Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes Page 5
In 1849 a first Ottoman attempt to enter Sanaa with a force of 1,500 was thwarted by tribesmen who, incensed by the invader’s demand that Friday prayers be dedicated to the Sultan rather than to their own imam, slaughtered a hundred of them. Just as they had in the mid-sixteenth century, the peaceful Sunni Tihamans made the Turks welcome, and even the southern highlanders tolerated them but, once again, not the Zaydi northern highlanders. A mightier army, whose transportation to Yemen was greatly hastened by the new Suez Canal,f fared much better in 1872 and was greeted by the merchants of Sanaa with roars of ‘Victory to the Sultan!’, as well as with open-mouthed amazement at the ‘order and tidiness and magnificence, splendour and display of the imperial forces’.43 For a time, even the northern highlands were subdued and the ruling imam thrust into what one historian terms ‘subsidised obscurity’.44 But before long, the highlander tribes started clamouring for stipends and mounting a fierce insurgency that would cost the Ottomans dearly in time, materiel and manpower for almost the next forty years. Still vivid folk memories of the last occasion they had ventured into the northern highlands plagued them. Recruits for their army in Yemen sometimes had to be chained and physically carried on board troop ships, so great was their dread of almost certain death in those desolate mountains. An old Ottoman folk-song captures the dismay and misery surrounding the very name of Yemen in the empire’s heartland:
Yemen, your desert is made of sand
What did you want from my son?
I don’t know your way or your sign
I am just missing my son
O Yemen, damned Yemen …45
The Ottomans’ efforts to rule Yemen as they did any other part of their empire met with dismal failure. Even an admission that the population’s backwardness forced them to administer the place directly, as a colony, as a muslemleke rather than a vilayet, brought no improvement. For example, after abandoning attempts to recruit Yemeni tribesmen into their own multi-national army, they tried to instil some discipline by following the British lead in India and establishing a native army. But, although the tribesmen were smartly kitted out with a specifically Yemeni uniform of white futa, black shirt and brass badge bearing the Ottoman state emblem, the force was unruly and unreliable and had to be disbanded after only three years.
Determined as ever to milk Yemen of whatever riches it had and recoup losses incurred by ceaseless punitive military expeditions into the highlands, the Turkish pashas did not follow the British lead in the protectorates by forbearing from taxing the tribes. Instead, misguid-edly priding themselves on their sensitivity to local custom in giving the tribesmen a chance to put up a face-saving show of resistance, they sent out military expeditions to demand payment. Although they could be said to be making improvements - a road from Sanaa to the port of Hodeidah, a telegraph, some schools and sturdy stone administration buildings in Sanaa, Taiz and Hodeidah - taxation swiftly re-emerged as a main source of dissatisfaction with this second period of Turkish rule. Sheikhs to whom they farmed out local administration soon found themselves having to pay for their posts and resorting to extortion in order to recoup their outlay. With the Turks in charge, Yemen’s Time of Corruption can be said to have extended itself into the second half of the nineteenth century and on, into the first decade of the twentieth.
By 1890 Turkish rule was so hated that rival claimants to the title of imam had ceased their feuding and coalesced around one Imam al-Mansur, who promptly established himself in the north-western Zaydi stronghold of Saada and terrified the Turks by organising a guerrilla army of tribesmen to carry out hit and run raids. Al-Mansur’s tribesmen dismantled telegraph poles, blew up municipal buildings and attacked Turkish homes and by 1892 there were 70,000 of them laying siege to Sanaa. The Turks tried to bribe the Imam into submission with an offer of a high position in their administration and a generous stipend in return for his lifting the siege, but al-Mansur was launched on a traditional Zaydi uprising against an unrighteous ruler, gathering fervent support by railing against the Turks’ homosexuality, their European style of dress, their trousers and their fezzes, their love of alcohol and their absence from the mosque. If not to the merchants of Sanaa then to many Yemenis, their Ottoman oppressors seemed to have strayed so far from the true path of Islam that they could properly be reviled as kuffar [unbelievers] and still worse, as nasara [Christians].
