Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (6 page)

Yahya stood by the Ottomans during the First World War but steered clear of taking on the British, refusing to fight shoulder to shoulder with the Turks outside Aden in early 1915, for example. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1918 he was therefore well placed to fill the vacuum left behind, extending his rule west to the Tihama and south to the borders of the British protectorates. As the historian George Lenczowski puts it, after the First World War Imam Yahya emerged as the ruler of the first independent state on the Arabian Peninsula ‘largely by default, inasmuch as there was no power ready and willing to assume imperial responsibilities in the area’
⁵⁶
- as the French and British were then doing in other former Ottoman possessions that were being reconfigured as Syria, Palestine, Trans-Jordan and Iraq. Outside powers, whether Muslim or Christian, had learned a lesson. None of them cared to waste their time or their money trying to subjugate the Zaydi tribes.

^a
After the death of the rourth Shia imam, All Z,ain al-Abidin, a minority in northern Iran recognised his younger son Zayd as Imam rather than his eldest son. Doctrinally Zaydism is as close to Sunnism as possible. Yemen is the only centre of Zaydism today, but between the ninth and twelfth centuries there was another Zaydi state located south of the Caspian Sea.

^b
Muslim judge.

^c
The Arabic for coffee is
qahwa.

^d
The preferred currency in most of Yemen from the late eighteenth century until 1970 was a silver dollar coin embossed with a bust of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and the date 1780.

^e
The Gate of Tears, the strait at the lower end of the Red Sea, the closest point between the Arabian Peninsula and Africa.

^f
Opened in 1869, the Suez Canal linked the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.

A search for traces of Imam Yahya, for some vestige of the man who ruled the north-western portion of Yemen for longer than anyone before or since, turned up only two reliable results in Sanaa.

Just outside the old city, behind the national museum, at the far end of an unmarked alley leading off September 26th street, is what could be one of the capitals biggest visitor attractions, but is not. All that remains of Yahya spalace compound is distinguished by a tatty signboard reading Government Property Office. An old and once ornate wooden gateway, missing a few planks and warped out of shape, looks like the entrance to an abandoned junkyard. Beyond it a mess of plastic bags, rusting machinery and weeds rots in the shade cast by the old royal buildings, a cluster of sagging mud high-rises with broken windows. On closer inspection, scraps of filthy fabric doing duty as makeshift curtains suggested that some of the floors were still inhabited. A crowd of children who had gathered to stare at a rare foreign visitor confirmed that the squalid squat was their home. They seemed to know its special history, helpfully pointing out for me rusting iron rings once used for tethering the Imam’s horses, and a bare space on the gate from which an Islamic inscription had recently been stolen. A short walk back and on along September 26th street and down another unmarked alleyway between houses brought me to a small untended Muslim cemetery where the largest gravestone standing among overgrown thorns, discarded plastic bags, cigarette packets and crumbling humbler graves belonged to Imam Yahya. The list of his proud
sayyid
genealogy, carefully inscribed on the stone, filled two pages of my notebook and ended with a simple statement of the fact of his killing in 1948.

Imam Yahya is utterly out of official favour in today’s Republic of Yemen for refusing to rise to the challenge of updating the imamate, for retarding his country’s development, for being an elitist aristocrat and a tyrant. But, in fact, his style of ruling was patriarchal rather than tyrannical. His motivation was not so much to restrict and control as to conserve and protect. He believed that as a true
sayyid
descendant of the Prophet he was doing God’s will by shielding the land and its people from the perils of modernity and infidel foreign contagion. In an effort to return the country to a mythical golden age it had supposedly enjoyed under the Qasim imams, Yahya closed it down. Administering his expanded realms as if they were his immediate household, he occasionally tempered his authoritarianism and love of hoarding silver with a gratuitous sweetness towards children or beggars, charming his family of Yemenis with his modest and pious lifestyle and his reputation as a miraculous healer. Almost everything that concerned each of his subjects - from their education, to their health-care, to their relations with their neighbours, to their travel abroad, to their land disputes, to their choice of a spouse - required his say-so or sanction. Advice was only acceptable to him if it forbore from criticism, remained a secret and was presented in poetic form. One such poem, penned by an eminent
qadhi
, began, ‘Take the stand of adviser towards the caliph/ Do not take the stand of a faultfinder/ Be gentle, don’t exaggerate in reprimanding him.’
¹

