones and founded a dynasty which reunited Yemen. Then, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the imamate fell into decline. Visiting in 1763, Niebuhr described the pomp of Imam al-Mahdi Abbas as ‘gorgeous and disorderly’. The later al-Mansur Ali, famed for his profligate palace building, would regularly consume an aphrodisiac, Habshush informs us, prepared from the engorged pizzles of thoroughbred donkeys. The potion made him ‘stronger than a Nile crocodile’.* A string of imams were born of slave-girls, and eventually the system crumbled into anarchy: one imam held the office on four separate occasions, each time under a different title; the imamate was sold for a night for 500 riyals; sayyids in San’a were dragged off the street and elevated temporarily to the imamate in order to legitimize Friday prayers. Playfair, writing in 1859, said, ‘At the present day, Yemen can hardly be said to have any government at all.’ Finally came the brilliant but flawed Hamid al-Din family: Imams Yahya and Ahmad, last of the scholar-warriors. Accompanied by the ancient trappings of power – the great tasselled parasol, and the executioner’s sword named Purity – they ruled Yemen by divine right until, Canute-like, they were overwhelmed by the flood-tide of the twentieth century.
South of Sa’dah you pass through a region of vineyards. Crumbling watchtowers peep over mud walls. Pre-Islamic poets mentioned the growing of grapes in this region, and an ancient quiet hangs over the place, as though it were Naboth’s vineyard before the days of Ahab.* But the signs of man soon disappear and the landscape turns to one of windy upland, blasted trees and sudden mountains like Jabal Maghluq, a tortured unclimbable mass, split down the middle like a cracked molar.
About sixty miles south of Sa’dah you reach Harf Sufyan, the market place and metropolis of the Bakil tribe of Sufyan. It is a temporary-looking town where a passing tumbleweed would not be out of place. A turning leads north-east to the Barat massif, home of Sufyan’s cousins Dhu Ghaylan whose two branches Dhu Muhammad and Dhu Husayn are a paradigm for the gordian complexities of tribal relations: their subsections form the longest entry in al-Maqhafi’s Gazetteer of the Land and Tribes of Yemen. Perhaps because they were often used by the imams as troubleshooters in Lower Yemen, Dhu Muhammad and Dhu Husayn became bywords for backwardness. The historian al-Wasi’i, writing in the 1920s, accuses them of being ‘up to their necks in ignorance, heartlessness, violence and dissoluteness’, and goes on to say that they tried to eat soap and thought that sugar-loaves – the conical, paper-wrapped kind you can still find in the San’a suq – were artillery shells. Another writer says that they threw away rice thinking it was dead maggots and, never having seen mirrors, shot at their own reflections.*
Whatever their former lack of gentility, the people of Barat live in extraordinary houses. The building technique is similar to that used in Sa’dah, but here huge buttresses are added either side of the door, and the whole edifice striped in bands of ochre, orange and cream. The effect looks edible, like a rich confection of caramel and fudge. One unusual advantage of building in mud was revealed by a story told me in Barat. During fighting between Dhu Muhammad and Dhu Husayn, an aged artillery piece was brought into action. The storyteller and some friends were quietly chewing qat when they heard an explosion and saw a shell pass, like a country-house ghost, in one wall and out of the other, just above head height. It was, he said, not a unique experience.
After Harf Sufyan, the road rises on to a higher, even barer plateau. This ends at the town of Huth and the turn-off to the most famous of the northern centres of scholarship, the airy fortress town of Shaharah, a place that could stand as a symbol for the traditional Zaydi mix of the learned and the warlike.
On my first visit to Shaharah I left San’a at lunchtime and was in Huth in little over two hours. There were another forty miles to al-Madan, a major-looking place just north-west of Shaharah which, according to the picnic table sign on the map, was a market. The first third of the distance was on a ‘Road, Loose Surface’, better than a ‘Motorable Track’ and far superior to an ‘Other Track’. The remainder was a ‘Road, Metalled’ which continued to the coast. It would take little over an hour, and I could spend the night in al-Madan and get up early for a bracing six-mile walk to Shaharah.
I got out at a filling station and looked for the road. There was nothing but a narrow dusty lane, and I cursed the taxi driver for setting me down at the wrong place. All the same, I checked with the man in the filling station. Yes, it was the Shaharah road. It took about three hours to get to the foot of the mountain.
‘Three hours? But it says there’s an asphalt road …’
The man shook his head. I felt cheated. A journey without maps was fair enough, but not one with a totally misleading map. And it had been prepared by the British Ordnance Survey, in tasteful colours. ‘Users noting corrections or additions’ were asked to send them, pencilled in, to Surbiton: the map would be replaced. When? In ten years’ time, after millions more of taxpayers’ money had been lavished on charlatans who could conjure sixty-mile roads out of nothing? My feelings mellowed slightly when I noticed, in very small print, ‘Road Under Construction’; but, eighteen years after the phantom red line was printed, it still does not exist in reality.
Much of the journey to the market village beneath Jabal Shaharah was made in the dark, and I spent the night on a metal workbench in a welding shop. Next morning, with bruised hip bones, I hitched a ride up the mountain in the back of a truck. The road climbed ever more steeply and, for the last section, turned into a series of large steps. It was here that supporters of Imam al-Mahdi Husayn saw him floating down the steps – after his death in battle in AD 1013 – along with Jesus.
Shaharah air is rarefied and brittle, stinging the nostrils after the muggy lowlands. The place is a retreat for study, a bleached ivory tower with a hint of refined asceticism. Shaharah developed its own tradition of belles lettres and became a pillar – literally, if on a giant scale – of the faith. It is also an eyrie, a lookout from which no movement of armies below would go unnoticed.
Although Shaharah seems impregnable, it fell to the Turks in 1587 but was retaken by Imam al-Qasim, who used it as his headquarters and died there in 1620. After that it was never captured, and even the Egyptians in the 1960s could only bomb it from the air. Its greatest moment of glory came in 1905, when a large Ottoman force was beaten off in hand-to-hand fighting at the gates.
Now, although the mountains round Shaharah are a prosperous qat-growing area, the town itself is a bit forlorn. For better or worse, its future may depend on tourism. In 1982 this was just beginning, and a grand house had been turned into a simple but impressive funduq. I called in to leave my bag and ask about lunch, and the woman in charge told me to go and pick up a chicken. Ten minutes later I returned with a scraggy and comatose bird, handed it over and set off for a walk.
The walk took me, inevitably, to The Bridge.
Shaharah is, like Jabal Maghluq, a split mountain, and The Bridge that joins its two halves has to be capitalized because it is one of the images of Yemen. Neither does it disappoint, a honey-coloured arc soaring over a dizzy chasm of dark rock, built around a hundred years ago. Beneath it are the stumps of an earlier structure.
I was back at the funduq at 2 p.m., after shooting at rocks with some undress policemen and visiting the prison, where I drank tea out of a rusty bean tin with the leg-ironed inmates. A German couple had arrived, fashionably weathered by a life of smart travel destinations. Their safari clothes were hi-tech, the sort which would pack away into a Coke can. (My own wardrobe comprised a shirt inherited from someone shot dead in Northern Ireland, a pair of Hong Kong cotton trousers nearly gone at the right buttock, and boots reinforced with bits of tyre.)
