known to be backed by Saudi Arabia,90 desecrated some of the tombs of Sufi saints buried in Aden and around Ḥaḍramawt.91 The tomb chamber of Sayyidah Ḥurrah, the ancient Ṣulayḥid Ismā˓īlī Queen, was also partially destroyed in 1993 by extremist Salafīs who deemed the established practice of religious visits and pilgrimages to the site to be heretical.92 The increased power of the Islamists had also inhibited progressive steps towards the implementation of women’s rights in political participation and education. Protests against social reforms were usually led by female Islamists whose very public demonstrations were, ironically, to demand that women remain in the private domain. In addition, Islamic banking and the increasing numbers of Islamic madāris (plural of madrasah, meaning, ‘school’) augmented the Islamists’ influence throughout the Yemen.93 In the presidential kinship circles, inter-family and tribal marriages ensured a dynastic government prevailed in Sana’a, whilst, at the same time, the President and some of his close family members pursued control over many of Yemen’s best known commercial and industrial companies. Other business ventures included multinational property magnates with interests in London, Paris and New York.94
As far as the national economy is concerned, ‘the country is extremely poor, but how poor the [Salih] government may be is hard to judge and those attached to government seem extremely prosperous’.95 The contemporary global concerns of market economy capitalism, modernity, terrorism and religious extremism, particularly the rise of Islamic fundamentalism or what is now more obscurely described as ‘Islamism’,96 have in recent times appeared as ‘flashpoints’ in the developing new Yemen.97 But the Yemen with its combined ancient biblical history and recent political struggles leading to reunification and the creation of the new Republic of Yemen is far more politically progressive and modern than many other Gulf States. In relation to the eventual outcome of its recent turbulent history, it is almost as if the dramatic events between the periods of Imām Yahya and former President Ali Abdullah Salih had never happened. But the hopes amongst some Yemenis of a revival of the Zaydī Imāmate tradition may have been dashed with the recent death of Al-Hassan Hamid al-Din (1908–2003), who died in his sleep whilst in exile in Jeddah on 13 June 2003.98 He was the oldest son of Imām Yahya and was exiled in 1954 and spent most of his time between living in America and Saudi Arabia. During the 1962 revolution, the ‘Prince’ fought with ‘royalist’ forces in the far north based around Sa˓dah which was occupied by the republican army. But his failing health saw him withdraw from the conflict in 1968.99 A year later, his son was shot dead on his way to Friday prayers at the Hādī Mosque in Sa˓dah. Al-Hassan Hamid al-Din had wanted to be buried next to his father’s grave in Sana’a and the Yemeni authorities agreed to his request in principle. However, restrictions on which members of his family could accompany the bier, for his grandsons could but his sons could not, meant that he was buried instead in the cemetery of al-Baqī˓ in the Prophet’s city of Madīnah.100
For a traditional Arab society like that of the Yemen, tribal belonging offers a cultural continuity: a history and aṡl (literally, ‘origin’), and provides an authenticity and rooting to a place and a people.101 The structures of tribal societies are heterogeneous, traditional and pre-modern and the particular size and configuration varies from region to region, often determined by the historical socio-politics of the local people. In the Yemen, a tribe may be subdivided into many divisions, each ranging from a few thousand to a grouping as small as a hundred members.102 Historically, the internal structures of tribes would derive ancestrally from the siblings of one family and its origins are geographically ‘fixed’ whereas individual men and families connected to the tribe need not be.103 Tribesmen, regardless of their subdivisions, will usually locate themselves as descendants of ‘one forefather’ (˓min jadd wāḥid’). In this sense, all subgroups belonging to a tribe are ‘brothers’ to each other in the same way that they are all ‘sons’ of one tribal originator.104 Whilst tribal nomenclature has local variations for a number of reasons, each tribe also further identifies itself in contradistinction from other tribes, despite sharing the same dominant culture, customs and religious beliefs. Paul Dresch offers an informative insight and explanation into the contradistinction of tribal identity when he says,
No village, section, or tribe by itself can properly be said to be a ‘moral’ community – none has sense without its opposite numbers; but the tribes none the less form together a society in that all are encompassed in the same values.105
This is because the relevance and unifying factors in tribal selfidentification are based, primarily, on structural relations within a particular ‘historical’ context and social setting. ‘History’ in the pre-modern tribal sense can often include mythological and folkloric elements, which does not necessarily conform to a ‘time and space’ or ‘factually accurate’ understanding of history commonly held in contemporary or modern societies.
Patriachally constructed, Yemeni tribes share a sense of family honour, or sharaf, and within their concept of honour both the tribe, as a collective group, and the individual, as a tribal member, uphold the sense of honour and are bound by their shared bonds to protect and preserve tribal honour. For the individual, protecting one’s personal dignity whilst simultaneously honouring the tribe is known as wajh, or ‘keeping face’ and to do otherwise is ˓ayb, or shameful.106 In the collective context, it is the tribal shaykh who ‘keeps face’ on behalf of the tribesmen. The shaykh usually belongs to an ‘original family’ (bayt aṡlī) who through his family lineage has the honour of representing the tribe at a given period of time, although there is no set law making his leadership a permanent rule. Dresch comments, ‘anyone of the shaykhly family may usually, in practice as well as theory, be chosen shaykh.’107 Generally speaking, the shaykh acts as an intra-tribal reconciler and unifier and an intertribal representative and mediator. Through the respect and power invested in him by the tribe, the shaykh helps to maintain cohesion between community (tribe) and society (waṭan) via what Dresch describes as a ‘structure of containment’ – a system of codified arbitration.108
Within the ancient tribal customs and laws, collectively known as ˓urf al-qabā’il, the individual can expect the protection and support of the tribe, be it moral, spiritual, political, financial or otherwise, providing he has not contravened any customary laws, compromising both wajh and sharaf. The tribal ˓urf provides a system by which men recognize a collective set of rules that allows them to act in concert such as resolving how they may financially contribute to a mutual fund, or levy collective payments, or participate in cultivation partnerships.109 Protecting both property (private and tribal lands and borders) and people (tribal kinsmen/women) is a priority and primary function of the tribe. Whenever the two are violated by an outsider then a recompense, or fidyah, mutually agreed by tribal leaders is paid. Through a detailed and often orally-transmitted system of tribal laws, the violation, protection, sale, travel, occupation and inheritance of land and family rights are codified through the ˓urf. But understanding tribal laws is complex and often compounded by local geo-cultural nuances as Dresch’s detailed study highlights. For example, he notes,
Sometimes one finds a killing between sections or tribes settled by a change of their common border, so that the victim’s tribe acquires some of the other tribe’s faysh [grazing ‘wasteland’] or non-arable land; this is one of the few exceptions to the rule of border’s explicit fixity.110
Dresch’s research also details how methods for collective payments to cover fidyah, and even divisions of wealth, differ from tribe to tribe.111 He also argues that without the shaykh and the symbolic office that he represents, ‘there is no assurance that ties between equals will be any more than episodes in mutual contradiction.’112 But even with the social structure of the tribe, which places the wajh of the shaykh vicariously and emblematically in front of other tribes, ‘episodes in mutual contradiction’ still frequently recur and often involve the shaykhs themselves.113 Dresch observes that