Sulayhid Dynasty

What the mission produced

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

The Fatimid caliphs of Cairo ran a missionary hierarchy — the da'wa — that operated overwhelmingly outside their own territory, in the business of persuading a rival caliph's subjects that their caliph was a usurper. Most of what it produced was congregations. In Yemen it produced a state.

Ali al-Sulayhi was the son of a Sunni judge in the Haraz mountains who converted after a long association with a Fatimid missionary, and in 1047 he rose in the mountains with a following. Within fifteen years he held most of Yemen, and for a period he controlled the appointment of the amirs of Mecca, which meant a Fatimid client was administering the holy cities on behalf of a caliph in Cairo whose name was preached there. That is the high-water mark of the Fatimid claim, and it was reached through a mission rather than an army.

The Sulayhids ruled as Fatimid vassals and did not pretend otherwise, and the relationship was unlike the ordinary one between a dynasty and a caliph. Most provincial houses of the age held a diploma from a caliph they acknowledged in the Friday prayer and otherwise ignored. The Sulayhids held theirs from a caliph whose missionaries had made them, who remained their religious superior, and whose orders on matters that had nothing to do with government were expected to be obeyed.

Ali was ambushed and killed on the road to Mecca in the 1060s and his wife was taken captive; his son al-Mukarram recovered the position and rescued her, and then, in 1086, handed the government to his own wife. What follows from that is most of the reason anybody remembers the dynasty.

A Fatimid client in the holy cities

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

Ali al-Sulayhi rose in the Haraz mountains in 1047 with a small following and within fifteen years held Yemen: Sana'a, the highlands, the Tihama coast, Aden, and the country east towards Hadramawt. He took Zabid from the Najahids, killed their ruler, and installed his own governor. It is a rapid conquest by any measure, and it was done by a man whose authority came from a missionary network rather than from a tribe or an army he had inherited.

Then he went further than Yemen. Sulayhid influence extended over the sharifate of Mecca — Ali is recorded as having intervened in the appointment of the amir of the holy city and as having had the khutba there read for the Fatimid caliph al-Mustansir.

That is the high-water mark of the Fatimid claim and it should be given its proper weight. The Fatimids in Cairo were a Shi'i caliphate asserting that the Abbasid in Baghdad was a usurper. Having the Friday sermon at Mecca — the one place in the Muslim world where the question of whose name is preached is visible to pilgrims from everywhere — read in their name was worth more than a province. And it was achieved not by a Fatimid army, which never came within a thousand miles of it, but by a mission that had converted a judge's son in the Yemeni mountains twenty years earlier.

The da'wa was arguably the Fatimid empire's principal instrument and that it worked best where Fatimid troops never went. Mecca in the 1060s is the demonstration.

It did not last. In 1067 Ali set out on the pilgrimage with his wife Asma and a substantial escort, and was ambushed on the road by the Najahids of Zabid, whose ruler's son had waited fourteen years to do it. He was killed and his head set on a spear outside Zabid; Asma was taken and held in a house overlooking it. His son al-Mukarram raised the highlands, stormed Zabid and got her out.

The state survived and the reach did not. After 1067 the Sulayhids held the southern highlands and lost, progressively, the coast, Sana'a, and any influence in Mecca at all.

The well of Umm Ma'bad

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

At the top of his career Ali al-Sulayhi sat still. He had taken the highlands out of the Haraz mountains, taken Zabid off the Najahids on the coast, and taken the amirate of Mecca; and then he returned to Sana'a and remained there twelve years without moving from the city.

The Yemeni kings he had beaten lived at Sana'a too, in houses he had given them. That is the arrangement at its height: a country of fortress-holding lords, brought down off their mountains and settled where the conqueror could see them.

What he had been told about himself

The strangest thing about him is documented in an account of his childhood.