After a strained international greeting, a sort of Red Indian ‘How!’, the Germans went back to their digestif qishr. They looked happily well-fed, and I was looking forward to my own lunch. A girl brought it in. Something was missing – the chicken. I asked where it was and she summoned her mother. ‘Where’s the chicken?’ I repeated, glancing at the Germans.
The woman looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘The cat ate it.’ It was an act of God and I could hardly ask for my money back, but as I dug into cold rice and vegetables I heard a sound from the Germans. I thought it was a purr, but it was the auto rewind of a camera.
Tourism in Shaharah is now big business. The local tribesmen have a monopoly on trucking foreigners up the mountain and – quite rightly – do well from it. As always there is a flip side: women drawing water from the cistern are too picturesque for words, and many tourists have shown surprisingly scant sensitivity as to where they point their cameras. It is even rumoured that a former French ambassador brought a magnum of champagne to drink on The Bridge, under cover of darkness. One only hopes, given the roughness of the road, that he chose a marque that travelled well.
It was in Shaharah that I saw my first bara’. It was at the time of one of the Islamic festivals, and there was a tense excitement in the air. A man was heating a large copper drum over a fire. When it was tuned he began beating it, a single insistent beat. Men and boys, bright in their festival clothes, appeared and formed a circle. It had soon reached forty or fifty strong. Another rhythm came in, higher pitched, syncopated, and as sharp as pistol shots, and the circle began to revolve. Every so often, it twisted, reversed and dipped. Jambiyah blades flashed in unison. Then the circle became still and a pair of older men entered the space in the middle. They began advancing towards each other, then retreating, describing more complex circles around the pivotal point. The rhythm speeded up; someone began to shoot off-beat tattoos on an assault rifle. Despite all the weaponry and the warlike sounds, there was a delicacy in the movement. It was awesome to watch, but enchanting.
I have purposely not called it a dance. Dancing, for the tribesmen, is frivolity, and has its own time and place. Ethnologists have called the bara’ an expression of tribal solidarity. Certainly, each tribe has its own steps; and with the display of weapons and connotations of honour, it may resemble the medieval tournaments of Europe. But whatever it is, it is not dancing.
In the days before I came to realize this, I dropped a brick at a wedding qat chew in a remote mountain region. One of the chewers was an unusually traditional sayyid, and when I asked him why he hadn’t yet joined in the dancing, the gathering fell suddenly, horribly silent. Then someone whispered, ‘Sayyids don’t dance …’ Seeing my consternation, the sayyid chuckled and said, ‘We don’t dance; but we can do the bara’!’ He gave a signal to the drummers, got up, and did a solo turn in the middle of the room.
The tribes around Shaharah are members of the Bakil confederation. Bakil and Hashid, the other main northern grouping, are traditionally traced back to eponymous ancestors. The two are brothers, great-great-grandsons of Hamdan; Hamdan is an eighth-generation descendant of Kahlan, son of Saba and brother of Himyar. Between them, the names Hashid, Bakil and Hamdan have dominated northern Yemen since well before Islam. But from the earliest inscriptions onwards, there is often confusion over whether a tribe, a person or a place is being referred to. There are also instances, up to recent times, where a whole clan, because of a disagreement with its ‘lineage’ group, has left Hashid for Bakil or vice versa. In fact, a look at the dictionary shows that the two names are connected to verbal roots meaning to ally or mix. Genealogy, then, has probably as much to do with place and politics as time and descent, and membership of the tribe often means not so much kinship as citizenship.
Al-Hamdani said of the Qahtani family tree that ‘its roots are deep, and therefore its branches are lofty’. He might have added that the branches would be impenetrably entangled were it not for the grafting and layering of the genealogists. It is precisely because the tribal family tree represents something more complicated than bloodlines that it has lasted so long. At the time when the Hutu-Tutsi problems were brewing in Rwanda, Abdullah ibn Husayn al-Ahmar, Paramount Shaykh of Hashid, said to me, ‘Tell them we are not like the tribes of Africa!’ If they had been, the Yemenis would probably have wiped themselves out centuries ago.
The qabili – the tribesman – is an ambivalent figure, particularly for the town dweller who regards him as both noble and savage: savage in that qabili equals yokel, hick, hayseed (and irretrievably so – a proverb says that ‘the qub’, the tribesman’s indigo headcloth, will always leave its mark on a man’s forehead, even if gentility shines out of his arse’); noble in that a townsman of tribal origin – and most of them are – will declare with pride, ‘We, our family, are qabilis.’* Pride stems from honour, honour that is almost as tangible as a suit of clothes and which, like clothing, protects and decorates. Honour can be brought into the most everyday transactions. If you give a taxi driver a hundred-riyal note for a short ride, by saying ‘Give me qabyalah’ – what a tribesman would give – you are honour-bound to accept whatever he hands back, he not to overcharge you. Qabyalah is, perhaps, a species of gentlemanliness, a first cousin of fair play.
Stories abound of the heroism and incredible magnanimity of tribesmen. Here is one from the history of al-Wasi’i: ‘A man who had killed another fled and took refuge, unwittingly, in the dead man’s house. Hot on his heels came a group including the victim’s brother. The victim’s father, who was shaykh and judge of the place, learnt that it was his son who had been killed. However, he kept the killer under his protection and calmed his fears. Then the brother demanded that his father try the killer, who still did not know that his victim was none other than his protector’s son. In the presence of the two parties [that is, the killer and the victim’s brother] the shaykh ordered blood-money to be paid. The killer then asked for permission to go to his own people to collect the money, after which he would return and pay it to the brother. At this the shaykh said, “I have judged that you should pay blood-money as justice demands, but since your victim was my son I absolve you from payment. This is because you took refuge in my house and in order that you may benefit fully from my protection and feel no fear. So, go to your people in peace. In God is my recompense for all I have lost.” The killer immediately burst into tears and wept so greatly that he almost fainted, but the shaykh calmed him and said, “No blame attaches to you, my son. Go on your way with a clear conscience.” And the killer answered him saying, “I weep because I do not know how one such as you can be allowed to die.” ’*
Since the 1962 Revolution, everyone has become, symbolically, a tribesman – sayyids, butchers and other non-tribal groups included – by adopting the asib, the tribesman’s upright dagger. Liberty, equality, fraternity: it could be a tribal warcry. In southern Yemen, where the Party outlawed tribal names, tribalism is now undergoing a renaissance.
Some urban intellectuals and technocrats view tribalism as a dangerous and potentially anarchic force. Many San’anis remember the sack of their city by the tribes in 1948, and the old tribal slogans, one of which went: ‘We are thieves, we are highwaymen, we wear our skirts above our knees!’*
Distinctions between city and tribes are blurring. But the bara’ has yet to be demoted to folkloric display. For the moment, the drums will beat on, the blades will flash, the circle will wheel and dip. And the brows of intellectuals and technocrats will remain furrowed as they try to work out just how it seems to adapt itself to the rhythm of the times.