The seat of Yahya’s government was a chaotic room in his palace whose floor was strewn with papers and whose battered furniture contained drawers stuffed with more paper, some of it inscribed by a minute hand in tiny concentric circles to avoid waste. One visitor witnessed a servant entering the room with a tray piled high with silver Maria Theresa dollars which, after showing them to the Imam, he poured onto an existing pile on the floor. Yahya’s response to a message announcing the death of a soldier was to mark and sign ‘the document with a formula tantamount to giving the already deceased warrior permission to die’
²
astonished him more. Another visitor watched Yahya resolve a complaint about a neighbour’s donkey kicking a wall with a command that the animal be chained from dawn until dusk. A fellow Arab, the Syrian American, Amin Rihani, saw the Imam deal with a request from one of his sons for the use of a car for a day. But Rihani gave credit where he felt it was due, judging Yahya to be ‘of all the Arab rulers of today [the late 1920s] the nearest to some system in conducting the affairs of State. He has the head of a man of business, and his one-man Government, with all its rusty gear, could not, under the circumstances, be run better by the president of an American corporation.’
³
Yahya was well respected as both a ruler and a scholar in the Arab world. The scene outside his palace however, in the courtyard where he kept a caged leopard and hyena, was not so impressive. Scribes employed in writing petitions for the illiterate jostled with supplicants so desperate for their grievances to be heard and alleviated they set fire to their headcloths to draw attention to themselves.

Imam Yahya travelled around his capital either by a nineteenth-century horse-drawn carriage with outriders and a bodyguard singing and dancing alongside or in a black Ford the British presented him with early in his reign, as a goodwill gesture. The highlight of every week was his visit to the mosque. If commendably friendly to the environment, his Sanaa may have been a pungent place; the walls of many houses displayed traces of sewage passing on its long open-air drop down to ground level and one visitor discovered human excrement being sold by the donkey-load for heating the water in the city’s
hammams.
The stink of that merchandise might account for the fact that many Sanaani women wore sprigs of basil or flowers dangling off ‘two hat-pins poked like carpenters’ pencils behind their ears’, to hold their veils out in front of their faces to a distance of two or three inches.
⁴

Traces of Turkish rule lingered on, though sadly not in the form of a large girls‘ school, which Yahya immediately closed. He had requested that the Turks leave behind some cooks and some of their German-trained military musicians to teach Yemeni soldiers how to play German marches, which they adapted by speeding up the tempo and adding an accompaniment of clapping and stamping. Yahya’s attempts to introduce sharia law were not as much appreciated. Sanaanis complained that sharia was like a mountain, ’a magnificent monument of past ages but a terrible and overwhelming disaster to those on whom it falls’,
⁵
and one foreigner observed that the capital’s inhabitants spent far too much of their time ‘watching for minute contraventions in the hopes of paying off old scores’.
⁶
In general, the old Ottoman law had proved more practical.

Although the quintessence of a righteous Zaydi ruler - brave, physically fit, well-versed in Koranic learning, pious - it took Yahya a good decade to establish himself firmly in his land. Always sympathetic, the Syrian-American Rihani detailed Yahya’s chronic insecurity: ‘He is at war openly with the Idrisi [Asir], at war secretly with Shawafe [Shafai Muslims of Tihama]; at war periodically with the Hashid and Bakil [the main Zaydi tribes]; at war politically with the English - also with those Arabs around Aden who enjoy English protection [the colony’s tribal hinterland] - to say nothing of the Saiyeds
[sayyids]
, his cousins, who aspire to his high place.‘ Rihani concluded that ’Not at all soft is the royal couch.’
⁷

The most warlike tribesmen of Tihama, the Zaraniq, were not neutralised until 1925 and the Marib desert region to the east of Sanaa not secured until the 1930s. In 1925 Yahya had conquered the northwestern Asir region, which had been thriving under the charismatic rule of the chieftain Muhammad al-Idrisi since 1909, but went on to lose it in a war with Saudi Arabia in 1934. The tribes accounting for the bulk of the Zaydi highlands, the Hashid and Bakil federations, sporadically rebelled until 1928, even treacherously allying themselves with al-Idrisi in Asir from time to time. Yahya forbore from taxing them and treated them as honoured allies when they co-operated with him. These means, and the old resort to carrots (bribes) and sticks (taking sheikhs’ sons hostage), eventually brought a semblance of peace to the northern highlands. By the late 1920s he was reputed to have rounded up 4,000 boy hostages,
⁸
some of them under lock and key but many of them receiving an education that would instil in them a proper love of the imam. There are some who say that the man in Yahya’s shoes today, President Salih, has had to dispense with this highly effective, if cruel, means of keeping Yemen’s more troublesome tribes in line, but it has left him with only two unsatisfactory levers of power; either he can dance on the heads of snakes and run the risk of not ruling at all, or he can emulate his old friend, Saddam Hussein, by relying on brute force and terror.

For all the hardness of his ‘royal couch’ Yahya developed into a strong and confident ruler. His repeated forays into Aden’s tribal hinterland to lure the tribes away from British protection with offers of guns and gold made him an aggressor as well as a defender. Those incursions were only temporarily halted when the British retaliated with cross-border air-raids. It was 1928 before Yahya agreed to respect the border that the Turks and British had agreed in 1914, but still he did not relinquish his early eighteenth-century-based claim to be the rightful ruler of all Yemen - Aden included.

