Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (3 page)

Ever interested in turning a profit from their troublesome southernmost province, the Ottomans had been encouraging coffee production and, with it, Mocha’s prominence. The southern highlands behind the Red Sea coastal plain, through which Jourdain must have passed en route for Sanaa, had experienced the equivalent of a Gold Rush. Its mountainsides had been transformed by an intricate lacework of terraces designed to take maximum advantage of the flash flood monsoon rains. A French visitor noted admiringly that ‘the greatest piece of husbandry that belongs to them [Yemenis], consists in turning the course of Rivulets and Springs, that descend from the Mountains into their Nurseries, conveying the Water by little Canals to the Foot of the Trees’.
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Those patterned mountainsides where a little coffee but more qat is grown these days remain one of the most beautiful and impressively workmanlike features of western Yemen, a startling testament to the people’s ingenuity and fortitude.

Back in the early seventeenth century, detachments of Ottoman soldiers guarded the precious coffee plantations and anyone apprehended in the act of trying to smuggle coffee seedlings out of the country was heavily fined. It was a disincentive that failed to deter the first Dutch visitor to Mocha, a merchant named Pieter van der Broeck, from removing a few to the Dutch Republic in 1616 and planting them in a greenhouse. That theft enabled a group of Amsterdam grandees to present the king of France with a single coffee sapling, a curiosity for his own Paris greenhouse. Yemenis were about to learn that if the Muslim Turks had come to their country to fight and steal, the Christian Franks who had come to trade and steal were not so different.

In 1618, the Porte had granted permission to both the English and Dutch to establish their ‘factories’ in Mocha. By the middle of the century, with the Turks gone, the port’s coffee trade with Europe was expanding fast and Yemen thriving. By the century’s end Mocha was reportedly exporting some ten million kilos of coffee a year.
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However, the effect of that first Dutch theft was about to be sorely felt. Yemenis were soon to lose their world coffee monopoly. In European colonies in south-east Asia, and South America and Africa, the precious plant could now be grown more cheaply thanks to colonised slave labour. The growing failure to compete would lead not only to the decay of Mocha and the southern highlands, but also to the impoverishment of the northern highlands that had so richly benefited from the trade since the Turks’ departure.

But Mocha has furnished Yemenis with some small consolation for their loss in the form of another plant - qat
(catha edulis).
A Koranically permitted stimulant derived from chewing the evergreen qat shrub’s tenderest top leaves for up to six hours a day, qat has long been as emblematic of Yemeni culture as the wearing of the
jambiyah
or the
fiita.
Yemenis believe the life-enhancing properties of both coffee and qat were discovered at precisely the same time by a fourteenth-century Sufi named Ali Ibn Umar al-Shadhili who, while residing as a hermit in the vicinity of Mocha for twenty years, nourished himself and his meditations on both substances. There was a time, probably as far back as the sixteenth century, when coffee and qat vied for pole position in Yemenis’ hearts, a state of affairs reflected in this imagined debate between the two substances:

Qat says: they take off your husk and crush you. They force you in the fire and pound you. I seek refuge in God from people created by fire.

Coffee says: A prize can be hidden in ritual. The diamond comes clear after the fire. And fire doesn’t alter gold. The people throw most of you away and step on you. And the bits they eat, they spit out. And the spittoon is emptied down the toilet.