Khamir, a town eighteen miles south of the Shaharah turn-off, is in the Hashid heartland. It has a prosperous yet dour look to it: you are out of the region of mud and into one of stone. Nothing softens the uncompromising angles; buildings are devoid of the spun-sugar fripperies of San’a plasterwork. The town looks less like a community than a convocation of pele towers. But soon after Khamir you come to the pass of Ghulat Ajib, and here, behind an abandoned petrol tanker, there is a sudden change. The ground drops to a vast and fertile plain, Qa’ al-Bawn, a great carpet of little dun and green compartments unrolling to the horizon and strewn with villages and farmsteads. At the first town of the plain, Raydah, I once picked up a taxi to San’a. It was early afternoon, chewing time, and the passengers were in a voluble mood. The man next to me was from the Sharaf al-Din family, descendants of a sixteenth-century imam who had settled in the fortress town of Kawkaban. We soon got on to the favourite subject of qat-chewers: qat.
‘Our ancestor, Imam Yahya Sharaf al-Din, tried to ban this,’ he said, handing me a branch. ‘But the religious scholars and doctors in Mecca wouldn’t support him. They said qat wasn’t a drug. Now, the Saudis say it is a drug, but only because they know we’d sell it to them and get rich.’
I suggested that his ancestor must have made himself highly unpopular.
‘Ah, except for the qat business, he was a great man. He defeated his rivals the Tahirid sultans. His son captured two thousand of their followers, cut off every second man’s head, and had the others carry them back to San’a. Dreadful times … a thousand heads … A great family.’
The act was a hard one to follow. The Sharaf al-Din family, exhausted by their subsequent fight against the Ottoman invaders, retired from politics to their fastness of Kawkaban where, for the past four and a half centuries, they have been writing poetry and running genteelly to seed.
We passed through the town of Amran and on to the last of the al-Bawn plain, where a cement factory puffs away like a beached tramp steamer. As the road rose, the man from Bayt Sharaf al-Din looked across to the west, to the distant and misty escarpment where his family held sway. Kawkaban, the Starry One, named because of the lavish use of plaster and white stone in its buildings, runs along the cliff edge like a row of gleaming incisors. Crows and kites scud past its windows, spying out carrion a thousand feet below in Shibam.
The taxi passed through a landscape of extinct volcanic cones before beginning the descent to the San’a plain. One of the curious features of this road down the mountain spine is that, even though it seems to drop in a series of huge steps as you journey southwards, the total altitude lost is negligible. The effect is like one of those trompe-l’oeil drawings where the eye climbs a staircase and, without appearing to descend, ends at the point where it started.
For some time the road had been skirting the territory of Arhab, a Bakil tribe. Arhab was the goal of probably the most eccentric traveller the Muslim world has ever seen. The Reverend Joseph Wolff, an Anglican clergyman born a Jew, had convinced himself that Arhab were none other than the Rechabites, a group of nomadic teetotal Hebrews.* In 1836 he arrived in San’a, having distributed along the way Arabic copies of the New Testament, Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe, and intending to bring Arhab into the Church of England. His reception was cool, but he avoided any serious incident. Wolff was less lucky when (following a spell as a curate in Massachusetts) he arrived in Bokhara eight years later claiming to be the Grand Dervish of the United Kingdom, Europe and America. This time he was on the trail of Stoddart and Conolly, two British officers who had been imprisoned by the Amir Nasrullah Khan. In Bokhara he discovered that his compatriots had been beheaded, and escaped the same fate only because the Amir found his appearance uproariously funny (the clergyman was travelling in full academic regalia). After these adventures, Wolff retired to his Somerset vicarage and never left England again.
Some decades later Habshush saw, in the house of a Jew of Najran, a copy of the New Testament which seems to have been one of Wolff’s. Its owner, not surprisingly, kept it well hidden, which makes one wonder whether in some byre or woodshed around San’a there may still exist a wormy Bunyan or Defoe. The latter was an ironic choice for a Christian missionary, as it was probably inspired by a twelfth-century Andalusian’s account of how a foundling child on a desert island grew from enfant sauvage, via Plato and Aristotle, not to Christianity but to Islam.
To the west, we passed the turn-offs to Tuzan and Madam, where rich volcanic soil nourishes grapes and qat of rare quality, before reaching the eastern end of Wadi Dahr.
Wadi Dahr is one of the world’s surprises. I first saw it at 9.47 a.m. on a Thursday late in 1982. We slewed off the road by a petrol station and laboured up a slope of disintegrating red rock. The bonnet of the car flapped open and shut, as if gulping for air. I had no idea where we were heading. Then my host hit the brakes and we slid to a stop in a cloud of red dust. The dust, settling, revealed a view: picture several square miles of intensive cultivation, shockingly green, transposed to a setting of tawny rock, then dropped far below the surface of the earth.
Over a thousand years ago, a visitor looked down on Wadi Dahr and exclaimed, ‘I have travelled the length of Egypt, Iraq and Syria, but never have I seen the like of this.’ Earlier this century, the sons of Imam Yahya had a small cave here fitted with glazed doors so they could chew qat surveying the scene. Today, people do the same, but in parked cars on the cliff edge. Yemenis are connoisseurs of landscape and colour (a San’ani friend once dismissed the Royal County of Berkshire – ‘There’s too much green’); here, the distance to the valley floor enables the eye to take in everything at once, as in a diorama. The prospect is neither of this world nor the next, but of another Eden.
Down in the valley, we were magicked into a secret world. Labyrinthine paths twisted between walled vineyards, qat plantations and orchards of pomegranate, peach and apricot glimpsed through gates made of twigs. Some of the entrances were so small that I expected to see a bottle of pills labelled, like Alice’s, ‘Eat Me’. Parts of this enormous hortus conclusus remain invisible behind high walls and handleless doors, like that in Holman Hunt’s Light of the World.
In this weird sunken landscape, it came as no surprise to catch a complete palace in the act of vertical take-off. Dar al-Hajar, the Palace of the Rock, stands on top of a huge pillar of stone that has popped up out of the valley floor like a jack-in-the-box. The building itself is not a folly but a standard, if rather grand, San’ani mansion constructed in the 1920s by Imam Yahya, the abode of a comfort-loving stylite. The folly is all nature’s for putting the rock pillar there in the first place.
Strange happenings might be expected in such a place as Wadi Dahr, and one in particular is still remembered by its older inhabitants. About fifty years ago, a man bought a house near the little suq to the west of Dar al-Hajar. He moved in but found the place haunted by a poltergeist which would bang about the house and upset the pots. Having tried all the usual means, the man appealed to his neighbour Imam Yahya, who wrote to the spirit commanding it to be gone. Even this attempt failed. In desperation, the man proposed to the poltergeist that he would no longer try to exorcize it provided they could live together in peace. The cohabitation was successful, and for some years the spirit would run errands, finding lost possessions and going to market. In recent years it has been less active. A neighbour commented that ‘Even the jinn grow old.’
