Zurayid Dynasty

The farm that kept itself

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

Ali al-Sulayhi, having taken most of Yemen for the Fatimid mission, needed someone to hold Aden and remit its revenue. Around 1080 the arrangement settled on two cousins of the Banu Zuray', a family of the Hamdani tribe of Yam, who held the port and its customs between them and paid an annual sum up to the Sulayhid court in the highlands.

This was a tax farm, not a principality. The distinction matters for what follows, because the Zurayids did not rebel, secede or conquer anything. They went on collecting, and the state above them fell apart around them, and at some point the payment stopped going up the mountain and nobody was in a position to come and ask for it. The dynasty is dated from the appointment, because there was no declaration to date it from.

What separated them from the Sulayhids was a partition rather than a revolt, and that is the weakest and most ambiguous way for a state to come into existence: what the Zurayids acquired was not independence granted or seized, but a piece of a state that had ceased to be able to hold its pieces together. Queen Arwa's authority contracted to Jibla and its district; Sanaa went to the Hamdanid sultans; Aden stayed with the men who were already in it.

What made Aden worth the trouble is the subject of the next chapter, and it is the reason this small dynasty of tax farmers ended up mattering more than the highland state it came out of.

The queen's dowry

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

Aden did not become independent in a year. It became independent in four instalments, each one a smaller fraction of the same tax, negotiated with the same creditor.

The creditor was Arwa. When Ali al-Sulayhi married his son to her in 1069 he settled the city of Aden and its district on her as her dowry, and from then on the revenue of the port was hers personally rather than the state's. It came to about a hundred thousand dinars a year — sometimes rather more, sometimes rather less.

At that point Aden was held for the Sulayhids by a family called the Banu Ma'n, who had taken it along with Lahj, Abyan, Shihr and Hadramawt before the Sulayhids arrived and had been left in place as governors. They paid the queen her tribute as long as Ali al-Sulayhi was alive. When he was killed on the pilgrim road they declared themselves independent.

The two brothers

Al-Mukarram marched down, took the city, and ended the Banu Ma'n. Then he did something that shaped everything afterwards: he did not appoint a governor. He appointed two, and divided the port between them.

Al-Abbas ibn al-Karam was given Ta'kar-Aden, the fortress next to the city gate, with authority over the trade coming in by land. His brother Mas'ud was given al-Khadra, the castle commanding the water, with authority over the coast and the shipping and the command of the city itself.

Both were made to swear to the queen, because the revenue they were now collecting was her dowry.

The arrangement is worth pausing on, because it is the reason there was a Zurayid dynasty at all rather than a Zurayid governor. Aden's income divided naturally into a land half and a sea half, and the two halves were given to two men of one family who did not answer to each other. It made the port stable and it made it permanently two things, and a hundred years later a war between the two halves would begin with a dispute about how the revenue was being split.

Four instalments

The default came in stages, and each stage waited for a funeral.

While al-Abbas and Mas'ud lived, they paid the queen in full. When they were dead, their sons declared themselves independent at Aden. The queen's general marched on them; there was a war; it ended in a treaty under which half the revenue would go to her.

When that general died, the princes of Aden stopped paying the half. Another Sulayhid was sent down and made a new agreement, for a quarter.

Then a rebellion broke out elsewhere in the highlands, and the princes of Aden stopped paying again. This time nobody came. The queen's leading men were dead by then, and the officer Cairo had sent to reorganise her government, Umara notes with what looks like contempt, made no attempt to do anything about it.

From full revenue to half to a quarter to nothing, in three renegotiations, each one conducted on the death of whoever had enforced the last. No independence was ever declared and no rebellion succeeded. The tax simply got smaller until it stopped, and a farm of the customs became a state.

The customs house

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

Aden is a harbour inside a dead volcano on the southern corner of Arabia, and its importance is a fact about wind rather than about Yemen. The monsoon divides the Indian Ocean run from the Red Sea run, and ships coming up from Gujarat and Malabar could not simply carry on to Egypt. Cargo was transferred. The place where it was transferred took a percentage.

The Zurayid state was that percentage, and nothing else. Every other power in Yemen had land under it: the dynasties of the coastal plain lived off irrigated grain, the highland states off terraces, and the Rasulids later off both together. The Zurayids had no agricultural hinterland worth the name. They had a gate.