Qat scoffs: You say I come out of the mouth into a spittoon. It is a better place than the one you will come out of!
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Qat has the last ribald word here, but its high standing did not stop Imam Mutahhar’s father, the great Sharaf al-Din, issuing a fatwa against it in 1543, commanding that all qat trees in his domains be immediately uprooted and burnt. He had taken fright at the reported ill-effects of the plant after discovering some of his closest entourage stumbling around his palace, slurring their words, claiming that
halal
[permitted by the Koran] qat, rather than
haram
[forbidden by the Koran] wine, was to blame. The chronicler of this tale piously protests the Imam’s harsh outlawing of his people’s main solace, noting that ‘God, realising that qat was utterly blameless, allowed some qat shoots to survive under the earth until the downfall of this dynasty, when they shot forth again, by means of his Grace. He the Creator par excellence!’
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Qat has had the whip hand over coffee ever since in Yemen, but it was never and will never be the enriching export commodity that coffee once was. Its defenders will point out that it is neither as mind altering nor as harmful to the health as alcohol, and forcefully argue that if not for its nation-wide popularity, if not for the fact that one in every seven Yemenis is involved in the cultivation, distribution and sale of qat, much of rural Yemen would be deserted. Its more numerous detractors will contest that it is both disgraceful and dangerous for Yemenis to be growing so much qat, that it represents a ruinous waste of money and time and, most importantly, water. There are those, however, who quietly reason that, if not for the passive consolations of qat, many more young Yemeni males than is presently the case would be eagerly resorting to the more active consolations of jihad.

On an expedition out of Sanaa to Mutahhar’s northern highland fastnesses of Thula and Kawkaban, I stood on a lofty rocky promontory scanning the wide view over a bare plateau, here and there sparsely dotted with neat rows of qat trees and the odd fortress of a local administration building. Behind me, the village of Kawkaban was almost deserted and strewn with rubble. It was easy to imagine how the Turks had first failed and then lost interest in conquering such places, but it was even easier to identify the most crucially enduring fact about Yemen’s political geography. In order to survive in their harshly inhospitable refuge, the northern highland tribes have had little choice but to turn their only asset, the threat or promise of their organised fighting potential, to their material advantage.

The attitude of defensive desolation I was sensing in Thula and Kawkaban had first struck me on a visit to another part of those highlands, the land of the Beni Shaddad, a clan belonging to the powerful Khawlan federation, an area barely an hour’s drive east of Sanaa. Along fifteen kilometres of unmade-up track only navigable by four-wheel drive, my Khawlani tribesman friend drove, climbing higher and higher, around rocky crags, past the range of seven high peaks on which beacons used to be lit as a signal for the clans to gather in preparation for war, past village after tiny village in which many of the mud brick multi-storey homes were collapsing into ruins or still bore the scars of 1960s civil strife, in which there was no sign of any economic activity whatsoever, not even a small qat plantation. At last we arrived at his home village, a loose cluster of mud brick or stone dwellings, some disintegrating, some already reduced to a pile of dust, and a small vineyard. A crowd of children gathered to welcome us, but there was no sign of any other life or activity. I learned that the village had neither electricity nor enough water to extend the vineyard into a commercial venture, that my friend’s brother-in-law counted himself lucky to be working at transporting lorry-loads of stone to Sanaa for the building trade, and that I was the first foreigner to visit the place for more than thirty years.

People in such remote areas have always distrusted any intruders, preferring to remain, as in Imam Muttahar’s day, a tribal law unto themselves. If, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the sweeteners paid to tribal sheikhs by the Turks had to be more and more generous to secure the tribes‘ loyalty, after the Turks departed a home-grown imam in Sanaa - his position was secured by the customs dues paid by foreign coffee merchants - continued to buy the support of those sheikhs by paying them regular stipends and rewarding them with gifts of fertile land outside their unproductive highlands. The majority of the most powerful Zaydi northern tribal dynasties today established themselves during the relatively stable period of northern Zaydi home rule that followed the Turks’ departure.

The role of the Zaydi highland tribes in Yemen’s failure to thrive as a modern nation state, complete with functioning and respected institutions, is easier to understand once the character of the Zaydi imamate is understood. First, a Zaydi imam could only derive from one of an aristocracy of
sayyid
families whose entitlement to special treatment - having their hands kissed and meriting the protection of tribesmen, for example - was based on their claim to be directly descended from the Prophet himself via his daughter and son-in-law. Lacking a divine right or a popular mandate to rule, an imam was more referee than ruler and entirely reliant on the armed support of the tribes for his maintenance in power. He lived in the knowledge that he was only imam for as long as his conduct and demeanour were deemed worthy of his office. The highland Zaydi tribes would not shrink from withdrawing their support since the violent overthrow of an unjust ruler was a specifically Zaydi religious duty. If those mercenary tribesmen could be kept in line with carrots and sticks - with gifts, but also frequent resort to taking a member of a troublesome sheikh’s family hostage - an imam also had to be expert at dividing and ruling, at watching for rivals and plotting in an atmosphere of permanent and chronic insecurity and suspicion. Like ‘dancing on the heads of snakes’, ruling Yemenis called for a light and nimble touch, and an acute apprehension of danger.

