Zaydi Imamate of Yemen

Invited to arbitrate

Drafted from Dresch, Tribes, Government, and History in Yemen (1989)formation

Almost every state begins with somebody taking something. This one begins with an invitation.

In 897 tribes in the country around Sa'da, in the far north of the Yemeni highlands, sent to Medina for a learned descendant of Ali named Yahya, and asked him to come and settle their disputes. He came, was acknowledged as imam, took the regnal title al-Hadi ila'l-Haqq — the guide to the truth — and ruled what he could hold for fourteen years. The state that followed him lasted, with long interruptions, until 1962.

The Zaydi conception of the imamate is what makes this different from the other Shi'i states of the period, and the difference is doctrinal rather than circumstantial. The Fatimids and the Nizaris held that the imam is designated by his predecessor — nass — which makes the office hereditary in a specific line and makes a disputed designation catastrophic: the Fatimid schism of 1094 broke the Isma'ili world in half and never healed. Zaydism rejects designation. The imam is any descendant of Ali who satisfies a demanding list of conditions — religious learning, piety, courage, physical soundness — and who then rises, calls for allegiance, and is answered.

That has three consequences visible in everything this polity did. It is open: an imamate can be claimed by anyone qualified, so the office survives the extinction of any particular family. It is contested: more than one claimant could rise at once, and often did. And it is demanding in a way inherited offices are not, because the qualification is scholarly and has to be demonstrated — an imam was expected to be a jurist, and many of them wrote.

It also explains the geography. The imamate held the northern highlands and repeatedly failed to hold anything else. Its authority rested on arbitration between tribes who had asked for a judge and had not asked for a government, and who could withdraw their recognition as readily as they had extended it. Dresch's account is of an office that sat above the tribal system without ever absorbing it, for a thousand years, which is why both survived.

One power among several, for seven hundred years

Drafted from Dresch, Tribes, Government, and History in Yemen (1989)expansion

For the first seven centuries the Zaydi imamate was not the government of Yemen. It was one power in a country that usually had three or four. The Sulayhids held Sana'a and the southern highlands in the eleventh century, the Ayyubids took most of the country in the 1170s, the Rasulids ran a wealthy state from Ta'izz and Zabid for two hundred years afterwards, and the Ottomans arrived in the 1530s and took the ports.

Through all of it there were imams. Sometimes several at once, which the doctrine permits and the politics encouraged: an office open to any qualified Alid who rises will attract more than one riser when the moment looks favourable. Sometimes the imam held Sa'da and a few districts and no more. Sometimes there was no claimant at all for decades.

What kept the office alive when it was not governing anything is the thing Dresch's book is about, and it is not the imamate. It is the tribes.

The northern highlands were organised in confederations — Hashid and Bakil, principally — with their own customary law, their own mechanisms for settling disputes and guaranteeing truces, and a structure that did not depend on any state and did not much change when states came and went. The imam sat above that system rather than inside it. He was an outsider by definition, an Alid and a scholar rather than a tribesman, and that was the qualification: a man with no stake in any tribe's quarrel could arbitrate it. He had no standing army worth the name and no bureaucracy; what he had was the ability to convene, to judge, and to call for a rising when there was something worth rising against.

Two consequences run through everything that follows. The imamate could not be destroyed by defeating it, because it was not an army or a capital — the Ayyubids, the Rasulids and the Ottomans each took Yemen and each found the office still there when they left. And it could not build a state either, for the same reason, because the constituency that answered an imam's call was the same constituency that would decline to be taxed by him.

The other output of those centuries is the law. Zaydi imams were expected to be jurists and many of them were serious ones; the madhhab has a large literature and a good deal of it was written by men who were simultaneously conducting a war in the mountains.

The century it ruled everything

Drafted from Dresch, Tribes, Government, and History in Yemen (1989)peak

For seven centuries the imamate had been one power among several. From the 1530s the strongest of the others was the Ottoman empire, which took Yemen as a province and held the ports because the Red Sea route to India mattered to it.

