[Aden Port Trust], Port of Aden Annual, Aden, 1960–1, 1961–2, 1963–4 (and other dates)
Allen, Charles, The Savage Wars of Peace: Soldiers’ Voices, 1945–89, London, 1990
Bā Makhramah see ‘Abdullāh
Belhaven, The Master of [Hamilton, R.A.B.], The Kingdom of Melchior, London, 1949
Foster, Donald, Landscape with Arabs, Brighton–London, 1969
Gavin, RJ., Aden under British Rule, 1839–1967, London, 1975
[Guides and Handbooks of Africa Publishing Company], Welcome to Aden: A Comprehensive Guidebook, Nairobi, 1963
Halliday, Fred, Revolution and Foreign Policy: The Case of South Yemen, 1967–1987, Cambridge, 1990
Ḥasan Ṣāliḥ Shihāb, ‘Adan furḍat al-yaman, Ṣan‘ā’, 1410/1990
Hunter, F.M., Account of the British Settlement of Aden in Arabia, London, 1877, reprinted London, 1968
Johnston, Charles, The View from Steamer Point, London, 1964
Knox-Mawer, June, The Sultans Came to Tea, London, 1961
Kour, Z.H., The History of Aden 1839–72, London, 1981
Ledger, David, Shifting Sands: The British in South Arabia, London, 1983
Lunt, James, The Barren Rocks of Aden, London, 1966
Morris, James [Jan], Farewell the Trumpets, London, 1978
[PDRY Ministry of Culture], Aden’s Bloody Monday, Aden, 1986
Stookey, Robert, South Yemen: A Marxist Republic in Arabia, Boulder, 1982
Trevaskis, Kennedy, Shades of Amber, London, 1968
Waterfield, Gordon, Sultans of Aden, London, 1968
Ḥaḍramawt
Abdalla [‘Abdullāh] S. Bujra, The Politics of Stratification, Oxford, 1971
‘Abd al-Qādir Muḥammad al-Ṣabbān, Ziyārāt wa ‘ādāt (duplicated typescript issued by the Say’ūn Department of Culture and Tourism), Say’ūn, n.d.
Allfree, P.S., Hawks of the Hadhramaut, London, 1967
Bent, Theodore [and Mabel], Southern Arabia, London, 1900
Bujra see Abdalla
Bulliet, Richard W., The Camel and the Wheel, New York, 1980
Hoek, Eva, Doctor Amongst the Bedouins, trans. Mervyn Savill, London, 1962
Ingrams, Doreen, A Time in Arabia, London, 1970
Ingrams, Harold, Arabia and the Isles, London, 1966
Johnstone, T.M., ‘Knots and Curses’, Arabian Studies, III, Cambridge–London, 1976
Lewcock, Ronald, Wādī Ḥaḍramawt and the Walled City of Shibām, Paris, 1986
Meulen, Daniel van der, Aden to the Hadhramaut, London, 1947
al-Ṣabbān see ‘Abd al-Qādir
Saqqāf ‘AIī al-Kāff, Ḥaḍramawt ‘ibr arba ‘at ‘ashar qarn, Beirut, 1410/1990
Serjeant, R. B., The Portuguese off the South Arabian Coast, Oxford, 1963, reprinted Beirut, 1974
——Studies in Arabian History and Civilisation, London, 1981
Stark, Freya, The Southern Gates of Arabia, London, 1936
——A Winter in Arabia, London, 1941
[Yemeni-Soviet Archaeological Mission], Natā’ij a‘māl al-ba‘thah li ‘ām 1984, trans. ‘Abd al-‘Azīz Ja‘far Bin ‘Aqīl and Muḥammad Aḥmad Bā Makhramah, Say’ūn, 1984
Suquṭrā
Beckingham, C.F., ‘Some Notes on the History of Socotra’, Arabian and Islamic Studies (festschrift for R.B. Serjeant), ed. R.L. Bidwell and G. Rex Smith, London, 1982
Botting, Douglas, The Island of Dragon’s Blood, London, 1958
Doe, Brian, Socotra: Island of Tranquillity, London, 1992
Ḥamzah ‘AIī Luqmān, Tārīkh al-juzur al-yamaniyyah, Beirut, 1972
Naumkin, Vitaly V., Island of the Phoenix: An Ethnographic Study of the People of Socotra, Reading, 1993
Ogilvie-Grant, W.R., The Natural History of Sokotra and Abd al-Kuri, Liverpool, 1903