The consequence is that a dynasty with almost no territory could outbid its neighbours for troops and could matter to powers a very long way off. Merchants from Egypt and the Gulf and the Indian coast used the port; the Jewish trading network whose letters ended up in the Cairo geniza ran through it; and the customs of Aden are the reason the Ayyubids came down to Yemen at all.

How much ground they held is the wrong question to ask about them, and it would stay the wrong question if somebody produced a good figure for it. The area of Zurayid authority is not the measure of the Zurayid state. The port was the polity, and everyone dealing with them knew it.

A hundred thousand dinars

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

In 1152 the ruler of Aden bought a kingdom.

The Sulayhid state had been left by Queen Arwa to a Himyarite lord named Mansur ibn al-Mufaddal, who had no use for most of it. The Da'i Muhammad ibn Saba purchased from him the whole of what had belonged to the Sulayhids: twenty-eight castles and cities, Jibla and Dhu Ashraq and Ibb among them, for a hundred thousand dinars.

That figure is worth setting against the other one. A hundred thousand dinars was roughly what Aden's customs brought in for a single year when they were being paid to the queen as her dowry. The highland core of the state that had once owned Aden — its capital, its fortresses, its towns — was bought by the port for about twelve months of the port's own revenue.

Mansur retired to his two fortresses at Sabir and Ta'izz, and divorced his wife. She was called Arwa, after the queen, and was a Sulayhid herself. Muhammad ibn Saba went up into the highlands, made Jibla his residence — the town Arwa had governed from for fifty years — and married the woman Mansur had put away.

The poets, Umara says, outdid themselves on the subject of the fortresses.

What the money was for

There is a temptation to read a purchase like this as decadence, and the man who made it does not support the reading. Umara knew him personally and describes somebody entirely deliberate.

He was generous and liked to be praised for it, and was a skilful improviser of verse himself. He kept a court of jurists, judges, poets, a physician who was also an astrologer. On a feast day outside al-Juwwah, Umara saw him sitting in full sun with thirty poets pressing round him, and heard him say: tell them to stop crowding, and say it loudly, because I am not moving from this spot until every one of them has finished. He paid all thirty.

Another night at the same palace, with ten poems in front of him, he asked his courtiers what the authors should get. Nobody suggested more than a hundred dinars. Make it three hundred, he said. It is little enough.

None of that is idleness. A dynasty of tax-farmers that had defaulted its way into sovereignty had no lineage worth the name and no religious authority of its own, and what it had instead was money and the sense to spend it on the people who decided what was said about you.

Umara steals the prize

The most human scene Umara records anywhere is at that court, and he is the villain of it.

At the palace of al-Hajr, in a garden, with several poets present, the ruler improvised two lines in an unusual metre and offered the robes he was wearing and the money on his person to whoever completed them first. The poets were slow. The chief judge of al-Janad, a famous extemporiser, got there first — and was sitting next to Umara.

Umara took the paper out of his hand, got the words ready on his lips, stood up, and recited them.

He won the money and the robes. He also wrote it down, decades later, in his own history, in a sentence he plainly liked: his shot hit the mark, but I had purloined the arrow.

The dynasty that could buy a kingdom for cash also produced a court where the best-documented theft is of two lines of verse — and the man who committed it is the reason any of this is on record.

The branch that lost

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

In 1130 the Fatimid caliph al-Amir was murdered in Cairo and the Isma'ili world split over who had succeeded him. One party recognised the cousin who took the throne in Cairo, al-Hafiz, and the line of caliphs after him. The other held that al-Amir's infant son al-Tayyib was the true imam, that he had gone into concealment, and that the community should be led in his absence by a chief missionary rather than by whoever sat in Cairo.

Yemen decided both ways, and the line ran between the highlands and the coast. Queen Arwa, from Jibla, took the Tayyibi position and appointed the first of the chief missionaries who have continued the line to the present day; the Sulayhid page tells that half. The Zurayids in Aden recognised al-Hafiz.