Other external relations were more easily managed, generally by keeping them to the barest minimum. French offers to revive Mocha, to buy lots of coffee from Yahya and sell him lots of guns, were rebuffed. There could be no cosying up to Britain while she still occupied Aden, of course, or to America, Britain’s close ally. Proudly suspicious of any outside interest in his realm, he once asked the Dutch explorer Daniel van der Meulen what his queen wanted from Yemen - ‘gold, or other minerals, the white gold of oil perhaps?’ Reassured to hear that she only wanted a friendship treaty, he confided that an American mining company had recently offered him two million dollars for the right to prospect for oil. When van der Meulen asked if he had accepted such an advantageous offer, Yahya’s firm negative was couched in a rhetorical question: ‘can you tell me how many millions it would cost me to be rid of them again?’
⁹
The Ford Corporation’s offer to build Yemen an entire network of roads, in exchange for Yemen importing only Fords, was similarly rebuffed.

Without the services of a venerable Ottoman diplomat known as Raghib Bey the grandly named Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen
^a
would have remained utterly isolated until after the Second World War. Raghib Bey understood post-First World War realities and, given that the European powers remained intent on carving up the world between them, how best to position the new state on the world stage. The best an impoverished and insignificant country like Yemen could hope for, he calculated, was an alliance with anyone prepared to offer material assistance with no strings attached.

Imam Yahya did not always appreciate his efforts. On one occasion, during negotiations with an American envoy in 1947, Yahya drove Raghib Bey to the point of resignation. The American visitor witnessed a scene which seemed to ‘out-Hollywood Hollywood’.
¹⁰
Negotiations had reached an impasse after seventeen days because the Imam had seen fit to replace Raghib Bey as chief negotiator with one of his sons who knew nothing of diplomacy. Sobbing and gesticulating, almost grabbing the Imam by his beard, Raghib Bey berated Yahya in the most disrespectful terms for ruining the ‘international masterpiece’ of diplomacy he had worked so hard on. Convinced that the old Turk was about to harm his master, Yahya’s bodyguard reached for his
jambiyah
and tiptoed up behind him, awaiting Yahya’s signal to cut Raghib Bey’s throat. But Yahya gave no such signal. Instead, smiling in a fatherly fashion, he merely told the old man, ‘Do not upset yourself, Raghib Bey; things will come out all right.’
¹¹
The Turk often bitterly regretted his decision to stay on in Yemen, once complaining to a foreign visitor that he felt ‘surrounded by ruffians who had no conversation and filled their endless hours of laziness with that stupid, animal-like habit of chewing qat’.
¹²

With Britain and America both off the menu of possible alliances, Raghib Bey had no choice but to steer Yahya in the direction of the rising totalitarian powers. After one of Yahya’s sons and his foreign minister travelled to Rome to meet Benito Mussolini in 1927, a few Italian airplanes arrived in Sanaa and a small flying school was opened. Soon after that two more German planes arrived, but Yahya’s aeronautical enthusiasm waned when the latter pair collided with each other, killing the two German pilots and two
sayyids.
With the advent of a handful of Italian doctors the following year, Yahya acquired a lasting taste for Italian health-care. The mid-1920s witnessed the arrival of a large Soviet mission, chiefly composed of aviation experts and doctors. By a treaty of 1928 the Soviet Union recognised Yemen as an independent kingdom, paving the way for a one-way trade in Russian grain, sugar and soap. A sizeable Soviet mission was housed in politically incorrect luxury in the old Turkish quarter, but only functioned for a decade, until 1938, when Stalin recalled and ‘purged’ all but two of its members. A year earlier, Mussolini’s envoy, the Fascist governor of Eritrea, had visited Sanaa to sign a treaty of friendship, and Hitler’s Germany had despatched 50,000 rifles - which the Poles had already rejected as faulty - to Yahya for payment in gold. Commercial links with Japan were so good throughout the 1930s that the Imam sent his eldest son all the way to Tokyo to attend the opening of the country’s first mosque.

By the time he was eighty, Yahya had buttressed his waning powers, not with well-trained and reliable professionals, but with a handful of his own sons whom he appointed to some rudimentary ministries and foreign embassies. His defiantly independent stance had looked noble and brave while most of the Middle East was still ruled by the western powers or their proxies, but in the era of imperial implosion it was starting to look dated, and there were other signs that his time had passed. Whether or not with the encouragement of Raghib Bey, he made two bad mistakes. For all his conservatism and wariness of ever being called a king, he was king enough to flout Zaydi tradition by declaring his son Ahmad his favoured successor and permitting him to be known as the Crown Prince. He was also king enough to establish his own army instead of trusting to tribal support to secure his rule. Both innovations mightily offended two pillars of the Zaydi order: the
sayyid
families who dreamed of replacing him and the northern highland tribes whom he was making redundant. The brains and the brawn of Zaydi Yemen were restive.