His father was a Sunni judge in Haraz with authority over forty thousand men. The Isma'ili chief missionary of the district set out to cultivate him — riding regularly to his house, persevering for years — but the son was the target. He worked on the boy before he had reached puberty, without the father's knowledge, and told him that he was described in one of the treasured books of the imams, the Book of Delineations, which set out the greatness reserved for him and the career he was to fulfil. When the missionary died he left the boy his writings and his learning.

So the founder of the Isma'ili state in Yemen was recruited as a child, by a man who showed him a book about his own future, in a house belonging to a Sunni judge. He grew up learned in law and in the interpretation of the Qur'an, led the pilgrimage caravan for several years, and rose, in his biographer's phrase, from lowliness to exaltation and from poverty to wealth.

There is a story from the poor end of that. Travelling in the Tihama as a young man, unable to raise the extravagant bride-price demanded for his cousin Asma — her mother wanting her married to one of the kings of Sana'a — he spent a night in the mosque of an Abyssinian at Zabid named Faraj, a man who made a practice of asking after strangers himself rather than through his servants. Faraj found him reading the Qur'an, asked whether he had eaten, and got a couplet of al-Mutanabbi for an answer. He took him home, heard the story, and gave him twice what the marriage required.

Asma bore him the son who succeeded him. She was famous in Yemen for her learning and her spending, and one of the court poets wrote that when people magnify the throne of Bilkis, Asma has put out the loftiest of the stars.

The road to Mecca

In the year he decided to go on pilgrimage again he took the whole apparatus with him: Asma, the settled kings, and a hundred and seventy princes of his own family — travelling with him, according to the account, precisely because he did not trust them to stay behind.

Najah's sons had been driven off the mainland to an island in the Red Sea years earlier. Two of them came back, raised seventy men with no horses and no weapons but nails on palm-sticks, and came down the coast road after him.

When the raiders were recognised and his brother shouted at him to mount, Ali answered that he was fated to die nowhere except at ad-Duhaym and the well of Umm Ma'bad — meaning the famous well far to the north, where the Prophet had halted on the flight to Medina. He had evidently carried the prediction a long time and found it reassuring, since neither place was anywhere near him.

Then one of his own men said: defend yourself, for that is the well of Duhaym ibn 'Abs, and that mosque stands where the tent of Umm Ma'bad stood.

He never moved from the spot again. They killed him where he stood, with his own sword.

The man who had been told as a child that a book foretold his life died because he believed a prediction about the place of his death, in the one place in Arabia where it could be made true by a coincidence of names.

The heads at the window

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

The Sulayhid state was broken in a single morning on the coastal plain, and the fullest account of it was written by the man who did the breaking.

Ali al-Sulayhi had spent twelve years at Sana'a without moving from the city. Then he decided to go to Mecca, and took with him his wife Asma and the Yemeni kings he had defeated and settled at Sana'a — a hundred and seventy Sulayhid princes travelled in the party as well, all of them, according to the account, men he did not trust to leave behind him.

Najah's sons came out of hiding at Zabid and caught the column at a place called ad-Duhaym, by the well of Umm Ma'bad.

What it cost

Ali was killed where he stood, beheaded with his own sword. His brother Abd Allah, whom the account calls the bravest of Arab horsemen, charged the raiders and was speared. Both heads were mounted and carried to the mosque where Asma was.

Then Jayyash ibn Najah advised his brother to let the rest of the party live — Asma, the hundred and seventy princes, thirty-five Qahtani chiefs — and to send Asma home to her son with a message that the feud was settled. He argued it on the merits: do that, he said, and the tribes will not contest your rule over the Tihama; refuse, and their sense of wounded honour will bring them down on you.

Sa'id al-Ahwal refused, and the Sulayhids were killed to the last man. Jayyash saw an old man among them try to shelter behind his son and one spear go through both.

Asma was taken to Zabid and lodged in a house, and the heads of her husband and her husband's brother were set up facing her window.

What was left of the state

The effect on the highlands was immediate and it is the reason this counts as more than a defeat.

