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.