Official History

I write what I have seen and heard.
Al-Wasi'i (1928: 278)

In the Author's Foreword to his Selections , a concise overview of Yemeni history published in Cairo in 1951, 'Abd Allah al-Jirafi recalls a former problem and its solution by Imam Yahya. The problem was the perceived state of existing historical studies in Yemen. One aspect of this concerned the fragmentation that had resulted from regional accounts: "The historian of the (northern) mountains limited himself to the history of the imams, and the historian of the Tihama and the south of Yemen limited himself to others; no one managed to bring together all the Yemeni historical sources and extract from them that which would satisfy the spirit and give pleasure to the intellect." A very different and also newly perceived part of the problem in the discipline of history derived from the reliance upon "pens and inkwells." This referred to the dangerous open interpretability of writing, the fact that "the handwritten books^[37] of Yemeni history were not secure against misreadings and changed vowelings." As a consequence, according to al-Jirafi, "the reader emerged from them with disordered views (ara' mudtariba )." A still further dimension of the problem was the physical frailty of writing and the extremely limited number of copies of manuscript works. Many histories had suffered the ravages of time (and spiders), while in the case of others, "the hands of Europeans and other visitors to Yemen of various eras had fallen upon them."

At the opening of his Foreword, before reviewing these detailed aspects of the problematic scholarly situation that obtained in Yemen, al-Jirafi offers a general testimony to the importance of the "art of history" (fann al-ta'rikh ):

Noble in what is perpetuated of bygone days and related of peoples and races, employing to this end inkwells and pens, is the art of history, the link between the past and the present, the record of works small and great, the presenter of the monuments of societies in countrysides and towns, the expressive tongue for their sciences and their knowledges and their circumstances and their character and their culture and their beliefs, the truthful picture of their rise and their fall, and the oppression and justice and lowliness and honor involved.

He continues that it is, therefore,

incumbent upon every society endeavoring to advance that it first turn attention to its past and the study of its history, learning what it has

consisted of in the way of events and catastrophes and what the causes have been of rises and falls. This is because the life of societies is bound up with their past, and their recent times are but the child of their distant eras. For this reason it is said that a society that has neglected its past and knows it not is like a man who has lost his memory. . . . The study of history is a necessity of survival; knowledge of the society's history is itself one of the greatest factors in progress, especially if in the society's history there are excellent and glorious accomplishments.

According to al-Jirafi, Imam Yahya had "reflected on the problematic state of affairs" in Yemeni historiography and

he desired, following upon his [political] unification of Yemen al-Sa'ida, to unify its history. To this end, he issued an official order to his son, his Royal Highness Sayf al-Islam 'Abd Allah, the Minister of Ma'arif, to establish a committee in the Ma'arif Ministry to study the history of Yemen and publish a comprehensive book, containing a concise survey together with political, literary, and social facts.

The history committee was appointed in A.H. 1356 [1937],^[38] relatively late in comparison with the school, publishing, and library efforts begun in the early or mid-twenties. The timing did coincide, however, with the beginnings of underground nationalist opposition. With Sayyid Muhammad b. Muhammad Zabara as its head and Sayyid Ahmad b. Ahmad al-Muta', Sayyid Ahmad b. 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Warith, and Qadi 'Abd Allah b. 'Abd al-Karim al-Jirafi as members,^[39] the committee was composed of leading intellectual figures, all of whom, except for al-Jirafi, are also commonly identified as important early advocates of reform. Their mandated production of a "unified" Yemeni history proceeded by first breaking the object of study down analytically, by means of a classification into periods. In a parallel division of scholarly labor, committee members undertook specialized compilation and writing tasks in one of the four resulting great historical epochs: pre-Islamic history (pre-seventh century A.D.); from the time of the Prophet to the beginning of the Banu Ziyad state in ninth-century (A.D.) Yemen; from the Banu Ziyad to the end of the tenth century A.H. [sixteenth A.D.]; and from the beginning of the tenth century to the "present history" (al-ta'rikh al-hadir ) of the fourteenth [twentieth] century.^[40]

