Yemen- The Unknown Arabia

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  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 vi
ew 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 fi
nally 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’.