Shari'a Politics
When Ottoman Turkish troops arrived in Ibb in 1872, they found a town adrift in stateless anarchy. Rule by the Qasimi line of Zaidi imams, which in vital early years ended the first Ottoman occupation (circa 1635), had weakened drastically by the beginning of the nineteenth century, and waves of insurrection began to sweep across Lower Yemen.[32] By 1812 a tribal leader of northern ancestry had carved out a domain that was said to extend from the Sumara Pass down to the Red Sea port Mocha; in 1838–41, his son served as the military commander in an uprising led by a local saintly figure named Faqih Sa'id.[33] From mid-century to the arrival of the Ottomans, the breakdown of authority was nearly total. The period is known as the ayyam al-fasad , the "time of corruption." Local tribal leaders fought among themselves in the countryside and periodically besieged the towns. In the absence of imamic control, a series of commoner merchants attempted to run the affairs of the capital city, San'a', while in Ibb a town butcher named al-Akhshar, who owned a small cannon, was pressed into service to mount a defense against marauders.[34]
In the scheme of the venerable old empire, the recently acquired province of Yemen was relatively remote, comparatively backward, and intermittently rebellious. Because of the difficult circumstances of Ottoman rule in the highlands, the full array of institutions established in better-integrated and less problematic provinces could not be put in place.[35] In Shafi'i Lower Yemen, Ottoman rule received a decidedly different sort of reception than it did from the Zaidis of the northern highlands. In Ibb, a district seat,[36] the coming of the Ottomans was significant for eliminating any remaining filaments of Zaidi hegemony. Since the Ottomans were Sunni Muslims (Hanafi school), a further by-product of their rule was a general florescence of local Sunni life. In addition to the stimulus to Shafi'i scholarship, there was a resurgence in saint-tomb visitation[37] and Sufi brotherhood activity,[38] both of which the Zaidis attempted to suppress. This open flourishing of Sunni diversity in Ibb would be curtailed by the resumption of ever-tightening imamic control, beginning in 1918. It should be noted, however, that some Shafi'i scholars also disapproved of such forms of piety, as the polemical verses of the senior al-Haddad, a straitlaced shari'a
jurist, demonstrate.[39] Whereas later Zaidi governors in Ibb would merely forbid such activities, as governor of Ta'izz in the 1940s, the future Imam Ahmad ordered the exemplary destruction of the tomb of Ibn 'Alwan, the most important saint of Lower Yemen.[40]
While the fact that the Ottomans were Sunnis offered a formula for compatibility with the Shafi'is, it provided for just the opposite in relations with the Zaidis. In Ibb, the Ottoman administration was considered sound, many Turks were well liked as individuals, and there were marriages into local families. When the town was besieged by Imam Yahya's forces in 1904, town loyalty to the Ottomans was clear.[41] In Upper Yemen, by contrast, the Turks met fairly constant hostility, including two imam-led rebellions, in 1891–92 and 1904. When the imamic historian al-Wasi'i wrote in the mid-1920s about the reasons why the "people of Yemen" (ahl al-yaman ) had rebelled against the Turks, he was articulating an imamic line, not speaking for the population of Ibb and Lower Yemen.[42] Interviewed by a Syrian traveler in 1927, Ibb governor Basalama said that the differences between Imam Yahya and the Ottomans had concerned "the shari'a." This was not a narrow reference to "legal" differences but a reference to political positions expressed in the shari'a-based discourse of the period. The protracted conflict between the Turks and the imams was fought out as much in the idiom of the shari'a as on the battlefield. The Zaidis were irritated by what they perceived as a Turkish misconception: "Inasmuch as the Turks are foreigners ('ajam ) they do not understand what 'Zaidi' is—a school (madhhab ) among the other schools. The founder of this school was the Imam Zaid, son of 'Ali Zain al-'Abdin, whose grandfather was the Prophet Muhammad."[43]
The imams asserted their claim to spiritual and temporal authority in Yemen and attacked the Ottomans for their alleged failure to uphold the shari'a. Zaidi opposition at the turn of the century was framed not in the vocabulary of national aspirations but as a defense of the shari'a. Refusing to allow the imams the discursive high ground, the Ottomans stoutly defended the empire's long-standing commitment to uphold the shari'a[44] and mobilized a locally tailored shari'a politics of their own to counter that of the imams. They argued that the imams represented only the narrow sectarian interest of the Zaidi community, not those of the substantial populations adhering to other madhhab s. The Ottomans called for the transcendence of sectarian differences and for solidarity with the Ottoman state to meet the aggressive inroads of the un-
believers, including the British and the Italians, upon the lands of the Muslims.[45]
In the two imamic uprisings, declarations focused on shari'a-framed issues. In a letter to the Ottoman sultan, Imam Mansur (al-Wasi'i 1928: 149) claimed he had acted in order to "uphold the shari'a of our grandfather" (i.e., the Prophet). His letter goes on to enumerate a stylized, shari'a-anchored list of wrongs attributed to the Turks, including "forbidden acts," the "consumption of alcohol," "fornication and pederasty," and the nonapplication of the Quran/shari'a-prescribed punishments, the hudud (sing. hadd ).[46] These punishments, the imam pointed out, had been "eliminated by Ottoman law in violation of the sacred shari'a."[47] When Imam Yahya succeeded his father in 1904, there was a similar ideological motif. The new imam "ordered the tribes to lay siege to the towns in which there were Turks, who had brought corruption (fasad ) to the land, relinquished shari'a precepts, and oppressed the believers."[48] Two years later, following battlefield reverses, Imam Yahya began making overtures toward an eventual coming to terms with the Turks.[49] His initial negotiating position of 1906 stressed a spectrum of interrelated, shari'a-connected issues.[50] The first and second conditions were that court judgments be in accord with the "noble shari'a" and that he be given the power to appoint and remove shari'a court judges. Other conditions demanded a return to shari'a-based state funding structures, including pious endowments (for instruction) and the tithe. Condition six concerned the hudud , the shari'a punishments, to be applied to the "perpetrators of crimes among the Muslims and the Israelites, as they were ordered by God Almighty and enacted by His Prophet, [and] which [Ottoman] officials have abolished."
