of Birmingham, Sheffield and Manchester.
The employment struggles of Yemeni settlers to Britain by the mid-twentieth century were compounded by the wider economic depression that plagued Western Europe for decades after the First World War. Added to this was the blatant discrimination Yemenis, their British wives and ‘mixed race’ children constantly confront. In the face of increasing hostility and exclusion, Yemeni sailors and industrial labourers began to mobilize through the trade union movement. Further, as the politics of the Yemen shifted by the late twentieth century, so too did the leadership of the British Yemeni community which had been led and motivated so charismatically by its spiritual guide, Shaykh Abdullah Ali al-Hakimi, for almost two decades. Al-Hakimi was originally welcomed by the British government and his spiritual reforms within the community were seen as a much needed antidote to the rising politicization of the British Yemeni communities and their increasing militant trade unionism. His inspiring spiritual leadership instilled the community with a sense of pride and belonging, both religiously and culturally. However, al-Hakimi’s efforts were thwarted by his political ambitions aimed at a free and united Yemen, rid of its archaic and outmoded, medieval, theocratic ruler in the shape of the Zaydī Imām in the North and the colonial occupation of British imperialists at the port of Aden. These ambitions were to prove extremely costly to al-Hakimi both upon him personally and upon the community and spiritual order he worked so tirelessly to establish. As al-Hakimi’s reformist aspirations increasingly began to focus on removing the autocratic Zaydī Imām, the British government began to distance themselves from him, fearing his revolutionary politics would not only disrupt their cordial diplomatic relations with the Imām in North Yemen, but would also lead to a revolt to their control of south Yemen. But when the dominant Shamīrī tribe, originating from the province of Ta˓izz, took exception to his anti-Imāmate stand and what they saw as his ‘meddling’ in the politics of Yemen, the rift between the Shaykh and his ṭarīqah adherents became irreconcilable and al-Hakimi was forced to leave Britain for the Aden Protectorate in 1953. This move saw the former assistant to Shaykh al-Hakimi, Shaykh Hassan Ismail, becoming the murshid (spiritual guide) of the ˓Alawī ṭarīqah in the UK. The chapter explores al-Hakimi’s far-reaching influence and indelible impact on the Yemeni community in mid-twentieth century Britain.
Chapter 6 follows the development of the ˓Alawī ṭarīqah when Shaykh Hassan Ismail, al-Hakimi’s former deputy and subsequent replacement, permanently returned to Yemen in 1956 after electing his adopted UK-born British Yemeni son, Shaykh Said Hassan Ismail, as the new murshid of the ˓Alawī ṭarīqah. The legacy of Shaykh Said’s consistent and loyal service to the Yemeni community in Cardiff spanned over 50 years and was rooted in a distinctly British Muslim context, largely reflected in the Shaykh’s own idiomatic British Yemeni identity. However, while claims to wider notions of Britishness became a developing feature of British Yemeni identity experiences in the latter part of the twentieth century, post-Second World War economic migrants coming directly from the Yemen into the industrial metropolises of Britain through a ‘second wave’ migration were experiencing varied degrees of cultural adjustment. The settlement of these new migrants was facilitated through the same tribal networks and muwassiṭūn (‘middleman’) systems employed by the Yemeni lascars to British port cities over a hundred years earlier. Although new Yemeni settlers still faced degrees of racism and discrimination in their places of work and settlement, social and political changes in Britain and Yemen meant that the migrant labourers were both better politically educated and actively organized as a result of both Marxist and socialist governments in North and South Yemen, respectively. In the UK this developed political awareness saw the establishment of the Yemeni Workers Union and the affiliation of many Yemeni workers with other established British Trade Unions.
At the local British Yemeni community levels, the politicization of Yemenis sparked the establishment of many cultural institutions and community organizations that galvanized the emerging innercity Yemeni communities locally, nationally and internationally, through which diaspora Yemenis were able to mobilize and work towards seriously developing their communities in the UK and Yemen. By the 1970s, economic recession hit the UK’s manufacturing industries hard and the resultant mass-unemployment impacted directly on the ‘second wave’ Yemeni communities across the northern industrial cities. Britain’s Black and Asian communities, largely established through postwar economic migration, were ‘scapegoated’ and transmogrified by the media and ruthless politicians from loyal and hard-working employees into lazy and unemployed ‘scroungers’ almost overnight. The Yemeni response was a degree of ‘mass migration’ to the more prosperous and opportune climes of the developed Arabian Gulf, thus creating another transnational Yemeni link and migration narrative as witnessed by Gadri Salih’s opening story. For those who stayed, their fate was to be once again subsumed by invisibility into the wider debates of immigration, integration, loyalty and belonging and a perceived failed multiculturalism. In the ensuing and highly controversial debates, demonstrations and ultimate riots a distinct sense of British Yemeni identity emerged in the presence of a muchneeded role model and hero; the Sheffield-born boxing phenomenon, ‘Prince’ Naseem Hamid. As one young British Yemeni put it; ‘[When] “Prince” Naseem came on the scene…it was, “I’m from the Yemen, you know ‘Prince’ Naseem?” And, that made it like alright and cool.’ Hamid’s singular contribution to British Yemeni identity represented a tangible manifestation of the resultant hybrid and hyphenated multiple identities as British Arabs, British Yemenis and British Muslims that was increasingly experienced by succeeding generations.
The final chapter explores the contemporary setting, present conditions and current developments of the Yemeni communities across Britain through a number of leading research studies and publications by academics, journalists and writers. Some key observations offered by various studies conducted on British Yemeni communities assert a multitude of often conflicting interpretations from ‘invisibility’ and ‘incapsulation’ to the description of Britain’s oldest Muslim community as representing both a genuine expression of ‘British Islam’ and ‘English Muslims’. The phenomenon of ‘second wave’ migration of single-male Yemenis to the industrial metropolises of post-World War Two Britain is contrasted with the earlier port settlements of the nineteenth-century lascars. A number of commentators viewed the Yemeni communities, particularly the South Shields community, as fully integrated members of the wider societies into which they settled. This reality, they assert, has been largely established as a result of the intermarriages and subsequent generations of settlement in their various locales.
The chapter also explores the custom, merits and dangers of chewing qāt, a plant indigenous to the Yemen, whose leaves are chewed in communal gatherings of males on a daily basis in Yemen but less frequently here in Britain. Media scrutiny regarding the easy availability of qāt in the UK has periodically presented its consumption with the same panic and fear as that of ‘hard’ drug use, demanding an outright ban of qāt that is simply reactionary. This chapter instead offers critical assessment of the consumption and use of qāt amongst British Yemenis based upon an examination of its physical and medical affects as well as its cultural significance.
The chapter also investigates the various degrees of community development and capacity building across the British Yemeni communities by comparing the largest, settled in Birmingham, to the smallest, living in Eccles, Greater Manchester, and examining how population size affects the ‘visibility’ and, consequently, the amount of investment and support from the local authorities these communities might receive. The comparison details the successful development of Birmingham’s Bordesley Centre, managed by the largely Yemeni-run Al-Muath Trust. The Centre is an institute that serves, not only the large settled Yemeni community, but also the majority of ethnic minority communities within the locale. The current growing confidence and community development sprouting across the British Yemeni communities is predominantly absent from the studies examined in this chapter despite some writers speaking about British Yemenis as ‘successfully integrated’, even describing them as ‘English Muslims’. Conversely, the research monographs of Richard Lawless and Fred Halliday express the experiences of Yemenis in Britain as the ‘end of an era’ of a community that lives in the ‘remotest village’, whose lives are both separated and ‘invisible’