Chapter 5
The New Method

At an annual awards day ceremony held at the elementary Revolution School in Ibb in 1975, some of the teachers and pupils put on a short skit. A breeze snapped at the Yemen Arab Republic flag bunting that decorated the stage, and an antiquated public address system crackled. Speeches that castigated the old regime, recalled the glorious events of the revolutionary years, and then underlined the importance of education in building the nation's future were made by local dignitaries, including the governor, the provincial military commander, and the director of the Ibb branch office of the Ministry of Education. Poems written for the occasion were also read out, local musicians played some popular tunes, and all joined in the national anthem.

Critical of the past and, somewhat more implicitly, of the present as well, skits are standard fare at the public occasions that have proliferated on the republican calendar. The skit this day was entitled, "Education in the Old Days."^[1] In it the teachers who wrote it looked back with a mix of serious and humorous intent typical of such theater at an institution, the Quranic school, which they and many in the audience had attended. For their young pupils, some of whom were the actors, the skit offered a representation of a mode of instruction that was fast disappearing. Unlike most other scripts, this one contains only a few spoken parts and was mainly intended to provide stage directions for a living tableau.

Initial scene: the curtain rises on a Quranic school room, with a floor covering of reed mats and burlap sacks. Sinna is sitting on the right side leaning against arm cushions. The general situation: the clothes of the poor students are old and some are torn. The clothes of the rich children

indicate wealth. The clothes of Sinna are a gown over a gown, a vest, a scholar's turban, with tooth-cleaning sticks and wooden pens stuck in it, and old-style "white" spectacles attached to the ear by means of two strings. Next to Sinna are a number of rods, inkwells for ink, and a collection of wooden writing boards.

At that moment a group of poor children enters from the left, carrying their writing boards. They go immediately to kiss the hands and knees of the teacher, who receives them in haste and with abuse. This is taken for granted, because they are poor. Sinna addresses them with insults: "Idle ones, sons of idle ones, ones of broken honor, you've come as early as the poor woman to the threshing floor, God curse your fathers. Yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that you didn't bring my food. And two weeks without my Thursday money. Do I work for your fathers instructing you for nothing?"

The students: "Sinna, we asked our fathers and each of them said he will give you all that is owed." Sinna: "You ingrates, each of you will pay nothing less than the full amount"—[aside: "as if their fathers were government functionaries or merchants, like those of Salih and Qasim"]—"all your fathers are worthless destitutes."

At this instant there enters a group of small pupils, whose clothes show wealth. They come to greet Sinna, who raises the chin of each one individually, trying to kiss them. A smile is across his face, and from time to time he praises them and their fathers. Each one of the rich pupils takes out some coins and slips them in Sinna's pocket or in his hand, excusing themselves for the paltriness of the sum. Sinna gathers the money and places it in his gown, while glaring at the poor children and then directing a few blows in their direction.

Sinna turns round to the rich pupils and invites them to sit next to him. He whispers in the ear of one of the students sitting next to him, "Did you tell your mother to send more food, and to provide sorghum stalks too?" He answers, "I told my mother. She's going to."

Sinna calls one of the poor pupils, "Bring me your writing board. Today I've decorated it with verses, and now I'm waiting to see how much your father will give." The boy responds, "Yes, Sinna." The boy takes the decorated board to his father, who after some difficulty manages to borrow a riyal to give to him. The boy returns and gives the riyal to Sinna, who turns it over in his hand a number of times and then puts it in his pocket.

An hour passes, then two, and Sinna does not excuse the children because the sum was too small. The boy tries to ask Sinna to let the children go. Sinna says to him, "Quit your bellyaching, what did you bring me, lowly one, son of a lowly one?" After a long time Sinna excuses the children. The poor boy goes to his house, and he is crying.

