Yemen- The Unknown Arabia

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  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?’