table where all the family would eat together, with grandfather al-Hubabi sitting at the head of the table.
0.2 – Muhammad al-Hubabi, in front of his father’s luxury car, taken in Liverpool, circa 1950.
Once re-established in Liverpool, Hassan acquired a number of properties, possibly boarding houses to service the Yemeni sailors visiting and lodging in the port city. One Yemeni migrant worker, Muhammad Kasseum, originally from Ta˓izz in North Yemen, arrived in Liverpool in the late 1930s after living in Marseilles, the southern French port, for seven years. Kasseum eventually married Said and Josephine Hassan’s daughter, Attegar, and the couple first lived in Liverpool before moving to Eccles, Greater Manchester, in the late 1950s. Gadri’s family were one of the first Yemeni families to settle in Eccles and his maternal aunt, Farida Qarina Salih Ali Qaadiri, born in 1952 in Liverpool, is the first Muslim to be buried in the Eccles and Patricroft Muslim Cemetery, after she sadly passed away on 9th September 1972, aged just 20. Kasseum and his wife had a number of children, some born in Liverpool and others in Eccles and he soon established two Arab cafés in the town. The first was located in nearby Monton, but, by 1969, Kasseum had established a new café on Liverpool Road, facing Eccles Town Hall. Kasseum was also a local Yemeni community organizer and, in 1961, on his initiative he organized Arab film shows at the local cinema. Eccles Justices gave Mr Swindlehurst, the proprietor of the Regent Cinema, permission to open on Sunday afternoons to cater for the town’s growing Yemeni population. In June of the same year, the film Samson and Delilah in Arabic, was screened and shortly after there were regular showings of Arabic films and musicals.5 By the early 1960s, a sizeable number of Yemenis had migrated to the industrial cities of the UK to work in the heavy industries of booming post-war Britain. This particular Yemeni migration to Britain is known as ‘second wave migration’. Gadri’s father, Salih Ali Audhali, originally came to Sheffield in the 1950s from Radā’, North Yemen, and he moved to Eccles in the early 1960s. ‘Audhali’ was not Salih’s real name but, rather, the name of a regional southern Yemeni tribe that was allied to the British Protectorate at Aden.
Once established in Eccles, Salih married Muhammad Kasseum’s daughter, a third-generation, British-born Yemeni. Gadri describes the transnational tribal marriage connections in his family as being comparable to a chess game in which, ‘the pieces are moving from the black squares to the white and from the left to the right until you get to the end [of the board]’.6 By the late 1970s, economic recession had gripped Britain’s manufacturing industries and large numbers of migrant Yemeni workers with very few transferrable skills were facing unemployment. As a result, a significant number took up employment opportunities in the Arabian Gulf, along with Gadri’s father, who initially moved to Saudi Arabia to work in the oil industry. In 1981, once established in Saudi Arabia, Salih sent for his family to join him from Britain. Gadri and his family soon settled into their new life in the Middle East, attending school and growing up in a culturally traditional and religiously conservative Saudi society relatively happily for ten years until the outbreak of the first Gulf war in 1991.
When the former president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait, Yemen, then one of 15 countries serving on the UN Security Council, abstained from the UN vote condemning Iraq’s actions. As a result, all Yemeni migrants in Saudi Arabia were expelled from the country. In effect this meant that almost one million Yemenis were forced to return to the Yemen virtually overnight. Salih was forced to leave his business and home with his family taking almost nothing with them but the clothes on their backs. Shortly after returning to the Yemen, Salih sadly passed away, forcing Gadri’s mother and younger siblings, as British subjects, to return to the UK in 1997 where they had extended family. As a then newly-married man, Gadri remained in the Yemen along with a couple of older married sisters but in 1998 he decided to pay a surprise visit to his mother and family in the UK. After his KLM flight stopped at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to take on more passengers to fly to Manchester via Amsterdam, his plane then suffered an engine fire immediately after take-off, forcing a return landing to Jeddah where it was discovered that both engines had actually failed! Nine hours later Gadri boarded a British Airways flight this time flying to London, Heathrow. Once in London, Gadri was obliged to make his own way to Manchester. However, disorientated by his difficult and redirected flight and unaware as to how he might find his way to Manchester, he approached ‘a very tall police officer’ saying:
I’m lost. He [the policemen] said, ‘What’s the story?’ I said I was on the KLM [flight], I was supposed to go to Amsterdam, then Manchester, this is what happened. … What am I supposed to do? I’m in London, I’ve never been here in my life. And he said, ‘You’ve got a Manchester accent!’ … He said, ‘[You’ve been away] eighteen years you say? You’ve still got that Manchester accent!’ But he helped me, and he took me [to the ticket office] to buy a ticket for the train. … He got me on the train.7
Gadri was then aided at Paddington Station by two Algerians who eventually helped him board a train for Manchester and contacted his family to arrange for them to meet him at the station in Manchester, after recognizing Gadri was an Arab, who was ironically lost in his own country! Gadri Salih’s family narrative crystallizes some of the key historical and sociological themes pertinent to British Yemenis explored in this monograph; migration, diaspora, discrimination, community settlement and formation, religion, culture, politics, being and belonging. This book traces the transformation of a nascent group of colonial, oriental merchant sailors into a thriving community as Britain’s oldest established Muslims, but who are practically invisible.
0.3 – Gadri Salih, great-grandson of al-Hubabi, and his fifth-generation, British Yemeni children at their home in Eccles, Greater Manchester.
The first chapter of this book provides a brief history of Yemen from ancient times as a centre of the production of frankincense and myrrh that was much sought after in the ancient world. The incense and spice trade turned Yemen into a place of legend and myth, as well as a very wealthy region both through international trade and agricultural production in its southern highlands. The production of incense and export agriculture meant that ancient Yemen needed its established camel caravan routes to carry goods to Babylonia and Byzantium and its developed entrepôts, which included Aden, to ship merchandise to Upper Egypt, the Mediterranean and across to Abyssinia via the Red Sea and through the Gulf of Aden to the Indian Ocean to India, the Far East and China. The ruling Sabean and Ḥimyarite kingdoms shaped the changing fortunes of the Yemeni people as a combination of economic shifts and natural disasters afflicted the prosperous region and it fell into rapid decline. Arabia Felix or ‘Felicitous Arabia’, as the Romans had called it, soon went from being the ‘land of plenty’ to the ‘land of empty’. The northern highlands of Yemen had been influenced by Byzantine Christianity for many years both from the Hellenistic world and from across the Red Sea in Africa. But when the Ḥimyarite king, Dhū Nawwās converted to Judaism and began persecuting his Christian subjects in Najrān, the powerful Abyssinian kingdom invaded in the early sixth century CE (Common Era) to remove the king and re-establish Christianity as the dominant religion of the Yemen until the introduction of Islam in the early period of Muhammad’s mission.
Dominated for a millennia by the minority ruling Zaydī Imāms, a branch of Shii Islam, the harsh topography and differing terrains of the Yemen have meant that imposing total rule over the whole country has never been completely achieved and the ancient tribal hostilities between the dominant Kathīrī and Qu˓aytī tribes of the southern desert region of Ḥaḍramawt were eventually exploited by the British in the mid-nineteenth century who desperately sought to control the port of Aden to protect its imperial, global entrepreneurialism. It is at this juncture that the historical narrative of this monograph begins as thousands of Yemenis sought employment on ships sailing from Aden, with many sailing to Britain from as early as the 1830s. The establishment of the British Protectorate at Aden in 1839 effectively precipitated the creation of two Yemens; the former northern socialist, Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) and the former southern Marxist, Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY). Britain’s colony