The Yemeni poltergeist, idar al-dar, appears in one account as ‘a beast of Yemen which copulates with humans. Its semen consists of maggots.’* An old house I once lived in was inhabited by an idar, but it did nothing more disturbing than smoking a water pipe outside my bedroom door every night, at around one in the morning. Others are known to take snuff.
On the morning of 17 February 1948 the unsuccessful exorcist, the hammer of the Turks, al-Imam al-Mutawakkil ala Allah Yahya ibn al-Mansur bi Allah Muhammad Hamid al-Din of the al-Qasimi dynasty, descendant of the Prophet, Commander of the Faithful, ruler of the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen and one of the most remarkable monarchs of the century, set out to inspect a new well at a farm of his south of San’a.
The Imam was travelling in a single car, accompanied by a small grandson, his Prime Minister Qadi Abdullah ibn Husayn al-Amri, and two soldiers. As was his custom, he left the main body of his escort at Bab al-Yaman, to save money on transportation. While the vehicle was passing along a narrow point in the road at Sawad Hizyaz it came under a barrage of fire that killed all its occupants. Yahya’s body was found to have fifty bullets in it. He was in his eightieth year. He had never seen the sea.
According to one account, the first shot was fired by one Muhammad Qa’id al-Husayni, a shaykh of Bani Hushaysh. It was he who checked the Imam’s body and found the old man still alive. ‘You’ve got as many lives as a cat!’ he said, and finished Yahya off with a bullet in the heart.
The ambush was led by Ali Nasir al-Qarda’i, a shaykh of the Murad tribe and a remarkable character in his own right. A poet and warrior, he had fallen out with the Imam twenty years before and had been imprisoned in San’a, but was able to escape by having a pistol and jambiyah smuggled into his cell in a tin of ghee. Later, Yahya pardoned him and sent him to occupy Shabwah, claimed by the colonial government in Aden. The British responded by dispatching a force under the Master of Belhaven, and after a short battle between the two scions of fighting stock, al-Qarda’i was ejected. Under the gentlemanly terms of surrender, the shaykh was allowed to take his rifle on to the aircraft which would take him home to Bayhan; but he realized that the plane was in fact heading for Aden and, in what may have been one of the first aerial hijacks in history, he forced the pilot to take him to his intended destination. On landing, al-Qarda’i bought a sheep and gave the aircrew lunch. He interpreted the incident, naturally enough, as a plot devised by the Imam and the British to get rid of him, and said,
The trick was hatched by San’a and London,
Plotting together, sayyid and Christian!
Belhaven’s version claims that ‘the RAF very handsomely flew him back to Beihan [sic] to save him the long desert march’.
Whether the regicide was the result of a personal grudge or, as al-Qarda’i’s supporters claim, stemmed from a genuine desire for political change, will always be open to question. Al-Qarda’i’s original reluctance to kill Yahya was assuaged by a fatwa issued by opposition sayyids permitting the assassination; it was a strange alliance, between a fastidious and urbane religious elite and a tribal leader who decorated his rifle butt with ibex beards and who, in his youth, had lost an eye and most of his nose in a fight with a leopard.
Yahya Hamid al-Din was born in 1869 and spent his early years, like any young sayyid, in the pursuit of knowledge – Qur’anic exegesis, jurisprudence, grammar, and so on. His father was proclaimed Imam in 1889 and went into opposition against Ottoman rule; he and Yahya, his only son, were to spend the next fifteen years moving from one northern fortress to another, whipping up funds to buy tribal support and fighting a guerrilla war against the forces of occupation. Following his father’s death in 1904, Yahya was accepted as Imam. Thus began the imamate’s strange Indian summer.
Yahya spread the word that he was here to replace with the shar-i’ah the corrupt and worldly rule of the Ottomans. Relying on a combination of charisma and cash, he had the capital surrounded in less than a year. The 1905 siege of San’a was just one in a series of trials undergone by the city’s long-suffering inhabitants, but it was the worst. People were reduced to grinding straw for bread and to eating cats, dogs and rats. A horse was sold as meat for four hundred silver dollars. There were, it is said, cases of cannibalism. By the time the siege was raised by Turkish reinforcements from the coast, around half the population had died of hunger.
Yahya retreated to Shaharah, but his campaign continued. A succession of governors were sent to Yemen by the Sublime Porte, but the Turks realized they were losing ground and came to a power-sharing agreement with the Imam. After the First World War, they left for good.
The three decades of Imam Yahyas reign were stable, but to the point of stagnation. Yahya was no delegator, and the bulk of the administration rested in his hands. On one level, security was better than ever before. Muhammad Hasan, an Iraqi military adviser who lived in San’a during the 1930s, claimed that only one policeman was needed to keep the entire city in order. Offenders in country regions were brought to book by having military units billeted on their villages: the soldiers had to be provided with everything, including qat and tobacco, until the criminal was handed over. Muhammad Hasan also approved of the hostage system. Yahya kept some four hundred young male relatives of tribal leaders in San’a, which ‘brought benefits no constitutional laws can match’. The Iraqi, however, deplored conditions for women (‘outwardly beautiful, they yet have no psychological beauty’), which resembled those in his own country fifty years before. As the twentieth century progressed Yemen – in the eyes of foreigners, and particularly other Arabs – went backwards in time until, towards the end of the imamate, it seemed to them to be firmly stuck in the Middle Ages.
Few outsiders were as complimentary as Muhammad Hasan. A Syrian agricultural adviser, Ahmad Wasfi Zakariyya, claimed for example that the Imam kept boy hostages fettered in ‘schools of evil and wretchedness’ (a later visitor, Lady Luce, described the hostage system as ‘a sort of compulsory Eton’). But it was the sense of claustrophobia that weighed heaviest. The British entomologist Scott complained constantly of the lack of freedom to travel. Ahmad Wasfi put it more dramatically: ‘He who enters Yemen is lost, and he who leaves it is reborn.’
In external relations Yahya, despite his maxim that he would ‘rather see his people eat straw than have a single foreigner in his land’, was not an all-out isolationist. His reconquest of the coastal plain of Tihamah from the Idrisi sharifs in 1925 was due in part to arms and technicians sent by the Italians, and during both his reign and that of his son Ahmad there was a small but persistent Italian presence. The British tried to counter it in 1940: their secret weapon was Freya Stark, sent to show Pathé newsreels to the ladies of the royal court. To the blandishments of oil companies, however, Yahya remained immune. When an American company offered $2 million for exploration rights, he retorted – with visionary cynicism, some would say – ‘And how much will it cost to get you out?’
Politically, the outside world was tapping insistently on the Imam’s front door; economically, Yemen was far from self-sufficient, and through the tradesmen’s entrance at Aden came a constant stream of goods – essentials like paraffin, and luxuries like Ovaltine, for which the Mutawakkilite princesses had a particular penchant.
A few carefully selected Yemenis were sent abroad – those who could pose no possible threat to the monarchy. They included al-Sallal, the future first President of the Republic, and Hasan al-Amri, who was to defend San’a against the Royalists in the Seventy-day Siege of 1967–8.
At home, by whittling away at the tribes’ independence, Yahya did not endear himself to those who, after all, had brought him to power. He also incurred the anger of the sayyid class by forcing them to recognize Ahmad as heir to the imamate. In circumventing the process of da’wah he was treating the institution like a hereditary monarchy. The two systems could not co-exist.
