Najahid Dynasty

The slaves of the house

formationDrafted from Bosworth, The New Islamic Dynasties: A Chronological and Genealogical Manual (1996)

Zabid was founded in 820 as the seat of an Abbasid governor, Muhammad ibn Ziyad, sent to hold the Yemeni coastal plain for Baghdad. The Ziyadids he founded ruled it for two centuries.

What happened to them happened to a great many dynasties in this period. The later Ziyadids left the government to their servants. The servants were Abyssinian slaves — bought across the strait from the Horn of Africa, which is the natural slave frontier for a Red Sea polity in the way the Kipchak steppe was for Egypt — and by the end of the tenth century one of them, Husayn ibn Salama, was the effective ruler and is remembered for building mosques and cisterns and milestones the length of the Tihama.

Zabid, Yemen · Bosworth, The New Islamic Dynasties: A Chronological and Genealogical Manual (1996) · Photograph: Julien Harneis · CC BY-SA 2.0

In 1022 another of them, Najah, ended the pretence. He removed the last Ziyadid, took the state, obtained a diploma from the Abbasid caliph and ruled Zabid in his own name for thirty-eight years.

The recurring failure of a state whose army is bought is that an army which can make a ruler eventually makes one it prefers. The Najahid case is that mechanism with the frontier moved. The men were bought in Africa rather than on the steppe, the state was a coastal plain rather than an empire, and the sequence is identical: purchase, promotion, the office of vizier, and then the throne.

Egypt went the same way under four successive houses, Syria under two, Khurasan under the Ghaznavids. What is unusual about Zabid is the date. This happened in 1022, earlier than most of them, on the wrong side of the Red Sea from where the subject is usually studied.

Zabid, Yemen · Bosworth, The New Islamic Dynasties: A Chronological and Genealogical Manual (1996) · Photograph: Ljuba Brank · CC BY-SA 3.0

Zabid

expansionDrafted from Smith, E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, New Series XXVI (1974)

The Tihama is the coastal plain between the Red Sea and the mountain escarpment: hot, humid, low, and — where the seasonal floods coming off the highlands can be spread across it — very productive. Zabid sits in the middle of that, on the Wadi Zabid, in country that grew grain, cotton, indigo and dates, and the dynasty lived on it.

Smith, E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, New Series XXVI (1974) · From al-Malik al-Mu'ayyad Da'ud al-Rasuli, Irtifa' al-Dawla al-Mu'ayyadiyya, 1321 · Public domain

The city was the intellectual centre of lowland Yemen for six hundred years. Its Shafi'i legal schools drew students from across the Indian Ocean, and the claim that the algebraic notation later used in the Maghreb passed through Zabid is made in the literature on the subject. Under the Najahids and their successors it accumulated a density of mosques and madrasas that has left it a UNESCO-listed town and, since the 1990s, a heavily endangered one.

The Red Sea is the other half. The ports below Zabid — Ghulafiqa and others — took a share of the traffic between Aden and Egypt, and the dynasty's connection to the Dahlak islands off the African coast, which mattered greatly in 1060, was a trading connection before it was a refuge. How much the ports were worth to the treasury at Zabid is not something anyone has put a figure to; what is clear is that the plain's irrigated grain and cotton paid for the government and the sea traffic was the margin on top of it.

What the dynasty did not have was the highlands. Yemen's political geography is vertical: the coastal plain and the mountains above it are different climates, different economies and, for most of recorded history, different states. A Tihama power could be rich and could not be safe, because the escarpment overlooks it and an army coming down has the advantage of height and can go back up.

In 1047 a man came down it.

Tihama, Yemen · Smith, E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, New Series XXVI (1974) · Photograph: جبريل الغصيني · CC BY-SA 4.0

Seven years on an island

peakDrafted from Daftary, The Isma'ilis: Their History and Doctrines (2007)

Ali al-Sulayhi rose in the Haraz mountains in 1047, took the highlands within a few years, and then came for the coast.

