* He was not the only Yemeni poet to meet a grisly end. In the seventh century, Waddah, having lost his first love to leprosy, cuckolded the Caliph Walid and was buried alive in a wardrobe.
* Sharifahs were, however, credited with the power to promote fertility in others, as Doreen Ingrams discovered: as yet childless, she was made to drink a draught of the Hadrami fertility drug – a sharifah’s spittle.
* A prominent local historian, Abdulqadir Muhammad al-Sabban, gives a vivid description of the Hud ziyarah and its carnival atmosphere. Alongside the performance of the standard Islamic obligations, pilgrims take part in a series of very uncanonical practices which include giving and taking ritual insults. First-timers are set upon by old hands, who grunt and foam at their victims ‘like bull camels in rut’, and pilgrims shout lewd nicknames at the villages they pass, sometimes causing fights – all because ‘laughter on the Hud pilgrimage is like praising God on others.’
* The form can be compared with tombs investigated by Yemeni and Soviet archaeologists above Wadi Rakhyah in Western Hadramawt and tentatively dated to the early second millennium BC. In these, dome-shaped structures containing crouched burials are given tails made of round or oval piles of stones. With the addition of more stones over the years, these would turn into the solid elongated form to be seen in Hud’s grave. While there is no obvious reason for the strange form, it may be linked to the shape of a comet, and thus to the ideas of a celestially based religion. A medieval writer, al-Ghazali, says that ringstones made from the rocks of Hud’s grave have powerful amuletic properties providing they are set at the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, a possible survival of these celestial beliefs.
* All available evidence points to this part of Arabia as the place where the camel was domesticated, possibly as early as the third millennium BC (see Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel).
* See Johnstone’s ‘Knots and Curses’. Such spells have also prevented the consummation of marriages. Knotting, however, can be used in white magic. On the isolated mountain of Razih, north-west of Sa’dah, lives a woman physician of repute who diagnoses illnesses by smelling the patient’s clothes, and then prescribes a remedy in the form of an amulet of knotted string.
* The story recalls the debate that raged over the permissibility of eating mermaids.
* The eighteenth-century traveller James Bruce noted the use of ‘a composition of musk, amber-grease, incense and benjoin, which they mix with the sharp horny nails that are at the extremity of the fish surumbac’.
* The choice of name rarely has any significance. However, I have seen a boy with six toes on each foot who was called Zayid, ‘Extra’.
* Unfortunately, we missed out on a delicacy of the Hajhir Mountains eaten by Vitaly Naumkin, the Russian scholar of all things Suqutri – the stomach of a goat cooked complete with its undigested contents, a sort of Suqutri haggis.
* The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah witnessed a witch trial in fourteenth-century Delhi, exactly the same as the Suqutri version except for the substitution of water-filled jars for stones. Naumkin suggests that Suqutri anti-witch campaigns could be connected with a subconscious fear of the island’s ancient matriarchal system reasserting itself. The term he gives for a witch, zahra, may be the same as the name of the seductress in the Bir Barhut story (see pp. 185–6). We also heard of an ancient Suqutri female ruler called al-Zahra.
* Wellsted says that the dog they had on board the survey vessel Palinurus was often mistaken for a lion. The distinction of being the only dog to penetrate the Suqutri interior probably goes to Rappo, a huge black Newfoundland that accompanied Schweinfurth in 1881. The reaction of the Suqutris is, unfortunately, not recorded.
* In fact it is the other way round, ‘civet’ having entered the European languages from the Arabic zabad, itself from the root connected with butter.
* Qalansiyah, where we first landed, probably gets its name – like San’a’s al-Qalis – from the Greek ecclesia.
* The Englishman John Jourdain, who visited Yemen in the early seventeenth century, gives a vivid picture of Portuguese decline. In Ta’izz he passed his time with ‘an old blind Portugall renegado witch’, who was considered a saint by the local inhabitants and consequently was in demand for his blessings and pious incantations. In private, however, the Portuguese ‘would burst out in laughing to me, sayinge … hee was noe other than a divell’.
* There can be few places left in the world where people are unacquainted with so ubiquitous an object. Watches appeared in the interior only recently; Wellsted, 160 years ago, had trouble persuading the Suqutris that his was not a live animal.
* Naumkin quotes an example of love poetry from Abdulkuri:
The nose of the woman who gave birth to her first child
Who forgot-you the agony
The bush which covered-you-it
The stone bush so that-would-not-stir.
* In 1993 a Kuwaiti newspaper, Al-Siyasah, said: ‘We have lost ten billion dollars in the Gulf War, and we are ready to lose ten billion more to ensure the partition of Yemen.’
* See above, p. 40.
* Victoria Clark used the phrase as the title of her Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (London, 2010).
† And so, I saw after I wrote it, did Harold Ingrams in his book on Yemen. Great minds … or maybe just the bleeding obvious.
* The original British edition is called Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land.
* A recently coined word in Arabic, jamlakiyyah, describes the political system most Arabs live under. It is a portmanteau word composed of jumhuriyyah, ‘‘republic’’, and mamlakah, ‘‘kingdom’’. Perhaps the best English equivalent would be ‘‘democracy’’ + ‘‘monarchy’’ = ‘‘demonarchy’’.
Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Page 31