The "New Method"

Sometime after 1878, the year it was introduced in the capital, San'a',^[2] a new educational institution opened its doors in Ibb. Housed in the old Jalaliyya Mosque on the town's Upper Square, the maktab rushdiyya , as the school was called (from rushd , adolescence), was an advanced primary school of a type legislated into existence by the Ottoman Public School Law of 1869 and instituted thereafter throughout the empire.^[3] A new Ministry of Public Instruction, utilizing the public and secular concept of ma'arif ,^[4] was an integral part of the ordering (nizam ) policies of the Ottoman reformers and modernizers. In the eyes of these reformers, ma'arif, the knowledge imparted in "public instruction," stood in opposition to the old style of knowledge ('ilm ), with its substantive focus on jurisprudence and its mode of recitational transmission in mosque-school lesson circles. Berkes (1964: 160) has aptly characterized the then current concept of ma'arif as "the learning of unfamiliar things." A related conception, focused on the instructional dissemination of "useful knowledge," had been developed for colonial purposes in British India. It too would have an impact on the Yemeni highlands, although indirectly and at a later date, through institutions and ideas in circulation in India-administered Aden.^[5]

For diverse political purposes, the new nineteenth-century conceptions of "knowledge" attributed a fundamental vitality and openness to a type of learning, of "unfamiliar things," of "useful knowledge," that seemed to fit consciousnesses of change and advocacies of "modern" goals. The same conceptions also contributed to the rise of an image of old modes of instruction and forms of knowledge as closed, unadaptable, moribund. Educational reforms also had direct implications for the construction of new notions concerning law. The Ottoman system of public instruction was initially created to parallel and compete with the old madrasas , just as the new nizam courts applying legislated law were instituted as foils (in the central provinces at least) for the old shari'a courts. Education reforms further represented an important early salient in the struggle to introduce a comprehensive notion of "public" responsibility, which entailed a thorough reconstitution of the form and scope of the state. This differentiation and elaboration of the "public" sphere, and the constitution of its opposite, the "private," were new to Yemen.

Both in the central Ottoman Empire and in Egypt instructional innovations in the first half of the nineteenth century were destined for

the formation of officers and other military specialists, and the methods involved were only later spread to the separately created field of general public education. In Yemen, however, the new rushdiyya schools were introduced at the same moment in the late nineteenth century as the first new-style battalions of Yemeni soldiers. As new-method schools acquired the ordered form and discipline of military units, there was a parallel effort toward the "education and training of the minds" of the new soldiers.^[6]

While pious endowments supported the instructional activities going on nearby in the Great Mosque of Ibb, the little maktab rushdiyya was financed in a novel manner: with budgeted state monies.^[7] In the 1916 Ottoman financial summary for the Ibb subdistrict, there appears a separate budgetary subheading for the local Ma'arif section, with a listing of salaries for three individuals, including two grades of Turkish teachers (mu'allim ) and a locally employed caretaker.^[8] Reflecting the competitive split of education in the Ottoman heartlands, and indicating a change already wrought internally to the local "traditional" system, there was another teacher (mudarris ) on the official payroll. This position, occupied by an Ibb man from the al-'Ansi family, is listed among the 'ilmiyya officials, who were otherwise the court personnel. As his full-position title indicates, he was a state-paid instructor in what had come to be designated as the "religious sciences" ('ulum al-diniyya ).^[9]

The maktab rushdiyya was the only Ottoman school established in the subdistrict seat of Ibb town, but there were secondary schools, military colleges, technical schools, schools for girls, and schools for orphans opened in the three larger towns of San'a', al-Hudayda, and nearby Ta'izz.^[10] As in nineteenth-century Egypt,^[11] the new Ottoman schools were adapted from instructional methods developed earlier in the century by the Englishman Joseph Lancaster.^[12] Elaborated in a concise guide for the requisite physical layout and associated instructional routines, the Lancaster school design was widely influential. Model schools were established in France, Germany, the United States, and a number of colonial settings. In his study of the birth of new "disciplinary" modes of power in the West, Michel Foucault (1977) examines the Lancaster-method schools as one of the principal sites of a subtle but consequential ordering that quietly invaded and replicated itself in a whole series of institutions, from the prison to the hospital, the factory, and the military barracks. New institutional efficiencies, enabled by new forms of supervision and control, rested upon the differentiation of space and the precise regulation and coordination of time and human

activities. As such disciplinary procedures took hold across a spectrum of institutional settings, they were integral to the definition and production of a new type of individual.