Unlike several bracketed studies that stayed within the frames of this new historical classification, al-Jirafi's own 1951 study is based on materials that he "selected" from all four periods. He put the history of Yemen back together again, reconstituting an unbroken chronology

that begins with sketches of the pre-Islamic Yemeni states of Himyar and Saba and concludes with details of the announcement of Imam Ahmad's cabinet in 1949. Unlike most contemporary Western historians, who by definition apply themselves to the study of other eras, Yemeni historians had always written most fully about the events of their own time. As with legal witnessing, the authoritative contributions of historical accounts centered on what the author had personally seen or had heard from reliable individuals. Historians used to open their accounts as if they were giving oral testimony: for example, "qala 'Ali b. al-Hasan al-Khazraji" (lit. "'Ali b. al-Hasan al-Khazraji said").^[41] These were historians of the present, chroniclers, in the main, of their own times. Retaining something of this sort of authority, al-Jirafi is most expansive on the contemporary reigns of Imams Yahya and Ahmad.

At the same time, however, the rapid surveys of his earlier chapters establish a continuous identity for an entity called "Yemen," ruled by a long succession of states. Developments in history writing outside of Yemen were part of the backdrop for such new approaches taken by highland authors. A series of published universal^[42] and national histories, from the Ottoman Sulayman Pasha (1876) to the Egyptian Jurgi Zaydan,^[43] had been in vogue among Yemeni readers. Universal and Ottoman history had been taught in the Ottoman school curriculum in Yemen; a new "comprehensive history," developed by the imam's History Committee, was eventually introduced into that of the madrasa 'ilmiyya (al-Akwa' 1980: 289).

Al-Jirafi's historical project is rounded out by introductory materials of an interdisciplinary nature: the first chapter includes, in his description, a "detailed account of the country of Yemen, including basic information about its land and its boundaries, its varied climates, its regions, its rivers and valley systems, its mountains, its most renowned towns and ports, its most important and ancient ruins, and something about its economy, its tribes, and its population." The inclusion of geographical, linguistic, genealogical, and folklore materials was, in part, a continuation of distinguished indigenous traditions of inquiry on these topics. The eclectic comprehensiveness of al-Jirafi's account would be reproduced—with a political adjustment from royalist to republican—in a series of works of similar scope—for example, al-Waysi (1962), Sharaf al-Din (1963), al-Thawr (1969), M. al-Akwa' (1971), al-Shamahi (1972), and al-Haddad (new ed. 1976; 1986), that began to appear about a decade later, in the early years of the Revolu-

tion. The original Yemeni study in this new genre was not by al-Jirafi, however, but by his distinguished predecessor as a quasi-official imamic historian, 'Abd al-Wasi' b. Yahya al-Wasi'i (d. A.H. 1379 [1959]).^[44]

In his History of Yemen , published in A.H. 1346 [1928], al-Wasi'i deploys a two-part "organization" (tartib ) described in his opening "discourse" (al-khutba ): "The first part concerns the biography of the Prophet and [then] the imams of Yemen down to the time of the contemporary imam of this era"; the second is devoted to "the geography of Yemen and its politics." In a transitional fashion, the book combines, as in al-Jirafi, diachronic and synchronic classifications, an initially rapid chronology that later slows to give year-by-year detail together with a type of presentation, new to Yemeni letters, arranged in quasi-analytic categories. Subheads (in Part II, Section 1, for example: "Language," "Industry and Commerce," "Marriage Customs in Yemen," "The Color of Town Women," "San'a', Capital of Yemen") are of widely varying levels of abstraction and elaboration. A Yemeni reality is re-presented in an unfamiliarly objective manner: at the same time that the implicit is made explicit for Yemeni readers, communicable sense is made of Yemen for non-Yemenis. Subsections such as "Pastimes and Games [of women]," which explains that Yemeni women do not engage in "disgraceful" and "dishonorable" dancing but dance only among themselves, seem mainly to address the perspectives of a foreign, especially Egyptian or Levantine audience.