Then the imamate did something it had never managed. From 1597 al-Mansur al-Qasim led a rising against Ottoman rule that his successors continued, and by 1636 the Ottomans were out of Yemen altogether. For roughly the following century the imams ruled the whole country: the highlands they had always held, the Tihama coast, Aden, and eastward towards Hadramawt. Coffee went out through Mocha to Europe on Yemeni terms, and the imamate collected the customs.

The family that did it, the Qasimids, then held the office continuously enough to look like a dynasty, which is exactly what the doctrine was supposed to prevent. An imamate open to any qualified Alid who rose had become, in practice, hereditary in one house — and the tension between the practice and the doctrine is a recurring subject of Yemeni scholarly argument thereafter, because there were always other qualified candidates entitled to rise, and sometimes they did.

The century of ruling everything did not last, and the coffee did not either: the Dutch and then the French took plants out of Yemen and established the crop in Java, Ceylon and the Caribbean, and by the middle of the eighteenth century the monopoly that had paid for the imamate's one period of real revenue was gone. The state fractured into effectively separate districts, and the Ottomans came back to the Tihama in the nineteenth century and to Sana'a in 1872.

What the Qasimids left behind was not the territory. It was the expectation that the imam would be one of them.

The sole vestige

Drafted from Bury, Arabia Infelix, or the Turks in Yamen (1915)contraction

The imamate that had driven the Ottomans out of Yemen in 1636 and ruled from Sa'da to Aden spent the following two centuries losing everything it had gained, and the losses came from every direction at once.

The account followed here was written by a British political agent who lived in Yemen and Aden and knew the country well. He is useful for the sequence and should not be borrowed from for anything else: he was writing wartime propaganda, his opinions of Yemenis and of Islamic law are contemptuous, and they can be left where he put them.

The pieces coming off

Aden and its hinterland stopped obeying Sana'a in 1728, and the British bombarded and occupied the port in 1839.

In 1801 the Wahhabi movement swept across central Arabia and took the holy cities. A chief of Asir joined it and took the Yemeni coastal towns as far south as Mocha in 1804. Muhammad Ali of Egypt, ordered by the sultan to deal with the Wahhabis, used the opportunity to seize several towns on the Yemeni coast for himself — and then handed them back to the imam, on tribute. When he broke with the Porte in 1832 he sent a pasha to occupy the coast again, and the Egyptians left only because of pressure at home and from four European powers.

Then the dismemberment turned into a family matter. Sharif Husayn of Abu Arish in Asir, a relative of the imam's, tried to bring the whole of Yemen under himself, found it beyond him, and acknowledged Ottoman suzerainty instead. The Porte made him governor of Yemen in 1843 with the title of pasha. He held only the coast; the interior went on recognising the imam at Sana'a.

In 1848 the imam took his relative prisoner in battle. The prisoner ransomed himself, and afterwards showed such energy that he reduced the imam, in the phrase of the account, to the city of Sana'a as the sole vestige of his sovereignty.

Beheaded by his own subjects

The next year the Ottomans landed at Hodeida to take the country back properly.

The imam recognised Ottoman suzerainty immediately. But when the Turkish column reached Sana'a the townspeople rose and attacked it in the streets; its commander was wounded and pulled back to the coast with what was left of his men. And then the people of Sana'a beheaded their own imam.

That is the position the office had reached. An imam is a qualified descendant of Ali who rises, calls for allegiance, and is answered; he is not a hereditary sovereign and his authority is conditional on his conduct. Two centuries after the imamate held the whole country, the holder of the office had been reduced to one city, had submitted to a foreign empire to keep it, and was killed by the inhabitants for doing so.

The Suez Canal opened in 1869 and made Yemen matter again to whoever held the Red Sea. The Ottomans sent a serious army in 1872 and stayed for the next forty-six years.

Winning by losing

The last act of the contraction is the strangest, because it looks like a recovery.

An imam driven out of Sana'a by Ottoman neglect at the end of the century was taken up by the tribes on the eastern border as a persecuted leader of Islam. His son established himself at Khamir in the central highlands, and in his name the tribes were always ready to have a go at the Ottoman government. In 1904 and 1905 they took Sana'a itself.