The governors Ali had appointed to the mountain fortresses simply kept them. The authority of his son al-Mukarram, Umara writes, was all but destroyed. On the plain the opposite happened: Sa'id's position became so strong that he sent buyers to Abyssinia for twenty thousand spearmen.

Al-Mukarram had no news of his mother at all. He eventually raised what he could, came down and stormed Zabid and got her out — and then had to leave, and the Najahids came straight back and expelled the governors he had installed.

That is the shape of the rest of Sulayhid history in one sequence. The state could still mount a campaign and win it. It could not hold what it took. And Sa'id al-Ahwal, who had made it so, was killed at the castle of Sha'ir some years afterwards by a stratagem contrived not by al-Mukarram but by his wife.

Fifty years, from Jibla

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

Arwa al-Sulayhi took the government of Yemen in 1086, handed to her by her husband al-Mukarram, and held it until she died in 1138 at about ninety. Fifty-two years is longer than almost any reign of the medieval Islamic world, and she spent them governing a state that was smaller every decade and outlasting everyone who expected to take it.

Her first substantial act was to move. Sana'a was the capital her father-in-law had conquered from and was indefensible: exposed on the plateau, contested by the Zaydi imams to the north and reachable from the Tihama, where the Najahids who had killed Ali al-Sulayhi were rebuilding. In 1087 she moved the seat to Jibla, a small town in the southern highlands on a spur between two valleys, and built it up — a palace, a congregational mosque she endowed and is buried in, roads and cisterns. The state stopped trying to hold all of Yemen and held what it could.

That is the decision the record marks as a turning point, and it is the reason the polity outlived its founder by seventy years. A conqueror's capital is chosen for reach; hers was chosen for survival, and the difference bought five decades.

The rest of the reign was management. She governed through appointed lieutenants, most consequentially the Zurayids at Aden, who paid her a fixed tribute for the port and its customs and eventually became a dynasty of their own. She kept the Najahids in the Tihama at a distance, sometimes by war and at least once by arranging the assassination of their ruler. She corresponded directly with Cairo, and her correspondence with the Fatimid caliphs — some of which survives in the Isma'ili collections — is addressed to her as a religious superior addresses a subordinate of rank rather than as a court addresses a provincial governor's widow.

She had no surviving heir with a claim anyone would follow. The Sulayhid state fragmented at her death, and what she had built inside it did not.

A gracious letter

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

When al-Mukarram died, the Sulayhid prince Saba ibn Ahmad asked his widow to marry him. She refused. He raised troops and marched on Jibla to compel her, and she raised a larger army than his, and the two hosts fought for several days.

Then her half-brother said to Saba: by God, she will not agree to what you want except on the command of the Imam al-Mustansir, Prince of the Faithful.

So Saba stopped fighting, went back to his fortress, and wrote to Cairo.

The delivery

The caliph's answer came in the form of two envoys and one of his own eunuchs, who bore the honorific title Right Hand of the Mission and was empowered to enter the queen's presence. The scene is described by a man who travelled with them.

They came into the palace at Jibla. Her ministers, her secretaries and the officers of state were standing, and the eunuch stood among them and delivered the caliph's greeting with her full titles — the Favoured, the Pure, the Unparagoned of her time, Sovereign Lady of the Kings of Yemen, Pillar of Islam, Treasure of the Faith, Refuge of the truly directed, Friend of the Prince of the Faithful — and then the command, with the verse that made it one: Unto no believer, male nor female, belongeth liberty of choice when God and His apostle have decreed a command. The caliph gave her in marriage to Saba, with a dowry of a hundred thousand dinars in money and fifty thousand in rarities, perfumes and robes.

The reply

She answered in Qur'an, and she chose her passage with enormous care. It is the speech of the queen of Sheba, receiving Solomon's letter.

Verily a gracious letter hath been conveyed unto me. It is from Solomon, and behold it saith: In the name of God, the Merciful, the Gracious. Resist me not but come unto me with submission.