In 1060 he had Najah poisoned — the accounts say by a slave girl sent for the purpose — and took Zabid. Najah's sons got out to the Dahlak islands, in the Red Sea off the Eritrean coast, and stayed there for seven years with no territory on the mainland at all.

Dahlak archipelago, Eritrea · Daftary, The Isma'ilis: Their History and Doctrines (2007) · NASA, ISS Expedition 42 · Public domain

Almost nothing comes back from that. A dynasty reduced to a garrison on an island, with its city held by the man who murdered its founder, is normally finished. The Najahids returned.

Museum of Islamic Art, Cairo · Daftary, The Isma'ilis: Their History and Doctrines (2007) · Photograph: DrRachT · CC0

In 1067 Ali al-Sulayhi set out on the pilgrimage with his wife Asma and an escort, and Najah's son Sa'id al-Ahwal caught him on the road. Ali was killed, his head was set on a spear outside Zabid where his widow could see it from the house she was held in, and the Najahids had their city back. Ali's son al-Mukarram raised the highlands, stormed Zabid the following year and got his mother out, and the Najahids withdrew and came back again after he left.

That is the pattern for the next ninety years, and it is the reason both these pages exist. Neither power could finish the other, because each held ground the other could not occupy: the Sulayhids could come down the escarpment and could not garrison a plain whose climate killed highlanders, and the Najahids could hold the plain and could not go up. The division outlasted both dynasties. When the Ayyubids arrived in 1173 they had to take Yemen twice, once at each altitude.

The doctrinal division mapped onto the geographical one exactly, which made it harder to settle rather than easier. Zabid named the Abbasid caliph in the Friday prayer and Sana'a named the Fatimid. A war between a Sunni coast and an Isma'ili highland was also the local form of the quarrel between Baghdad and Cairo, and both capitals had reason to keep it going.

I am Jayyash

peakDrafted from trans.), Yaman: Its Early Mediaeval History (1892)

The fullest account of how the Najahids got their city back was written by the man who took it, and it survives because a Yemeni historian a century later copied it out at length.

Jayyash, son of Najah, was on Dahlak with his family after Ali al-Sulayhi had driven them off the mainland. The eldest brother killed himself there. Jayyash studied. His full brother Sa'id — al-Ahwal, the squint-eyed — quarrelled with him over a piece of treachery against the island's prince that Jayyash had stopped, went to Zabid alone, hid in the house of a man of the lower orders named Mula'ib who was loyal to the family, and dug himself a hiding place in the man's grounds. From it he wrote to his brother that the Sulayhids were about to fall and to come at once.

Sa'id rose with seventy men. Not one of them had a horse, and they had no weapons but iron nails mounted on palm-sticks. On the way out of the city they met a mounted soldier, killed him, and Sa'id took the horse.

The march

They went by the coast road to avoid the royal highway, expecting to be intercepted. Word had run ahead of them anyway: al-Sulayhi had already sent five thousand Abyssinian spearmen — most of them, Jayyash says, the Najahids' own servants and kinsmen — with orders to bring him the heads of the squint-eyed Sa'id and his brother. There was hardly a mosque or market or road in the country where the rising was not being discussed, and Sa'id had been swearing publicly that he was the master of the day.

They walked barefoot, day and night, with the one horse led among them, Sa'id calling out that tomorrow's sun would not rise on his enemy still alive. One night, lost in a valley, a man stepped out from behind the hillocks, told them they had strayed, and walked in front of them until daybreak, when they lost sight of him.

At the camp they were taken for al-Sulayhi's own servants and nobody looked at them.

What Sa'id did with the victory

How Ali al-Sulayhi actually died — the misread prophecy about a well far to the north, the sword, the heads mounted facing his widow Asma's window — is the Sulayhid dynasty's own story to tell in full. What matters on the Najahid side is what Sa'id did with the win. Jayyash advised sparing Asma, the hundred and seventy Sulayhid princes travelling with her, and the Qahtani chiefs, and sending her home with word that the feud was settled — the tribes, he argued, would not then contest Najahid rule over the Tihama. Sa'id answered with a proverb about not sparing a viper once its tail is crushed, and killed them all. Three days later he entered Zabid with two thousand horses and three thousand camels of plunder.