The Ottomans then did the cleverest thing available to them. Rather than continue a war they could not finish, they recognised him as imam — and after the rising of 1911 they conceded his central demand, that Yemen be administered under the sharia rather than the Ottoman civil code, with the imam nominating the judges who would apply it. A decree proclaiming his authority and his alliance with the empire was read out at Sana'a in September 1913 to celebrations in the streets.

He had won the thing the office existed for: religious authority over the country, formally acknowledged. He had won it by becoming the junior partner of an occupying empire, with Ottoman troops stationed at his own capital — soldiers whose European-cut trousers his tribal supporters considered immoral.

The observer who recorded this thought the arrangement fragile and expected it to break. It did, five years later, though not for any of the reasons he had in mind: the empire lost a world war, went home, and left the imam holding a country.

Four thousand boys

Drafted from Rihani, Arabian Peak and Desert: Travels in al-Yaman (1930)contraction

The Ottomans left in 1918 and the imamate got the country back — more of it than any imam had held since the seventeenth century. Four years later an Arab-American writer travelled up from Aden to Sana'a, was received by Imam Yahya, and wrote down what an independent Yemen actually looked like while it was working.

Ameen Rihani is a sympathetic witness, which is what makes his account useful. He wanted Arab states to succeed, he thought Yahya one of the few genuine rulers in the peninsula, and he describes the machinery anyway.

The machinery, at Yarim, came out to meet him: fifty-odd boys, brought by the local jurist to welcome the visitor. They were hostages. Rihani says he had heard in Lahej that the imam took a son or a brother of every official in his service, civil and military, as a guarantee of honesty and loyalty, and that he had not believed it. There were, he was told, four thousand of them, all living away from home and deliberately circulated — Yarim's hostages sent to Sana'a, Sana'a's to Ibb, Ibb's to Dhamar. Some were under military supervision and taught to read and write; some were simply imprisoned; a few, on satisfactory bail, could move about the town they were held in.

That is a revenue and loyalty system with no administration underneath it, and Rihani noticed the hole. At an inn on the road he asked for milk and was told there were neither cows nor sheep, and nobody to herd them if there were, because the imam's agents took them.

The rest of his portrait is of a state improvised out of the wreckage of the one before it. The last Ottoman governor had handed over power at Sana'a in person and then stayed on as the imam's adviser; three hundred-odd Ottoman soldiers and officers were retained to leaven the regular army; an Austrian Christian ran the cartridge factory. Yahya was sixty-three, of the line of the first Zaydi missionary to Yemen, with four wives, thirty-four children of whom sixteen lived, and four sons serving as officers. Rihani counts twenty-seven years of reign of which twenty were continuous war — a chain of campaigns and truces — and observes that making children and making war would seem to be the business of an imam.

And he identifies, precisely, the thing that would eventually end the imamate. Yahya governed as a Zaydi and invoked the Zaydi creed against the Shafi'is of the Tihama as well as against his rivals: these are worse heretics than the Turks, and the jihad must continue. Rihani calls it a jihad of one party of the Prophet's followers against another, and argues that if the rule were civil rather than sectarian the imam would get everything he wanted without a war, because the Shafi'is would stop being a weapon in his enemies' hands and become his strongest supporters. As it stood, he writes, whatever might be said of the imam's impartial justice, they were discontented.

He also notices the country's arithmetic. A population of three million that is not growing; about a third of Yemen under cultivation; and a state whose answer to both is a larger hostage list.

Rihani published this in 1930. Imam Yahya was assassinated in 1948 in a constitutionalist coup that his son Ahmad put down from the north; Ahmad ruled until 1962 and survived several attempts on his life; and a week after Ahmad's death the army abolished the imamate. Everything that happened in those thirty-two years is already there in outline in what Rihani wrote, from a man who liked the imam and could see it coming.

An open office that became a family's

Drafted from Haykel, Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization (2003)aside?What aside means

The Qasimid century created a problem the doctrine had no clean answer to.

Zaydism holds that the imamate belongs to any descendant of Ali who meets a demanding list of conditions and who rises and calls for allegiance. It is explicitly not hereditary: designation is rejected, and the whole point of the qualifications is that they have to be demonstrated in each generation by the man claiming the office. It is not designation, not inheritance and not election, and the initiative lies entirely with the claimant.

After 1636 the office stayed in one family for three centuries.