Then she cut the quotation off at exactly the point where it would have gone against her. In the Qur'an the queen's next words are to her counsellors — advise me, and nothing will I determine until you have spoken. Arwa said: I do not say, touching the command of our lord, O counsellors advise me, and nothing will I determine until you shall have spoken.

She had cast the caliph as Solomon and herself as Bilkis, a queen of Yemen receiving a summons from a greater king, and then declined the one part of the role that involved being talked into it.

And she named the men who had done this to her. As for you, Ibn al-Isfahani — by God, you have not carried a true message to our lord from Saba. You have wrested words from their sense, and your souls have prompted you to an act of wickedness. My recourse is patience, and God is He whose help is to be implored against what you have set forth.

What actually happened

Her vizier and her officers then talked to her in pacifying terms until she consented, which is a sentence worth sitting with: the queen who had just refused to consult her counsellors was brought round by her counsellors.

A contract was drawn up. Saba came to Jibla with a great retinue and stayed a month, feasting his army and spending on it as much again as the dowry had cost him. And in the course of that month, Umara says, the contemplation of her aims and her actions made him feel small. He saw that his own reputation was dimmed beside hers, and that nobody could fairly be compared with her. Her people, he noticed, all called their Lady their Mistress.

In the end he sent her a private request: receive me in your palace, so that people will believe the marriage was consummated. She agreed.

What happened that night has two versions at Jibla. Some said she received him in her own apartments for one night and he left at first light. Others said she sent him a slave girl who looked very like her, that he was warned of it, and that the girl stood at the head of his couch all night while he sat without once raising his eyes to her. At dawn he said his prayers, ordered the drums beaten for departure, and told the girl to take a message to her mistress: she is a precious pearl, to be worn only by whoever is worthy of her.

They never met again.

Her of whom thou hast said

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

Cairo eventually decided that the queen of Yemen was too old to be left in charge of the Yemeni mission, and sent a man to take it off her. The account of what happened next is Umara's, and it is the best evidence there is for how Arwa actually governed.

The man was Ibn Najib al-Dawla, sent as da'i with full powers. He began well enough to be worth describing well: he respected the property of the inhabitants, dealt righteously with them and maintained the laws, and Umara says the queen's reputation was enhanced through him and the neighbouring Yemeni powers were constrained to stop coveting her outlying provinces. He took three hundred horsemen of the Banu Himas and Sinhan into his service under a Hamdanite commander, and when the Fatimid vizier who had appointed him died in 1121 his successor confirmed him, sent letters delegating to him the fullest powers over the people, and reinforced him with four hundred Armenians and seven hundred black archers. He set up his residence at Janad, in the centre of the country.

The kings of Yemen endured this impatiently, and the record of the next four years is a man with Egyptian troops losing fights to local ones.

In 1124 he attacked Zabid, held by the Najahid vizier. Ten of his own archers had come to an understanding with the townspeople; as the armies engaged one of them put an arrow into the muzzle of his horse. He came off it, the army broke, every one of his black troops was killed and fifty of the four hundred Armenians got away. Fifteen Hamdanite horsemen fought over his body until one of them got him up behind his own saddle. His horse disappeared from the battle at midday prayer on the Friday; he was in Janad — four days' journey, three at a forced pace — early on the Saturday morning. By that evening Jibla had heard he was dead.

The next campaign went the same way. He made war on the Zurayids, took a lance thrust, and — being, Umara notes in passing, a bad horseman — fell off again, and was saved by the same Hamdanite chief, who killed the slave coming for him. He left his breastplate on the ground, and the Zurayid prince wrote a poem about it: he fled forgetting his breast-plate, in terror of the Banu Yam, lest their lances should pierce him; but flight saveth not from death.

In 1125 he moved against the queen. Her mind, he said, had become weakened, and in his opinion it was necessary to place her in seclusion.