For many, however, life went on as it had for the previous thousand years. Among the loyal supporters of the status quo was the historian Abdulwasi’ al-Wasi’i, author of The Relief from Care and Tribulation in the Events and History of Yemen, written in 1928 and one of the last great annalistic accounts of the imamate. In this, unruly tribes are put down by righteous and valiant princes, who bear the honorific ‘Sword of Islam’, and the humdrum life of good and bad harvests is punctuated by marvels: demonic sheep, giant hailstones, a false prophet, and a clairvoyant madman who reveals a treasure. Al-Wasi’i warns – ahead of his time – of the dangers of cigarette smoking, which ‘causes a worm to grow in the brain’.
A slightly later contemporary, Isma’il al-Washali, also wrote an annalistic history. Again, local events are carefully recorded. There is, for example, the story of the cat in Milhan which was struck by a bolt of lightning while sitting on a drum and sealed unharmed under the drumskin. But in al-Washali’s history, the outside world is beginning to impinge. The author lived in Tihamah, where he had witnessed the coming and going of Turks, Idrisis, Italians and British. There is much fascinating detail on an eventful period in Tihami history but perhaps even more interesting is his reporting of happenings further away, and particularly of new inventions. Some he was able to see for himself, like the telegraph, which on one occasion ‘brought word of the destruction, by a comet, of two cities of India whose people are infidels. They are cities of Amrika in the Land of the Franks.’ The wireless telegraph arrived soon after: al-Washali suggests that it works by means of mirrors. Later, in 1917, the first telephones and moving pictures appeared in Yemen. Other inventions are reported second-hand, like the ‘land steamer’ on the Hejaz Railway, the ‘steamer which flies in the air’ built by the Germans, and the aeroplane – two were brought down during fighting between the Ottomans and the British near Aden, ‘perhaps with a magnet’. In the very last entry before his death in 1937, al-Washali records the arrival of foreigners – probably Scott and his party – who had come to collect insects and other vermin. To the end, the Franks remained inexplicable.
Unlike most other twentieth-century Arab leaders whose image proliferates as their power grows more absolute, Imam Yahya maintained a total ban on representations of himself. Apart from the Islamic strictures on portraiture, it had been rumoured during his fighting days that he would only die if he were drawn or photographed. Another Syrian visitor in the 1920s, to whom the Imam had said, ‘You may photograph anyone and anything you like – except me,’ described him thus: ‘His countenance is grave yet bright, his frame evenly proportioned, and his face tawny and round with a few smallpox scars. He has a high forehead, large cranium and small mouth. His eyes are dark and glint magnetically. His nose is short and broad, and his beard black. He has small hands and feet.’ According to those who knew him, the sketches of Yahya which a number of visitors drew from memory bear little resemblance to him.
Yahya has been condemned for many faults, chiefly his isolationism, but also his miserliness (after his death the rebels discovered a cache of tens of millions of gold sovereigns and hundreds of millions of Maria Theresa dollars). But unlike Imam Ahmad, he is rarely charged with tyranny, although his functionaries were often overbearing and corrupt. And none would deny his credentials as a traditional Zaydi scholar. He published occasionally in the international Islamic press, and it was even suggested by the Lebanese Islamic reformer Muhammad Rashid Rida that Yahya assume the caliphate, in abeyance since the fall of the Ottomans. Despite an early Islamic prophecy that San’a would get a turn as the seat of the caliphate, he refused.
In his personal life Yahya was an ascetic. His only indulgence was qat, and even this he gave up on his physician’s orders. Perhaps his greatest failing was that he expected others to emulate him. He banned music and imprisoned one of his sons for riding a ‘fiery bicycle’. The national anthem, chanted by massed troops after the end of Friday prayers, went:
O you who disobey our master and transgress his orders,
There is a day you will surely see,
A day when the heads of children will go grey
And birds stop dead in the sky!
Scott summed the Imam up: ‘If anyone on earth can say, “I am the State,” it is the Imam of Yemen.’
During Yahya’s reign, the trumpets were blown every night at three o’clock Yemeni time – three hours after sunset. This was the signal for everyone to go home and turn in. The whole nation was, symbolically, tucked up in bed by the High Victorian paterfamilias whose love for his people, his children, ultimately stifled them.
The coup of 1948 was intended to set up a constitutional imamate, with Abdullah al-Wazir holding the title. It had the support of many prominent members of the qadi class, learned families of Qahtani tribal origin who resented the patronizing attitude of the sayyids. For some, the descendants of al-Hadi were still incomers a thousand years on.
The idea had been to kill Ahmad, at the time Governor of Ta’izz, and his father simultaneously; but the revolutionaries lacked all but the most basic means of communication and had to depend on bicycles to carry messages. Worse, news of the coup – including a complete list of the intended revolutionary government – had been leaked to the foreign press a full month earlier. Also, the manner in which the old imam was disposed of shocked many of his subjects. The princes in San’a mustered enough support to win back Qasr al-Silah, the fort that dominates the city, while Ahmad rushed up from Ta’izz. One account claims that he had dogs slaughtered before the tribal leaders, in a grotesque and shaming parody of the aqirah ceremony in which sheep or bullocks are slaughtered as a plea for aid. In the event, the tribes streamed into San’a to carry out Ahmad’s revenge.
The Sack of San’a lasted for seven days, and according to the historian al-Shamahi was carried out by 250,000 tribesmen. They vandalized and plundered, taking anything movable – including doors and windows: some of the plunderers were themselves plundered by latecomers. Ahmad had shown the strength of his hand but carried righteous vengeance beyond the limit. It is understandable that he never lived in the capital again, and no wonder that the San’anis backed the Republic from the start.
Less than a month after his proclamation as Imam, al-Wazir and the other ringleaders were executed. It took ten blows of a blunt sword to sever al-Husayni’s head. Al-Qarda’i, who had held out on Jabal Nuqum for twenty days, slipped away but was caught and killed. For two months his head, which even in life Belhaven had compared to that of a month-old corpse, stared down with its one eye from Bab al-Yaman. The warrior-poet’s very last verse, uttered with the curious snuffling sound that came less from his mouth than from the gaping hole above it, had been:
To Yahya ibn Muhammad I say:
We shall meet once more – on Judgement Day …
South of the spot where Yahya was assassinated, the road passes through a fertile valley whose pumpkin fields are interspersed with shallow terraces of barley, before dropping down in another huge step. From the top of the step, the Yislah Pass, the view on to the plain of Qa’ Jahran is immense. Red-winged grackle wheel and whistle overhead; from below comes the distant chug of irrigation pumps. Although the plain lies indisputably beneath you, it is actually higher than San’a. It took the introduction of altimeters this century to reveal the fact, so complete is the illusion of continuous descent.