Strict enforcement of the hudud , for Zaidi imams as for purists of other periods, was a key summarizing symbol, shari'a shorthand for the existence of legitimate government.[51] If the implementation of a single part of the shari'a could stand for that of the whole, hudud application frequently served this discursive purpose. Ironically, it was these same hudud punishments that were typically singled out both by critical Westerners and by Muslim modernizers—again as the distinctive part representing the whole—to stand for the backwardness of the shari'a. In the shari'a manual of the Zaidi school, the imam's personal responsibility in the "administration of the hudud " heads his list of duties, and the same holds, in theory, for a Shafi'i imam.[52] Official imamic histo-
rians duly noted their proper enforcement. One way of exemplifying the existence of legitimate authority was by means of reports on otherwise unremarkable instances of punishment.[53]Hadd administration notices appeared also in the official imamic newspaper.[54] An account concerning the flogging of an adulteress concluded by saying, "All those attending departed asking God to support our majesty and his perfect state in his efforts to implement the shari'a." A condensed biographical sketch of Imam Yahya that appeared shortly after his death states that "he carried out the hudud established for criminals by God."[55] In this type of shari'a politics, the hudud offered a litmus test of upright rule.
Another integral part of the old shari'a discourse was the classification of the sociopolitical world into madhhab s and other equivalent groupings.[56] With the rise of the new political discourse of the nation-state, however, the madhhab construct—technically, a school of jurisprudence and, by extension, a label of regional geopolitical identity—underwent a further shift in meaning. When Isma'il Basalama, the former Ottoman and then imamic governor of Ibb, was asked by his visitor about the issue of Zaidi rule over a Shafi'i district, he responded in a way that both recognized and denied the relevance of madhhab categories. "I am a Shafi'i man," he began,
and I am free to act and invested with full power in Ibb. I appoint or dismiss whomever I want among the functionaries, and neither His Majesty the imam nor his distinguished government enter into such small matters. He has delegated to me the requisite authority to enable me to govern the people with an Islamic and shari'a government. There is no difference for me between a Zaidi or a Shafi'i, and everything you have heard in the way of foreign propaganda is nothing but lies and slander against Yemen and its people. (al-'Azm 1937:290)
Basalama acknowledges ("I am a Shafi'i man") that a madhhab category fits, but at the same time he asserts that there is no practical difference between Zaidi and Shafi'i, and that the idea of difference is itself the product of outside efforts to divide Yemenis. This interview occurred at exactly the time when the first opposition groups were coalescing in the highlands and in Aden. These groups would frame their opposition to the imams in increasingly nationalist terms, and the government would respond with a quasi-nationalist discourse of its own. The new, "nation" view of Yemen and Yemenis, like the "people of Yemen" usage of the twenties,[57] attempted to override old madhhab distinctions in order to project an image of unified national support for
imamic rule. Basic elements of this new discourse, especially its focus on new political wholes ("Yemen and its people") and a reinterpretation of the madhhab notion, already appear as assumptions in Basalama's statement. In its official newspaper, the imamic regime developed the political theme that it was the British who encouraged Zaidi versus Shafi'i sentiment to further the aim of drawing Lower Yemen into their own sphere of colonial influence.[58]
By the Revolution of 1962 madhhab distinctions had come to represent the divisive subversions of national fulfillment and the true shari'a under the old regime. The First Proclamation of the Revolution, issued "in the name of the free and independent Yemeni people (sha'b )," states that the first goal of national reform is to "give life to the correct Islamic shari'a, after its death had been caused by tyrannical and wicked rulers." The same provision calls for the "elimination of hatreds and envies, and divisions of descent and of madhhab."[59] Post-Revolution writers would continue to criticize the misuse of the shari'a and the geopolitical divisiveness of madhhab identities. One speaks of the "manipulation of the shari'a" under the imams.[60] "If we look fairly at the two madhhabs, the Zaidi and the Shafi'i," another cultural historian writes,
and make a detailed study of the subjects of difference between them, we would find them very insignificant . . . but the ignorant and the fanatical (muta'assabin ) made out of them a tool for the destruction of national unity and a means for sowing the seeds of discord among a people tied together by the bonds of unity and brotherly ties for thousands of years. This has had the greatest impact in troubling social life in Yemen and affects its political condition until today.[61]
As a shari'a politics grounded in madhhab affiliations gave way to a nation-state politics anchored in the new notion of a citizenry, so the old manual texts relied upon by Shafi'is and Zaidis would be replaced by a new type of authoritative text, the legislated code. It is to an examination of these specifically textual aspects of discontinuity, illustrated by the ground-breaking nineteenth-century efforts of the Ottomans and (a hundred years later) the legislative work of the Yemen Arab Republic, that the discussion now turns.