Yemen - Qasimid Dynasty

levels.
(3) Capital cities; (2) Port cities and larger towns; (1) Rural towns and villages
The following material was imported from the later data sheets. Most Yemenis lived in rural villages and towns: ’Yemen is an overwhelmingly rural country, with about three-fourths of the people living in the countryside. With only a few exceptions, the rural population is distributed fairly evenly. The monsoon rainfall that causes the western slopes of the massif to be so well-dissected makes the area the most densely populated part of the country. Fertile soils are another regional asset. In varying concentrations, Yemenis inhabit nearly all the country’s geographic zones - from sea level to 10,000 feet (3,000 metres) and higher. (In fact, the intricate variety of subregions and microclimates produces an agricultural base of astonishing diversity.) The scarcity of farmland has greatly influenced rural settlement and construction patterns, as has the need for security. Villages tend to be small, and buildings are erected on ground that cannot be cultivated - frequently along cliffs and rock outcroppings. Homes often consist of several stories (as many as five or more), with the lower floors being made of hand-hewn stone. Upper stories, where the family resides, are usually made of mud brick, a superior insulator. These quarters also have many windows, providing ventilation in the heat of the summer. The location of the living quarters in these upper stories offers the capacity for storage in the lower stories, as well as an element of security. Cities in Yemen follow patterns seen in other parts of the Arab world. Original construction consisted of a walled and fortified old city, in which the ornate multistory home was standard. The old city also contained shops, souks, schools, and mosques. In the modern period, urban areas began to sprawl outside the old city, and the wealthy began to build larger and more-ornate mansions and villas in nearby suburbs.’ ^[1] Specialists were concentrated in larger towns: ’But the ideological power of the Imamic state did not erase rural political idioms and leadership. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the economic power of urban forces remained circumscribed. Craft production and trade remained small-scale, and specialists were divided in status between those who ruled (families with literate and religious specialties or engaged in long-distance trading) and those who served (the craftsmen and market-service families). In the countryside arms-bearing farmers regarded the groups who worked in craft production, petty trading and market services as a dependent service class attached to their local political communities. Even in large towns the men who performed such occupations were distinguished as Jews or as Muslim strata (mazayinah, bani ’l-khums, nuqqas) marked by sumptuary customs or regulations. Literate specialists, who sought to govern, to regulate the market, and to control long-distance trade, distinguished themselves from the labouring specialists of the market.’ ^[2] Cities served as economic and political centres and grew significantly only during the 20th century: ’Most Yemenis live in small, widely dispersed farming villages and towns. Three-quarters of the population lives in roughly 50,000 settlements with less than 500 inhabitants. The cities of Aden, Abyan, Al-Houta, Al-Hudaydah (a port), Sana, and Taizz have more than 100,000 residents each. Many foreign countries have assisted in the building of roads, hospitals, and schools, but improvements such as sanitary water facilities and power supply typically remain local development projects.’ ^[3] We have provisionally adopted a similar distinction while being aware of urban growth in the modern period. This remains in need of confirmation and more material is needed.

[1]: (Burrowes and Wenner 2020) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/RMZUSMFG.

[2]: Mundy, Martha 1995. "Domestic Government: Kinship, Community and Polity in North Yemen", 13p

[3]: Walters, Delores M.: eHRAF Cultural Summary for the Yemenis

levels.
(3) Zaydi imams; (2) Other sayyids and scholars; (1) Local preachers
Most Yemenis were Muslims: ’Islam is the major force that unifies Yemenis across social, sexual, and regional boundaries. Yet most adherents of the different schools of Islam reside in distinct sections of the country, and this fact has certain political implications. Zaydis, who belong to the Shia subsect of Islam, are located in the northern and eastern parts of Yemen, whereas Shafis, orthodox Sunnis, live in the southern and coastal regions. Location in the highlands apparently enables Zaydis more successfully to repel invasions than Shafis in the lower lying areas. A smaller Shia subsect, the Ismaili, and also the remnants of an ancient Jewish community, may still be found in certain parts of Yemen.’ ^[1] ’As Muslims, Yemenis aspire to fulfill the five tenets of Islam: affirmation of the Islamic creed, prayer, fasting, charity, and pilgrimage.’ ^[1] ’In the Shafi areas of Yemen, the tombs of certain holy men are visited by believers for their special healing and other powers.’ ^[1] ’Being of sayyid status, even in contemporary Yemeni society, still validates (but does not necessarily guarantee) one’s access to religious learning. Men gather at the mosque for prayers and sermons on the Sabbath, which in Yemen occurs on Friday. Strict segregation of the sexes usually does not permit women to worship in public.’ ^[1] ’Yemenis observe the major holidays, such as Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, as well as lesser festivals in the Arabian calendar.’ ^[1] Religion was an important social divider: ’Throughout society, the broadest distinctions between population groups are based not on ethnicity but on religious affiliation. Islam is the state religion, and the Sunni branch of Islam, represented by the Shāfiʿī school, predominates. The Shīʿite minority consists of the Zaydī school, which has long been politically dominant in the mountainous highlands of the north, and the Ismāʿīlīs, now a relatively small group found in the Haraz region of northern Yemen and in Jabal Manakhah, the mountainous area west of Sanaa. The non-Muslim community is very small, consisting mostly of foreign visitors and workers. All are free to worship as they wish - including the Jewish community - but, as in most conservative Muslim countries, proselytizing of Muslims by non-Muslims is illegal.’ ^[2] Yemen has a history of religious militancy: ’Yemen’s distance from any Islamic central authority has made it historically an attractive haven for militant offshoots of normative Sunni Islam, particularly the two smaller branches of Shi˜ism: Ismaili, or “Sevener,” Shi˜ism, and Zaydi, or “Fiver,” Shi˜ism. Zaydism was established in Yemen by the imam Yahya al-Hadi (d. 911), a descendant of ˜Ali’s son Hasan who migrated from Medina to Yemen late in the ninth century and established his capital at the northern highland city of Sa˜da.1 Unlike Ismaili or Twelver Shi˜ite doctrine, Zaydi theology posits an active, visible imam, or leader of the Muslim community, descended from either Hasan or his brother Husayn, who is learned in the religious sciences and who publicly proves himself worthy of leading the Muslim community, in battle if necessary.2 What this has meant in Yemeni history is that scions of numerous lines of Hasanid and, less frequently, Husaynid descendants have proclaimed their da˜was, or “calls” - occasionally simultaneously, so that the supporters of one line were obliged to fight it out with supporters of another.’ ^[3] While Yemen was nominally under the control of a Zaydi imamic dynasty, sayyids also quarreled amongst themselves: ’AI-Mahdi al-iAbbas (1748-75) was very much a Sanani Imam, being based on the city throughout his reign. Among learned San’anis he retained a high reputation (al-Shawkani 19 29: 310-12; Serjeant 1983: 85 ff.), but it is plain that all was not well elsewhere. Abu ’Alamah’s 175I rising in the north-west has already been mentioned. Two years earlier a campaign had been fought in Lower Yemen against a ’sorcerer’ who promised his followers immunity against sword wounds and gun shots.V In the year before that, Hasan al-Tlkarn, of the qadi family from Barat and the north-east, was leading tribesmen at odds with the new Imam in Lower Yemen (Zabarah 1958: 684)Y In both the west and the south, the incursion of tribesmen over the preceding generation had not been quietly absorbed, and the affairs of the Barat tribes in particular (Dhii Muhammad and Dhu Husayn) became involved with those of the Imam’s capital at San’a’.’ ^[4] ’The connections of learning which were often important in an Imam’s rise to power (Ch. 5) could also readily generalize a threat to that power if one emerged; and the language of equality, justice, and religious probity linked the learned with the tribesmen also. In 17 68, for instance, the ’ulamd’ of Barat (particularly Bayt al-’Ansi) wrote to Zaydi centres such as Huth and Dhamar, calling for the expulsion of al-Mahdi al-Abbas and his Qasimi relatives on doctrinal grounds (al-jirafi 1951: 187; Zabarah 1958: 521-2; al-Shawkani 1929: ii. 134-5), though the Barat tribes’ incursions in preceding years suggest that doctrinal detail was not the main motive force (see e.g. Zabarah 1958: 13).’ ^[5] ’The Qasimis were accused of ’innovations’ (bida’). Zaydism had always recognized ijtihad (the formation of new law by extrapolation from scripture), but in the mid-eighteenth century a pronounced movement of criticism was under way. Ibn al-Amir, for instance, a Zaydi scholar who kept his political distance from the Imamate, blurred the distinction between his own school and the Shafi’i,14 with the result that conspicuous details, such as postures of prayer, became matters of contention among those less learned than he. The Barat qadis blamed the Qasimis for supporting him. On at least one occasion, an intestine squabble among San’ani ’ulamd’ over mosque appointments, phrased in these terms, led one faction to demand arbitration from al-’Ansi, ’the qadi of Hashid and Bakil’ (Zabarah 1941: 617), rather than from their Qasimi rulers.’ ^[6] Dresch also mentions millenarian militant movements: ’In 175I, however, a millenarian rising broke out in the western mountains, led by Abu ’AIamah, a black ’magician’ who preached a puritanical renewal of Islam. Accounts of the rising mention several forts in the west being taken from Bayt al-Ahmar: al-Qahirah at alMahabishah was lost, then Qaradah and al-Gharnuq at Najrah, just south of Hajjah, then Sabrah, and finally the fort near alMadayir that al-Mansur had bought several years earlier (Zabarah 1941: 53-5). During the forty years since al-Mansur al-Husayn b. al-Qasim (a rival of al-Mawahib) came to power in 1712, says a contemporary witness, the state had counted for little: "The rule of ’All al-Ahmar and his sons after him and of other tribesmen from Hashid remained over-great and excessive until God destroyed what they had built and extinguished their flame, proclaiming their weakness and perdition by the appearance of this dervish. (Quoted ibid. 54)’ ^[7] Accordingly we have opted for a rough approximation of the complex religious landscape of Yemen for the time being. More material is needed.

[1]: Walters, Delores M.: eHRAF Culture Summary for Yemen

[2]: (Burrowes and Wenner 2020) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/RMZUSMFG.