Schweinfurth, G., ‘Recollections of a Voyage to Socotra by George Schweinfurth, 1881’, trans. E.A.F. Redl, Bombay, 1897, reprinted in Records of Yemen, vol. IV, ed. D. and L. Ingrams, Neuchâtel, 1993
Simeone-Senelle, Marie-Claude, ‘Suquṭrā: Parfums, Sucs et Résines’, Saba, no. 2, n.p., 1994
[University of Aden Research Programme, Faculty of Education], Socotra Island (in English and Arabic), Aden, 1982
Wellsted, J.R., ‘Survey of Socotra’ (India Office Records MS), facsimile in Records of Yemen, vol. I, ed. D. and L. Ingrams, Neuchâtel, 1993
Miscellaneous
‘Abdullāh al-Baraddūnī, Al-thaqāfah al-sha ‘biyyah: tajārib wa aqāwīl yamaniyyah, Cairo, 1988
——Funūn al-adab al-sha ‘bī fi ’l-yaman, Damascus, 1995
‘Abdullah Muḥammad al-Ḥibshī, Al-Ṣūfiyyah wa ’l-fuqahā’ fi ’l-yaman, Ṣan‘ā’, 1396/1976
——(ed.) Majmū‘ al-maqāmāt al-yamaniyyah, Ṣan‘ā’, 1407/1987
[Admiralty Office, Naval Intelligence Department], A Handbook of Arabia, 2 vols., London, 1916–17
Adra see Najwa
Ahmed al-Hubaishi [Aḥmad al-Ḥubayshī] and Müller-Hohenstein, Klaus, An Introduction to the Vegetation of Yemen, Eschborn, 1984
‘Alī b. Zāyid, Aḥkām ‘alī b. zāyid, compiled by Anatoly Agarichev, Beirut–Ṣan‘ā’, 1986
al-Baraddūnī see ‘Abdullāh al-Baraddūnī
Caton, Steven C, ‘Peaks of Yemen I Summon’: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe, Berkeley–Los Angeles–London, 1990
Costa, Paolo, Yemen Land of Builders, London, 1977
Ḥamzah ‘Alī Luqmān, Asāṭīr min tārīkh al-yaman, Beirut–Ṣan‘ā’, n.d.
Hansen, Eric, Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea, Boston, 1991
Ḥasan Ṣāliḥ Shihāb, Aḍwā’ ‘alā tārīkh al-yaman al-baḥrī, Beirut, 1981
al-Hubaishi see Ahmed
Ismā‘īl b. ‘AIī al-Akwa‘, al-Qāḍi, Al-amthāl al-yamāniyyah, 2 vols., Beirut–Ṣan‘ā’, 1984
Makhlouf, Carla, Changing Veils: Women and Modernisation in North Yemen, London, 1979
Muḥammad Sharaf al-Dīn, Islam and Romantic Orientalism, London, 1994
Najwa Adra, Qabyalah: The Tribal Concept in the Central Highlands of the Y.A.R. (unpublished Ph.D. thesis), Philadelphia, 1982
Qā’id Nu‘mān al-Sharjabī, Al-sharā’iḥ al-ijtimā‘iyyah al-taqlīdiyyah fi ’l-mujtama‘al-yamanī, Beirut–Ṣan‘ā’, 1986
Stone, Francine (ed.), Studies on the Tihāmah, Harlow, 1985
Varanda, Fernando, Art of Building in Yemen, London, 1981
Varisco, Daniel, ‘Dirāsah fi ’l-taqwīm al-zirā‘ī al-yamanī’, Al-ma’thūrāt al-sha‘biyyah, no. 16, al-Dawḥah, 1989
TIM MACKINTOSH-SMITH has lived in Yemen since 1982, earning the unofficial title “Shaykh of the Nazarenes.” Steeped in the language and customs of his adopted land, he is both guest at the feast and fly on the wall. This, his first book, won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.
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Notes
* For example, rash, ‘to eat much/to eat little/a camel hairy behind the ears’.
* The jibe refers to two of Yemen’s traditional crafts, and to the baboons which live in its mountains. The remark about nags is unfair – Yemeni horses were held in high esteem. The rat was the one said to have gnawed away at the great Marib Dam and caused its collapse. The woman was the biblical Queen of Sheba/Saba, who the Qur’an says was brought to Solomon’s attention by a talking hoopoe.