Constantinople despatched a commander named Ahmad Feyzi Pasha at the head of a 4,000-strong army to break the siege and quash al-Mansur’s uprising, which he managed to do by holding out to the famine-stricken rebel tribesmen the promise of a daily meal, a reward for any of their severed heads, and a general pardon. Locating the main source of trouble in the Hashid federation of highland tribes, Feyzi Pasha also took a leaf out of the British book by showering the Hashid sheikhs with gifts. But the Imam remained at large and on the offensive, pursuing Ahmad Feyzi Pasha’s army to Sanaa and on south, as far as Taiz. Ottoman supply lines broke down and the Syrian troops mutinied over having received only one year’s pay after several years‘ service in Yemen. Losses of manpower were running at over a third when, thanks to yet another fresh influx of miserably underpaid and disheartened troops, Feyzi Pasha, who was in his seventies and himself begging to be allowed to retire from a place already renowned as the ’graveyard of the Turks’, gradually managed to turn the tide.
His back to the wall at last, Imam al-Mansur wrote to the British authorities in Bombay, begging for help. Wisely, Britain passed up this chance of extending its tribal protectorates around Aden north to the highlands. But still the jihad sputtered on, even spreading as far as the usually docile Tihama. By 1900 a team of foreign specialists surveying the route for a Turkish railway linking Sanaa to the Tihaman port of Hodeidah required a 350-strong armed guard to go about its business. In the same year an American visitor to the country detailed what he judged to be the baneful effects of Ottoman rule: ‘The peasantry are robbed by the soldiers on their way to market, by the customs collector at the gate of each city and by the tax gatherer in addition,’ he noted. ‘No wonder we read of rebellions in Yemen, and no wonder that intense hatred lives in every Arab against the very name of Turk.’46
Al-Mansur’s son, Imam Yahya, succeeded him, largely because a powerful Hashid sheikh threatened to slaughter all those involved in the selection process unless they chose Yahya. The memory of having briefly lost control of their highlands in the early 1870s made the Hashid tribes especially keen to fight the Turks. Under Yahya those tribes renewed the jihad in 1905, mounting probably the worst siege Sanaa has ever experienced. More than two thirds of Sanaanis starved to death while the remainder held out for the three months of the ordeal on a hideous diet of straw bread, dog, cat, rat and human flesh. The city’s 8,000-strong community of Jews was especially hard hit. On a visit to Sanaa a few months after the siege had been lifted, the British diplomat Aubrey Herbert reported that the city’s ghetto ‘was like the dream of some haunted painter. Many of the men were still skin and bone, and the crowd of dark faces with cavernous cheeks, half-hidden by twisted, black elf-locks that hung on either side, begging eyes and clutching hands, were horrible.’47 Described by one foreign visitor in 1900 as the ‘most impressive city [in the Ottoman Empire] after Baghdad’, filled with Greek shops selling European goods, whose Turkish quarter boasted billiard rooms, boot-blacks and a brass band,48 Sanaa had been reduced to dusty savagery. It was estimated that no fewer than 8,000 of the 10,000 besieged Turkish troops had died too, the vast majority of sickness.49 Another reckoning states that of the 55,000 Turkish troops that disembarked at Hodeidah, 6,000 were killed in the siege but 9,000 died of typhoid.50
Once again, Feyzi Pasha had mustered a mighty force to throw off the siege but, pursuing Imam Yahya to yet another Zaydi mountain fastness - this time to Shahara, half a day’s journey by car to the north-west of Sanaa - he was forced to concede defeat after two months. There were 50,000 Turkish troops in Yemen at the time, but still the northern highlands resisted Ot
toman colonisation and by 1911 they were ready for a fresh offensive. Arthur Wavell, an intrepid British army officer, happened to be in Sanaa that year. The only other European in town, an Italian merchant and spy named Signor Caprotti, had weathered the sieges of 1892 and 1905 and so warned Wavell that he should lay in supplies because another was in the offing.
The first shots were heard in January, and by the end of the month Wavell was observing a ‘sudden great increase in the number of camp fires visible by night around the town’.51 The Turks were rumoured to have two years’ worth of rations in store and plenty of ammunition, but the tribes, outnumbering the Turks by a ratio of three to one, were also well armed with Mauser rifles captured or bought from their enemy. Guns of all sorts and every vintage, Wavell observed, were far cheaper in Yemen than in Europe. Scaling ladders were being prepared, but still the tribes hesitated. Popular belief had it that Sanaa enjoyed God’s special protection, that anyone storming the city was doomed. At last, the siege began. For the first two months of its three-month duration only qat was in short supply. Cigarettes, lamp oil and cooking oil ran out eventually, but qat was available by the time it ended and anyone with money never went as hungry as they had in 1905.
Nevertheless, the Turks acknowledged that, once again, they had been bested by the highland tribes. Decades too late, one Ottoman official stated the blindingly obvious: ‘To keep them [Yemenis] down unjustly will take much money and many troops. Conscientiousness and justice is what we expect from our administrators. Yemen has become now the graveyard of Muslims and money’52 Even a perceived duty to guard the southern approach to the holy places at Mecca and Medina and ever-mounting pressure to compete with the European empires failed to outweigh the crippling cost of maintaining a patchy control of Yemen. As well as the Sanaa siege, the Turks had an unrelated Italian-backed uprising in the Asir region of the country (now a part of Saudi Arabia), to say nothing of unrest in the Tihama to contend with in 1911.
A new pasha was sent out with instructions to come to terms with Imam Yahya, which proved easy enough. Yahya had long argued that he was only rebelling against corrupt Turkish officialdom, not against the Ottoman Sultan, and only on behalf of Zaydis who were, he claimed, the rightful rulers of all Yemen - the highlands, Aden and its tribal hinterland, Tihama and Asir - since the third century of the Islamic calendar. He had, he insisted, ‘no desire save to “order the right” [a key Zaydi concept] and extirpate what is loathsome and reprehensible, to establish the shari’ah, set straight him who strays and advise the ignorant’.53 In exchange for formal recognition of his control over the Zaydi highlands he could agree to dispense with the titles of Caliph and ‘Commander of the Faithful’ which had hitherto placed all Zaydi imams in direct competition with the Ottoman sultans. In return, he would be free to replace Ottoman with sharia law in his domains, to select his own judges and collect his own taxes. The Turks would remain in control over Tihama and much of the southern highlands including the city of Taiz and retain responsibility for Yemen’s external defence.
Although Yahya faced numerous challenges to his rule, because there were many among his tribal supporters who thought he had conceded too much, the last few years of the Turkish presence in Yemen, until the end of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, were comparatively peaceful, the Turks less heavy-handedly controlling. ‘Tact is the order of the day, and laissez faire’, observed one British visitor to the region in 1912 of Ottoman rule at the time, ‘… the writing is on the wall’.54 The game was up long before the Turks left Yemen and the stain of failure lingered long after their departure. More than a decade after his exit from Sanaa the last Ottoman pasha to administer the truncated province was still smarting at the memory: ‘in my opinion, this is what happened, from the day we conquered it to the time we left it we neither knew Yemen nor did we understand it nor learn [anything] about it, nor were we, for that matter, able to administer it’.55
For the second time, Yemen’s northern highland Zaydi tribes had expressed their objection to outside rule, even when that rule was by fellow Muslims, even when that rule was imposed in the name of uniting the Muslim umma. Together, the ancient memory of being a persecuted and dissident Shiite minority hounded out of what is north Iran in the ninth century, and more recent mistreatment and exploitation at the hands of foreigners, acted as a powerful prophylactic against any outside interference whatsoever.
Yahya stood by the Ottomans during the First World War but steered clear of taking on the British, refusing to fight shoulder to shoulder with the Turks outside Aden in early 1915, for example. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1918 he was therefore well placed to fill the vacuum left behind, extending his rule west to the Tihama and south to the borders of the British protectorates. As the historian George Lenczowski puts it, after the First World War Imam Yahya emerged as the ruler of the first independent state on the Arabian Peninsula ‘largely by default, inasmuch as there was no power ready and willing to assume imperial responsibilities in the area’56 - as the French and British were then doing in other former Ottoman possessions that were being reconfigured as Syria, Palestine, Trans-Jordan and Iraq. Outside powers, whether Muslim or Christian, had learned a lesson. None of them cared to waste their time or their money trying to subjugate the Zaydi tribes.
aAfter the death of the rourth Shia imam, All Z,ain al-Abidin, a minority in northern Iran recognised his younger son Zayd as Imam rather than his eldest son. Doctrinally Zaydism is as close to Sunnism as possible. Yemen is the only centre of Zaydism today, but between the ninth and twelfth centuries there was another Zaydi state located south of the Caspian Sea.
b Muslim judge.
c The Arabic for coffee is qahwa.
d The preferred currency in most of Yemen from the late eighteenth century until 1970 was a silver dollar coin embossed with a bust of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and the date 1780.
e The Gate of Tears, the strait at the lower end of the Red Sea, the closest point between the Arabian Peninsula and Africa.
f Opened in 1869, the Suez Canal linked the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.
