‘al-Khāṡṡ’ (‘the special’) implies that she was the offspring of a marriage between a human father and a jinn (‘genie’) mother. The legend is fuelled by the fact that pagan Arabs believed that any human possessing exceptional qualities, brilliance of mind or endowed with any natural gift was probably due to the intervention of the jinn.32 Martin Lings also refers to two prominent women of Makkah, Hind bint ˓Utbah Umm Mu˓āwiyah, the wife of Abū Sufyān, a tribal leader of the Quraysh, and Umm Salamah or Hind bint Abī Umayyah. Hind bint ˓Utbah’s son Mu˓āwiyah was later to become the Muslim governor of Syria and Umm Salamah became a wife of the Prophet after her husband, Abū Salamah, died from the injuries he received in the battle of Badr.33 Whilst the region of Hind appears to have captured the imagination of pre-Islamic Arabs, in the early spread of Islam in India, perhaps the only Yemeni contribution was the migration of Ismā˓īlī dā˓īs, or proselytizers, into the region of Gujrat.34 One cannot overlook, however, the later influence of eighteenth-century reformist Yemeni scholar, Muhammad al-Shawkānī (1760–1834CE), on the newly developing approaches to sunnah, taqlīd and ijtihād in the traditional legal schools of India.35
The introduction of the Ismā˓ilis to the Yemen was largely as a result of the Egyptian Fatimid hegemony and conquests in Arabia.36 Fatimid ascendancy saw the establishment of a Ṣulayḥid Queen, Sayyidah Ḥurrah (c.1048–1138CE), as a monarch over large parts of the Yemen with special religious authority over the Ismā˓īlī communities of the Yemen and Gujarat.37 Ismā˓īlī proselytizing in Gujarat is said to have begun in the mid-twelfth century CE and is attributed to a dā˓ī (religious prosylitizer) named either ˓Abdullāh or Muhammad (depending on the particular tradition), who travelled from the Yemen. He was apparently burnt alive by Siddha Raja (d. 1143CE), the Brahmin monarch, after he was caught preaching Islam disguised as a Brahmin servant in the palace.38 Annemarie Schimmel confirms the spread of Ismā˓īlī Bohoras in India but does not allude to the legends of ˓Abdullāh. Instead, she links them to the twelfth-century Musta˓liyyah under Queen Ḥurrah in the Yemen.39 The process of Ismā˓īlī proselytizing was further accelerated when the dā˓ī, Sayyidinā Yūsuf ibn Sulāymān (d.1567CE), migrated to Sidpur after the Sunni Ottoman Turks conquered northern Yemen. It was under the Sayyid’s patronage that the original Dā’ūdi faction of the Ismā‘īlī Bohoras was established.40
Yemenis were also established as jama˓dārs (‘commanders’) in military service via the Arab army of the Nizam of Hyderabad well into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were mostly of Ḥaḍramī origin from the two rival tribes of the Kathīrī and the Qu˓aytī and as jama˓dārs they were able to amass great wealth and extensive estates in Hyderabad. This wealth was later used to reinvest in the Yemen by acquiring port property, vast tracts of land and financing tribal conflicts between both tribes and rival sultanate struggles for control of Ḥaḍramawt.41 The British, in their efforts to increase their influence in the region, sided with the Qu˓aytī and both eventually signed a Treaty of Friendship, in 1882, after the British had supported the Qu˓aytī possession of the port city of al-Mukalla a year earlier.42 By 1888, the Qu˓aytī signed a full Protectorate Treaty with the colonial occupiers under the rule of ˓Awaḍ ibn ˓Umar al Qu˓aytī, succeeding his older brother ˓Abdullāh, who died earlier in the same year. Both brothers were born in Hyderabad and their interests in the Yemen and India were represented by their various successors in both tribal communities in Ḥaḍramawt and Hyderabad respectively.43 Linda Boxberger quotes a translation of a poem that is said to have been recited by the Kathīrī subtribe, or clan, the Nuwwah, before a battle for the control of the town of Hajr then under their protection. The poem reflects the disdain for the Qu˓aytī muwalladūn44 and their ‘foreign’ take-over of the region, it begins,
Tell the Qu˓aytī: so the souk (al-Mukalla) is not enough for you,
And now you want Ḥajr, the protected.