Derived ultimately from Western models, educational "order" arrived in the Province of Yemen mediated and adapted by Ottoman planners, legislators, and administrators. According to the legislative model,^[13] education was to be given systematic form. Overall, five levels were envisioned, each comprising a set number of years. The four-year program of the rushdiyya included, in legislative theory, "elementary religious instruction, Turkish grammar, writing and prose style, Arabic and Persian grammar following the new method, bookkeeping, drawing, elementary geometry, universal history, Ottoman history, geography, physical exercise, and the language of a non-Muslim community in the locality." Students in the empire's commercially active towns could elect to study French in their fourth year. Although there is no indication that French was being used or taught in Ibb,^[14] instruction was provided in Ottoman Turkish.

During my residence in Ibb in the 1970s, Ahmad al-Basir, a maktab rushdiyya student in his youth, was able to make translations for me from Ottoman Turkish to Arabic. Once a member of a local Sufi order, and later a Quranic schoolmaster, teacher of muhajirin , and a prominent Ibb notary, al-Basir had an eclectic educational career, which included years in several of the new Ottoman schools. After Quran instruction in his own neighborhood he attended the Ibb maktab rushdiyya . Then he moved to Ta'izz, where he lived with relatives while attending the Ottoman secondary (i'dadiyya ) school in the mornings and the military college in the afternoons. Later still, however, he studied in the mosque-school darasa format in Zabid, where he did advanced work in jurisprudence and related disciplines. Returning to Ibb, he was initially appointed to the Endowments Office as a functionary. Later, under imamic rule, he became one of the teachers in the Great Mosque and began a lucrative parallel career writing legal instruments in the afternoons. In the late 1970s, he was considered one of the last of the town's old-style scholars, which is ironic in view of his extensive exposure to the Ottoman "new method" schools.

While certainly not delivered to Ibb intact, the Ottoman educational program nevertheless marked the local advent of revolutionary new ideas concerning the nature of schooling and appropriate subjects for study. However reduced and adapted, it was a program that stood in sharp contrast to the old sequences of mi'lama to darasa lesson circle

and of Quran to shari'a manual. If not yet seriously challenged, the madhhab approach to knowledge was at least confronted by the existence of the new curriculum approach to "ma'arif." The pursuit of 'ilm would persist in Yemen for another half century, but its once exclusive field of action was irrevocably altered. Although it initially appeared in Yemen in only embryonic form, the new conception of instruction would eventually displace the old style altogether.

According to the new program, instruction was to be extended in time and have its own space. While 'ilm was transmitted in the mosque, a multipurpose place, with the Hazr serving as the student residence and the locale of peer learning, the maktab rushdiyya and the other Ottoman schools were meant to be schools in the Western sense, ideally utilizing set-apart and specially arranged spaces designed for the newly conceived, daylong activity of instruction. One eventual by-product of this move would be the redefinition of the mosque as the place of exclusively "religious" practices. Furthermore, with teacher-student contact extended to encompass the entire learning day, peer learning, lacking both a space and a time in the new system, would decline.

In Ibb, the Ottomans had to make do with the available room in the Jalaliyya Mosque, but in the minds of the legislators was a different idea.^[15] As in Lancaster's conception, the Ottoman schools were to be newly constructed, in conformity to a design set forth in a ministerial plan. This aim of standardization involved the physical differentiation of rationalized seating arrangements and the development of classrooms as separately walled spaces for the instruction of different levels of students. This ordering procedure helped define a student, who was categorized by sex, age, and academic level. In contrast to the Quranic schools and the Great Mosque lesson circles, where students of widely different ages and levels of study intermingled,^[16] the new classes were to be composed of groups of children and youths with uniform characteristics.

"Elementary instruction is obligatory in the Empire," wrote the Ottoman legislators of 1869. "Education is a right for all Yemenis," echoed the provisional Yemeni constitution of 1962.^[17] Universal education offered a template for a different sort of society, and it carried with it the Western ideology of attainable equality. Replacing the sharply pyramidical pattern of restricted attendance and rapid attrition that appears from the outset of the mosque-school system, and the conception of instruction as but one of many "crafts," the philosophy (at least) behind the Ottoman schools was one of universal access to primary