It was, on Jayyash's own later reading, the wrong call. The highlands never forgave it, and the war that followed ran for decades on the strength of a grudge a different answer might have closed in a season.

The chess player

Sa'id's triumph did not last. The Sulayhid queen contrived his death some years later, and Jayyash went to India for six months with his vizier, then came back to take Zabid on his own.

He did it in disguise. He sent the vizier ahead to spread the news that he had died in India and to ask for a personal amnesty, then came down from the highlands got up as an Indian, with his beard spread over his face, his hair and nails long, and one eye covered with a black cloth. He took lodgings near the palace and started sitting each morning on the bench outside the gate of Ali ibn al-Kumm, vizier to the governor — a man he had heard say, in a temper, that if he could find a dog of the family of Najah he would make him king of Zabid.

The vizier's son challenged the Indian to chess and lost, and went in furious to tell his father, who said that nobody at Zabid had ever beaten him except Jayyash son of Najah, and Jayyash was dead in India. The old man came out and played the Indian himself. Jayyash, careful now, played him to a draw, and was taken into the household as a friend.

He nearly gave himself away twice. Struck by the end of a whip one day he let out the exclamation he always made when startled — I am Abu't-Tami — which is his own kunya, and had to claim on the spot that his name was Bahr. The second time was final. Playing the son again, deliberately losing to keep the father sweet, he let the young man crow, and the young man reached over and pulled the black cloth off his eye. Jayyash stood up in a rage and said: I am Jayyash.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · trans.), Yaman: Its Early Mediaeval History (1892) · Metropolitan Museum of Art · CC0

The old vizier ran after him barefoot with his cloak trailing, produced a copy of the Qur'an, and swore an oath on it; Jayyash swore one back. That night the vizier had al-Sulayhi's own palace, the Dar al-'Izz, emptied, carpeted and curtained, and installed the Indian slave girl Jayyash had bought in India in it. Jayyash entered it after dark and found that she had given birth to his son al-Fatik between sunset and evening prayer — on the night, he says, that a dream had promised him the kingdom back.

Five thousand Abyssinian spearmen were already in and around the city, summoned by letter and paid with ten thousand dinars called in from a debt.

Which year

The date of the killing is not settled, and the disagreement is worth stating because it moves everything around it by fourteen years.

Umara gives 12 Dhu'l-Qa'da 473, which is April 1081, in the passage that narrates the ambush, and Jayyash's own account gives the ninth of the same month of the same year for the departure from Zabid. One line in Umara's text says instead that the year was 459 — 1067 — and that this is the correct version. Two other chroniclers give 459; two more, and Umara everywhere else, give 473.

Kay, who edited and translated the text, argued that the sentence preferring 459 is a later interpolation and that a comparison of dates requires 473. Modern accounts generally keep 1067, and that is the year given elsewhere here. The eyewitness narrative belongs to the other.

Winter belongs to the mountains

contractionDrafted from trans.), Yaman: Its Early Mediaeval History (1892)

For a long stretch of Jayyash's reign the Tihama had two governments a year, and both of them knew it and worked out the accounting.

The Sulayhid prince Saba ibn Ahmad held the fortresses on the escarpment directly above the coastal plain — closer to it than any other mountain stronghold in Yemen — and his Arabs came down every year at the approach of winter. Jayyash would withdraw when they did, though never far. Saba would collect the revenues of the plain through the winter and the spring. When the weather turned the Arabs went back up the mountain, sometimes fighting their way and sometimes not, and Jayyash re-entered his city.

On his return the Qur'ans were opened, his subjects prayed for his prosperity, and the jurists came out to ask God for the prolongation of his reign.

The convention

Here is the part that is genuinely strange, and it is recorded on both sides.

When Saba settled accounts with the tax collectors, he made allowance for what Jayyash had already taken during the summer and the autumn. And when Jayyash settled with his governors and collectors, he made allowance for what Saba had taken over the winter and the spring.