[3]: Hathaway, Jane 2003. "A Tale of Two Factions", 79pp

[4]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 212

[5]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 212p

[6]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 213

[7]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 206

levels.
(4) Imams and their advisers; (3) retainers; (2) Shaykhs and other tribal leaders; (1) Armed tribesmen
Political and military authority was loose and fluid. Accordingly, it is difficult to establish precise hierarchies and the code provided is only a rought approximation. Dresch describes the emergence of the Qasimid court, including the establishment of a retainer army: ’Besides the wealth to be extracted from the southern peasantry, the Imams of the period also had available, if they could retain control, taxes from a burgeoning coffee trade. The rise and fall of the Yemeni coffee trade with Europe matches almost exactly the trajectory of the Imamate’s wealth (see Boxhall 1974; Niebuhr 1792). The English and Dutch established factories at Mocha in 1618; the trade was probably at its height around 1730; and the world price of coffee finally crashed at the start of the nineteenth century, at which point one gets mention of Imams debasing the currency (al-’Amri 1985: 59). This wealth, however, had always to be fought for; the rulers became wealthier and more powerful than hitherto, but still were liable to dispute among themselves.’ ^[1] ’The state the Qasimis formed in the midst of this was none the less impressive (for the rulers’ genealogy see Fig. 6.1). Al-Qasim himself, who early in his fight against the Turks had wept over his children starving at Barat, was wealthy when the truce was signed. He built the mosque at Shaharah, then built houses for himself and his followers, planted coffee in al-Ahnum, and amassed more land than the public treasury (Nubdhah: 258, 334-6). The court expanded with the southern conquests. Al-Mutawakkil received an embassy from Ethiopia and exchanged gifts of fine horses with Aurangzib of India (Serjeant 1983: 80-1), while his relatives expressed concern about his monthly demands for funds from Lower Yemen. Further criticism of his taxation policy came from Muhammad al-Ghurbani at Barat, but in 1675 the levies on Lower Yemen were redoubled (ibid. 82). Under Muhammad Ahmad, ’He of al-Mawahib’" (1687-1718), the exactions became more severe still, in support of a grandiose court and a large standing army complete with slave soldiers (ibid., Zabarah 1958: 451, 457; alShawkani 1929: ii. 98).’ ^[1] Leading shaykhly families rose to prominence in this period, partly due to the military support they had provided to the Qasimids in their anti-Ottoman campaigns: ’At precisely this period, and in the space of a decade, the names of several great shaykhly families important nowadays all appear for the first time: al-Ahmar of Hashid, for instance, juzaylan of Dhu Muhammad, ani Hubaysh of Sufyan, Some of the lesser shaykhly houses, such as al-Ziyadi, al-Rarnmah, ’Irnran, ~lGhashrni, and al-Barawi, are attested as much as a century earlier (see e.g, Nubdhah: III, 121, 123, 175, 453). Many of the tribal divisions familiar nowadays had been present far longer, as readers will have gathered from Chapter 5, but the leading families now identified with them appear only at this later date. They were associated with the state and with events elsewhere than in tribal territory.’ ^[2] The relationship between imams and tribal leaders could be supportive as well as hostile, in both political and military terms: ’Sali1}. Hubaysh of Sufyan is first mentioned in 1698 as putting down a revolt of Raymah and Wa~ab (south-west of San’a’) against al-Mawahib’s governor: women’s earrings taken by his men were sold in San’a’ with fragments of ear still attached, provoking certain ’ulama’s» preach against Hubaysh’s cruelty (Zabarah 195 8: 670). Then, after a disastrous attempt on Yafi’ (in what is nowadays South Yemen), which resulted in Ibb being lost to the tribes of the eastern desert, al-Mawahib called to account the northern tribes who had failed him. In 1702 he sent his nephew to deal with ’Hamdan and their chief Ibn Hubaysh’, but a truce was made instead (ibid. 428; Zabarah 1941: 297). Five years later, after another failure in Yafi’, al-Mawahib sent al-Qasim b. al-Husayn and Sali1}. Hubaysh to Khamir to deal with Hashid, where the two fell out. In 1709 Hubaysh was again sent to Khamir by alMawahib, this time to deal with al-Qasim, but Hubaysh was finally tricked and killed there (ibid. 778-80; Zabarah 1958: 357)·’ ^[2] ’In the intervening period he had been placed in charge of an army to fight the tribes of the east and Yafi’. Al-Mawahib had ordered his minister to strike a balance between Hubaysh and Bin juzaylan of Dhii Muhammad (again, this is the earliest clear reference to this famous family), but the governor’s own aim was to balance the pair of them with the eastern tribes whom the Imam wanted conquered. The result of his intrigue was that the two Bakil chiefs opposed each other and the easterners won (ibid. 875; Zabarah 1941: 773). Soon after this Hubaysh was sent with al-Qasim b. al-Husayn to Hiith, and the Imam’s men razed a house nearby which belonged to Muhammad ’Ali al-Gharibi of Hashid (ibid. 778-80; id. 1958: 684; al-Shawkani 1929: ii. 46), who, as we shall see, is probably Bayt al-Ahmar’s immediate forebear.’ ^[3] Conflict between rival imams also occurred and tribal military support could be decisive for the outcome: ’A few years later, in 1713, al-Husayn b. al-Qasim declared himself Imam in opposition to al-Mawahib, and ’Ali Hadi Hubaysh (probably Sali1}.’s brother) supported him (Zabarah 1941: 601-9). ’Ali al-Ahmar of al-Usayrnat was sent by al-Mawahib to oppose him (again, this is the first mention of the family by name), but the tribes preferred the new claimant (ibid. 356,607). The country was at one point divided among several of these rival Imams-although, significantly, none of them claimed control of the major tribes (ibid. 616)-and the struggle between.the different Qasimis dragged on, with the shaykhs holding the balance, until al-Mawahib died in 1718.’ ^[4] ’Al-Mutawakkil al-Qasim then took the Imamate (Serjeant 1983: 84), and at this stage al-Ahmar was apparently on good terms with al-Husayn, the new Imam’s son (Zabarah 1941: 539); but when alNasir Muhammad made a rival claim in 1723 al-Ahrnar and many other shaykhs went over to him. The leading sayyids were meanwhile divided among themselves over the perennial problem of taxation (ibid. 289). In 1726 the Dhayban section of Arhab cut the roads, and a group of them made trouble in San’a’ itself (Zabarah 1958: 359). The Imam had them hunted through the streets, in response to which "Arhab tribesmen invited Hashid and Bakil to join them in taking revenge and wiping out the dishonour they had sustained. The tribes responded. ’All b. Qasim al-Ahmar, Paramount Shaykh of Hashid, and Nasir b. juzaylan, Paramount Shaykh of Bakil, proceeded to ’Amran where they met al-Husayn, the Imam’s son, whom they persuaded to join them ... (al]iriifi 1951: 181, trans. Stookey 1978: 151-2).’ ^[4] ’As Stookey points out, al-Husayn’s combination with the tribes against his father availed him little since when his father died, in the following year, and he claimed the Imamate himself under the title al-Mansiir, they supported his cousin, al-Nasir Muhammad.’ ^[4] ’But al-jirafi goes on, more importantly, to relate that al-Ahmar wrote al-Mansur al-Husayn a brusque letter demanding a meeting. The Imam feared an attempt at assassination; so he’assassinated alAhmar first, stuck his head on a lance, and galloped off with it through a hail of bullets from the shaykh’s enraged tribesmen (aljirafi 1951: 182). In fact, al-Ahrnar, accompanied by Bin juzaylan of DhU Muhammad and by Ahmad Muhammad Hubaysh of Sufyan, seems to have come to ’Asir, just outside San’a’, to seek a settlement (Zabarah 1941: 539 and 1958: 486). The details are probably lost forever, and we are told only that al-Ahmar ’had wished to make independent his own rule of part of the country’ (ibid.), which he very well may have done; but al-Mansur alHusayn’s view of the matter, as recorded in the histories, has all the vigorous clarity of the Zaydi tradition. The taunt to the tribesmen at the time was, typically, that they were no better than polytheists: he brandished al-Ahmar’s head on his spear and cried ’this is the head of your idol’.’ ^[5] Dresch also mentions millenarian militant movements: ’In 175I, however, a millenarian rising broke out in the western mountains, led by Abu ’AIamah, a black ’magician’ who preached a puritanical renewal of Islam. Accounts of the rising mention several forts in the west being taken from Bayt al-Ahmar: al-Qahirah at alMahabishah was lost, then Qaradah and al-Gharnuq at Najrah, just south of Hajjah, then Sabrah, and finally the fort near alMadayir that al-Mansur had bought several years earlier (Zabarah 1941: 53-5). During the forty years since al-Mansur al-Husayn b. al-Qasim (a rival of al-Mawahib) came to power in 1712, says a contemporary witness, the state had counted for little: "The rule of ’All al-Ahmar and his sons after him and of other tribesmen from Hashid remained over-great and excessive until God destroyed what they had built and extinguished their flame, proclaiming their weakness and perdition by the appearance of this dervish. (Quoted ibid. 54)’ ^[6] Tribal leaders held lands, collected taxes, and defended forts, enabling them to form a power base in their own right: ’Whatever setbacks they suffered, however, Bayt al-Ahmar were not displaced permanently. In the year after Abu ’Alamah’s rising, when the Sharif of Abu ’Arish and a rival claimant to the Imamate were active in the north-west, they were again a power to be reckoned with." Certainly they collected taxes as well as rents in the nineteenth century, and local memory credits them with taking revenue even from coastal towns in the north Tihamah, They retain considerable lands in the west to the present day.’ ^[6] ’Nor were Bayt al-Ahrnar of Hashid the only shaykhly family in the area: Nasir juzaylan of Dhu Muhammad lost forts to Abu ’Alamah at al-Masiih, and a garrison from Dhii Husayn were chased out of al-Sha’iq in Bani ’Awam (again near Hajjah), but the shaykhly families of Barat retained or re-established a hold there. Al al-Shayif of Dhfi Husayn, for example, still own land in Hajjah province, and Bayt Hubaysh of Sufyan have considerable holdings near al-Mahwit (Tutwiler 1987). The picture which emerges between the lines of eighteenth-century histories and tariijim is of myriad forts in the western mountains, each garrisoned by twenty or thirty tribal soldiers and controlling an area for some shaykh of the northern plateau. As the eighteenth century wears on, so the same pattern comes more clearly to light in Lower Yemen too: in his entry for 1752, for example, al-jirafi records for the first time what will punctuate his history thereafter, Barat tribesmen at odds with the Imam south of San’a’ (al-jirafi 195I: 183). They continued to appear there into the present century, leaving behind great numbers of tribal families and large shaykhly holdings of land outside tribal territory.’ ^[7] However, written records are often silent on these matters: ’These shaykhs are not the subject of Imamic history. Although the Imamate could not have functioned as it did without them, and although the granting of ’fiefs’ to them went on for centuries, the details of their financial and administrative position are nowhere written up. Nor has local documentation come to light. Until it does, we must form what estimate we can by looking at the great shaykhly houses nowadays.’ ^[8] In addition, sayyids also quarreled amongst themselves: ’AI-Mahdi al-iAbbas (1748-75) was very much a Sanani Imam, being based on the city throughout his reign. Among learned San’anis he retained a high reputation (al-Shawkani 19 29: 310-12; Serjeant 1983: 85 ff.), but it is plain that all was not well elsewhere. Abu ’Alamah’s 175I rising in the north-west has already been mentioned. Two years earlier a campaign had been fought in Lower Yemen against a ’sorcerer’ who promised his followers immunity against sword wounds and gun shots.V In the year before that, Hasan al-Tlkarn, of the qadi family from Barat and the north-east, was leading tribesmen at odds with the new Imam in Lower Yemen (Zabarah 1958: 684)Y In both the west and the south, the incursion of tribesmen over the preceding generation had not been quietly absorbed, and the affairs of the Barat tribes in particular (Dhii Muhammad and Dhu Husayn) became involved with those of the Imam’s capital at San’a’.’ ^[9] ’The connections of learning which were often important in an Imam’s rise to power (Ch. 5) could also readily generalize a threat to that power if one emerged; and the language of equality, justice, and religious probity linked the learned with the tribesmen also. In 17 68, for instance, the ’ulamd’ of Barat (particularly Bayt al-’Ansi) wrote to Zaydi centres such as Huth and Dhamar, calling for the expulsion of al-Mahdi al-Abbas and his Qasimi relatives on doctrinal grounds (al-jirafi 1951: 187; Zabarah 1958: 521-2; al-Shawkani 1929: ii. 134-5), though the Barat tribes’ incursions in preceding years suggest that doctrinal detail was not the main motive force (see e.g. Zabarah 1958: 13).’ ^[10] ’The Qasimis were accused of ’innovations’ (bida’). Zaydism had always recognized ijtihad (the formation of new law by extrapolation from scripture), but in the mid-eighteenth century a pronounced movement of criticism was under way. Ibn al-Amir, for instance, a Zaydi scholar who kept his political distance from the Imamate, blurred the distinction between his own school and the Shafi’i,14 with the result that conspicuous details, such as postures of prayer, became matters of contention among those less learned than he. The Barat qadis blamed the Qasimis for supporting him. On at least one occasion, an intestine squabble among San’ani ’ulamd’ over mosque appointments, phrased in these terms, led one faction to demand arbitration from al-’Ansi, ’the qadi of Hashid and Bakil’ (Zabarah 1941: 617), rather than from their Qasimi rulers.’ ^[11] Imams were often reduced to negotiate protection money with tribes under the threat of military incursions: ’Hasan al-’Ansi and the Barat tribes appeared outside San’a’ in 1770. They were successfully driven off, which provoked some vainglorious poetry from the victors (Serjeant 1983: 86; d. alShawkani 1929: i. 459), but elsewhere al-Shawkani suggests (ibid. ii. 136) how this was achieved: an addition to the tribesmen’s stipend of 20,000 riyals per annum, the implication being that they already received regular payment. These incursions and payments continued for several decades.P and the Barat tribes remained active in Lower Yemen until the Turks took the area in the late nineteenth century.’ ^[11] ’Al-Mansiir ’All b. al-Mahdi (1775-1809) was, like his father, a San’ani Imam, and from the city’s point of view was at first a considerable success (Serjeant 1983: 86-7; al-Shawkani 1929: i. 359 ff.). But at the state’s periphery, Sharif Harniid of Abu Arish was forced south by the Nejd Wahhabis into territory the Imamate had held or at least had part access to. The resulting loss of port revenue was almost certainly serious. I? From now on, the Imams’ ability to buy off the tribes declined sharply.’ ^[12] ’At the centre, al-Mansur’s grip on affairs failed when his sons fell out with each other, and the qadis of Bayt al-’Ulufi fell out with those of Bayt al-’Ansi, in part over stipends to the tribes (al-jirafi 1951: 192; al-tAmri 1985: 52-64; al-Hibshi 1980: 4; Zabarah 1929: i, 343-4). In 1818, in the time of the Imam al-Mahdi, a large body of tribesmen from Barat arrived at the capital in search of pay to fight in the Tiharnah (al-Hibshi 1980: 18). The Imam, having collected support of his own from Khawlan and Nihm, had ’All ’Abdullah al-Shayif of Dhii Husayn beheaded and the body strung up for three days, then thrown in the rubbish ditch outside Bab Sha’ub (ibid. 20-1; Zabarah 1929: ii. 66). But Bayt al-Shayif’s call for support to avenge this was answered by Wa’ilah, Hashid, al’ Amalisah, Sufyan, and Arhab, among others; in short, by tribes from as far away as what is now the Saudi border. They looted the city’s outskirts and carried off enough plunder ’to suffice the son’s son’ (ibid. 23-4; al-Arnri 1985: 88-91).’ ^[13] This lead to a gradual break-down of imamic authority: ’In 1823 a severe drought in the east forced a meeting of tribes at Jabal Barat, where they decided to seek aid from the Imam. When he refused and they turned on Lower Yemen, he seems to have been able to do nothing but warn others they were coming. ’When they reached Sarnarah [the pass that is sometimes taken to define Lower Yemen’s border; see Chapter I], each put down his pledge on a place, and they divided it all up as if their father had left them the land as inheritance’ (al-Hibshi 1980: 34). It is quite possible, of course, that many had indeed been left inheritance there, either property or presumed rights to ’fiefs’ (quta’): they had been involved with the area for the best part of a century. From 1823 onwards, though, they are said to have held the area unopposed: ’they took control of it by force and coercion, then settled there, married there, and forgot the east until the Faqih Sa’Id threw them out in [1840]’ (ibid.i.l" Even that was not sufficient, and when a further drought struck in 1835, Dhii Husayn, under Muhsin ’Ali alShayif, began raiding the north-west, while their women and children moved westwards by themselves in great numbers (ibid. 60-2). The Tiharnah had meanwhile fallen to the Egyptians.’ ^[14] ’At the centre, in San’a’, the Imamate under al-Mansiir ’All b. alMahdi ’Abdullah lost not only its resources but its ~oral vigour: ’drunkenness was the prevailing vice among the higher orders, and ... the corpses of men, women and children lay about the streets, no one taking the trouble to bury them .. .’ (Playfair 1859: 145)· Al-Mansiir squabbled with one of his relatives, who fled to Ta’izz and handed it over to the Egyptians. Al-Nasir ’Abdullah Ahsan was then raised to the Imamate by the soldiers in San’a’, only to be assassinated at Wadi Dahr in 1840.19 Al-Hadi Muhammad took the throne and succeeded briefly in regaining Mocha and Ta’izz, but when the Egyptians withdrew-under indirect pressure from Britain (Baldry 1976: I6I)-the Tiharnah fell under the control of Sharif Husayn.’ ^[14] ’The geographical pattern of power had now changed beyond recognition. Hashid (led in part by the qadis of Bayt Hanash), were in Raymah, as well as further north in the western mountains, Dhii Muhammad and Dhii Husayn were in the south, as well as in the Tihamah, and all were involved with Yam, whose homeland in Najran had usually been outside the field of Yemeni events but whose presence in Haraz and the Tiharnah was nothing new. The land of Hashid and Bakil, on the northern plateau, was itself a dead centre to the whirl of events involving tribesmen elsewhere. Sharif Husayn’s movements in 1845 make the point: starting from the north-west, in the Tihamah, he moved to the south, around Ta’izz, then to Barat, in the extreme north-east (al-Hibshi 1980: 120-31). The Imamate, at San’a’, retained a mere rump of territory.’ ^[15] ’There was -violence enough in the north itself, particularly in times of drought (see e.g. ibid. 306); but the tribal divisions, one should note, changed very little, and then rather in a longue duree than in the order of events recorded year by year. As we shall see in Chapter 9, the geographical detail even of sections within tribes changes hardly at all from al-Qasim’s time (early seventeenth century) to our own, and where change occurs it does so by recognizable quanta. Inequality and movement alike are registered in other terms. The prominence of major shaykhs, for instance, whom the tribesmen followed much as they did Imams, derived from wealth in the west and in Lower Yemen, and this is also where the great non-quantum shifts in territorial control resulted from tribesmen fighting each other. Inequality, power, and geographical change all attach, not to tribal self-definition, but to the history of successive Imams, to the history of a tradition or of a dynasty; and the dynasty had, by this point, collapsed because it had lost control of non-tribal land.’ ^[16] ’The Imams’ attempts to regain the south met with little success. Ahmad Salih Thawabah of Dhu Muhammad, who had controlled a large ;wa~he of Lower Yemen, was defeated by al-Mutawakkil Muhammad and finally executed in 1848, to the delight of the Imam’s supporters (Dresch 1987b). Within three years, however, his sons were formally granted land in much the same area (al-Hibshi 1980: 166). In the interim the Imam had been forced to send Dhii Muhammad horses as slaughter-beasts (’aqa’ir), which they took but did not have killed, and then pay them to fight again in the south (ibid. 146).20 Dhu Muhammad, Dhii Husayn, Arhab, Khawlan, and Hashid were also all fighting in the west, on the Imam’s side, the Sharif’s, or both; but the Ottoman Turks now seized the Tihamah. Hufash, near al-Mahwit, and al-Haymah were both contested, and several rival claimants to the Imamate appeared at once.’ ^[17] This enabled the eventual Ottoman re-conquest: ’In despair al-Mutawakkil asked the Turks to intervene in the highlands. They arrived at San’a’ in 1849 with 1,200 foot and 500 horse, but a riot ensued and they withdrew after only three weeks (Zabarah 1929: ii, 346 ff.; al-Sayaghi 1978: 25-7). AlMutawakkil was killed by his rivals. One of the Ashraf of the northern Tihamah, supported by ’a large following from Hashid, was then bought off with a gift of 2,000 riyals, robes of honour, and a horse (al-Sayaghi 1978: 31). The combination of a Tihamah Sharif and Hashid at the gates of San’a’ is symptomatic enough of the Imamate’s weakness.’ ^[18] ’From the summary histories one forms an impression of steadily increasing disorder through the next twenty years, until ’the people of San’a’ and others’ invited the Turks again to take the city ’after they had tired of the chaos which prevailed there, the dominion of men from the tribes, the cutting of the roads, and the lack of any ordered security’ (al-jirafi 1951: 205-6). A more recently available, and more detailed, source gives a different impression (al-Hibshi 19 80: 29 6 ff.). But the Turks seem in any case to have had designs on the highlands: they had increased their forces on the coast ’until stores were coming ashore with San’a’ printed on every load’ (ibid. 315), and when they finally arrived, in 1872, they demanded the tax registers which would reveal to them the administration and resources of the whole country (al-Wasi’I 1928: IIO). They were to remain in highland Yemen until 19 18.’ ^[18] ’For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then, Yemen had been plagued by disputes between rival Imams and by tribal disorder. The Imamate had taken the form of an elaborate dynastic state, yet failed to secure the means to support itself or to transmit authority without dispute. Al-Shamahi credits the Qasimi dawlah with surviving until the middle of the nineteenth century. In name it did. He rationalizes the great decline of its power by saying that al-Mu’ayyad Muhammad (d. 1686) was the last of the Qasimis to possess all the qualities needed of an Imam, and that the rulers after him were more like kings (al-Shamahi 1972: 144-6). Similarly, al-Wazir (1971: 50) attributes the collapse of the state to the appearance of ’evil Imams’. Authors writing nearer the time each choose some point at which the real decline starts, always simply by reference to the actions or fate of a particular Imam (e.g. al-Hibshi 1980: 193).’ ^[19]