It is easy to read this as the port choosing the side its trade lay on, and that reading is available: Aden's business was with Egypt, and the Fatimid state was the customer. It is also insufficient. The Hafizi position was the institutionally orthodox one — the caliph in Cairo was the caliph in Cairo — and the Zurayids were recognising the constituted authority of the mission they belonged to, from a caliph who was alive and reigning and had appointed them.

The outcome is what makes the choice worth a chapter. Hafizi Isma'ilism did not survive the fall of the Fatimids by very long and has no community today. The Tayyibi line Arwa chose became the Bohra communities of Gujarat and is alive. Two polities ninety kilometres apart made opposite decisions about the same question in the same decade, and one of them is still being lived in.

Turanshah takes the gate

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

In 1173 Saladin's elder brother Turanshah came down into Yemen with an Ayyubid army and took the country in a single season: Zabid from the Mahdids on the coastal plain, the highlands from what remained of the Sulayhid successors, and Aden from the Zurayids.

The Zurayid end was not much of a fight. The dynasty's last years had gone the way the Ziyadids' had gone two centuries earlier and on the same coast — the government in the hands of the sultans' viziers, the sultans themselves indistinct even to the chroniclers who lived through it, who do not agree on who the last of them was. An army arriving from Egypt against a port held by a household with a garrison had an obvious result.

What ended in 1173 was larger than a dynasty. For ninety years the customs of the richest transfer harbour in the Indian Ocean had belonged to whoever physically held Aden, and had funded nobody but him. From that year they funded a state governed from the Yemeni highlands. The Ayyubids took them; the Rasulids, who were the Ayyubids' deputies and stayed on when the family went home, built the wealthiest polity Yemen ever had on them, and the Rasulid record two pages over is largely an account of what Aden's revenue could buy.

And nothing passed from the Zurayids to the Rasulids in the ordinary sense — no claim, no institution, no acknowledged connection, and the Rasulids would not have recognised one if it had been put to them. What passed was the port, and the port is why both of them existed.

A site chosen by doctors

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

Turanshah took Aden, and then had to decide where to govern from.

He had come down from Egypt, broken the power that held the coastal plain, and extracted from its ruler both a great deal of money and whatever information he wanted before carrying him along to Aden and taking the port. He settled first at Zabid, which was the obvious choice: it had been the capital of the lowland for three and a half centuries.

He formed an unfavourable opinion of its air.

So he went up into the mountains with his physicians to look for somewhere with a healthy atmosphere and good water, and their choice fell on a place called Ta'izz, where he founded a city.

That is where the customs of Aden went. Ta'izz became the seat of government for Turanshah, for the Ayyubids who followed him in Yemen, and then for their own freedmen the Banu Rasul, who ruled from it for two and a quarter centuries. The richest transit harbour in the Indian Ocean spent the next three hundred years paying for a court in a highland town that had been picked out by doctors on health grounds.

What ended, in one sentence

The chronicler who records this puts a line under the whole period, and it is worth quoting because it is not the line a modern account would draw.

With the fall of the last of the lowland dynasties, he writes, Arab sovereignty came to an end in Yemen, and supreme rule was thereafter held by the Ghuzz — the Turks — and by their freedmen.

That is a South Arabian historian, writing in the fourteenth century, treating 1173 as the year Yemen stopped governing itself. Everything from the Ayyubids onward is, in his reckoning, foreign rule by Turks and by the slaves of Turks; and the last of the native dynasties to hold real power were the Zurayids of Aden and the men who had just destroyed them.

The branch that had nowhere to go

The other thing that ended was a religious allegiance, and this one left no successor at all.

The Zurayids had taken the office of chief missionary for the Cairo caliphs — handed to them, in fact, by Queen Arwa herself when she went the other way, with a remark about the Sulayhids knowing well enough what had become of the hidden imam. So Aden was the seat of the Isma'ili obedience that recognised the actual, living, reigning Fatimid caliph, against a Yemeni highland mission that recognised an infant who had disappeared.

Then Saladin abolished the Fatimid caliphate in Cairo, and Saladin's brother took Aden. Within two years the branch that had backed the caliph who existed had no caliph and no state, and the branch that had backed the child nobody could produce had neither of those things and did not need them.

One of those communities is still here. It is not the one that was right about where power was.