* Shelagh Weir, Qat in Yemen.
* For brief accounts of the Sabaean. s and other rulers of Yemen, see the Glossary.
* Until the 1960s, San’a was supplied by water in the same way, by a system of wells and underground tunnels known as ghayls.
* By a quirk of history, oil is now being extracted from just those areas where the ancient trade in incense was centred: Marib, Shabwah and Hadramawt.
* This fancy – if that is what it is – recurs in later works. On the doombur, the Indian fat-tailed sheep, the compiler of Hobson–Jobson quotes a contributor to the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal: ‘I was informed by a person who possessed large flocks, and who had no reason to deceive me, that sometimes the tail of the Tymunnee doombas increased to such a size, that a cart or small truck on wheels was necessary to support the weight, and that without it the animal could not wander about; he declared also that he had produced tails in his flock which weighted 12 Tabreezi munds, or 48 seers puckah, equal to about 96 lbs’
† The French archaeologist Christian Robin has pointed out that among the Sabaean names for incense are two terms for unknown varieties, ‘gold’ and ‘divine gold’. Perhaps, then, the first gift of the Magi to the infant Christ was another aromatic.
* The great church built by the Ethiopians, now a hole in the ground near the suq but still known as ‘al-Qalis’ after its Greek name.
* Accounts of bodies found intact recall the recent discovery near San’a of five mummies, wrapped in leather and linen. They are accompanied, like the ones al-Hamdani describes, by wooden plaques. Carbon-14 dating has given their age as around 2,300 years.
* See, on customs involving bulls and ibexes, the articles by Jacques Ryckmans and Walter Dostal in Arabian and Islamic Studies.
* A sixteenth-century Yemeni traveller considered twenty items indispensable for any journey. His packing list went: kohl applicator, kohl pot, scissors, tooth-cleaning stick, mirror, comb, inkstand, writing-case, penknife, pen-box, staff, overcoat, tweezers, Qur’an, prayer-mat, ablution vessel, belt, victuals, scroll of paper, sewing kit.
* A Tradition of the Prophet says that snakes found in houses embody spirits, some benign, others malevolent: you should give them fair warning by reciting the call to prayer, and only if they take no notice should they be killed.
* Ibn al-Mujawir ascribes the condition, known as ‘white leprosy’, to a number of possible causes: the bite of a yellow fly; an excess of milk and fish in the diet leading to the predominance of moist humours; or infection with the saliva of geckoes.
* Habshush mentions that fish called awshaj, a type of barbel, were caught in Surdud and elsewhere by poisoning with dafar seeds and sold to the Jews. Mountain tribesmen long considered fish to be an inedible kind of worm.
* The sword, of ancient Yemeni manufacture, was found embedded in a column in Sa’dah by a later imam of the fourteenth century AD. It passed into the hands of the Rasulid sultan al-Ashraf, who had its authenticity confirmed when, after having sex, he found himself unable to lift it from its hook until he had bathed. One Dhu al-Fiqar is now displayed in Istanbul, although there are other claimants.
† Zayd’s naked body was exposed on a rubbish dump for five years. Tradition says that his paunch drooped, miraculously, to conceal his pudenda.
* The British Indian naval officer Cruttenden, who visited al-Mansur in 1836, describes the Imam’s stately procession to the Great Mosque, mounted on a magnificent white charger, his hand resting on the shoulder of ‘a confidential eunuch’. The Imam, however, lived a private life marked by ‘gross sensuality’, and within a month had been dethroned, insulted and immured in a dungeon.
* The Sabaean word for a vineyard is wyn. Its similarity to the supposedly Indo-European root (oinos, vinum, wine, and so on) is striking, and makes one wonder where viticulture was first practised.
* The soap story is also told, by Fynes Moryson (An Itinerary Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell …, London, 1617), of the Irish: ‘when they found Sope and Starch, carried for the use of our Laundresses, they thinking them to be some dainty meates, did eat them greedily’.
* The contradictory nature of mountain tribesmen was noted by the journalist Walter Harris, who visited Yemen in 1892. ‘The Yemenis’, he wrote, ‘are the aristocracy of Islam. Wild in appearance, their manners are perfect.’ The manners remained perfect even when Harris did his party trick – administering electric shocks with a small generator he carried in his baggage.