education. Instead of the "ascending individualization" (Foucault 1977: 193) of the old social order, with its fundamental distinction between the knowledgeable and the ignorant, with the lives of the "great men" inscribed in biographical histories, a society of educated citizens implementing a form of "descending individualization" was implied. For the first time, schooling was intended to be something appropriate for all boys and girls.^[18] Education was in the process of becoming a newly constituted right of the individual, required and guaranteed by the laws of a new form of state. To this end, procedures were elaborated in the central Ottoman districts for keeping local registers of school-age children, and fines were set for parents who did not comply with the law.^[19] The advent of rushdiyya education for girls entailed not only a modified instructional program that included home economics and needlework but also the radical idea that girls should receive post-Quranic-school instruction outside the home.^[20] Most of these ideas would not begin to be implemented in Yemen until after the 1962 Revolution, at the same time that the abstract political notion of the Yemeni "citizen" (muwatin ) began to take hold.

Important changes in pedagogical technique were part of the nascent transformation of the Ottoman period. Over the longer term, these would entail a shift in elementary instruction from the luha writing board of the individual student to the collective blackboard of the contemporary classroom. The luha was not merely a highly personalized and intimate instrument—each of the boards being a bit different in surface and cut—it also concretely exemplified the fact that students in the same circle worked at diverse paces and levels, with varying capacities applied to different segments of text. By contrast, the blackboard, now standard equipment in Yemeni schools, in its distance from the student and in its control by the teacher, entails a comparatively depersonalized and uniform pattern of instruction. A teacher-to-class relationship mediated by the blackboard would replace the numerous Sinna-to-pupil dyads mediated by luhas . This change also went to the heart of the old theory of knowledge transmission, which was based on individual teacher-student links, on a student's being formed "in the hands," in the undivided presence, of the teacher. A new sort of teacher, salaried and standardized through professional formation in teacher training institutes, would relate to a new sort of student.

Before the introduction of the classroom blackboard, the initial shift was from luhas to slates, which were used in the rushdiyya as they were in Lancaster schools. The apparent similarity between the individual

writing board of Quranic instruction and the individual slate of the new-method schools concealed a fundamental organizational difference, one that accompanied the equally important change in the nature of the text written down. Instead of routinely centering on dyadic, "recite your lesson-board" commands from Sinna to individual pupils taken one at a time, the new method worked upon a collectivity of concurrently performing individuals who received the same instruction simultaneously from an orchestrating schoolmaster. In the mornings, when reciting pupils occupied Sinna's attention one by one, the rest of the circle were left unattended to pursue their lessons (or not) as they saw fit. In the afternoons, Sinna turned to his water pipe and qat, and the pupils were completely on their own. By contrast, in the typically large Lancaster classrooms, bells and simple semaphores were employed to signal the appropriate numbers of a minutely regimented and continually engaging instructional program to hundreds of simultaneously attentive pupils, each positioned at a specially designated desk. A typical writing exercise, for example, followed a sequence of numbered instructions:

9: hands on knees. This command is conveyed by one ring on the bell; 10: hands on table, head up; 11: clean slates: everyone cleans his slate with a little saliva, or better still with a piece of rag; 12: show slates.^[21]

In this manner, it was seen, a school could function efficiently, like a machine for learning. Each individual was at the same time both located and occupied; space and time were blocked off, minutely organized, mobilized in the service of a continuing disciplinary hold and maximum output. Transposed to Yemen, later versions of such pedagogical procedures would eventually result in a class with a single voice replacing one of many voices, which came to be understood as representing an undesirable cacophony.

Testing, and the passing and failing associated with it, figures prominently in a system that is based on collective activity and is at the same time crosscut by the necessity of ranking and marking individual movement through grades. These days, a primary-school student's final report card, organized by subject matter and according to grades for class work and written-test scores,^[22] concludes by passing the successful student on to the next level. The old ijaza , the granting of transmission authority by a particular teacher to a particular student for a particular text, has given way to the diploma (shahada ), a standardized, state-issued document of fulfillment, through testing, of abstractly defined

educational goals. This has initiated a system that gives the "same value to all holders of the same certificate, so that any one of them can take the place of any other" (Bourdieu 1977: 187).