Down on Qa’Jahran the road, for once, is straight. Here, huge dust devils wobble and pirouette over a land that 5,000 years ago was marsh and lake. People say that the sky in these parts is cracked, and the wind pours in through the holes. Dhamar, the largest settlement of the plain, is a prosperous town. Seen from the road it is the usual hotch-potch of eateries, stores and filling stations – ‘a confused or despersed city’, as the Englishman Benjamin Green saw it in the early seventeenth century; but its origins are ancient and, unusually, there is a visible link with the city’s presumed eponymous founder. Pre-Islamic inscriptions built into the Great Mosque there mention Tha’ran ibn Dhamar Ali, the Himyari ruler whose bronze statue, together with that of his father, dominates the entrance hall of the National Museum in San’a. (The statues are the joint work of two sculptors, one with a Greek name and the other Yemeni; they depict their subjects as typical Hellenistic athletes – foreskins and all.)
The men of Dhamar are the canniest in Yemen and, proverbially, a Dhamari is worth two San’anis. There is a story behind the saying: some years ago two San’anis and a Dhamari were travelling together. In those days, cotton sleeping bags were used to keep out the cold and the fleas. During an overnight stop the San’anis decided to play a trick on their companion and, as he slept, they burned holes in his bag with coals from the water-pipe. The Dhamari did not appear to stir but realized what was going on, and when the San’anis were asleep he slipped out of bed and cut off their donkey’s lips with his jambiyah. Next morning, the San’anis roused the Dhamari, shouting, ‘Look! Look! The stars have fallen and burned holes in your sleeping bag!’ ‘I know,’ he replied sleepily. Then he pointed to their donkey: ‘Even the donkey’s still laughing about it.’
Typically, the account of the thirteenth-century traveller Ibn al-Mujawir centres on girls, whose suitability for marriage can be judged by observing how hard they bargain in the suq. The medieval Syrian geographer Yaqut also writes on the women of the region. Of two villages south of Dhamar he says, ‘Nowhere in Yemen are the women lovelier. Adultery is widespread and people come from afar in search of wantonness.’
Another story, if true, would give some substance to Yaqut’s comments. Ludovico di Varthema, a Bolognese gentleman traveller, was captured in Aden in the early sixteenth century. The Portuguese had been trying to seize the city, so the Tahirid governor’s suspicions were justifiable. Varthema was taken to the Tahirid capital Rada’, south-east of Dhamar, and incarcerated. In no time at all one of the Sultan’s wives became inflamed with passion for the fair-skinned prisoner (luckily, her husband was away at the time). She would come and contemplate him, Varthema says, ‘as tho’ I had been a nymph’. Later, she took to feeding him eggs, hens, pigeons, pepper, cinnamon, cloves and nutmegs. In order to extricate himself, the Italian decided to feign insanity. This he did by attempting to convert ‘a great fatt sheepe’ to Islam; but the plan backfired when some of his captors began to suspect him of being a holy man. The case was resolved, however, when he urinated over some religious scholars sent to assess him – ‘whereby’, Varthema says, ‘they agreed that I was no Sainct, but a mad man.’ Eventually, he persuaded the Sultana to let him go to Aden to visit a genuine holy man for a cure, and from there he escaped. Not long ago, I bumped into Varthema in the British Museum. He was in the Print Room and still travelling, a gnome-like figure with staff, scrip and hairy knees, striding out lustily along the bottom margin of Holbein the Younger’s world map.
For two and a half centuries following Varthema’s journey, Western visits to the Yemeni interior were sporadic. The first organized European expedition since the Roman Aelius Gallus’s abortive military adventure took place in 1763 and was funded by the King of Denmark. This time the aim was scientific, and the group included the celebrated Swedish botanist Peter Forskaal, a student of Linnaeus. But the expedition fell victim to Tihami malaria, and when its members arrived in Yarim, the next large town on the road south from Dhamar, Forskaal was already exhausted by fever. He died shortly after.
Seven years after it started out, the expedition returned to Denmark. Of the five members who had left Copenhagen, only the Frieslander Carsten Niebuhr survived. The combined knowledge he brought back was of inestimable value, and the book of the expedition became a best-seller. It included the first significant contribution to European cartography of Yemen since Ptolemy. The title of Niebuhr’s map is inscribed on a parchment scroll which, appropriately, unrolls to reveal a branch of the choicest qat, Catha edulis Forsk. The botanist would have approved.
The Sumarah Pass south of Yarim, which Forskaal ascended tied to the back of a donkey, is the highest point of the road from Sa’dah to Ta’izz and the divide between Upper and Lower Yemen, Zaydi and Shafi’i. Western writers have dwelt too much on supposed implications of the division. The two schools of Islamic thought have never been seriously at odds, doctrinally or otherwise. What does happen south of Sumarah is that rainfall increases: the people here, al-Hamdani said, ‘live up against the udders of the sky’. More rain means more crops, which make the area irresistible to tax-gatherers. While further north the medieval and later states usually left the tribes to their own devices, here in Lower Yemen an overtly tribal system has long been buried under layers of centralized bureaucracy.
Together with port dues from Aden, the lush farmland south of Sumarah provided the cash for that most magnificent of Yemeni dynasties, the Rasulids. Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries they ruled Lower Yemen and made Ta’izz a wealthy and cosmopolitan capital, cultivating literary figures and scholars of religion. One of these, however, proved something of an embarrassment to them. To visit him, we must temporarily bypass Ta’izz, along a road that continues southward through a fertile wadi before arriving at the foot of Jabal Habashi. Here is the town of Yafrus, the centre of devotion to the Sufi wali and poet Ahmad ibn Alwan. He was born glowing: later, his sanctity was confirmed when a green bird landed on him. The Rasulids tolerated him as a sort of memento mori – perhaps surprisingly, as some of his poetry is forthright in its condemnation of them. For example, he warns the reigning sultan,
Shame on you for building lofty palaces,
When your subjects live in dungheaps!
Ibn Alwan died in 1267 but his popular following survives; the mosque at Yafrus is always full of lunatics taken there in the hope that the wali’s influence will bring about a cure. On the ziyarah or annual visitation to Ibn Alwan’s tomb, Benjamin Green says, ‘The goast of the said saint is said to walke, and telleth them of many strange things, which they houlde and doe beleeve infallible, and with these and the like abominable falshoods is theire develish sect maintained.’
The place has an undeniably strange atmosphere which proved all too much for Imam Ahmad. As Governor of Ta’izz in 1939 he was less tolerant than his Rasulid predecessors, and had the wali’s tomb chamber demolished.* It has been rebuilt, and the mosque itself remains intact, a pair of bosomy domes rising above a host of lesser ones against a backdrop of green mountain.
Some visitors were overwhelmed by the fecundity of Lower Yemen. One of these was Ibn al-Mujawir, who passed through in the time of Ibn Alwan. On a certain pass in the region, he says, are two rocks in the shape of vaginas, which are said to menstruate. ‘I did indeed see something like blood on them, but was unable to confirm whether it was blood or not.’ One of his scientific friends suggested that the liquid might be mumiya, mummy, since ‘the origin of human mummy is a substance which condenses in rock and flows from it. Some people say that the rocks give off a bad odour, but I smelt it and found it otherwise …’
South of Yafrus the vegetation becomes even lusher. The asphalt finally gives out at al-Turbah, some 340 miles south of Sa’dah. Since Ta’izz, the road has dipped beneath the 5,000-foot contour, but here the altitude rises again, the highlands’ last fling before they drop into the empty southern coastal plain.