As print decisively altered the communicability of the new historians' writings, its fixity and reproducible qualities also stilled fears about the perilous alterability and perishability of longhand texts. While some external textual apparatuses, such as title pages, chapter headings, tables of contents, and indices, were not completely unknown in manuscripts, they became standard and much more elaborate in printed works. Other apparatuses were altogether new, either separated out from the main body of the text or positioned in a novel meta-relation to it. Al-Jirafi's history includes what may be the first bibliography (maraji' ) of supporting references for a scholarly study,^[45] and footnotes initially appeared in such works as al-Wasi'i's history and Zabara's edition of al-Shawkani's biographical dictionary. Very specific to printed books of the era are concluding lists of "mistakes and corrections." While revealing the fallibility of editing and the available typography, these errata lists (which later disappeared) also subtly pointed up the potential perfectibility, finality, and closure of the printed text. In comparison with the physical and conceptual openness

of manuscripts, printed texts were to be related to in a new manner. Copying, of course, would be completely eliminated; reading would no longer be an open-ended process that required and invited corrective intervention and elucidating comment. While printed texts were more physically distanced from and conceptually independent of equally newly constituted readers, they also contained a new authority, a new truth value, enhanced by the definitiveness of the technology.

With al-Wasi'i's book it is possible to speak of, and fairly precisely date, the birth of a new kind of Yemeni historiography. Not only were the previous generation of historians (e.g., al-Kibsi, al-Iryani, al-'Arshi)^[46] pre-political-unification writers, their works were manuscripts in both the physical and the discursive sense.^[47] It was with al-Wasi'i that a convergence occurred between an emergent nation-state awareness, new modes of constituting an account, and the availability of print technology. If al-Jirafi may be considered a second-generation representative of this new tradition, then the scholars of the first decade of the Revolution are a third and perhaps final one. With the 1970s and 1980s, Yemeni history writing began to merge with a new discursive era, that of the university-trained historian and of international standards of composition, citation, and publication.

Bounded by earlier, manuscript authors and the recent appearance of "trained" historians, this transitional Yemeni history writing is marked by still other distinctive features. These we know about largely because of the parallel continuation, in the twentieth-century period in question, of the great biographical-dictionary tradition. The principal reference here is to the astounding corpus of biographical compilation undertaken and published by al-Wasi'i's contemporary, the other founding father of contemporary Yemeni history writing, Sayyid Muhammad b. Muhammad Zabara (d. A.H. 1380 [1961]),^[48] who was mentioned earlier as the head of Imam Yahya's history commission. Almost simultaneously in the mid-1920s, the two men were the first Yemenis to publish their own historical writings.^[49] The crucial source for understanding changes in scholarly activities over the past one hundred years (the fourteenth century A.H. ) is the last of Zabara's biographical histories, "The Entertainment of the Gaze" (Nuzhat al-nazar ), published posthumously in 1979.^[50] It provides entries on all the key figures in the history writing of the period (including the last of the manuscript historians, such as al-Kibsi, and the men of the following print generations: al-Wasi'i, Zabara, al-Jirafi, al-Warith, al-Muta', al-Waysi, al-Haddad, Sharaf al-Din, Muhammad and Isma'il al-Akwa', etc.).

Chronicles and biographical dictionaries are the two main old genres of Muslim historical writing. In Yemen, the biographical works have taken various forms, including some imaginative reworkings by twentieth-century Yemeni authors. The initial impetus for such works was to "know the men," enabling the critical assessment of the passage of authoritative knowledge through time. Ibn Samura's early dictionary details the actual arrival in the highlands of key legal texts. A simple genealogical method specified the teacher-student transmission links between generations (tabaqat ) of jurists and the texts they carried. In later centuries, as it became increasingly difficult to trace linkages, breaks in reported chains of transmission occurred. Despite the multiplication of human transmitters and the proliferation of texts, however, genealogical analysis, often much more limited in scope, persisted in historical accounts. Al-Shawkani's early-nineteenth-century specification of the transmission links for the entire corpus of his knowledge was exceptional.^[51]