The Politics of Instruction

With the demise of the Ottoman Empire at the close of World War I, Imam Yahya unceremoniously closed the entire Turkish school system.^[23] In 1924 the Lebanese visitor Amin al-Rihani recorded a schoolboy's lament: "We had organized schools under the Turks," he said, "where geography and arithmetic were taught. They gave us books, slates, paper, ink, pens, exercise books, and chalk—everything, and all free. Sir, I am sad. Today we have no schools and no teachers except the faqih . . . and he charges eight riyals per month."^[24] The semiofficial imamic historian al-Wasi'i tells a different story, however.^[25] "In the days of the Turks," he writes, the educational system was in "total disarray"; it was the imam who "opened the schools and disseminated knowledge ('ilm )." In the post-Ottoman period of Yemeni independence educational policy would continue to be a bone of political contention.

It should be noted here that the account I am giving of the relationship of education and social transformation in Yemen is not the familiar one. The standard political history begins with a group of Yemeni students of the mid-1930s sent to study at the Iraqi military academy in Baghdad and continues with those trained later in Yemen by Iraqi military missions of the 1940s and in Yemen and Egypt by Egyptian officers after 1952. Having absorbed revolutionary ideas from their foreign instructors, it was these former cadets who participated in the several attempted coups and eventually launched the successful Revolution of 1962 by a tank assault on the last imam's palace on the night of September 26.^[26] By contrast, my account cites another history, emphasizing the far less dramatic, cumulative importance of detailed shifts in organization and techniques. It also dates the formative events in these processes of change to practices instituted in the Ottoman period.

While the imam's abrupt closure of the Ottoman schools might have seemed to imply the elimination of all innovations and a simple return to a unitary "traditional" system of instruction, such was not the case. Imam Yahya was an astute observer of all aspects of the Ottoman system, and his own educational oeuvre, despite its outwardly traditional appearance, was actually very much a hybrid, quietly incorporating

several of the key features of Ottoman-introduced instructional "order." Some of the schools al-Wasi'i credits the imam with founding, including the Military College, and the School for Orphans, had in fact been established by the Ottomans.^[27] As early as 1906, when engaged in preliminary negotiations that would later result in the Treaty of Da"an (1911), Imam Yahya had already demonstrated that he was conversant with the special Ottoman usage of the term ma'arif . His fifth demand was for the "transfer of pious endowments to our stewardship so as to revitalize education (ma'arif ) in the country."^[28]

This early idea and others drawn from the Ottoman system were integrated in the foundation of an important new school, al-madrasa al-'ilmiyya , opened in San'a' by Imam Yahya in 1926,^[29] two years after the al-Rihani visit. Located in the modified, Turkish-style residence of the former Ottoman governor, its carriage garage converted into a mosque, the school had a complete, jurisprudence-centered course of study in the classic style, including set readings in the basic Zaidi text, Sharh al-Azhar , and works on ijtihad and hadith by al-Shawkani. Over a forty-year period it would graduate many of the country's leading jurists, who assumed judgeships and other posts in the middle and late imamic era and on into the republican period. In its heyday the school had over five hundred boarding students and about one hundred and fifty day students from San'a'.^[30]

In structure the madrasa 'ilmiyya was quite new: never before in Yemen had 'ilm been conveyed in a "school" that began to approximate the Western organizational sense of the term. One important element was funding. In the three lines he devotes to describing this school, al-Wasi'i mentions a key fact: that the students' "food and drink are the responsibility of the government."^[31] This funding was predicated upon a reorganized system of endowments administration, a move hinted at in negotiations twenty years earlier.^[32] Although this sort of funding is still distinct from the purely public mode of financing of the Ottoman system, it was indicative of an emergent attitude toward asserting a new sort of state control over pious endowments. At Imam Yahya's new school the reorganized endowment revenues were put to a use suggested by Ottoman practice: the providing of regular monthly cash salaries for some twenty-four regular staff, including twenty-one teachers and three functionaries. As in the darasa system, students were also provided for.^[33]

Other features that distinguished the madrasa 'ilmiyya from the earlier 'ilm-transmitting institutions include the division of both the student

body and the curriculum into distinct classes. Al-Wasi'i, who had traveled outside Yemen, observed that "the organization of the school into grades is like Egyptian schools.^[34] In the twelve-year program there were three levels with four grades to a level. The final year was known as the "ijtihad class." Venerable madhhab texts were converted into a curriculum: subjects of study were identified, and specific books were set up as a formal program, especially for the higher levels.^[35] Progression from class to class was by means of passing annual examinations. A committee of scholar-examiners, chosen by the minister of Ma'arif, posed questions to the students individually, and rankings by test results on a scale of one to ten were issued in an annual report. Supervising the overall operation of the school was a director (nazir ). These were the rudiments of an academic form that has become so utterly basic all around the world that its relatively recent historical emergence is often forgotten.