Tell him: it’s impossible, the notion is rejected,
You Indian, we don’t even understand your language. 45
As the tribal conflict for control of Ḥaḍramawt continued the Kathīrī Sultan tried to internationalize the hostilities and made moves to enlist the help of the Ottomans, trying to bring them into conflict with the British. However, after appeals to the Zaydī Imām, Yahya, failed, the Sultan’s politicking ‘created [a] conflict of interests among different groups in Ḥaḍramawt and the Ḥaḍ ramī emigrant communities overseas.’46 This came about because the Sultan’s advisor, Ibn ˓Ubaydillāh, a prominent member of the ˓ulamā’, wanted to see an Islamic ruler dominating the region rather than a non-Muslim European one. Ibn ˓Ubaydillāh believed that the British had undermined the ˓ulamā’, and therefore Islam, by establishing secular legal and educational institutions. But most Ḥaḍramī Kathīrī communities abroad opposed their own Sultan and instead preferred to support the Qu˓aytī-British rule of al-Mukalla. This choice was devoid of any religious ideological reasoning and was motivated purely by economic pragmatism. The transportation and communication systems between diaspora Yemeni communities in Europe, Indian and the Malaysian Archipelago were controlled by the European powers and opposing them would possibly result in the disconnection of the emigrants and the supply of much-needed remittances to their families and tribesmen back home.47
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the hostilities between Kathīrī and Qu˓aytī tribes over sovereign claims to Ḥaḍramawt and the influence of tribal notables in the diaspora was a major factor in both the continued conflicts and the eventual peace negotiations and brokerage between the opposing Sultans.48 The transnational tribal hierarchy and organization of both the Kathīrī and the Qu˓aytī exemplifies the fluid nature of tribal identity and allegiance in the diaspora. Whilst emigrant Yemeni communities may experience both integration and hybridity in their new geo-cultural environs, maintaining a direct connection and interest into the political affairs of the tribe and homeland have remained a constant feature of migrant Yemenis. Linda Boxberger remarks, ‘in 1939 there were about 80,000 Ḥaḍramīs in the East Indies whose strong ties with their homeland made them follow events there with the greatest attention.’49
Whilst the southern region of Ḥaḍramawt wrestled for tribal hegemony the northern regions of Bāb al-Mandab and Tihāmah were desperately trying to shake off the yoke of oppressive Zaydī Imāmate rule. The Zaydīs were a minority ruling elite who had ruled over the large parts of the Yemen for almost a thousand years. They emerged after the decline of the orthodox caliphate that had directly followed the Prophet Muhammad, a succession of his companions known as al-khulafā’ al-rashidūn (‘the rightly-guided caliphs’),50 when the Yemen became an ideal haven and location for Islamic heterodoxy largely under the influence of the Ismā’īlī and Zaydī Shii sects. Al-Faruqi asserts that the Zaydī school of jurisprudence refers to Zayd ibn ˓Alī Zayn al-˓Ābidīn (d.793CE), the third grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Although Zayd was not the founder of this particular sect, the Zaydī adherents regarded him as worthier than his brother, Muhammad al-Bāqir, to succeed his father in the imāmate of the Shia. Al-Faruqi states that the rise of the Zaydīs in the Yemen is,
a situational consequence of the political isolation, once they [the Zaydīs] took over power in Yaman [Yemen] and practically locked themselves up in its mountains for a millennium and a century.51
Yemen is the only place in the Muslim world where the Zaydī school has followers and as a minority sect it has influenced the whole Yemeni population.52 However, in matters of fiqh, the Zaydīs largely follow the Sunni schools and only differ in particular issues; the negation of ablution when bare feet have been exposed but unsoiled, the killing of animals and preparing of food by non-Muslims, marriage to Christian and Jewish wives, and the concept of temporary marriage, or muṭa˓, practised by the majority of Shia but refuted by the Zaydīs.53
The Ismā˓īlīs historically