Ibn Alwan’s reprimand to the Rasulid sultans was ignored, and not long after his death Sultan al-Mu’ayyad built a showpiece palace, al-Ma’qili, just east of Ta’izz. The palace was decorated with gold and marble; pleasure gardens were laid out, with cisterns and fountains that rivalled the jeux d’eau of the Alhambra, its contemporary at the other end of the Muslim world. Now, only some bits of a cistern are left.
The Rasulids were true renaissance princes, active in many branches of the sciences. A set of chronological tables produced for al-Mu’ayyad are the most detailed for any location in the medieval Islamic world. Another ruler, al-Ashraf, personally constructed an astrolabe, now in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, and made the earliest known reference in an Arab text to a magnetic compass. Others wrote scholarly treatises on agriculture. At a time when a large part of the Islamic world was still in ruins from the Mongol attacks, Ta’izz was the repository for much that had been lost elsewhere.
The Rasulid city, with its extraordinary buildings, must have looked strange to visitors from further north. For the Rasulids, spiritual and temporal beauty were closely linked and their mosque-schools, like the Ashrafiyyah with its twin minarets, were enclosed by covered terraces from which their glittering capital could be surveyed. The city itself turned its face not to Yemen’s mountain interior, but to Aden and beyond the sea. Together with new ideas in science and architecture, lavish gifts were exchanged between the Rasulid court and the rulers of Egypt, the Levant, Persia and India. A glass vase enamelled with the Rasulid blazon, a five-petalled rosette, has been found in China, and was perhaps part of the gift sent by Sultan al-Muzaffar to the Chinese Emperor to persuade him to allow the circumcision of Muslims. The gifts that flowed into Yemen included menageries of animals – leopards, elephants and ‘grammatically-speaking female parrots’.
The Zaydi Imam al-Mutahhar’s epitaph on al-Muzaffar, who by the time of his death in 1295 had not only brought Hadramawt under his control but had also composed several scholarly works (including one on the magical properties of gemstones), may serve for the Rasulid dynasty as a whole: ‘The one whose pens broke our lances is dead.’
In this century, Imam Ahmad was less kind to the memory of that brilliant dynasty, and used the palace-builder al-Mu’ayyad’s tomb as a petrol store.
Ahmad, in general, followed his father’s policy of isolation. (He did commission a US corporation to conduct a geological survey of the country; after the 1962 Revolution, the resulting map was found hidden inside a wireless set.) Nothing, however, could stop the flow of money into Ta’izz via Aden. During his thirty-odd years there as Governor and then Imam, the city grew enormously. Yet there could be no greater contrast to the Rasulid palace of al-Ma’qili than Ahmad’s Ta’izz residence next to the Turkish barracks. The building is now a museum, entered through a cramped courtyard and a series of guardchambers. Visitors have commented on the palace’s tatty air, and on its contents which, for the writer Eric Hansen, ‘brought back memories of my middle-class American childhood in the 1950s’. Given the benefit of time, the objects could become objets, but at the moment the senseless duplication of possessions, with whole rooms given over to scent bottles or fountain pens, is reminiscent of the boudoir of Miss Havisham or Imelda Marcos.*
Ahmad’s last residence is in its way as alien as the first Imam’s resting-place in Sa’dah; but while the palace suggests that he was an introverted hoarder, Ahmad was also a lover of the dramatic and extrovert gesture. In front of the building there is now a busy traffic intersection, but in 1955 it was a place of execution.
Ahmad, who for some time had seemed to be living the life of an invalid recluse, had been besieged in his palace by army units led by al-Thalaya, an officer unhappy with the Imam’s authoritarian rule. Ahmad was persuaded to sign abdication papers which gave the throne to his brother Abdullah. In fact, he was playing for time. When the Imam was certain of support from irregulars and local shaykhs he burst out of house arrest, sword in hand, and by force of character alone made his former guards join the attack on the rebels. He also sent a warning in verse to Abdullah, saying that the rebellion had lit a fire which, ‘If right-minded men do not put it out, will be fuelled by corpses and heads.’ True to his word, Imam Ahmad had Abdullah and another brother, Abbas, decapitated in Hajjah. Of the other ringleaders, thirteen were executed here in Ta’izz. When it came to the turn of Qadi Abdulrahman al-Iryani, he bowed his head. The executioner raised his sword, smeared with the blood of those he had already dispatched. Suddenly the Imam called ‘Stop!’ Shortly afterwards, al-Iryani was released. He went on to become second President of the Yemen Arab Republic in 1967.
A photograph of Ahmad (unlike his father, he did not object to being portrayed) shows him watching the executions, surrounded by family and courtiers. The Imam sits in the middle, his great bulk clothed in white, his face framed by a dense beard (dyed black – it was said to have gone grey prematurely during a fight with a jinni who was guarding a treasure), a white turban on his shaved head.* The eyes, the famous exophthalmic stare said by his detractors to have been deliberately induced by sleeping with a rope tied round his neck, study the scene with shrewd yet bemused appreciation. We cannot see it, but clearly the sword is poised to fall. The other onlookers display neck-craning concentration, knuckle-biting suspense, and in one case laid-back boredom. One of the little princes in the foreground ignores the spectacle completely and is playing with something in his lap.
There was something superhuman about Ahmad. A visitor in the 1920s said, ‘When I placed my hand in his, it was like touching an electric current.’ During his campaigns against the Tihami tribe of al-Zaraniq he claimed to be bullet-proof; and like the Prophet Solomon and the first Zaydi Imam, he was said to have the jinn under his control. Ahmad cultivated such rumours, and others which claimed that – again like Solomon – he could also control wild animals. Often he could be glimpsed in a high window of the palace, stroking a tiger. The tiger is still there, a cuddly toy sitting on top of a wardrobe.
Throughout the 1950s opposition to the Imam grew. Pamphlets denouncing the imamate flew from the presses, the airwaves buzzed shrilly with attacks on Ahmad from Nasser’s Cairo. The Imam could not beat them, so he joined them. In 1958 the Mutawakkilite Kingdom became part of the United Arab Republic, now renamed the United Arab States; its official capital was al-Hudaydah. Egypt and Syria had found themselves the strangest bedfellow but Nasser, who had spent so long calling for Arab unity, could hardly refuse. Ahmad had dealt a masterstroke.
During the 1950s Imam Ahmad developed a passion for Heinz Russian Salad. At some time in the same decade, he became dependent on morphine following the administration of the drug during an operation, and in 1959 he left for Italy to be cured of the addiction, taking with him a retinue of 140 staff. The visit was a success; the only hitch occurred when the Imam’s guards rushed on to the street brandishing their jambiyahs – some paparazzi had swarmed up trees in an attempt to snap the royal harem.
On his return via Egypt his famous meeting with Nasser took place. The Imam refused to rise from his bed to greet the President, an omission which strained their relations to breaking point. Yemen’s membership of the UAS was withdrawn in 1961, when Ahmad publicly belaboured Nasser in verse for his unIslamic socialist policies.
