Yemen- The Unknown Arabia

by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

  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 stamp
s’. 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.

  5

  Emerald, Amber, Carnelian

  ‘Of this will they assure you, those who know:

  Ours is the Green Land – look to the hills!

  For the Watchful One blesses them with rain

  In times when all His creatures thirst.’

  Dhu al-Kala’ al-Himyari (d. AD 1014)

  AL-SUKHNAH means ‘Hot’, and the place was living up to its name. A drop of sweat fell from the tip of my nose into my tea with an audible plop. I was too drowsy to mop my face. The torpor was due not so much to the febrile Tihamah night as to the Egyptian soap opera on the TV across the yard. The plot: poor boy, factory worker, falls in love with boss’s daughter … The rest was predictable. Even the calf tethered next to my string bed seemed to be following it. That highly coloured world of gilt what-nots and candy limousines, the 1,001 cliffhangers (camera zooms to startled face) – it’s all been done before, long ago, by the suq storytellers. But it did seem strange in this dun place where the mountains meet the plain.

  Al-Sukhnah, though, is no ordinary Tihamah town. The name comes not from the climate but from the hot springs which bubble up at the base of the mountains, and the town dates back only to the days of Imam Ahmad. In his declining years, Ahmad spent an increasing amount of time here, stewing his corpulent frame in water heated by underground fire. Al-Sukhnah was also the setting for his one and only press conference. The journalist David Holden was engrossed by the Imam: ‘His face worked uncontrollably with every utterance, his hands tugged at his black-dyed beard, and his eyes … rolled like white marbles only tenuously anchored to his sallow flesh.’ Again, it was the eyes.

  Early that evening I had found the bath in a clump of shabby, block-like buildings. There were three pools of varying temperature, from very hot upwards: the first was just bearable; the second I dipped a toe into; the third was hot enough to boil a lobster. The bath-keeper told me that the temperature varies from season to season. At the moment it was ‘quite cool’.

  The waters of al-Sukhnah are said to be good for rheumatism and skin diseases. I had come out of curiosity, and to loosen my limbs for an unrest cure in the mountains of Raymah.

  Anyone who had not been there before would need some persuading that Jabal Raymah existed at all. But it was there, invisible behind the post-prandial Tihamah haze. Al-Mansuriyyah market, the departure point for the mountain, was settling down for the afternoon, and potential Raymah passengers were drifting away alarmingly. The Landcruiser taxi would leave only if it was full; earlier, the suq seemed to be packed with Raymis on their way home, but they couldn’t provide a stable quorum and the taxi-driver had spent the last three hours appearing and disappearing with shrieks of differential and clouds of dust, like a jinni in a huff, trying to round them up.

  I was the eye of the storm, the queue of one at the taxi stop. Raymis would come and use me as a timetable, getting the latest travel information then dashing off to make some last-minute purchase. All the last minutes mounted up. I should have been recording the manners and customs of Tihamah market-goers, but all I remember is an old man on the pillion of a motor cycle, brandishing a pair of crutches to clear a passage through the crowd. Several people were felled, as if
by the scythes on Boudicca’s chariot wheels.

  A man was shaking me by the shoulder. I must have dozed off. ‘Come on! You’re holding everybody up.’ He dragged me away by the hand. Waiting for the taxi in an orderly English way I had forgotten that the world, and not least al-Mansuriyyah, was in a state of perpetual flux. To paraphrase the pre-Socratics, you could not stand in the same queue twice.

  The man was soon ahead of me. I had the longer legs but while I shuffled, he skipped, the result of a lifetime of mountain paths. Even dressed in a suit and tie, his gait would still have given him away as a mountain man.

  The taxi was packed. I followed my acquaintance to a place on the roofrack, but one of the fifteen or so passengers inside was ejected and I was pulled in instead. A woman in the back admonished me when I protested. ‘Shame on you, Professor. Old people like us deserve to travel in comfort.’ She was old enough to be my grandmother.

  We were off. The driver selected a cassette and turned the stereo on full. A rhythmic slapping and a noise like a vastly amplified comb and paper, just recognizable as a mizmar, a double reedpipe, came from the single working loudspeaker. We passed the turning to al-Sukhnah, then entered a landscape of carefully pollarded trees and bullrush millet, invaded in places by patches of rock and euphorbia. Ahead, Raymah hovered, a spectral mountain. It rises to over 7,000 feet and is the bulkiest of all the ranges that overlook Tihamah, the ‘Climax Mountains’ on Ptolemy’s map,* but in the afternoon vapours it is on top of you before you have a complete idea of its size. The road became increasingly steep, rounding the bases of huge honeycombed stacks.