The Qasimids had expelled the Ottomans and ruled the whole country, and the prestige of that made their descendants the obvious candidates; and once an imam's son could expect to succeed, an imam could govern like a king. Haykel's account traces what followed. The eighteenth-century imams accumulated the apparatus of a dynasty — a court, a treasury, a standing guard, tax farms — and found the classical Zaydi doctrine increasingly inconvenient, because the doctrine gave every qualified Alid in the country a standing right to rise against them, and some did.

So the doctrine was revised, and the revision came from inside. Muhammad al-Shawkani, chief judge under three imams from 1795 until his death in 1834, argued against the accumulated Zaydi legal tradition and for direct recourse to the Qur'an and hadith — a position that reads as scholarly purism and had a precise political effect. It undercut the school's own jurisprudence, including the parts of it that made the imamate contestable, and it moved Yemeni legal practice towards the Sunni schools.

Haykel's argument is that the sunnification of Yemeni society over the following two centuries and the imams' need for an uncontestable throne are the same story. It is an uncomfortable finding and it is hard to argue with: an office that had been elective for seven hundred years spent its last three centuries dismantling the grounds of its own election, and did so by degrees, in good faith, one reasonable accommodation at a time.

The shape is not peculiar to Yemen. The Ibadi imamate in Oman split over whether a deposition had been lawful and never entirely healed. An office constituted on a principle has to keep paying for the principle, and the usual way of stopping is to reinterpret it rather than to abandon it.

What a thousand years means here

Drafted from Dresch, Tribes, Government, and History in Yemen (1989)aside?What aside means

The Zaydi imamate is conventionally dated from 897 to 1962. That is one thousand and sixty-five years — longer than Byzantium, longer than the Abbasids, longer than any other polity in this period anywhere.

The number is real, and it does not mean what it appears to mean.

An office, not a government

What persisted for a thousand years was the imamate as an institution. The imam was a qualified Alid who had risen and been answered. When no qualified claimant rose, or when the man who had risen held only a few districts, or when an Ayyubid, Rasulid or Ottoman administration governed most of Yemen from the coast, the office did not cease to exist — but it was not running a state in the sense the word usually carries.

There were decades in which the imamate amounted to a family in the northern mountains with a claim. There was also the Qasimid century, when it ruled from Sa'da to Aden.

Both of those are inside the thousand years, and no single figure can distinguish them.

Why the figure is still worth having

The temptation is to fix this by picking a smaller number — counting only the centuries when an imam governed something substantial, and reporting that instead. It would be a worse answer.

Yemeni historiography treats the imamate as one institution with interruptions, and it does so for a reason: continuity of the office is what the claimants themselves asserted and what their followers acted on. A rising in the fifteenth century that invoked an imamate founded in 897 is a fact about the fifteenth century, whatever a modern observer thinks of the intervening gaps. Cutting the span to the periods of effective government would erase precisely the thing that made the office worth claiming.

So the honest form is the long number, given with the argument attached. Read it as the duration of an institution rather than of a state, and set it beside Byzantium's ten centuries only with that firmly in mind — because Byzantium's figure measures something else entirely, which is an administration that never once stopped collecting taxes.

1962

Drafted from Dresch, Tribes, Government, and History in Yemen (1989)end

The Ottomans came back to the Tihama in the nineteenth century and to Sana'a in 1872, and were finally gone in 1918 when their empire ended elsewhere. What Imam Yahya inherited was something the office had never had: an independent state with recognised borders, a coast, and a seat at international negotiations.

He governed it by keeping almost everything out. Foreigners, foreign capital, foreign schools, roads, and — as far as possible — the twentieth century. Hostages from tribal families were held at Sana'a as surety for their confederations' good behaviour, which was traditional practice conducted on a larger scale than tradition had required. Yemen in the 1930s had a handful of motor vehicles and almost no modern schooling, and a generation of Yemenis educated abroad, in Egypt and Iraq, came home and found that intolerable.

In 1948 a conspiracy of those men and dissident sayyids killed Yahya and proclaimed a constitutional imamate under a different Alid. It was doctrinally coherent — a qualified candidate had risen — and it lasted a few weeks. Yahya's son Ahmad raised the northern tribes, took Sana'a back, and executed the leaders. What the episode established was that the question had stopped being which Alid would be imam and had become whether Yemen would have one at all.