[1]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 200

[2]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 202

[3]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 202p

[4]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 203

[5]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 203p

[6]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 206

[7]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 206p

[8]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 209

[9]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 212

[10]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 212p

[11]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 213

[12]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 214

[13]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 214p

[14]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 215

[15]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 215p

[16]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 216

[17]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 216p

[18]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 217

[19]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 217p

levels.
(3) Imams; (2) Retainers, advisers and other courtiers of imams; (1) Shaykhs and other tribal leaders
Political authority was loose and fluid. Accordingly, it is difficult to establish precise hierarchies and the code provided is only a rought approximation. Dresch describes the establishment of the Qasimi court: ’Besides the wealth to be extracted from the southern peasantry, the Imams of the period also had available, if they could retain control, taxes from a burgeoning coffee trade. The rise and fall of the Yemeni coffee trade with Europe matches almost exactly the trajectory of the Imamate’s wealth (see Boxhall 1974; Niebuhr 1792). The English and Dutch established factories at Mocha in 1618; the trade was probably at its height around 1730; and the world price of coffee finally crashed at the start of the nineteenth century, at which point one gets mention of Imams debasing the currency (al-’Amri 1985: 59). This wealth, however, had always to be fought for; the rulers became wealthier and more powerful than hitherto, but still were liable to dispute among themselves.’ ^[1] ’The state the Qasimis formed in the midst of this was none the less impressive (for the rulers’ genealogy see Fig. 6.1). Al-Qasim himself, who early in his fight against the Turks had wept over his children starving at Barat, was wealthy when the truce was signed. He built the mosque at Shaharah, then built houses for himself and his followers, planted coffee in al-Ahnum, and amassed more land than the public treasury (Nubdhah: 258, 334-6). The court expanded with the southern conquests. Al-Mutawakkil received an embassy from Ethiopia and exchanged gifts of fine horses with Aurangzib of India (Serjeant 1983: 80-1), while his relatives expressed concern about his monthly demands for funds from Lower Yemen. Further criticism of his taxation policy came from Muhammad al-Ghurbani at Barat, but in 1675 the levies on Lower Yemen were redoubled (ibid. 82). Under Muhammad Ahmad, ’He of al-Mawahib’" (1687-1718), the exactions became more severe still, in support of a grandiose court and a large standing army complete with slave soldiers (ibid., Zabarah 1958: 451, 457; alShawkani 1929: ii. 98).’ ^[1] Leading shaykhly families rose to prominence in this period: ’At precisely this period, and in the space of a decade, the names of several great shaykhly families important nowadays all appear for the first time: al-Ahmar of Hashid, for instance, juzaylan of Dhu Muhammad, ani Hubaysh of Sufyan, Some of the lesser shaykhly houses, such as al-Ziyadi, al-Rarnmah, ’Irnran, ~lGhashrni, and al-Barawi, are attested as much as a century earlier (see e.g, Nubdhah: III, 121, 123, 175, 453). Many of the tribal divisions familiar nowadays had been present far longer, as readers will have gathered from Chapter 5, but the leading families now identified with them appear only at this later date. They were associated with the state and with events elsewhere than in tribal territory.’ ^[2] The relationship between imams and tribal leaders could be supportive as well as hostile: ’Sali1}. Hubaysh of Sufyan is first mentioned in 1698 as putting down a revolt of Raymah and Wa~ab (south-west of San’a’) against al-Mawahib’s governor: women’s earrings taken by his men were sold in San’a’ with fragments of ear still attached, provoking certain ’ulama’s» preach against Hubaysh’s cruelty (Zabarah 195 8: 670). Then, after a disastrous attempt on Yafi’ (in what is nowadays South Yemen), which resulted in Ibb being lost to the tribes of the eastern desert, al-Mawahib called to account the northern tribes who had failed him. In 1702 he sent his nephew to deal with ’Hamdan and their chief Ibn Hubaysh’, but a truce was made instead (ibid. 428; Zabarah 1941: 297). Five years later, after another failure in Yafi’, al-Mawahib sent al-Qasim b. al-Husayn and Sali1}. Hubaysh to Khamir to deal with Hashid, where the two fell out. In 1709 Hubaysh was again sent to Khamir by alMawahib, this time to deal with al-Qasim, but Hubaysh was finally tricked and killed there (ibid. 778-80; Zabarah 1958: 357)·’ ^[2] ’In the intervening period he had been placed in charge of an army to fight the tribes of the east and Yafi’. Al-Mawahib had ordered his minister to strike a balance between Hubaysh and Bin juzaylan of Dhii Muhammad (again, this is the earliest clear reference to this famous family), but the governor’s own aim was to balance the pair of them with the eastern tribes whom the Imam wanted conquered. The result of his intrigue was that the two Bakil chiefs opposed each other and the easterners won (ibid. 875; Zabarah 1941: 773). Soon after this Hubaysh was sent with al-Qasim b. al-Husayn to Hiith, and the Imam’s men razed a house nearby which belonged to Muhammad ’Ali al-Gharibi of Hashid (ibid. 778-80; id. 1958: 684; al-Shawkani 1929: ii. 46), who, as we shall see, is probably Bayt al-Ahmar’s immediate forebear.’ ^[3] Conflict between rival imams also occurred and tribal support could be decisive for the outcome: ’A few years later, in 1713, al-Husayn b. al-Qasim declared himself Imam in opposition to al-Mawahib, and ’Ali Hadi Hubaysh (probably Sali1}.’s brother) supported him (Zabarah 1941: 601-9). ’Ali al-Ahmar of al-Usayrnat was sent by al-Mawahib to oppose him (again, this is the first mention of the family by name), but the tribes preferred the new claimant (ibid. 356,607). The country was at one point divided among several of these rival Imams-although, significantly, none of them claimed control of the major tribes (ibid. 616)-and the struggle between.the different Qasimis dragged on, with the shaykhs holding the balance, until al-Mawahib died in 1718.’ ^[4] ’Al-Mutawakkil al-Qasim then took the Imamate (Serjeant 1983: 84), and at this stage al-Ahmar was apparently on good terms with al-Husayn, the new Imam’s son (Zabarah 1941: 539); but when alNasir Muhammad made a rival claim in 1723 al-Ahrnar and many other shaykhs went over to him. The leading sayyids were meanwhile divided among themselves over the perennial problem of taxation (ibid. 289). In 1726 the Dhayban section of Arhab cut the roads, and a group of them made trouble in San’a’ itself (Zabarah 1958: 359). The Imam had them hunted through the streets, in response to which "Arhab tribesmen invited Hashid and Bakil to join them in taking revenge and wiping out the dishonour they had sustained. The tribes responded. ’All b. Qasim al-Ahmar, Paramount Shaykh of Hashid, and Nasir b. juzaylan, Paramount Shaykh of Bakil, proceeded to ’Amran where they met al-Husayn, the Imam’s son, whom they persuaded to join them ... (al]iriifi 1951: 181, trans. Stookey 1978: 151-2).’ ^[4] ’As Stookey points out, al-Husayn’s combination with the tribes against his father availed him little since when his father died, in the following year, and he claimed the Imamate himself under the title al-Mansiir, they supported his cousin, al-Nasir Muhammad.’ ^[4] ’But al-jirafi goes on, more importantly, to relate that al-Ahmar wrote al-Mansur al-Husayn a brusque letter demanding a meeting. The Imam feared an attempt at assassination; so he’assassinated alAhmar first, stuck his head on a lance, and galloped off with it through a hail of bullets from the shaykh’s enraged tribesmen (aljirafi 1951: 182). In fact, al-Ahrnar, accompanied by Bin juzaylan of DhU Muhammad and by Ahmad Muhammad Hubaysh of Sufyan, seems to have come to ’Asir, just outside San’a’, to seek a settlement (Zabarah 1941: 539 and 1958: 486). The details are probably lost forever, and we are told only that al-Ahmar ’had wished to make independent his own rule of part of the country’ (ibid.), which he very well may have done; but al-Mansur alHusayn’s view of the matter, as recorded in the histories, has all the vigorous clarity of the Zaydi tradition. The taunt to the tribesmen at the time was, typically, that they were no better than polytheists: he brandished al-Ahmar’s head on his spear and cried ’this is the head of your idol’.’ ^[5] Dresch also mentions millenarian militant movements: ’In 175I, however, a millenarian rising broke out in the western mountains, led by Abu ’AIamah, a black ’magician’ who preached a puritanical renewal of Islam. Accounts of the rising mention several forts in the west being taken from Bayt al-Ahmar: al-Qahirah at alMahabishah was lost, then Qaradah and al-Gharnuq at Najrah, just south of Hajjah, then Sabrah, and finally the fort near alMadayir that al-Mansur had bought several years earlier (Zabarah 1941: 53-5). During the forty years since al-Mansur al-Husayn b. al-Qasim (a rival of al-Mawahib) came to power in 1712, says a contemporary witness, the state had counted for little: "The rule of ’All al-Ahmar and his sons after him and of other tribesmen from Hashid remained over-great and excessive until God destroyed what they had built and extinguished their flame, proclaiming their weakness and perdition by the appearance of this dervish. (Quoted ibid. 54)’ ^[6] Tribal leaders held lands, collected taxes, and defended forts, enabling them to form a power base in their own right: ’Whatever setbacks they suffered, however, Bayt al-Ahmar were not displaced permanently. In the year after Abu ’Alamah’s rising, when the Sharif of Abu ’Arish and a rival claimant to the Imamate were active in the north-west, they were again a power to be reckoned with." Certainly they collected taxes as well as rents in the nineteenth century, and local memory credits them with taking revenue even from coastal towns in the north Tihamah, They retain considerable lands in the west to the present day.’ ^[6] ’Nor were Bayt al-Ahrnar of Hashid the only shaykhly family in the area: Nasir juzaylan of Dhu Muhammad lost forts to Abu ’Alamah at al-Masiih, and a garrison from Dhii Husayn were chased out of al-Sha’iq in Bani ’Awam (again near Hajjah), but the shaykhly families of Barat retained or re-established a hold there. Al al-Shayif of Dhfi Husayn, for example, still own land in Hajjah province, and Bayt Hubaysh of Sufyan have considerable holdings near al-Mahwit (Tutwiler 1987). The picture which emerges between the lines of eighteenth-century histories and tariijim is of myriad forts in the western mountains, each garrisoned by twenty or thirty tribal soldiers and controlling an area for some shaykh of the northern plateau. As the eighteenth century wears on, so the same pattern comes more clearly to light in Lower Yemen too: in his entry for 1752, for example, al-jirafi records for the first time what will punctuate his history thereafter, Barat tribesmen at odds with the Imam south of San’a’ (al-jirafi 195I: 183). They continued to appear there into the present century, leaving behind great numbers of tribal families and large shaykhly holdings of land outside tribal territory.’ ^[7] However, written records are often silent on these matters: ’These shaykhs are not the subject of Imamic history. Although the Imamate could not have functioned as it did without them, and although the granting of ’fiefs’ to them went on for centuries, the details of their financial and administrative position are nowhere written up. Nor has local documentation come to light. Until it does, we must form what estimate we can by looking at the great shaykhly houses nowadays.’ ^[8] In addition, sayyids also quarreled amongst themselves: ’AI-Mahdi al-iAbbas (1748-75) was very much a Sanani Imam, being based on the city throughout his reign. Among learned San’anis he retained a high reputation (al-Shawkani 19 29: 310-12; Serjeant 1983: 85 ff.), but it is plain that all was not well elsewhere. Abu ’Alamah’s 175I rising in the north-west has already been mentioned. Two years earlier a campaign had been fought in Lower Yemen against a ’sorcerer’ who promised his followers immunity against sword wounds and gun shots.V In the year before that, Hasan al-Tlkarn, of the qadi family from Barat and the north-east, was leading tribesmen at odds with the new Imam in Lower Yemen (Zabarah 1958: 684)Y In both the west and the south, the incursion of tribesmen over the preceding generation had not been quietly absorbed, and the affairs of the Barat tribes in particular (Dhii Muhammad and Dhu Husayn) became involved with those of the Imam’s capital at San’a’.’ ^[9] ’The connections of learning which were often important in an Imam’s rise to power (Ch. 5) could also readily generalize a threat to that power if one emerged; and the language of equality, justice, and religious probity linked the learned with the tribesmen also. In 17 68, for instance, the ’ulamd’ of Barat (particularly Bayt al-’Ansi) wrote to Zaydi centres such as Huth and Dhamar, calling for the expulsion of al-Mahdi al-Abbas and his Qasimi relatives on doctrinal grounds (al-jirafi 1951: 187; Zabarah 1958: 521-2; al-Shawkani 1929: ii. 134-5), though the Barat tribes’ incursions in preceding years suggest that doctrinal detail was not the main motive force (see e.g. Zabarah 1958: 13).’ ^[10] ’The Qasimis were accused of ’innovations’ (bida’). Zaydism had always recognized ijtihad (the formation of new law by extrapolation from scripture), but in the mid-eighteenth century a pronounced movement of criticism was under way. Ibn al-Amir, for instance, a Zaydi scholar who kept his political distance from the Imamate, blurred the distinction between his own school and the Shafi’i,14 with the result that conspicuous details, such as postures of prayer, became matters of contention among those less learned than he. The Barat qadis blamed the Qasimis for supporting him. On at least one occasion, an intestine squabble among San’ani ’ulamd’ over mosque appointments, phrased in these terms, led one faction to demand arbitration from al-’Ansi, ’the qadi of Hashid and Bakil’ (Zabarah 1941: 617), rather than from their Qasimi rulers.’ ^[11] Imams were often reduced to negotiate protection money with tribes under the threat of incursions: ’Hasan al-’Ansi and the Barat tribes appeared outside San’a’ in 1770. They were successfully driven off, which provoked some vainglorious poetry from the victors (Serjeant 1983: 86; d. alShawkani 1929: i. 459), but elsewhere al-Shawkani suggests (ibid. ii. 136) how this was achieved: an addition to the tribesmen’s stipend of 20,000 riyals per annum, the implication being that they already received regular payment. These incursions and payments continued for several decades.P and the Barat tribes remained active in Lower Yemen until the Turks took the area in the late nineteenth century.’ ^[11] ’Al-Mansiir ’All b. al-Mahdi (1775-1809) was, like his father, a San’ani Imam, and from the city’s point of view was at first a considerable success (Serjeant 1983: 86-7; al-Shawkani 1929: i. 359 ff.). But at the state’s periphery, Sharif Harniid of Abu Arish was forced south by the Nejd Wahhabis into territory the Imamate had held or at least had part access to. The resulting loss of port revenue was almost certainly serious. I? From now on, the Imams’ ability to buy off the tribes declined sharply.’ ^[12] ’At the centre, al-Mansur’s grip on affairs failed when his sons fell out with each other, and the qadis of Bayt al-’Ulufi fell out with those of Bayt al-’Ansi, in part over stipends to the tribes (al-jirafi 1951: 192; al-tAmri 1985: 52-64; al-Hibshi 1980: 4; Zabarah 1929: i, 343-4). In 1818, in the time of the Imam al-Mahdi, a large body of tribesmen from Barat arrived at the capital in search of pay to fight in the Tiharnah (al-Hibshi 1980: 18). The Imam, having collected support of his own from Khawlan and Nihm, had ’All ’Abdullah al-Shayif of Dhii Husayn beheaded and the body strung up for three days, then thrown in the rubbish ditch outside Bab Sha’ub (ibid. 20-1; Zabarah 1929: ii. 66). But Bayt al-Shayif’s call for support to avenge this was answered by Wa’ilah, Hashid, al’ Amalisah, Sufyan, and Arhab, among others; in short, by tribes from as far away as what is now the Saudi border. They looted the city’s outskirts and carried off enough plunder ’to suffice the son’s son’ (ibid. 23-4; al-Arnri 1985: 88-91).’ ^[13] This lead to a gradual break-down of imamic authority: ’In 1823 a severe drought in the east forced a meeting of tribes at Jabal Barat, where they decided to seek aid from the Imam. When he refused and they turned on Lower Yemen, he seems to have been able to do nothing but warn others they were coming. ’When they reached Sarnarah [the pass that is sometimes taken to define Lower Yemen’s border; see Chapter I], each put down his pledge on a place, and they divided it all up as if their father had left them the land as inheritance’ (al-Hibshi 1980: 34). It is quite possible, of course, that many had indeed been left inheritance there, either property or presumed rights to ’fiefs’ (quta’): they had been involved with the area for the best part of a century. From 1823 onwards, though, they are said to have held the area unopposed: ’they took control of it by force and coercion, then settled there, married there, and forgot the east until the Faqih Sa’Id threw them out in [1840]’ (ibid.i.l" Even that was not sufficient, and when a further drought struck in 1835, Dhii Husayn, under Muhsin ’Ali alShayif, began raiding the north-west, while their women and children moved westwards by themselves in great numbers (ibid. 60-2). The Tiharnah had meanwhile fallen to the Egyptians.’ ^[14] ’At the centre, in San’a’, the Imamate under al-Mansiir ’All b. alMahdi ’Abdullah lost not only its resources but its ~oral vigour: ’drunkenness was the prevailing vice among the higher orders, and ... the corpses of men, women and children lay about the streets, no one taking the trouble to bury them .. .’ (Playfair 1859: 145)· Al-Mansiir squabbled with one of his relatives, who fled to Ta’izz and handed it over to the Egyptians. Al-Nasir ’Abdullah Ahsan was then raised to the Imamate by the soldiers in San’a’, only to be assassinated at Wadi Dahr in 1840.19 Al-Hadi Muhammad took the throne and succeeded briefly in regaining Mocha and Ta’izz, but when the Egyptians withdrew-under indirect pressure from Britain (Baldry 1976: I6I)-the Tiharnah fell under the control of Sharif Husayn.’ ^[14] ’The geographical pattern of power had now changed beyond recognition. Hashid (led in part by the qadis of Bayt Hanash), were in Raymah, as well as further north in the western mountains, Dhii Muhammad and Dhii Husayn were in the south, as well as in the Tihamah, and all were involved with Yam, whose homeland in Najran had usually been outside the field of Yemeni events but whose presence in Haraz and the Tiharnah was nothing new. The land of Hashid and Bakil, on the northern plateau, was itself a dead centre to the whirl of events involving tribesmen elsewhere. Sharif Husayn’s movements in 1845 make the point: starting from the north-west, in the Tihamah, he moved to the south, around Ta’izz, then to Barat, in the extreme north-east (al-Hibshi 1980: 120-31). The Imamate, at San’a’, retained a mere rump of territory.’ ^[15] ’There was -violence enough in the north itself, particularly in times of drought (see e.g. ibid. 306); but the tribal divisions, one should note, changed very little, and then rather in a longue duree than in the order of events recorded year by year. As we shall see in Chapter 9, the geographical detail even of sections within tribes changes hardly at all from al-Qasim’s time (early seventeenth century) to our own, and where change occurs it does so by recognizable quanta. Inequality and movement alike are registered in other terms. The prominence of major shaykhs, for instance, whom the tribesmen followed much as they did Imams, derived from wealth in the west and in Lower Yemen, and this is also where the great non-quantum shifts in territorial control resulted from tribesmen fighting each other. Inequality, power, and geographical change all attach, not to tribal self-definition, but to the history of successive Imams, to the history of a tradition or of a dynasty; and the dynasty had, by this point, collapsed because it had lost control of non-tribal land.’ ^[16] ’The Imams’ attempts to regain the south met with little success. Ahmad Salih Thawabah of Dhu Muhammad, who had controlled a large ;wa~he of Lower Yemen, was defeated by al-Mutawakkil Muhammad and finally executed in 1848, to the delight of the Imam’s supporters (Dresch 1987b). Within three years, however, his sons were formally granted land in much the same area (al-Hibshi 1980: 166). In the interim the Imam had been forced to send Dhii Muhammad horses as slaughter-beasts (’aqa’ir), which they took but did not have killed, and then pay them to fight again in the south (ibid. 146).20 Dhu Muhammad, Dhii Husayn, Arhab, Khawlan, and Hashid were also all fighting in the west, on the Imam’s side, the Sharif’s, or both; but the Ottoman Turks now seized the Tihamah. Hufash, near al-Mahwit, and al-Haymah were both contested, and several rival claimants to the Imamate appeared at once.’ ^[17] This enabled the eventual Ottoman re-conquest: ’In despair al-Mutawakkil asked the Turks to intervene in the highlands. They arrived at San’a’ in 1849 with 1,200 foot and 500 horse, but a riot ensued and they withdrew after only three weeks (Zabarah 1929: ii, 346 ff.; al-Sayaghi 1978: 25-7). AlMutawakkil was killed by his rivals. One of the Ashraf of the northern Tihamah, supported by ’a large following from Hashid, was then bought off with a gift of 2,000 riyals, robes of honour, and a horse (al-Sayaghi 1978: 31). The combination of a Tihamah Sharif and Hashid at the gates of San’a’ is symptomatic enough of the Imamate’s weakness.’ ^[18] ’From the summary histories one forms an impression of steadily increasing disorder through the next twenty years, until ’the people of San’a’ and others’ invited the Turks again to take the city ’after they had tired of the chaos which prevailed there, the dominion of men from the tribes, the cutting of the roads, and the lack of any ordered security’ (al-jirafi 1951: 205-6). A more recently available, and more detailed, source gives a different impression (al-Hibshi 19 80: 29 6 ff.). But the Turks seem in any case to have had designs on the highlands: they had increased their forces on the coast ’until stores were coming ashore with San’a’ printed on every load’ (ibid. 315), and when they finally arrived, in 1872, they demanded the tax registers which would reveal to them the administration and resources of the whole country (al-Wasi’I 1928: IIO). They were to remain in highland Yemen until 19 18.’ ^[18] ’For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then, Yemen had been plagued by disputes between rival Imams and by tribal disorder. The Imamate had taken the form of an elaborate dynastic state, yet failed to secure the means to support itself or to transmit authority without dispute. Al-Shamahi credits the Qasimi dawlah with surviving until the middle of the nineteenth century. In name it did. He rationalizes the great decline of its power by saying that al-Mu’ayyad Muhammad (d. 1686) was the last of the Qasimis to possess all the qualities needed of an Imam, and that the rulers after him were more like kings (al-Shamahi 1972: 144-6). Similarly, al-Wazir (1971: 50) attributes the collapse of the state to the appearance of ’evil Imams’. Authors writing nearer the time each choose some point at which the real decline starts, always simply by reference to the actions or fate of a particular Imam (e.g. al-Hibshi 1980: 193).’ ^[19]