An octogenarian early eighteenth-century imam whom the French coffee-merchant Jean de La Roque encountered in 1709 - a relatively prosperous era when, as he put it, it was ‘easy to see that the consumption of coffee was never so great as it is at present’
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- was particularly anxious to know how France was governed. The news that Louis XIV ruled in reasonable safety and by divine right must have awakened his envy as well as his interest. After accepting a gift of a mirror, Imam al-Mahdi Muhammad ‘look’d himself several Times in it, as did all the Grandees of his Court’ while quizzing the Frenchman long and hard about ‘the Qualifications and Personal Vertues’
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of his sovereign. In return for a generous gift of coffee, an alliance, and permission for a French trading post with preferential customs duties to be opened in Mocha, he requested a short history of France, a picture of the Sun King’s most magnificent palace and a portrait of him with his family.

The modest appearance and lifestyle of that early Qasim imam impressed de La Roque. ‘Going with his legs and feet bare and wearing slippers after the Turkish fashion’, he was at least as much religious leader - ‘Priest or Pontiff of the Law of Muhammad’ - as king. The Frenchman described the main event of his week, Friday worship, which revealed him to be at least as much a military as a religious leader. Accompanied by a thousand foot-soldiers, two hundred members of his personal guard, camels and horses adorned with black ostrich feathers and a small army of drummers, with a son on either side of him, the Imam rode a white horse towards the large tent that served as his mosque. One of his cavalry officers held a vast green damask umbrella, with an eight-inch-long red and gold fringe and a ‘globe of silver gilt’ on top, over his head while in front of him another cavalry officer carried a Koran in a red cloth bag and behind him another carried his sabre, symbolising the distinctively Zaydi twinning of Islam with the pious duty of rebelling against an unrighteous imam. Emerging from the tent an hour later, the man the Zaydis revered as the rightful caliph of the entire Muslim
umma
was greeted by volleys of celebratory gunfire. Finally, a display of stylised skirmishing awaited him back in his palace courtyard.

Enriched and therefore empowered by the proceeds of the coffee trade, those early Qasim imams succeeded in extending their rule over what might now be called ‘Greater Yemen’. Along with Aden in the south, they took Hadhramaut in the east and Dhofar, now a part of Oman, as well as Asir and Najran in the north-west, which are two southern provinces of Saudi Arabia today. There was a price to be paid for this success, however. Military campaigning coupled with the ceaseless game of dividing and ruling the tribes while showering them with gifts were always more pressing priorities than living up to the claim to be an ideally just Muslim ruler. When the mid-eighteenth-century Danish scientist explorer Carsten Niebuhr was travelling around Yemen, astonishing every Yemeni he met with his new-fangled microscope and cures for impotence, the imam of the day had a rotten reputation for ‘perfidious cruelty’.