Ahmad ruled until 1962, survived several attempts on his life, and died in bed. His son Muhammad al-Badr succeeded him and a week later army officers under Abdullah al-Sallal shelled the palace and declared a republic.

This time it held, at a price. Al-Badr got out and raised the same northern tribes his grandfather had, and the civil war that followed ran for eight years with Egyptian troops on the republican side and Saudi money on the royalist one — a proxy war that cost Egypt heavily and is one of the reasons the Egyptian army was in the state it was in 1967. The republicans kept Sana'a. The imamate was not restored.

The office had begun in 897 with tribes near Sa'da sending to Medina for somebody to arbitrate, and it ended with a claimant fighting from the mountains above Sa'da with foreign subsidies. Calling that a coup is right in the narrow sense — army officers took the state — and thin in every other. What ended in 1962 was not a government but a way of constituting one: the proposition that the right to rule Yemen belonged to whichever qualified descendant of Ali stood up and was answered. Nothing replaced the proposition. What replaced it was a republic.

The northern hinterland

Drafted from Intelligence, Current Intelligence Memorandum: The Situation in Yemen (1963)afterlife

The imamate was abolished in a week and then fought for eight years.

Army officers shelled the palace at Sana'a in September 1962 and declared a republic. The imam got out, went north, and did what every claimant to the office had done since 897: called on the tribes of the northern highlands, and was answered.

What followed is described, a year in, by an American intelligence memorandum written for people who needed to know whether it was going to end. It is a useful document precisely because it is not a history — it is a working assessment, hedged where the analysts were unsure, and it describes the imamate's last campaign in the terms the office had always operated on.

A continuing stalemate

The overall picture in Yemen, the memorandum begins, is that of a continuing stalemate.

Egyptian and Yemeni republican forces, it goes on, remained unable to cope effectively with the guerrilla tactics of the royalist tribes in the northern hinterland, while holding the major population centres and the coastal lowlands firmly. The Egyptians were bearing almost the entire brunt of the actual fighting on the republican side and keeping up indiscriminate daily bombing and strafing attacks on royalist areas. As long as those troops stayed in the field the royalists could not win a major victory — but they had arms, ammunition and money enough inside Yemen to go on with hit-and-run attacks indefinitely.

And this: the pattern of shifting centres of hostile action and of shifting tribal loyalties, in response to changes in the tactical situation and to new offers of money to individual tribes, remained a constant.

Read that against the thousand years behind it. Highlands that no lowland army could hold; a lowland power that could take every town and none of the country; tribes whose allegiance moved with the tactical situation and the money. It is the same description that fits the Ayyubids in the 1170s, the Rasulids, the Ottomans in the 1870s. The republic had inherited the Yemeni problem entire, and so had the Egyptian army sent to solve it.

The line that did not move

The other thing the memorandum records is the confessional geography, and it had outlived the office that produced it.

The republican regime's main support was the southern Shafi'i tribes. Its president had alienated some of them by appointing a number of northern Zaydi tribesmen to important posts, and his own position looked doubtful in consequence. Some Shafi'is, unhappy with all of it, apparently favoured a separate state free of Zaydi domination altogether.

So within a year of abolishing an office that had been Zaydi for eleven centuries, a republic founded to replace it was already quarrelling about whether northerners were getting too many of the jobs, and southerners were already talking about leaving.

What was actually abolished

The war ran for eight years. The republicans kept Sana'a, the Egyptians eventually went home, and no imam was proclaimed again.

But it is worth being exact about what stopped in 1962, because the answer is narrower than it looks. What ended was the proposition that a qualified descendant of Ali who rose and called for allegiance thereby became the legitimate ruler of Yemen. What did not end was any of the material the proposition had been built on: the sayyid families, the Zaydi law and learning, the tribal confederations of the north, the fact that Sa'da is a long way from anywhere an army wants to be, and the readiness of those tribes to answer somebody.

The imamate's afterlife is not a memory. It is a set of conditions that were still there when the office went, and that produced, within twelve months, a republic with a northern problem.