There were also similarities between the new school and Imam Yahya's military, where a number of Turkish officers had stayed on. Both students and soldiers were handled administratively through the legal mechanism of the bond (kafala ),^[36] which was required for enrollment of either type. As in the case of new military recruits, entering students had to be accompanied by bondsmen, who undertook to guarantee "conduct appropriate for students of 'ilm," their obedience to imamic orders, and financial responsibility for any supplies misappropriated. Also like the imam's soldiers, students at the new school received graded weekly pay^[37] and daily allotments of a special type of government bakery bread. Soldiers, younger students, and government-supported orphans regularly paraded together on state occasions, arranged in units and classes.^[38]

Instruction was an essential policy area in the imam's shari'a style of politics in two distinct ways: one concerned madhhab control of the formation of jurists at the highest levels, which the new madrasa 'ilmiyya ensured; another was the perennially felt duty (especially among town scholars) to push back the frontiers of ignorance by sending teachers out to rural districts to provide basic instruction.^[39] The symbolic importance of this second political objective is indicated by the idealized summary account of Imam Yahya's first acts upon his triumphant entrance into the capital in the month of Safar, A.H. 1337 [1918]: "The imam set the affairs of San'a' in order, forbade officials from oppression and corruption, and dispatched instructors to all the villages."^[40]

The regional version of such instructional policies involved, as in previous centuries, the movement of Zaidi scholars into Shafi'i districts.

A local example from the early 1920s is the posting of 'Ali b. Husayn al-Akwa' (father of Muhammad and Isma'il, whose books I have repeatedly cited) to a madrasa in the little village of Ma'ain, just outside of Ibb to the northwest. In a few years, he was succeeded in the post by his eldest son, Muhammad, who had just completed his studies in Dhamar and San'a'.^[41] In his early twenties at the time, Muhammad al-Akwa' taught at Ma'ain while continuing his own studies with scholars in Ibb.

Like most of his students, al-Akwa' resided in Ibb and walked out to the village madrasa every day to hold classes. Conscious both of changes the imam was instituting in San'a' and of new ideas percolating northward from British Aden, he organized his students in small groups of four or five according to their level, and he also gave weekly exams. His former students remember that he was fatherly and friendly during the week, even to the extent of joining them in swimming and soccer, but that he became very severe at test time. Maintaining an older practice, the students engaged in regular recitations to the "soul" of the waqf founder and received a full sack of grain per month from the waqf revenues, which al-Akwa' administered.^[42]

It was in such scholarly milieus around the country that nationalist ideas began to be articulated in the 1930s. By 1944, Muhammad al-Akwa"s secret political activities against the imamic regime were discovered and he was jailed, which terminated his teaching career. The year before he had been elected head of an Ibb-based group of scholars and rural leaders from nearby Ba'dan known as the Reform Society.^[43] Composed of both Shafi'is and Zaidis of qadi families, but no Zaidi sayyids, the Ibb group was one of the earliest nationalist organizations to operate in the country, and it established links both with the Free Yemenis, who had just surfaced in Aden, and with other organizations or groups of individuals in Ta'izz and San'a'. Muhammad's younger brother Isma'il, also a member of the Ibb group, was responsible for carrying messages and pamphlets printed in Aden, including nationalist poetry and the group's own Reform Program leaflet, north to Dhamar and San'a'. It was on such a trip that he too was arrested and jailed.^[44]