What happened then is the whole of Arwa's career in one manoeuvre. The six Yemeni kings — the same men who had spent four years fighting each other and him — came to her, and asked her permission to besiege him at Janad. She gave it. They brought three thousand horse and three thousand foot and surrounded the walls, inside which he had four hundred picked Hamdanite horsemen and a handful of individual fighters Umara says were each worth a hundred men, and the siege pressed him hard.

Then she wrote, as was her custom, to her own tribal ally, who came and camped at Jibla. She sent to the tribal chiefs and distributed ten thousand Egyptian dinars among them. And she instructed the men carrying the money to put a rumour about among the ordinary soldiers of the besieging army: that Ibn Najib al-Dawla had distributed ten thousand Egyptian dinars among their own commanders.

The soldiers demanded their share of the Egyptian gold or they would go home. The kings made promises. When night fell the kings left, each for his own country, and in the morning the army found itself without leaders, struck camp and abandoned the siege.

Umara gives the line somebody said to Ibn Najib al-Dawla afterwards, and it needs no help: perceivest thou the artifice accomplished by her of whom thou hast said that her mind is weakened?

He rode to Jibla and tried to justify and excuse himself to her. He was arrested not long afterwards and sent back towards Egypt, and did not arrive.

The queen was by then somewhere past seventy and had been governing Yemen for about forty years, and the incident is the clearest statement of what her authority rested on. It was not Egyptian troops, because the Egyptian troops had just been destroyed at Zabid. It was that she could buy six rival kings for ten thousand dinars and then buy their soldiers away from them for nothing, using the same money twice.

Two women, and what the ruler fields cannot show

Drafted from Daftary, The Isma'ilis: Their History and Doctrines (2007)aside?What aside means

Across every dynasty this kind of survey ordinarily asks about a founder, a ruler at the height of the state, and a last ruler, the answer has almost always been a man. That is worth examining rather than noting.

Some of it is the period and some of it is the sources, which record women as mothers, wives and regents where they record them at all, and which — being mostly written by men attached to courts — treat a woman exercising authority as an irregularity to be explained. And some of it is the question itself: asking who formally held the sovereign office is a question about a title, and in most of the medieval Islamic world women exercised power without holding one. Shajar al-Durr does not answer to the title of Mamluk sultan in the ordinary telling of that dynasty, though she was proclaimed sultan and ruled for eighty days. Gawhar Shad ran the Timurid state for a decade without ever being named its ruler. Zenobia of Palmyra is remembered mainly as a regent who never claimed the throne in her own name.

Yemen has two women and neither needs that kind of accommodation.

Asma bint Shihab, Ali al-Sulayhi's wife, is recorded as having sat in the council unveiled, as having had her name read in the khutba alongside her husband's and her son's, and as having governed while her son was on campaign. Having a woman's name in the Friday sermon is not a courtesy; it is the formal announcement of who is sovereign, and it was done.

Her daughter-in-law Arwa is the one who actually held the title outright. She governed for about fifty years in her own name, moved the capital, conducted the diplomacy, ran the wars, and her name was in the khutba too. And she held religious office — the Fatimids recognised her as hujja, the senior rank of the mission in Yemen, which is a position of doctrinal authority over a network of missionaries, and which no other woman held anywhere in the Isma'ili hierarchy.

Political authority delegated to a woman is unusual anywhere in this period. Religious authority is close to unique, and it is what mattered when Cairo produced a disputed succession: a hujja was competent to decide what the Yemeni mission would do about it, and she did.

What she detached from Cairo

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

The Fatimid caliphate produced two succession disputes in thirty-six years and the Yemeni mission had to answer both.

The first was 1094. Al-Mustansir died, a vizier put the younger son al-Musta'li on the throne over the designated elder son Nizar, and the mission split. The eastern network went to Alamut under Hasan-i Sabbah and became a state of its own in the Persian mountains. Yemen recognised al-Musta'li.