Back home, dissent continued to simmer. While Ahmad was away the Hashid paramount shaykh, Husayn al-Ahmar, considered staging a coup and setting up the malleable Crown Prince al-Badr as Imam in place of his father. Ahmad was furious, and in his speech on landing at al-Hudaydah he displayed his talent as a showman to the full. In verse, he threatened his opponents with ‘blows so hot that fire will turn to ice’; he vowed, in prose, to lop off heads and ‘smash stuck-up, corrupt noses with a pickaxe’; and – the final flourish – he brandished a sword: ‘My blade burns with thirst for the blood of the necks of those who desire to snatch rule from its rightful owner! If there be any here whose veins throb with such satanic insinuations, let them come forward. Here is the horse, here is the battleground, and if anyone calls me a liar then let him be put to the test!’ Had the circumstances of his birth been different, the Imam might have had a glittering career as a Hollywood villain.
Two years after the speech, also in al-Hudaydah, Ahmad’s challenge was taken up when three army officers emptied their revolvers into him at point-blank range. Having turned his body over to check he was dead, the assassins fled. In fact, the Imam had survived the attack. His opponents began to wonder whether his claim to be in league with the supernatural was not entirely baseless.
Imam Ahmad died in Ta’izz, of natural causes, on 19 September 1962. In the words of one revolutionary, which recall that other far-reaching event in Yemen’s history, a dam had collapsed.
Ahmad’s son al-Badr was proclaimed Imam. A week later, the tanks moved in on the new monarch’s ironically named residence, Dar al-Bashayir, the Palace of Good Tidings. Al-Badr escaped down the long-drop of a lavatory and fled San’a as Abdullah al-Sallal, a trusted officer of Imam Ahmad, took over with the blessing of Cairo. At long last, some pointed out, power was once more in the hands of Qahtan’s descendants.
Al-Badr and the Royalists, for their part, found an eager backer in the Saudis and this, together with Nasser’s support for the fledgeling Republic, sparked off what became a proxy ideological war. By the end of 1964 around 60,000 Egyptian troops were in Yemen. Their use of napalm foreshadowed events in Vietnam; the Saudis, true to the memory of Imam Sharaf al-Din and to their own pre-modern image, offered a bounty for severed Egyptian heads.
The Royalist cause attracted several foreign soldiers of fortune and at least one eccentric. Bruce Condé, an American, had originally become attached to the royal court in the late 1950s because he shared with Prince al-Badr ‘a consuming interest in postage stamps’. Through Condé, the Mutawakkilite exchequer profited from foreign sales of Yemeni stamps. The American fell from favour but was back during the war, this time – according to Thesiger, who travelled with him and thought him ‘a strange character’ – as Major-General Prince Bourbon Condé, Postmaster-General in the Royalist Government.
Of the mercenaries, the most notable was Colonel David Smiley, an ex-SAS man who had fought the Jabal Akhdar rebels in Oman. His exertions there were followed by a spell as Scottish contributor to The Good Food Guide, before taking command of the fifty or so British, French and Belgian soldiers in the Imam’s forces. Among Smiley’s responsibilities was keeping the mercenaries supplied with parachute drops of beer, scotch and brandy from a depot in Saudi Arabia. He took up the command on condition that he be allowed to return to the UK for his children’s school holidays; it was to come to an end in the summer of 1966, when he was appointed a Gentleman-at-Arms to Her Majesty the Queen.
Cairo soon realized just how crippling was the cost of maintaining a huge military presence in Yemen, and with the 1967 war with Israel the Egyptians needed every soldier possible at home. Al-Sallal, too much a creation of Nasser, was ousted in a bloodless coup – ‘bloodless,’ said The Independent’s obituary, ‘because no one lifted a finger to defend him’ – and replaced by the more traditionally minded Qadi Abdulrahman al-Iryani, who had escaped the executioner’s sword. The Saudis, terrified of the Left, breathed a sigh of relief and gradually withdrew their support for the Royalists. The Revolution had resulted not in the destruction of the old socio-political edifice, but in a reshuffling of its constituent blocks. It resembled, perhaps, the French Revolution more than the Russian. But, like everything else in Yemen, it was not quite like anything else on earth.
The tribes have proved the most durable element in the structure. They had always had a love-hate relationship with the Zaydi imams, sometimes falling dramatically foul of their nominal ruler. In 1727, for instance, the imam of the day killed the paramount shaykh of Hashid with his own hands, impaled his head on a lance and galloped off towards San’a shouting at the tribesmen pursuing him, ‘Your idol, Hashid and Bakil!’ The tempestuous affair came to an end in 1960, when Imam Ahmad had Shaykh Husayn al-Ahmar and his son Hamid executed. Poor Hamid, not yet thirty, had spent his life since the age of eight as a hostage attached to the court.
Hamid’s brother Abdullah is the present paramount shaykh. A ‘progressive’ after the Revolution, Shaykh Abdullah is now leader of the Islah Party, which represents a conservative – though not traditional Yemeni – strain of religious thinking. He is the most powerful tribal leader in the country, with tens of thousands of armed men at his disposal. He is also Speaker of a democratically elected parliament. This seeming paradox may titillate Western commentators and Arab intellectuals, who view the tribes as an inherently anarchic force. The contrast, as so often in Yemen, is imagined.
In his role as Shaykh of Shaykhs, he must ‘gather the word’ of his people. As Speaker, he gathers the word of Parliament. In tribal terms he is, by virtue of his position, hijrah – set aside and unassailable. In Parliament, he puts aside party allegiances and is, in a sense, made hijrah by the Speaker’s chair.
Urbane, charming, but still a tribesman in his speech, Shaykh Abdullah’s very appearance is a compromise: he wears the long coat of the religious scholar, but the ordinary headscarf and upright dagger of the tribesman. One wall in his San’a house is a pictorial history of Yemen over the last forty years, beginning with photographs of his father and reaching the present via shots of himself in Revolutionary government posts. Next door, however, he has built a new house, its entrance front surmounted by the upright jambiyah, the blazon of qabili-dom. Inside, another wall tells a different story: it is carved with his tribal genealogy back, almost, to the year dot, with names he has given his bandolier-hung sons, like Qahtan and Hamdan. The ancestors are being resurrected, the lineage made permanent in stone.
Al-Sallal, rehabilitated from exile, was brought out every year to reminisce on the anniversary of the 26 September Revolution until his death in 1994. In the suq you can still buy tin tea-trays commemorating his first official meeting with Nasser. The Egyptian, with his boyish smile, looks like a used car salesman; al-Sallal appears surprised, as if he hadn’t expected to be the chosen one who was to end a thousand-year dynasty. As the market for commemoratives goes, the trays must rank as something of a flop.
Until his death in August 1996, the last Imam of Yemen resided in the English Home Counties, in the bosky purlieus of Bromley. His father, however, was not allowed to rest in peace. It is said that after Imam Ahmad’s death some tribesmen tried to break into his tomb. Their intention was not to desecrate it, but to check that those eyes of his were shut, once and for all.