Whereas the attempts of 1955 and 1961 and the successful Revolution of 1962 would be led by military officers, this first generation of nationalist endeavor, culminating in the abortive coup of 1948, the dusturiyya ("Constitutional Movement"), was mainly the work of scholars and intellectuals. They had contacts with Yemenis returned

from studies in Cairo and, through merchant connections, with the numerous highlanders resident in Aden. Political activity emerged from the regular intellectual gatherings that were such a prominent part of the scholarly life of the period. In Ibb such men assembled for qat-chewing sessions in the afternoons and for lengthy evening gatherings as well. "The town used to glow at night from the lights of houses where men gathered to study," one participant fondly remembered. Individuals such as Hasan al-Du'ais, a leading Ba'dan shaykh known as "the philosopher," joined rooms of men who took turns reading aloud from and commenting upon such newly available, smuggled works as Jurgi Zaydan's world history. An extension of the youthful activity of peer learning into adult life, such intellectual gatherings occurred in other towns as well, where they took a similar political turn. With other prominent Ibb members of the Reform Society, Muhammad al-Akwa' was initially jailed from 1944 to 1947. After only one year of freedom, however, he was once again brought in and jailed in the aftermath of the 1948 coup, this time until 1955.^[45]

Such men turned their jails into virtual academies. Ahmad al-Shami has written an account of the flourishing of Yemeni literature that occurred in the notorious prison in Hajja.^[46] He tells how the writers, scholars, and poets among the prisoners eventually overcame their dreadful circumstances: "Lips started to smile again, weariness and fatigue were relieved by literary anecdotes, verses were recalled, and tales and morals drawn from history started to circulate among the prison inmates. . . . Literary sessions took place and discussion circles were convened; jokes, maqamahs , poems, and tales were exchanged, and thus the otherwise oppressive and miserable time was killed in a pleasant manner." One of the techniques used by the prisoners recalls their days in Quranic schools. When there were no writing materials, he writes, "we used pieces of wood or flattened tin cans to write on, after blackening them with charcoal or soot. We recorded verses and ideas so that they would not be lost. Then we would commit them to memory, wipe them off, and write others." Among prisoners from the Ibb area, 'Abd al-Rahman al-Iryani and Isma'il al-Akwa' worked on editions of the famous Yemeni poets 'Abd al-Rahman al-Ansi and 'Umarah al-Yamani, while Muhammad al-Akwa' prepared an annotated edition of volumes of the Iklil by the early Yemeni historian al-Hamdani.

In this period Aden was both an important refuge and a source of reform ideas for the early nationalist leaders. From the middle of the

previous century, when Aden became a free port, trade volume had grown steadily, and merchants and laborers were increasingly drawn to the bustling enclave from the highland Shafi'i districts around Ta'izz and Ibb. By 1900 there was regular caravan traffic between Aden and Ibb: coffee, skins, "bastard saffron" (wars ), and clarified butter were sent southward, and the spectrum of Indian Ocean trade goods, including spices, cloth, scents, medicines, and many other items, were carried northward. Isma'il Basalama, who was both an important regional shaykh and the Ottoman governor in the waning days of the empire, was also the leading merchant of his day.

Educational innovation in Aden dates to an unsuccessful effort to introduce a new style of school as early as 1856.^[47] According to a later British observer, the "ignorance and apathy of the inhabitants," combined with criticism from India, where colonial educational policy was then the subject of intense debate, caused the school to be closed after only two years. A more modest government institution intended to provide elementary instruction in English was opened under an Indian headmaster in 1866. By 1877 the Aden Regency School had sixty students of widely varied backgrounds who studied a Bombay presidency fifth-standard program that included the "elementary histories of England, India, and Rome; Euclid as far as the first book; geography, arithmetic, and algebra."^[48] Instruction in English and bookkeeping (introduced later) proved attractive for Adeni students interested in conducting trade with foreign firms or obtaining positions in government service. An Arabic Government School was also opened in 1866. While the sort of education provided by the English-language schools, employing a "new method" pedagogy applied to a new spectrum of subjects known as the "Aden syllabus," may have represented the ultimate local model of "modern" instruction, the Arabic school program was also innovative and was more readily imitated. In the early years of the Arabic Government School the "medium" of instruction was the Quran, but "secular reading, writing, and elementary arithmetic" were later introduced. And, unlike local Quranic schools, where parents paid the teacher, the Arabic Government School was supported by the colonial government and the Municipal Fund.

In terms of the student population involved, schooling in Aden remained relatively small in scale until the 1930s and 1940s. At about the same time that rapid educational expansion was occurring in the colony, schools inspired in part by Aden models began to appear in the highlands. One example, connected to the activity of the important

early nationalist leader Ahmad Muhammad Nu'man, was a school established in a village in al-Hujariyya district (in Ta'izz province close to Aden) in 1934. At this alternative to the regular Quranic schools students studied such subjects as geography, history, arithmetic, and science, and at an associated "club" they could read books, newspapers, and magazines brought back from Aden by workers.

But it was not only the nationalists who were attentive to developments in Aden. In the same year in Ibb, the imamic government under Sayf al-Islam al-Hasan (Imam Yahya's son) opened a new school known simply as the maktab , perhaps suggesting descent from the old maktab rushdiyya .^[49] Like the former Ottoman school, it was a four-year advanced primary school, but it was financed more on the Aden model with support from merchant parents and with the government assuming responsibility only for the teacher's salary and floor coverings. Another educational development in Ibb still more directly reflected the influence of policies in British Aden. A special college in Aden for the sons of hinterland "chiefs" had been founded in 1935–37.^[50] By 1940 a similar institution, known as al-mas'af , meaning "to rescue," was established in Ibb. Designed to "rescue" the sons of rural notables from ignorance, the new Ibb institution dovetailed with an ancient Yemeni political device—the hostage system.^[51] Holding the sons of rural shaykhs hostage ensured the fathers' good conduct vis-à-vis the state. Several hundred young men from districts radiating around the town thus embarked on a tightly supervised student life (there were soldier chaperons for walks around town), including a mild educational-indoctrination program taught by Zaidi instructors. Among other subjects, they studied the history of the family of the Prophet, touching on the line of descent that produced the Zaidi imams of Yemen. Although the "school" lasted only three years, its brief existence was part of a new awareness of the political potential of instruction as a policy instrument.

After the threatening period of the 1940s, with the initial arrests of nationalists in Ibb and elsewhere and then the abortive "Constitutional" coup attempt (1948), there was also a local reinforcement of the classic strategy in instructional politics. This was to ensure madhhab control in darasa instruction, the idea behind the establishment of the madrasa 'ilmiyya in San'a'. In connection with his treatment of this institution and other educational programs in the mid-1920s, al-Wasi'i remarks that in the mosques of San'a', "'ilm is studied as in the old days." Through the transition to Zaidi rule in Lower Yemen instruc-

tion had also continued at the Great Mosque of Ibb. In later years, the San'a' model of the madrasa 'ilmiyya was replicated on a smaller scale in other towns, including Sa'da, in the far north,^[52] and Ibb and nearby Jibla in Lower Yemen.^[53] In Ta'izz, the provincial seat and, after 1948, the national capital of Imam Ahmad, the equivalent new-style 'ilm school was known as the Ahmadiyya. The student body at the Ahmadiyya included a few young men from Ibb, such as Muhammad Yahya al-Haddad, who had been a student with al-Akwa' at Ma'ain, others from Jibla and elsewhere in Lower Yemen, and students from Ta'izz, including young men from the royal family, such as the future imam, Muhammad al-Badr.

The alteration of the Great Mosque program in Ibb was associated with a local reorganization of the endowments system in the late 1940s and 1950s.^[54] As the aim of this restructuring and replicating the old practice of supporting study in the madhhab of the ruler, a specially earmarked monthly stipend of half a sack (qudah ) of grain and two riyals cash was offered as "encouragement" for Ibb darasa students to study the Azhar , the Zaidi manual, in both "text and commentary." Those who took up this offer, including the continuing responsibility to recite to the "souls" of the waqf founders, were young men with no other means of support, such as an orphan named Muhammad Zain al-'Awdi, who went on to study at the Ahmadiyya and later became an Ibb primary-school director after the Revolution. Al-'Awdi remembers that together the four thick volumes of the Sharh al-Azhar served as a perfect armrest for floor-level sitting. At this point before the Revolution, darasa instruction at the Great Mosque had become an intermediate level, situated between the primary instruction offered at the local maktab and the potential for some students to pursue advanced work at the Ahmadiyya in Ta'izz.