The second was 1130, and it was worse. The caliph al-Amir was assassinated, leaving — by the account the Yemenis accepted — an infant son called al-Tayyib. A cousin took the throne in Cairo instead and was recognised there. Arwa, as hujja, declined to follow Cairo. She recognised al-Tayyib as imam, declared that he had gone into concealment, and reconstituted the Yemeni mission under a da'i al-mutlaq — an absolute missionary — holding authority on the hidden imam's behalf and appointing his own successor.

That is the decisive act of the reign, and it is a religious one, taken by a woman who was also the head of state, without reference to the caliphate that had made her dynasty.

The consequences are radically out of proportion to the polity. The Sulayhid state came apart at Arwa's death in 1138, ninety-one years after it began, with no successor and no claimant. Nobody conquered it; it simply stopped being governed as one thing. The Tayyibi da'wa she had constituted did not fragment. It continued in Yemen for four centuries, sent missionaries to Gujarat, and when conditions in Yemen deteriorated the seat of the mission moved to India, where the Bohra communities that descend from it still are, still under a da'i al-mutlaq in a line that runs back to the one she appointed.

A state of ninety-one years, in a corner of Yemen, whose ruler's decision about a disputed infant in Cairo is still the constitutional basis of a religious community on another continent nine hundred years later. Nothing else the Sulayhids did comes close, and it was not a political act at all.

The kingdom was sold

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

Arwa died at Jibla in 1138, and left the kingdom of the Sulayhids by bequest to Mansur ibn al-Mufaddal, a lord of Himyarite descent whose family had spent two generations acquiring castles in the southern mountains.

Fifteen years later he sold it.

The fortress of Ta'kar, which commanded al-Janad; the fortress of Habb; the strongholds of Mikhlaf Ja'far with their attached districts — the whole southern core of what had been an Isma'ili state stretching from Aden to Mecca went to the prince of Aden for money, in the year 1152. The chronicler who records it does the arithmetic in the same breath: reckoning from 1038, the Sulayhid sovereignty had lasted a hundred and nineteen years.

Mansur lived at the fortress of Ta'izz until he died. He is remembered for one other thing: he was the first to take up Tha'bat as a place to relax, and used to go down and spend several days there.

Where the rest of it went

What he had not sold was taken.

The surviving Sulayhid family strongholds, each with a wide territory and large revenues attached, were among the properties that ended up in the treasury of Ali ibn Mahdi when he came down off the mountain in the 1150s and destroyed the coastal dynasty. A man of Jibla told Umara that the wealth of twenty-five Yemeni dynasties finished in that one hoard.

Then in 1173 an Ayyubid army out of Egypt took the whole country in a single campaign — the coast off Ibn Mahdi's son, the mountains off whoever was holding them — and the hundred and fifty years in which no power in Yemen could finish any other came to an end because a fourth party arrived with more men than any of them.

What did not get sold

Two things survived the auction.

The first is the religious organisation. The decision Arwa made in 1130 — recognising an infant imam and declaring him hidden — detached the Yemeni mission from Cairo and put it under a line of chief missionaries she appointed herself. That structure outlived the state by centuries and moved east, and the community it produced is still there.

The second is her reputation in her own country, and it is worth being precise about its shape. The Yemeni sources are not admiring in a general way; they are specific. She was tall and fair and inclined to stoutness, with a clear voice; she was well read and a skilful writer, her memory stored with history, poetry and the chronology of past times, and nothing could surpass the interlinear notes on grammar and meaning that she wrote in the margins of books. Her father-in-law used to tell his wife to show the girl respect, because she would be the preserver of the family and the guardian of its crown for whoever of the dynasty was left.

He was right in a way he cannot have intended. She outlived him by seventy-one years, held what he lost, chose the succession that mattered, and was the last of them. The crown she guarded was sold by the man she left it to, and the thing she actually preserved was not the kingdom at all.