Neither of them taxed a village twice for the same year. Two states at war, each with a claim on the whole plain and a doctrine that made the other a heretic, had arrived at a working revenue convention, and Saba is separately noted for not letting his men squeeze the people while he had them.

Kawkaban, Yemen · trans.), Yaman: Its Early Mediaeval History (1892) · Photograph: Rod Waddington · CC BY-SA 2.0

It is a picture of what a war looks like when both sides have concluded, without saying so, that it will not be won. The fighting was real and so was the bookkeeping.

How it broke

It broke from the inside, as these things do.

The vizier Khalf ibn Abi Tahir — the same man who had gone with Jayyash to India and helped put him back on the seat — advised Jayyash's son to imprison his father, seize the treasury, and appoint a different vizier. The son did it. Then Khalf broke a hole through the wall of his own prison, got out, and went over to Saba, who received him well; and from the mountain he spent his time telling Saba exactly how the Tihama could be ruined.

The arrangement was renegotiated, on advice, into a fixed sum paid to Saba in place of the seasonal half. The effect was the opposite of what was intended. Once the Arabs were being paid rather than fighting for it, their appetite for the country grew and they began to think themselves secure in it.

They were not. A freedman of Sa'id ibn Najah named Rayhan al-Kahlani came on them at night by the gate of Zabid with ten thousand men, against three thousand horse and ten thousand foot drawn up in the open, and destroyed them. Almost all were speared. Saba escaped on foot among the fugitives and was picked up by a rescue party towards morning.

The Arabs did not come back down to the Tihama after that. The plain was the Najahids' again, entire and all year — and the dynasty that had it spent its remaining decades with its sultans in the hands of their own viziers — a pattern already set when Jayyash's son locked him up on a vizier's advice.

The viziers again

contractionDrafted from Smith, E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, New Series XXVI (1974)

The last Najahid century repeats the dynasty's own founding, which is either irony or the ordinary working of the arrangement, depending on how much weight one puts on the pattern.

The later sultans were young, or weak, or both, and the government passed to their viziers — Mann Allah and after him others — who ruled Zabid in the sultan's name and disposed of sultans who objected. It is precisely what the Najahids had done to the Ziyadids in 1022, conducted by the same kind of men in the same offices, and it took about the same length of time.

A state can run like that for a long time, and this one did. What it cannot survive is a bad generation at the top of the household combined with pressure from outside, and both arrived together.

Seventy-two engagements

endDrafted from trans.), Yaman: Its Early Mediaeval History (1892)

Ali ibn Mahdi rose at the fortress of ash-Sharaf, on the mountain wall above the plain, and the place is half the explanation of what followed. To reach it you went a day's journey up a narrow valley between two mountains and then half a day up a torrent bed. The valley below opened into gorges in which an army could lie hidden with its baggage for a month before anyone suspected it was there.

His method was not conquest. His raiders came down into a district of the lowland, plundered it and burned it, and went back into the gorges at first light, where nobody could reach them. His standing orders were to drive off the cattle and the slaves and to kill the prisoners and any animal that could not march. Umara, who met him in 1154 at the court of the prince of Aden and was offered command of all his followers, says plainly what the orders were for: they fed his men's greed, terrified his enemies, and ruined the country.

It worked. The people left. The land stopped being ploughed and the roads went empty.

The city

Then the chiefs of Zabid destroyed their own best officer. The qa'id Surur al-Fatiki had risen higher than they could bear, and Ali ibn Mahdi arranged his death in the summer of 1156. After that, in Umara's phrase, the closed gates of evil were thrown open against the Abyssinian dynasty and the bonds of its stability were unloosed.

Ibn Mahdi came down from the fortress to a place half a day from Zabid, and the country people began going over to him — the more easily because his men kept meeting brothers and cousins among the ploughmen and camel-drivers and cattle-herds in Najahid service, and turned them.

The siege itself is the part Umara insists on, and he is not a writer with any reason to flatter Zabid's rulers. He had been told by several men who watched it that no people ever withstood an enemy so firmly. There were seventy-two separate engagements. The citizens went on fighting as their numbers fell and went on fighting when the hunger got bad enough that they were eating carrion.