[1]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 200

[2]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 202

[3]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 202p

[4]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 203

[5]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 203p

[6]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 206

[7]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 206p

[8]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 209

[9]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 212

[10]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 212p

[11]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 213

[12]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 214

[13]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 214p

[14]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 215

[15]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 215p

[16]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 216

[17]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 216p

[18]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 217

[19]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 217p

’The state the Qasimis formed in the midst of this was none the less impressive (for the rulers’ genealogy see Fig. 6.1). Al-Qasim himself, who early in his fight against the Turks had wept over his children starving at Barat, was wealthy when the truce was signed. He built the mosque at Shaharah, then built houses for himself and his followers, planted coffee in al-Ahnum, and amassed more land than the public treasury (Nubdhah: 258, 334-6). The court expanded with the southern conquests. Al-Mutawakkil received an embassy from Ethiopia and exchanged gifts of fine horses with Aurangzib of India (Serjeant 1983: 80-1), while his relatives expressed concern about his monthly demands for funds from Lower Yemen. Further criticism of his taxation policy came from Muhammad al-Ghurbani at Barat, but in 1675 the levies on Lower Yemen were redoubled (ibid. 82). Under Muhammad Ahmad, ’He of al-Mawahib’" (1687-1718), the exactions became more severe still, in support of a grandiose court and a large standing army complete with slave soldiers (ibid., Zabarah 1958: 451, 457; alShawkani 1929: ii. 98).’ ^[1]

[1]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 200

Most Yemenis were Muslims.

’The state the Qasimis formed in the midst of this was none the less impressive (for the rulers’ genealogy see Fig. 6.1). Al-Qasim himself, who early in his fight against the Turks had wept over his children starving at Barat, was wealthy when the truce was signed. He built the mosque at Shaharah, then built houses for himself and his followers, planted coffee in al-Ahnum, and amassed more land than the public treasury (Nubdhah: 258, 334-6). The court expanded with the southern conquests. Al-Mutawakkil received an embassy from Ethiopia and exchanged gifts of fine horses with Aurangzib of India (Serjeant 1983: 80-1), while his relatives expressed concern about his monthly demands for funds from Lower Yemen. Further criticism of his taxation policy came from Muhammad al-Ghurbani at Barat, but in 1675 the levies on Lower Yemen were redoubled (ibid. 82). Under Muhammad Ahmad, ’He of al-Mawahib’" (1687-1718), the exactions became more severe still, in support of a grandiose court and a large standing army complete with slave soldiers (ibid., Zabarah 1958: 451, 457; alShawkani 1929: ii. 98).’ ^[1]

[1]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 200

^[1]

[1]: Andrey Korotayev, pers. comm., February 2018.

^[1]

[1]: Andrey Korotayev, pers. comm., February 2018.

Traditional Islamic law does not recognize professional lawyers.

Political leadership and judicial duties overlapped in the person of the imam: ’Hakim, the standard term for “judge” (qadi was also used), as in hakim sharʿi or “shariʽa judge,” had another sense, which meant “ruler,” as in the identification of Imam Yahya as hakim al-yaman, “ruler of Yemen.?”3 In this domain of overlapping terminology a verb from the same h-k-m root, followed by bainahum (lit. “between them”) can mean “he governed” when used of an imam or, beyond the sphere of the state, ofan important rural shaykh, and “he adjudicated their case” (p.169) when used in reference to a judge. One is reminded of a similar double resonance of the English word “court,” held by both kings and judges. While the categories judge and imam are not to be confused, it is also true that the activity of governing in Yemen was in general very much devoted to settling disputes, with only a specialized part of this activity being handled by the shariʽa court variety of hakim.’ ^[1] Messick describes the interaction of imams, judges and muftis with the public: ’To Yemenis, judges in this type of open setting, accessible to the public, appeared in a posture known as muwajaha, from wajh meaning “face,” the quintessential face-to-face encounter of official public life (see fig. 9). Muwajaha was also the format in which the mufti received afternoon fatwa seekers, and the same sort of generic activity was characteristic as well of both ruling imams and local governors. Direct accessibility, based on a public presence that enabled personal encounters and personal solutions to problems, was a fundamental value of the old administrative style.’ ^[2]

[1]: Messick, Brinkley 1992. "The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society", 168p

[2]: Messick, Brinkley 1992. "The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society", 168

Formal Islamic and informal tribal law co-existed.

The coffee trade was an important source of revenue for the imamate: ’Besides the wealth to be extracted from the southern peasantry, the Imams of the period also had available, if they could retain control, taxes from a burgeoning coffee trade. The rise and fall of the Yemeni coffee trade with Europe matches almost exactly the trajectory of the Imamate’s wealth (see Boxhall 1974; Niebuhr 1792). The English and Dutch established factories at Mocha in 1618; the trade was probably at its height around 1730; and the world price of coffee finally crashed at the start of the nineteenth century, at which point one gets mention of Imams debasing the currency (al-’Amri 1985: 59). This wealth, however, had always to be fought for; the rulers became wealthier and more powerful than hitherto, but still were liable to dispute among themselves.’ ^[1] Accordingly, public markets were probably present.

[1]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 200

According to Ethnographic Atlas variable 28 ’Intensity of Agriculture’, the Yemenis practice ’Intensive irrigated agriculture.’ Yemen has a long tradition of irrigated terraced agriculture, although most land was under dry cultivation: ’Yemen’s difficult terrain, limited soil, inconsistent water supply, and large number of microclimates have fostered some of the most highly sophisticated methods of water conservation and seed adaptation found anywhere in the world, making possible the cultivation of surprisingly diverse crops. The most common crops are cereals such as millet, corn (maize), wheat, barley, and sorghum; myriad vegetables from a burgeoning truck farm industry have appeared on the market in recent years. There has also been extensive cultivation of fruits-both tropical (mangoes, plantains, bananas, melons, papayas, and citrus) and temperate (pears, peaches, apples, and grapes).’ ^[1]

[1]: (Burrowes and Wenner 2020) Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/RMZUSMFG.

Imams kept food in storehouses, which was distributed to the poor in times of need: ’The structure of payments was that of the state itself. From the time of the Turks (1636) to that of al-Mahdi of al-Mawahib (1687) Yemen supposedly ’was spared hunger and strife, and that wealth was taken which the law permits’. (As we have seen, this is too rosy a view; but the perception is what concerns us.) ’When this man [alMawahib] arose he took what wealth is permitted and what is not permitted. His state grew strong, his prestige became great, his power expanded, the number of his troops increased, and he became more like a king than a caliph’ (al-Shawkani 1929: ii. 298). Yet the control of such wealth from taxation was surely vital where the country’s agricultural. base was so vulnerable; as in 1723-4, for instance, when "a drought struck San’a’ and most of the mountains of Yemen. Most people (sic. akthar al-niis) died of hunger and the villages were emptied of their inhabitants ... People ate even carrion. The price of all grains rose and a qadab reached eight [silver] riyals. Prosperous people gave what they had as alms. AI-Mutawakkil Qasirn b. al-Husayn gave out all that was edible from his store-houses ... and it was distributed among the poor in the alleyways of San’a’. Then there was abundance at the start of the next year [i.e. from the end of summer 1724], which went on until prices reached four qadahs of wheat for only one riyal, or six of sorghum, or eight of barley. Praise God, then, the Lord of the worlds. (Zabarah 1941: 588)" The role of the Imams’ public store-houses in smoothing such fluctuations would be an interesting subject. But what is important for the present purpose is the concept of generosity at work here.’ ^[1] But Jews were excluded from this after the emergence of a Messianic movement: ’Various natural disasters, especially a severe drought. that struck Yemen in the years following the execution of Jamal reinforced the opinion among Ihe Muslims in Yemen that the country was being punished for the act. For their part the Jews worked 10 spread and estab· Iish this view. II was also reported that a certain Jewish leader lOl vowed to take Muslim property to compensate for what the Imam Isma’il had confiscated from the Jews. It is related that he actually did so by means of witchcraft that destroyed Muslim propeny and harmed their villages and fields. 102 From a Hebrew source at our disposal, a lament by Shelo~ mo ben Ho!er al_’Uzayri,IOJ we learn that the reference is to the serious drought that occurred in 1669 throughout Yemen. This calamity struck the Jews in panicular, not only on account of the economic structure of the country, in which they were chiefly anisans remote from farming, but also owing to their poverty resulting from the heavy fines imposed on them and the expropriation of their property two years previously. The government, as was its wont, exploited these terrible circumstances, and did not supply the Jews with grain from its stores unless they convened. And indeed, as Hamami,l04 "about five hundred or more of Israel altered their faith, and it was as the generation of apostasy owing to the poverty that was from the start and owing to the famine that visited the earth", ’Uzayri points out not only the great famine but also the wandering of the Jews from place (0 place in search of food, and the decrees imposed on them by the "kingdom of evil" precisely at the time of their woe.’ ^[2]

