Yemen- The Unknown Arabia

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  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 ma
ggots 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.