* Tribal generosity sometimes became a fetish. Doreen Ingrams says that travellers who did not stop to accept hospitality from the Buqri family in Hadramawt would be shot at.
* Another version runs, ‘We are thieves, we are highwaymen, our knees are nailed!’ Having nailed knees has something of the English expression ‘putting hairs on your chest’- or even ‘lead in your pencil’.
* This curious people also features in the work of another Anglicized Jew, Disraeli’s 1847 novel Tancred, or The New Crusade.
* The great ninth-century polymath al-Jahiz’s Book of Animals. Al-Jahiz, ‘Popeyes’ (his real name was Abu Uthman Amr ibn Bahr al-Basri), was reputedly killed by his own library when the piles of books he worked among collapsed on top of him.
* Mainstream Zaydi opposition to Sufism has always been implacable. One imam cured a lunatic maidservant by having her fed bread baked on a fire fuelled by Al-Fusus, a famous tract by the Andalusian Sufi Ibn Arabi. A similar prescription also cured an eighteen-month bout of diarrhoea.
* A hoarding instinct seems to have run in the family. Robert Finlay, Assistant Surgeon to the British Mokha Residency, who treated the ruling Imam in 1823, wrote in his diary: ‘The rooms His Highness occupied during his sickness were so full of horse trappings, jimburs [jambiyahs], swords, matchlocks, pistols, organs, common empty bottles, bales of piece goods, broad cloths, English silks, etc. etc. that there was scarcely room left for him to move. On his pillow were fixed 6 gold and silver watches, all going.’
* Until recently Ahmad’s personal barber was still at work in Ta’izz. I have been shaved by him, and admit that as the blade passed over my throat, I felt a frisson at the thought of where the hand holding it had been.
* The old Arabic name for Raymah was Jublan, from a certain Jublan ibn Sahl of the line of Himyar. His brother Wusab gave his name to the next range south.
* The pro-Ottoman historian al-Nahrawali recorded that on one occasion Yemeni forces retreated after their commander’s donkey farted – they took it as an omen of disaster. The Raymis – judging by the flatulence of their donkeys – must have a lot of bad luck.
* Pedro Páez, one of two Jesuits captured off the south coast towards the end of the sixteenth century, records that in Hadramawt they were given ‘Cahua, made from the rind of
the fruit Bun, in place of wine’. The Arabic qahwah – by coincidence originally a word for wine – went through various English spellings including ‘coho’, ‘cohoo’ and ‘coughe’, before ending up as ‘coffee’.
* The eighteenth-century French visitor de la Roque said, wistfully, of qishr, ‘La couleur de cette est semblable à la meilleure bière d’Angleterre.’
* Al-Khadir is a fearfully complex figure, variously considered a prophet (Elijah?), a saint or an angel. Some authorities have him as the brother of Qahtan. An eighth-century writer said that al-Khadir, whose name is really an epithet, was told during a visit to the Fountain of Life: ‘Where thy feet touch the earth, it will become green.’ He is still alive and well, and people occasionally bump into him in Yemen’s western mountains.
* A story in al-Hajari’s Compendium tells of some cattle rustlers who sacrificed a stolen bullock as part of the rain-prayer ceremony. Rain fell, but on the territory of the bullock’s rightful owners.
* The name comes from Prince of Wales Crescent (itself commemorating the 1875 visit of the future Edward VII, who was presented with three ostriches in allusion to his heraldic badge).
* For an account of which I have drawn on the late Dr Robin Bidwell’s article in Arabian Studies, VI, 1982.
* Ba is a common prefix of Hadrami family names.
* Mrs Bent’s book (her husband died shortly after the journey) is one of the most fascinating accounts of Arabian travel. It tells of the couple’s wanderings in the region, accompanied by an Indian surveyor who wore a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers. Among their many discoveries was a new species of scorpion, Buthia bentii, which Mrs Bent found inside her glove. The book is, unfortunately, extraordinarily rare.
* The spiralling price of honey seems to have caused the disappearance of a traditional Hadrami recipe: slaughter a kid and cut the meat into chunks; put these in a large jar and cover them completely with honey; seal the jar tightly and leave for six months. The preserved meat is eaten uncooked. Women should not be allowed to eat this dish, as it is a powerful aphrodisiac.
Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Page 30