Niebuhr took the trouble to record a story that highlighted ‘several particulars illustrative of the principles of the imam’s government’. A good, loyal sheikh named Abd Urrab had speedily obeyed when told by Imam al-Mahdi ‘to demolish the castles of some neighbouring lords’, but his zealous obedience backfired on him. One of those targeted ‘lords’ took his revenge by convincing the Imam that Abd Urrab was getting above himself, plotting to raise a rebellion and depose him. The credulous, possibly paranoid, Imam sent an army of 3,000 to besiege Abd Urrab in his fortress for eleven months, but without success. When the abused Abd Urrab finally did turn against the Imam and succeed in capturing Taiz, the Imam had no choice but to acknowledge the conquest and offer an alliance. The agreement was duly sealed - ‘confirmed with seven oaths’. Two sheikhs stood as its guarantors. The too trusting Abd Urrab then accepted a courteous invitation to visit the Imam in Sanaa. On arrival he was ‘seized, bedaubed on the face and hands with red paint… placed on a camel with his face to the tail, and conducted through the streets’ while his distraught sister ‘sprang from the roof of a house and fell, dead at his feet’. But even this tragic gesture could not spare her brother the ignominy of being hurled onto a dung hill and beheaded. The two guarantor sheikhs did not hesitate to express their outrage. One, whom Niebuhr identifies as the head of the Hashid and Bakil tribal ‘mercenaries’, was instantly thrown into prison and beheaded, while the other was invited to a meeting with the Imam and swiftly despatched by a cup of poisoned coffee. ‘Since that time’, notes Niebuhr, the Imam had been constantly troubled by tribesmen encroaching on his dominions and burning ‘several cities’.
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Niebuhr guessed he would soon be deposed and/or murdered.

Yemen’s best-known tribal federations today - the Hashid (east and north of Sanaa) and Bakil (west and north of Sanaa) - come out of this story well, as proud upholders of truth and honour. The Imam, meanwhile, is revealed as a ruthlessly vengeful villain, as a brazen flouter of tribal law, as illegitimate a ruler as any Ottoman Turk had ever been. Generally, the eighteenth-century imams were not as competent as their predecessors, and the less competent they were, the more land they forfeited. Having lost Hadhramaut and Dhofar by 1680, they were forced out of Aden by the southern Abdali tribe in 1727. They also flouted another important qualification of their rule by copying European monarchs, starting to hand their office straight on to their sons between 1716 and 1836. A son became imam apparent as soon as he was appointed governor of Sanaa and he, along with all his brothers, gained the title
al-Sayf al-hlam
[the Sword of Islam].

The gap between the ideally qualified imam and the reality was widening all the time. ‘He was more like a king than a caliph,’ wrote one Yemeni chronicler about the imam who succeeded the one de La Roque had met. Although sufficiently modest never to wear silk, this imam only pretended to be learned, ‘He inclined to the scholars, talking with them and imitating them … So the scholars in his court would help in this [pretence], both out of desire and fear.’
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Al-Mansur Ali, imam from 1775 until 1809, was neither a brave military leader nor a just ruler; ‘his habit was to seclude himself and to cavort with free and slave women’, in a palace filled with ‘gold and silver and all kinds of clothes, precious stones… weaponry, medical implements and vials, and trunks full of musk, amber and clocks’.
²⁰
In 1823 he invited Robert Finlay, a doctor attached to the British trading post in Mocha, up to Sanaa to cure him and his family of various ailments. After presenting the Imam with gifts that included a ‘double-barrelled percussion gun’, Finlay treated him for a fever in a room stuffed full of horse tack, bales of cloth, weapons and no fewer than six ticking gold and silver watches. Unimpressed, Finlay reported back to London that there was ‘nothing dignified or commanding in the Imam’s countenance; he is extremely passionate and constantly changing and disgracing in the most shameful manner, by putting in prisons and in irons, his principal servants and favourites, then restoring them again to their former rank’. Fearful of
sayyid
rivals, his current closest favourites were ‘a former watch mender and a tailor from the bazaar’.
²¹

Finlay formed no better opinion of the highland tribes, dismissing them as ‘an idle uncivilised race, constantly quarrelling with each other and committing robbery’. Their sheikhs, many of them bribed by the Imam not to ‘plunder his subjects’, inspired no respect in him because they looked ‘just like their men, simple in blue cotton, all of them chewing kaat [qat], drinking kishr [a tea made from the husks of coffee beans]’.
²²
He mentioned what the Ottomans had long ago discovered to their cost and what remains broadly true today, that the most independent sheikhs were ‘those who inhabit the highest and most precipitous mountains’.
²³

Such an unfavourable report might have convinced Lord Palmerston that the southernmost tip of the Arabian Peninsula could safely be ignored, but Britain’s mounting rivalry with France had compelled him to take an interest in the region.