CHAPTER TWO
REVOLUTIONARY ROADS (1918–1967)
IN IMAM YAHYA’S PALACE
A search for traces of Imam Yahya, for some vestige of the man who ruled the north-western portion of Yemen for longer than anyone before or since, turned up only two reliable results in Sanaa.
Just outside the old city, behind the national museum, at the far end of an unmarked alley leading off September 26th street, is what could be one of the capitals biggest visitor attractions, but is not. All that remains of Yahya spalace compound is distinguished by a tatty signboard reading Government Property Office. An old and once ornate wooden gateway, missing a few planks and warped out of shape, looks like the entrance to an abandoned junkyard. Beyond it a mess of plastic bags, rusting machinery and weeds rots in the shade cast by the old royal buildings, a cluster of sagging mud high-rises with broken windows. On closer inspection, scraps of filthy fabric doing duty as makeshift curtains suggested that some of the floors were still inhabited. A crowd of children who had gathered to stare at a rare foreign visitor confirmed that the squalid squat was their home. They seemed to know its special history, helpfully pointing out for me rusting iron rings once used for tethering the Imam’s horses, and a bare space on the gate from which an Islamic inscription had recently been stolen. A short walk back and on along September 26th street and down another unmarked alleyway between houses brought me to a small untended Muslim cemetery where the largest gravestone standing among overgrown thorns, discarded plastic bags, cigarette packets and crumbling humbler graves belonged to Imam Yahya. The list of his proud sayyid genealogy, carefully inscribed on the stone, filled two pages of my notebook and ended with a simple statement of the fact of his killing in 1948.
Imam Yahya is utterly out of official favour in today’s Republic of Yemen for refusing to rise to the challenge of updating the imamate, for r
etarding his country’s development, for being an elitist aristocrat and a tyrant. But, in fact, his style of ruling was patriarchal rather than tyrannical. His motivation was not so much to restrict and control as to conserve and protect. He believed that as a true sayyid descendant of the Prophet he was doing God’s will by shielding the land and its people from the perils of modernity and infidel foreign contagion. In an effort to return the country to a mythical golden age it had supposedly enjoyed under the Qasim imams, Yahya closed it down. Administering his expanded realms as if they were his immediate household, he occasionally tempered his authoritarianism and love of hoarding silver with a gratuitous sweetness towards children or beggars, charming his family of Yemenis with his modest and pious lifestyle and his reputation as a miraculous healer. Almost everything that concerned each of his subjects - from their education, to their health-care, to their relations with their neighbours, to their travel abroad, to their land disputes, to their choice of a spouse - required his say-so or sanction. Advice was only acceptable to him if it forbore from criticism, remained a secret and was presented in poetic form. One such poem, penned by an eminent qadhi, began, ‘Take the stand of adviser towards the caliph/ Do not take the stand of a faultfinder/ Be gentle, don’t exaggerate in reprimanding him.’1
The seat of Yahya’s government was a chaotic room in his palace whose floor was strewn with papers and whose battered furniture contained drawers stuffed with more paper, some of it inscribed by a minute hand in tiny concentric circles to avoid waste. One visitor witnessed a servant entering the room with a tray piled high with silver Maria Theresa dollars which, after showing them to the Imam, he poured onto an existing pile on the floor. Yahya’s response to a message announcing the death of a soldier was to mark and sign ‘the document with a formula tantamount to giving the already deceased warrior permission to die’2 astonished him more. Another visitor watched Yahya resolve a complaint about a neighbour’s donkey kicking a wall with a command that the animal be chained from dawn until dusk. A fellow Arab, the Syrian American, Amin Rihani, saw the Imam deal with a request from one of his sons for the use of a car for a day. But Rihani gave credit where he felt it was due, judging Yahya to be ‘of all the Arab rulers of today [the late 1920s] the nearest to some system in conducting the affairs of State. He has the head of a man of business, and his one-man Government, with all its rusty gear, could not, under the circumstances, be run better by the president of an American corporation.’3 Yahya was well respected as both a ruler and a scholar in the Arab world. The scene outside his palace however, in the courtyard where he kept a caged leopard and hyena, was not so impressive. Scribes employed in writing petitions for the illiterate jostled with supplicants so desperate for their grievances to be heard and alleviated they set fire to their headcloths to draw attention to themselves.