Zabid, Yemen · trans.), Yaman: Its Early Mediaeval History (1892) · Photograph: Rod Waddington · CC BY-SA 2.0

What they were asked to pay for help

In the end they sent to the Zaydi sharif at Sa'da, in the far northern highlands, and asked him to save them.

He came, wanting the city. His terms were that they should make him king — and that they should first kill their own lord, Fatik. They agreed. The slaves rose against their master and killed him.

Umara sets out at that point exactly who had just been murdered by whom, in a single line of descent: Fatik son of Jayyash son of Najah; and Najah the freedman of Marjan, and Marjan the freedman of Husayn ibn Salama, and Husayn the freedman of Rushd the steward, and Rushd the freedman of the house of Ziyad. Six generations of purchased men, ending with a lord killed by his own slaves at the request of a sharif who had promised to defend a city he could not defend.

He could not. The war went on, the citizens fell back behind their walls, and Ali ibn Mahdi took Zabid on a Friday in Rajab of the year 554 and sat down in the government house. Umara dates the fall precisely, to the fourteenth of that month — the first days of August 1159 — where the conventional date given for the end of the dynasty is the year before.

He had two months and twenty-one days to enjoy it, and then he died.

The book that was quoted

afterlifeDrafted from trans.), Yaman: Its Early Mediaeval History (1892)

Ali ibn Mahdi held Zabid for eighty-one days and died. His sons held it after him, and what they inherited is described in one of the strangest inventories in Yemeni history.

A man of Jibla told Umara that the wealth of twenty-five Yemeni dynasties had ended up in Ibn Mahdi's treasury. The kingdom of the Sulaymani sharifs, the fortresses of the Banu Wa'il who had ruled Wuhaza and were an old and noble line, the strongholds of the surviving Sulayhids with their attached territories and revenues, the Himyarite lordships of the southern mountains — all of it converted into one hoard in one town on the coastal plain.

The Najahid share of it was extracted from the families. None of Fatik's slaves, Umara says, nor the princesses of his house, nor the nobles of the dynasty died without leaving large sums behind; and Ibn Mahdi came into possession of their women and children, who told him where the gold and silver plate was, and the pearls, and the jewels, and the clothes.

What the Mahdids got and how long they kept it

Fourteen years.

In 1173 an Ayyubid army under Saladin's brother came down into Yemen, took Zabid off Ibn Mahdi's son, took the highlands off what was left of the Sulayhid successor houses, and put the whole country under one government for the first time in a century and a half. The Tihama and the mountains had spent six generations proving that neither could hold the other, and were then taken together by a third party from Egypt in a single campaign.

Umara was writing while that was being prepared, and it has been said that the expedition was undertaken on his advice — partly, according to the story, so that Saladin's brother would be far from Cairo if the Fatimid restoration his friends were plotting came off. If that is true, then the Yemeni exile who wrote the history of these dynasties also arranged for the army that finished them, and was hanged the following year by the man who sent it.

Jayyash's history

The other thing the Najahids left is a book, and it is almost entirely lost.

Abu't-Tami Jayyash — the man who cut off Ali al-Sulayhi's head and came back from India disguised as an Indian — wrote a history of Zabid, the Kitab al-Mufid. A king in a dynasty of purchased soldiers who was also, on the evidence of his own narrative, a good writer with an eye for the detail that gives a scene away: the man who steps out of the hillocks and walks in front of them until dawn, the exclamation he cannot stop himself making, the old vizier running after him barefoot with his cloak trailing.

By the fourteenth century the book was already described as exceedingly rare. It does not survive. What survives is the long stretch of it that Umara quoted inside his own history, which is why the killing of the Sulayhid and the chess games at Zabid can be read in the first person eight and a half centuries later.

So the record of a slave dynasty was written by one of its kings and preserved by a lawyer of the town who was executed in Cairo for the wrong loyalty — and both of them are the reason there is anything here beyond a list of names and dates.

Zabid, Yemen · trans.), Yaman: Its Early Mediaeval History (1892) · Photograph: Véronique Dauge / UNESCO · CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO