Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (23 page)

Since my first visit to Hadhramaut in 2004, a cluster of buildings with a magnificent view down into the Wadi Doan had appeared on the edge of the high plateau where nothing moved but the odd Toyota pick-up, speeding up-country with a load of fresh qat under a flapping tarpaulin. It turned out to be a brand new luxury holiday resort and closer inspection revealed matching studio cottages with iron-studded Hadhrami front doors, traditional wooden shutters with keyhole cut-outs, and even en suite western bathrooms. Two thousand feet below its airy terrace was another clear sign that the globalised age was prising open even this remote corner of southern Arabia from which Osama bin Laden’s father had left for Saudi Arabia in 1930 and where the doughty Freya Stark contracted a near fatal attack of the measles a few years later. A thin new ribbon of asphalt road snaked its way along the wadi floor, more or less neatly linking dozens of small towns and villages clinging to the wadis almost vertical walls.

The Wadi Doan was changing fast, but, gazing across the half kilometre width of the wadi floor to its opposite wall and imagining its 130-mile length, it was still easy to understand how Hadhramis had come by their belief that once upon a very ancient and prehistorical time a tribe of giants named the Ad had walked and worked the land, but ended up displeasing Allah by presuming to create a heaven and so been swept away in a punishing flood, leaving only imprints as gigantic as this wadi on the landscape. It was even easier to imagine how, fabulously enriched by the tolls charged on camels loaded with precious frankincense
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bound for the Mediterranean and Europe, the Wadi Doan had been on one of the Roman world’s superhighways. Those glory days are very long gone. In the intervening millennium-and-a-half its inhabitants have usually had to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Sailing away east to India and Indonesia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they returned to build homes that reminded them of their exile. Many of the Wadi Doan’s mud high-rises are painted luminously faded orange, turquoise, violet, pink, peppermint green and primrose yellow, and adorned with flower motifs. Others, not so colourful but more grandiose than anything else in Yemen, are the property of men who, like Osama bin Laden’s father, migrated to the new Kingdom of Saudi Arabia after 1930 to ride the wave of the oil boom.

Near the village of Sif, set lonely and unlikely as a space ship on a patch of stony ground, is a mansion built in the same neo-classical style and to almost the same scale as London’s Buckingham Palace. Rarely occupied and tightly shuttered, it belongs to a member of the al-Amoudi family now resident in Saudi Arabia. Of mixed Hadhrami and Ethiopian parentage, Muhammad Hussein al-Amoudi is a Saudi citizen who, after amassing a Saudi fortune in property and construction, progressed to oil interests in Sweden and Morocco and emerged as Ethiopia’s largest investor and yet still, to judge by his palace in the Wadi Doan, remained true to his Hadhrami roots.

More striking even than al-Amoudi’s is a multi-storey edifice painted a glorious patchwork of bright colours, a family mansion known as the Buqshan Palace, two floors of which were converted for use as a hotel in 2006. Thanks to their long service as one of the sturdiest pillars of the Hadhrami community in Jeddah, the Buqshans are the leading royal family in this Valley of the Kings. A close friend of the Saudi royals in the mid-twentieth century, Ahmad Said Buqshan acted as chief sponsor and guarantor of all Hadhramis seeking work and the necessary residence permits. His first question to a countryman who arrived in the Kingdom was always ‘Where are you from in Hadhramaut?’ and ‘Who is your father and your father’s father?’ before he checked their accent for Hadhrami authenticity by asking them to pronounce the Arabic word for flour. His son Abdullah has ensured that the family name is as famous in Hadhramaut today as al-Kaff was in Tarim between the world wars, as synonymous with the Wadi Doan in particular as the name Ford is with Dearborn, Michigan. The saying
‘andak Buqshan’
is Hadhrami Arabic for ‘as rich as Croesus’, but no grand factory complex attaches to it, no product. Abdullah Buqshan, who recently funded the restoration of the psychedelic palace hotel, the building of the new road, new schools and clinics in the wadi as well as the brand new tourist resort overlooking it, consolidated his father’s wealth with lucrative dealerships for Bridgestone tyres and Komatsu bulldozers, perfume and jewellery. His own modern residence in the wadi, a large complex of buildings next door to the psychedelic palace hotel, boasts a large swimming pool.

After bin Laden, the best-known Hadhrami name in Saudi Arabia is bin Mahfouz. The patriarch of the clan, Salim Ahmad bin Mahfouz, also hailed from the Wadi Doan and reportedly pawned his precious
jambiyah
to raise the cost of his passage to Jeddah by dhow in the 1930s. Starting out as a humble money-changer, he was making his mark and a gigantic personal fortune by the 1950s, having convinced King Abdul Aziz that the new country urgently needed its own bank, the National Commercial Bank.

The eldest of his three sons, Khaled, proceeded to inherit the biggest bank in the Middle East, but he was not as lucky as his father. While he was never convicted of any wrongdoing, his purchase in the 1980s, of a 20 per cent stake in an institution notorious for arms trafficking and money laundering for criminals and terrorists, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) inevitably sullied the family name. A charitable foundation named Muwaffaq (Blessed Relief), which he established in 1992, landed him in more hot water. Long before the declaration of President Bush’s ‘War on Terror’, US intelligence officials were suspecting Muffawaq of funnelling donations to al-Qaeda. Once again, nothing was proved. Khaled loudly asserted his opposition to jihadism, and any journalist or author who alleged a shared ideology and close links between the Hadhrami Saudi banker bin Mahfouz and the Hadhrami Saudi global terrorist bin Laden was immediately sued and always lost. An often repeated report that the two families were related by marriage, that one of bin Mahfouz’s sisters was one of bin Laden’s wives, has been similarly denied and retracted. Nevertheless, Khaled’s son Abdulrahman wasted little time in visiting the US consul in Jeddah after 9/11 to assure him that the bin Mahfouzes were with, rather than against, the US in the new ‘War on Terror’.
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The al-Amoudis, the bin Ladens, Buqshans and bin Mahfouzes have all tried to pull their weight for Yemen since unification in 1990, especially in the formerly Marxist south of which Hadhramaut was a part. If Buqshan is most visible in the Wadi Doan itself, his name emblazoned on smart signposts detailing his charitable giving, bin Mahfouz’s oil company Nimr expended half a billion dollars on a bloc in the Shabwa area before withdrawing from the sector in 2003. Both Buqshan and bin Mahfouz have been involved in the long-delayed and murky project to redevelop the port of Aden. Al-Amoudi has also contracted to build two large hotels in Sanaa, and the bin Ladens have built the new road leading from the Hadhramaut port of Mukalla west, almost as far as Aden.

That the Wadi Doan should have generated such an especially entrepreneurial streak in a Hadhramaut known for its entrepreneurs is surprising given that it produces nothing itself except some thirty-five tons a year of the best and most expensive honey in the world, sold on the comb in large, round tins.
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Mentioned in the Koran, honey of any kind is prized all over the Muslim world, but the Doan variety is famed for its medicinal and aphrodisiac powers and particularly loved in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States where a kilo of the product of the
apis mellifera yemenitica
can fetch $150. Back in the mid-1930s the first British political officer in the Hadhramaut, Harold Ingrams, tried to promote the honey’s export to Britain by sending a sample tin to the Colonial Office for testing but it failed to excite any interest. ‘It is probable that such dextro-rotatory honey would be regarded with suspicion, whilst its unattractive flavour and odour would be further obstacles to its sale’,
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was the expert negative response. Undaunted, the following year, one of the Hadhramaut sultans marked the coronation of King George VI with a gift of a hundred tins of the exotic elixir, some of which found its way to Buckingham Palace, Downing Street and two London hospitals.

Hadhramaut honey has had a bizarre walk-on part to play in the ‘War on Terror’ since 9/11. Shortly after the attacks, American intelligence officials divulged that they had been keeping a close watch on the Middle East’s luxury honey trade for the past two years, suspicious that because the product’s ‘smell and consistency’ made it ‘too messy’ for customs officers to want to handle, it was proving a useful medium in which to smuggle cash, drugs and weapons.
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Along with thirty-seven other Middle Eastern enterprises suspected of involvement with bin Laden’s cause, two Yemeni honey shops, one in Sanaa and another in Taiz - the latter humbly listed its address as ‘by the shrine, next to the gas station, Jamal Street, Taiz’ - had their assets frozen. In the end, no firm link to al-Qaeda was established, but honey merchants all over Yemen enjoyed mocking the allegations. A better-established link between Osama bin Laden and honey seems to be that according to his fourth wife - a Yemeni from the southern highlands region whom he married in 2000 - he eats a lot of it.
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It is also known that his Hadhrami paternal grandfather, Awad bin Laden, scraped a precarious living from beekeeping in the Wadi Doan in the early decades of the twentieth century.
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At the southernmost end of the Wadi Doan, far from al-Amoudi’s Buckingham Palace and well to the south of the Buqshan Palace, at the spot where the wadi’s high walls narrow into a claustrophobically shaded cul de sac, is al-Ribat, the bin Laden family’s home village. By the mid-1930s, when the painstaking Harold Ingrams reported that it contained 800 fighting men with 100 rifles between them,
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the poor beekeeper Awad’s illiterate eldest son, Muhammad bin Laden, had already left it, first for a docker’s job in Mukalla and then to Ethiopia and finally to what was about to become the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Possessor of an abundance of Hadhrami virtues, adventurous and self-reliant as any al-Kaff, Muhammad bin Laden was an astute businessman and as gifted a builder and engineer as the men who had built the first road out of the Wadi Hadhramaut in the 1930s, Tarim’s hundreds of mosques and the soaring mud skyscrapers of Shibam. He was also hard-working and reliable, so he was soon employed as a bricklayer for the jointly owned Saudi-American oil company, Aramco, where he earned the respect of his American employers and began to take on projects himself before setting up on his own, to profit by the building boom. He then caught the eye of the Saudi minister of finance, who recommended him to the obese King Abdul Aziz, who entrusted him with the delicate task of constructing a ramp up the side of his palace to enable him to drive straight into his second-floor bedroom. Once close to and appreciated by the royal family, especially by its relatively liberal al-Faisal branch, he was made. By 1950 he was renovating and expanding the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. Saudi Arabia urgently needed roads, so he built most of them. Even his death, in a plane crash over the southern province of Asir in 1968 did not inhibit his company’s rise; in the 1980s the Bin Laden Group was entrusted with the most prestigious, and still ongoing, public work of all - the renovation of Mecca’s Grand Mosque.

But bin Laden Snr built himself a comparatively modest mansion in al-Ribat, so the bin Ladens are more practically remembered there in a road and school of the same name and a project to bring running water to the village. I arrived there one mid-afternoon at qat time, to wander through the tight cluster of houses, feeling like an intruder watched by unseen eyes, marvelling at the tangible prosperity of such a remote place, guessing it was entirely dependent on remittances earned in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Two of its inhabitants - a man with the fiery stare of a habitual qat chewer and a rifle slung over his shoulder, and his young son - passed me without a glance or a nod, let alone a greeting. Like the rest of the Hadhramaut interior, al-Ribat holds itself aloof from the outside world.

While Hadhrami men are quiet and guardedly polite in their dealings with strangers, the women of the wadis signal their reserve by adopting not just the full black rig of their Saudi sisters but also black gloves and socks and very tall, pointed straw hats that are said to keep their heads cool when herding their goats in the palm groves or working in the fields. Just over a hundred years ago a doughty first British visitor to the Wadi Doan, Mabel Bent, found them far more colourfully dressed, in blue embroidered dresses which were short in front and long at the back and showed off ‘their yellow-painted legs above the knee’, but noted a similar wariness; when she tried to establish contact ‘they fled precipitously like a flock of sheep before a collie dog’.
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In more recent times, they have been known to throw stones at tourists who stop to photograph them. A year before 9/11, when a small army of FBI agents was hard at work unravelling the story behind the attack on the USS
Cole
, already suspecting bin Laden’s involvement and learning that two of the bombers had had Hadhrami accents, some of them visited the Wadi Doan but learned nothing. In the aftermath of 9/11, when Hadhramaut seemed an obvious place to search for its world famous son, a small army of foreign reporters beat a path to al-Ribat. If they were lucky they discovered that, just like anywhere else in Yemen or the wider Muslim world, there was plenty of admiration for the West’s most wanted terrorist. Usually, the then rough track along the wadi to bin Laden’s home village was barred by security officials and the locals tight-lipped.

Al-Qaeda’s astonishing attacks on those towering symbols of American power and wealth struck a special imaginative chord in the land of the mud-brick skyscraper, where the light is usually as dazzlingly clear as it was on that September morning in New York. Bin Laden’s attack on the American superpower and the billionaire migrants of the Wadi Doan are compelling modern proofs that high, bright dreams of worldly power and wealth still can and do come true for Hadhramis. A large magazine photo-montage I spotted on the wall of a teahouse in a village near al-Amoudi’s palace seemed to me to proclaim this fervent faith. Comprising a background of high snow-topped mountains, a middle ground of Manhattan skyscrapers looking uncannily like the famous 500-year-old mud skyscrapers of nearby Shibam, and a foreground resembling the sandy floor of a wadi, graced by a shiny red Toyota Land Cruiser and dotted with palm trees, it spoke volumes. On closer inspection, I noted that someone had embellished the bizarrely glamorous scene with a biro scribble of two tiny aeroplanes, making straight for the Manhattan mid-ground.