[1]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 208

[2]: Tobi, Yosef 1999. "The Jews of Yemen", 75p

Traditionally, water was gathered from freshwater springs: ’Traditionally, springs were used for drinking water supply as well asfor agricultural purposes.’ ^[1]

[1]: Almas, Ahmed A. M. and Scholz, Miklas 2006. "Agriculture and Water Resources Crisis in Yemen: Need for Sustainable Agriculture", 59

The coffee trade was an important source of revenue for the imamate: ’Besides the wealth to be extracted from the southern peasantry, the Imams of the period also had available, if they could retain control, taxes from a burgeoning coffee trade. The rise and fall of the Yemeni coffee trade with Europe matches almost exactly the trajectory of the Imamate’s wealth (see Boxhall 1974; Niebuhr 1792). The English and Dutch established factories at Mocha in 1618; the trade was probably at its height around 1730; and the world price of coffee finally crashed at the start of the nineteenth century, at which point one gets mention of Imams debasing the currency (al-’Amri 1985: 59). This wealth, however, had always to be fought for; the rulers became wealthier and more powerful than hitherto, but still were liable to dispute among themselves.’ ^[1] Accordingly, ports were probably present.

[1]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 200

Written records in Arabic have a long scholarly tradition in Yemen.

Written records in Arabic have a long scholarly tradition in Yemen.

Written records in Arabic have a long scholarly tradition in Yemen.

No information on mnemonic devices has been found so far.

Historiography and Islamic theology may have been present along with treatises on Islamic law. More material is needed on scholarly writings in the Qasimid period.

The primary works of reference were Qur’an and Sunna: ’A primary sort of textual authority was derived:4 it followed from the existence and importance of an original, genuine, and ultimately reliable text, which refers back to the position and identity of the Quran. “In the genealogy of texts,” Edward Said writes (1983: 46), “there is a first text, a sacred prototype, a scripture, which readers always approach through the text before them.” A genealogy of authoritative texts in Islam must begin with a consideration of the Quran as the authoritative original. The paradigmatic, Ur text qualities of the Quran concern both content and textual form. Substantively, the Quran and the Sunna, the practice of the Prophet, constituted the two fundamental “sources” (usul, sing. asl) for the elaboration of shariʽa jurisprudence. Discursively, the Quran represents both the end and the beginning of the kitab (text, scripture, writing, book). Just as Muhammad was the last, the “seal,” of the Prophets, and also the first Muslim, the Quran was the definitive and final kitab, whose particular authority would initiate and delimit a discursive tradition.’ ^[1]

[1]: Messick, Brinkley 2012. "The Calligraphic State", 16

Scholars of Islamic law referred to biographical literature and legal manuals: ’For many centuries now, Ibb has supported an active community of Shafiʿi scholars. Despite their seemingly remote mountain valley location, town jurists were far from parochial. In terms of texts studied, theirs was not an unconventional local version of the shariʽa, Beginning with Ibn Samura and continuing to the present century, biographical histories provide views of the changing scholarly community in Ibb. A recently published work (Zabara 1979) devoted to noted individuals of the just-completed (fourteenth) Hegira century contains an entry on a distinguished Ibb scholar and prominent political figure who lived from 1876 to 1922, some seven and a half centuries after Faqih al-Nahi. Like al-Nahi, ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Haddad was an adherent of the Shafiʿi school of shariʽa jurisprudence. Both men were connected to the school through their relations with particular teachers and specific texts. In al-Haddad’s case the teacher was his father, and the key text was a celebrated old manual known as Al-Minhaj. [...] Ibb scholars such as ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Haddad and, in the next generation, men such as his nephew and son-in-law, Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Haddad, whom I knew in the 1970s as an old man and a practicing court judge, commenced their higher studies with two standard Shafiʿi texts, the just-mentioned Al-Minhaj by Muhyi al-Din al-Nawawi, a Syrian who died in A.D. 1277,10 and a still more radically concise manual, known as Al-Mukhtasar (“the abridgment”) or simply as the matn, the “text,” of Abu Shuja, a resident of Basra active in the twelfth century.’ ^[1]

[1]: Messick, Brinkley 2012. "The Calligraphic State", 20

Historiography and Islamic theology may have been present along with treatises on Islamic law. More material is needed on scholarly writings in the Qasimid period.

Dresch mentions tax registers: ’From the summary histories one forms an impression of steadily increasing disorder through the next twenty years, until ’the people of San’a’ and others’ invited the Turks again to take the city ’after they had tired of the chaos which prevailed there, the dominion of men from the tribes, the cutting of the roads, and the lack of any ordered security’ (al-jirafi 1951: 205-6). A more recently available, and more detailed, source gives a different impression (al-Hibshi 19 80: 29 6 ff.). But the Turks seem in any case to have had designs on the highlands: they had increased their forces on the coast ’until stores were coming ashore with San’a’ printed on every load’ (ibid. 315), and when they finally arrived, in 1872, they demanded the tax registers which would reveal to them the administration and resources of the whole country (al-Wasi’I 1928: IIO). They were to remain in highland Yemen until 19 18.’ ^[1]

[1]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 217

Historiography and Islamic theology may have been present along with treatises on Islamic law. More material is needed on scholarly writings in the Qasimid period.

"Fictional" literature may have been present, given the fact that this was a literate culture. Expert confirmation needed.

Taxation was a majour source of public income: ’Besides the wealth to be extracted from the southern peasantry, the Imams of the period also had available, if they could retain control, taxes from a burgeoning coffee trade. The rise and fall of the Yemeni coffee trade with Europe matches almost exactly the trajectory of the Imamate’s wealth (see Boxhall 1974; Niebuhr 1792). The English and Dutch established factories at Mocha in 1618; the trade was probably at its height around 1730; and the world price of coffee finally crashed at the start of the nineteenth century, at which point one gets mention of Imams debasing the currency (al-’Amri 1985: 59). This wealth, however, had always to be fought for; the rulers became wealthier and more powerful than hitherto, but still were liable to dispute among themselves.’ ^[1] ’The state the Qasimis formed in the midst of this was none the less impressive (for the rulers’ genealogy see Fig. 6.1). Al-Qasim himself, who early in his fight against the Turks had wept over his children starving at Barat, was wealthy when the truce was signed. He built the mosque at Shaharah, then built houses for himself and his followers, planted coffee in al-Ahnum, and amassed more land than the public treasury (Nubdhah: 258, 334-6). The court expanded with the southern conquests. Al-Mutawakkil received an embassy from Ethiopia and exchanged gifts of fine horses with Aurangzib of India (Serjeant 1983: 80-1), while his relatives expressed concern about his monthly demands for funds from Lower Yemen. Further criticism of his taxation policy came from Muhammad al-Ghurbani at Barat, but in 1675 the levies on Lower Yemen were redoubled (ibid. 82). Under Muhammad Ahmad, ’He of al-Mawahib’" (1687-1718), the exactions became more severe still, in support of a grandiose court and a large standing army complete with slave soldiers (ibid., Zabarah 1958: 451, 457; alShawkani 1929: ii. 98).’ ^[1] Shaykhs also collected funds from landholdings: ’Whatever setbacks they suffered, however, Bayt al-Ahmar were not displaced permanently. In the year after Abu ’Alamah’s rising, when the Sharif of Abu ’Arish and a rival claimant to the Imamate were active in the north-west, they were again a power to be reckoned with." Certainly they collected taxes as well as rents in the nineteenth century, and local memory credits them with taking revenue even from coastal towns in the north Tihamah, They retain considerable lands in the west to the present day.’ ^[2] ’Nor were Bayt al-Ahrnar of Hashid the only shaykhly family in the area: Nasir juzaylan of Dhu Muhammad lost forts to Abu ’Alamah at al-Masiih, and a garrison from Dhii Husayn were chased out of al-Sha’iq in Bani ’Awam (again near Hajjah), but the shaykhly families of Barat retained or re-established a hold there. Al al-Shayif of Dhfi Husayn, for example, still own land in Hajjah province, and Bayt Hubaysh of Sufyan have considerable holdings near al-Mahwit (Tutwiler 1987). The picture which emerges between the lines of eighteenth-century histories and tariijim is of myriad forts in the western mountains, each garrisoned by twenty or thirty tribal soldiers and controlling an area for some shaykh of the northern plateau. As the eighteenth century wears on, so the same pattern comes more clearly to light in Lower Yemen too: in his entry for 1752, for example, al-jirafi records for the first time what will punctuate his history thereafter, Barat tribesmen at odds with the Imam south of San’a’ (al-jirafi 195I: 183). They continued to appear there into the present century, leaving behind great numbers of tribal families and large shaykhly holdings of land outside tribal territory.’ ^[3] ’These shaykhs are not the subject of Imamic history. Although the Imamate could not have functioned as it did without them, and although the granting of ’fiefs’ to them went on for centuries, the details of their financial and administrative position are nowhere written up. Nor has local documentation come to light. Until it does, we must form what estimate we can by looking at the great shaykhly houses nowadays.’ ^[4] Taxation and stipends were a major bone of contention between imams and tribes: ’Al-Mutawakkil al-Qasim then took the Imamate (Serjeant 1983: 84), and at this stage al-Ahmar was apparently on good terms with al-Husayn, the new Imam’s son (Zabarah 1941: 539); but when alNasir Muhammad made a rival claim in 1723 al-Ahrnar and many other shaykhs went over to him. The leading sayyids were meanwhile divided among themselves over the perennial problem of taxation (ibid. 289). In 1726 the Dhayban section of Arhab cut the roads, and a group of them made trouble in San’a’ itself (Zabarah 1958: 359). The Imam had them hunted through the streets, in response to which "Arhab tribesmen invited Hashid and Bakil to join them in taking revenge and wiping out the dishonour they had sustained. The tribes responded. ’All b. Qasim al-Ahmar, Paramount Shaykh of Hashid, and Nasir b. juzaylan, Paramount Shaykh of Bakil, proceeded to ’Amran where they met al-Husayn, the Imam’s son, whom they persuaded to join them ... (al]iriifi 1951: 181, trans. Stookey 1978: 151-2).’ ^[5] Dresch mentions tax registers: ’From the summary histories one forms an impression of steadily increasing disorder through the next twenty years, until ’the people of San’a’ and others’ invited the Turks again to take the city ’after they had tired of the chaos which prevailed there, the dominion of men from the tribes, the cutting of the roads, and the lack of any ordered security’ (al-jirafi 1951: 205-6). A more recently available, and more detailed, source gives a different impression (al-Hibshi 19 80: 29 6 ff.). But the Turks seem in any case to have had designs on the highlands: they had increased their forces on the coast ’until stores were coming ashore with San’a’ printed on every load’ (ibid. 315), and when they finally arrived, in 1872, they demanded the tax registers which would reveal to them the administration and resources of the whole country (al-Wasi’I 1928: IIO). They were to remain in highland Yemen until 19 18.’ ^[6] More details on the currency used may be needed. Dresch mentions Riyals in his discussion of stipends: ’Hasan al-’Ansi and the Barat tribes appeared outside San’a’ in 1770. They were successfully driven off, which provoked some vainglorious poetry from the victors (Serjeant 1983: 86; d. alShawkani 1929: i. 459), but elsewhere al-Shawkani suggests (ibid. ii. 136) how this was achieved: an addition to the tribesmen’s stipend of 20,000 riyals per annum, the implication being that they already received regular payment. These incursions and payments continued for several decades.P and the Barat tribes remained active in Lower Yemen until the Turks took the area in the late nineteenth century.’ ^[7]

[1]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 200

[2]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 206

[3]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 206p

[4]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 209

[5]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 203

[6]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 217

[7]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 213

Rural fortresses built on hilltops were present and remained significant into the modern period: ’Dresch mentions forts of great military importance held by imams and shaykhs: ’Ali al-Ahrnar is mentioned by name in connection with events in 1713, trading his support between rival Imams. His tombstone, and the local tradition that no doubt incorporates what is writtenthere, gives al-Ahmar the .further name of al-Gharibi, and Muhammad ’Ali al-Gharibi, as we have seen, is mentioned as a great shaykh based near Hiith in 1709. Before that we know nothing of the family or of what they were called? But after al-Mansiir al-Husayn declared himself Imam, in 1727, he bought a strategic fort near alAhnum from Qasim al-Ahmar for one thousand riyals and razed it (Zabarah 1941: 55). When al-Mansiir was succeeded by al-Mahdi in 1748, al-Ahmar went down to Habur, took the area and rebuilt the fort. In the interim, in 1729-30, the Najran tribe of Yam had attacked the Tihamah and the west, after Hashid had opened the route to them through Dhibin, Bayt al-Ahmar are mentioned specifically as taking (and very probably retaking) areas of Hufash and Milhan, and then sending part of the spoil to the Imam as if to legitimate their position (Zabarah 1958: 890-2). No details are given of how extensive their possessions were.’ ^[1] ’In 175I, however, a millenarian rising broke out in the western mountains, led by Abu ’AIamah, a black ’magician’ who preached a puritanical renewal of Islam. Accounts of the rising mention several forts in the west being taken from Bayt al-Ahmar: al-Qahirah at alMahabishah was lost, then Qaradah and al-Gharnuq at Najrah, just south of Hajjah, then Sabrah, and finally the fort near alMadayir that al-Mansur had bought several years earlier (Zabarah 1941: 53-5). ^[2] ’Nor were Bayt al-Ahrnar of Hashid the only shaykhly family in the area: Nasir juzaylan of Dhu Muhammad lost forts to Abu ’Alamah at al-Masiih, and a garrison from Dhii Husayn were chased out of al-Sha’iq in Bani ’Awam (again near Hajjah), but the shaykhly families of Barat retained or re-established a hold there. Al al-Shayif of Dhfi Husayn, for example, still own land in Hajjah province, and Bayt Hubaysh of Sufyan have considerable holdings near al-Mahwit (Tutwiler 1987). The picture which emerges between the lines of eighteenth-century histories and tariijim is of myriad forts in the western mountains, each garrisoned by twenty or thirty tribal soldiers and controlling an area for some shaykh of the northern plateau.’ ^[3]

[1]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 205p

[2]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 206

[3]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 206p

Rifles were present: ’But al-jirafi goes on, more importantly, to relate that al-Ahmar wrote al-Mansur al-Husayn a brusque letter demanding a meeting. The Imam feared an attempt at assassination; so he’assassinated alAhmar first, stuck his head on a lance, and galloped off with it through a hail of bullets from the shaykh’s enraged tribesmen (aljirafi 1951: 182). In fact, al-Ahrnar, accompanied by Bin juzaylan of DhU Muhammad and by Ahmad Muhammad Hubaysh of Sufyan, seems to have come to ’Asir, just outside San’a’, to seek a settlement (Zabarah 1941: 539 and 1958: 486). The details are probably lost forever, and we are told only that al-Ahmar ’had wished to make independent his own rule of part of the country’ (ibid.), which he very well may have done; but al-Mansur alHusayn’s view of the matter, as recorded in the histories, has all the vigorous clarity of the Zaydi tradition. The taunt to the tribesmen at the time was, typically, that they were no better than polytheists: he brandished al-Ahmar’s head on his spear and cried ’this is the head of your idol’.’ ^[1]

[1]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 203p

Rifles were present: ’But al-jirafi goes on, more importantly, to relate that al-Ahmar wrote al-Mansur al-Husayn a brusque letter demanding a meeting. The Imam feared an attempt at assassination; so he’assassinated alAhmar first, stuck his head on a lance, and galloped off with it through a hail of bullets from the shaykh’s enraged tribesmen (aljirafi 1951: 182). In fact, al-Ahrnar, accompanied by Bin juzaylan of DhU Muhammad and by Ahmad Muhammad Hubaysh of Sufyan, seems to have come to ’Asir, just outside San’a’, to seek a settlement (Zabarah 1941: 539 and 1958: 486). The details are probably lost forever, and we are told only that al-Ahmar ’had wished to make independent his own rule of part of the country’ (ibid.), which he very well may have done; but al-Mansur alHusayn’s view of the matter, as recorded in the histories, has all the vigorous clarity of the Zaydi tradition. The taunt to the tribesmen at the time was, typically, that they were no better than polytheists: he brandished al-Ahmar’s head on his spear and cried ’this is the head of your idol’.’ ^[1]

[1]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 203p

Rifles were present: ’But al-jirafi goes on, more importantly, to relate that al-Ahmar wrote al-Mansur al-Husayn a brusque letter demanding a meeting. The Imam feared an attempt at assassination; so he’assassinated alAhmar first, stuck his head on a lance, and galloped off with it through a hail of bullets from the shaykh’s enraged tribesmen (aljirafi 1951: 182). In fact, al-Ahrnar, accompanied by Bin juzaylan of DhU Muhammad and by Ahmad Muhammad Hubaysh of Sufyan, seems to have come to ’Asir, just outside San’a’, to seek a settlement (Zabarah 1941: 539 and 1958: 486). The details are probably lost forever, and we are told only that al-Ahmar ’had wished to make independent his own rule of part of the country’ (ibid.), which he very well may have done; but al-Mansur alHusayn’s view of the matter, as recorded in the histories, has all the vigorous clarity of the Zaydi tradition. The taunt to the tribesmen at the time was, typically, that they were no better than polytheists: he brandished al-Ahmar’s head on his spear and cried ’this is the head of your idol’.’ ^[1]

[1]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 203p

New World weapon.

We have assumed that daggers and swords were present alongside rifles.

’But al-jirafi goes on, more importantly, to relate that al-Ahmar wrote al-Mansur al-Husayn a brusque letter demanding a meeting. The Imam feared an attempt at assassination; so he assassinated al Ahmar first, stuck his head on a lance, and galloped off with it through a hail of bullets from the shaykh’s enraged tribesmen (aljirafi 1951: 182). In fact, al-Ahrnar, accompanied by Bin juzaylan of DhU Muhammad and by Ahmad Muhammad Hubaysh of Sufyan, seems to have come to ’Asir, just outside San’a’, to seek a settlement (Zabarah 1941: 539 and 1958: 486). The details are probably lost forever, and we are told only that al-Ahmar ’had wished to make independent his own rule of part of the country’ (ibid.), which he very well may have done; but al-Mansur alHusayn’s view of the matter, as recorded in the histories, has all the vigorous clarity of the Zaydi tradition. The taunt to the tribesmen at the time was, typically, that they were no better than polytheists: he brandished al-Ahmar’s head on his spear and cried ’this is the head of your idol’.’ ^[1] This could be ’present’ but I don’t understand the context/time period from the quote so inferred present until more specific information.

[1]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 203p

We have assumed that daggers and swords were present alongside rifles.

The following paragraph suggests that horses were present: ’But al-jirafi goes on, more importantly, to relate that al-Ahmar wrote al-Mansur al-Husayn a brusque letter demanding a meeting. The Imam feared an attempt at assassination; so he’assassinated alAhmar first, stuck his head on a lance, and galloped off with it through a hail of bullets from the shaykh’s enraged tribesmen (aljirafi 1951: 182). In fact, al-Ahrnar, accompanied by Bin juzaylan of DhU Muhammad and by Ahmad Muhammad Hubaysh of Sufyan, seems to have come to ’Asir, just outside San’a’, to seek a settlement (Zabarah 1941: 539 and 1958: 486). The details are probably lost forever, and we are told only that al-Ahmar ’had wished to make independent his own rule of part of the country’ (ibid.), which he very well may have done; but al-Mansur alHusayn’s view of the matter, as recorded in the histories, has all the vigorous clarity of the Zaydi tradition. The taunt to the tribesmen at the time was, typically, that they were no better than polytheists: he brandished al-Ahmar’s head on his spear and cried ’this is the head of your idol’.’ ^[1]

[1]: Dresch, Paul 1989. "Tribes, Government and History in Yemen", 203p

We are unsure whether camels were present in the South of the peninsula at the time. We have assumed so for the time being, but more detail is needed.

We have found no indication of naval battles.

We have found no indication of naval battles.

We have found no indication of naval battles.