In Zabara's biographical collections, specific attention is given only to an individual's teachers and students, although it is possible, by means of cross-referencing, to follow intellectual links backwards and forwards through several generations. In addition, Zabara frequently quotes ijaza s in poetry, and these name in some detail the relevant backgrounds of men and texts.^[52] More innovative than Zabara's dictionaries are books by al-Jirafi and Isma'il al-Akwa'. Al-Jirafi's Tuhfat al-ikhwan is an extended biography of the great Yemeni scholar and jurist, Husayn b. 'Ali al-Amri (d. A.H. 1361 [1942]), completed by biographies of his numerous students. Al-Akwa"s Madaris al-islamiyya shifts the conventions of foreground and background, organizing the presentation by particular institutions, giving biographical notices for the individuals who taught at each of these schools. The development of the specialized genre of autobiography is evidenced both in the personalized style of historical writing by al-Shamahi^[53] and in A Page From the Social History of Yemen and the Story of My Life by Muhammad al-Akwa'. This last combines a literary account of growing up in Yemen (in some respects like Egyptian Taha Hussain's famous autobiography) with a folklorist's fascination for details of custom and colloquial expression.^[54]

An item that first appears in Zabara's biographies beginning with the entry on al-Wasi'i is mention of activities connected with the official mission of "enlivening" the Yemeni textual intellectual legacy (turath ) and introducing it to scholars elsewhere in the Middle East, mainly

through publishing Yemeni works overseas. Trips were undertaken with an aim at once old and new: the "dissemination"/"publication" (nashr ) of knowledge. "And he undertook to have printed," the biographical entries say, and lists follow of "his own writings" and titles of other Yemeni-authored works seen through presses in Mecca, Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, or Baghdad. Imams Yahya and Ahmad, al-Jirafi wrote, "ordered the publication of a number of Yemeni writings, which had a distinct impact throughout the Arab world and a beneficial influence."^[55]

This official publication policy extended to more than Yemeni histories. Unlike the texts of the Shafi'i school, which were of far greater interregional and colonial significance and therefore found their way into print much earlier, most of the major works of Zaidi jurisprudence were published for the first time in the first half of the twentieth century. The men who handled these publication projects were the leading Yemeni historians of the day. Before he had printed any of his own works, al-Wasi'i was responsible for the 1921 publication of the text (matn ) of Al-Azhar , the basic manual of the school; the key commentary work, Sharh al-Azhar , which appeared in four large volumes; and also Majmu' Zaid bin 'Ali , the early hadith-jurisprudence work by the school's eponym.^[56] The Azhar text appeared in a collection of basic texts (Kitab majmu' al-mutun ) that also included a brief inheritance treatise and a short usul jurisprudence manual (Al-Ghaya ). The biographer writes that his subject "expended an enormous effort in seeing Kitab al-majmu' into print." Al-Wasi'i had also taken the Zaid bin 'Ali manuscript with him on his travels, "and undertook to present [it] to the scholars of Egypt and Syria, to obtain their poetic appreciations of it,^[57] and to bring to their attention the Yemeni method in the religious sciences." In addition to efforts to get books by al-Shawkani and his own massive biographical studies published, Zabara was instrumental in having the important commentary on the Zaid bin 'Ali text, Rawd al-nadir by al-Sayaghi, published in four volumes in 1929.^[58] For his part, and in addition to several other types of important texts he supervised at the presses, al-Jirafi was instrumental in the publication of Bahr al-zakhkhar , a five-volume comprehensive study of all the legal schools by Imam al-Murtada, author of Al-Azhar .^[59]

This intensive publication activity represented an important new wrinkle in the centuries-old pattern of traveling for scholarly pursuits, although al-Wasi'i and Zabara,^[60] at least, endeavored to study on their trips in something approaching the long-established manner. Inside

Yemen there was still some of the old circulation of scholars in search of particular teachers or local schools of note, although the newly centralized pull of the madrasa 'ilmiyya in the north and the Ahmadiyya in the south skimmed the cream of the advanced students. Another sort of rihla in evidence in the first part of the century was only a recent version of a venerable practice. This was the research trip. To the extent possible, historians endeavored to base their accounts on personal communications and eyewitness experiences. Thus al-Wasi'i reports in the first person on his findings among a tribe, significantly including the women and children, who spoke classical Arabic "instinctually."^[61] On a trip to Ibb, Zabara interviewed Ahmad al-Basir about the family ancestor who originally came to Lower Yemen; and Abu Bakr al-Haddad was the source for the profile of his uncle 'Abd al-Rahman al-Haddad. Later, al-Waysi and Muhammad Yahya al-Haddad would travel extensively in the pursuit of geographical data and information about early Yemeni civilizations, while the Akwa' brothers "visited numerous locales in various regions of Yemen to inspect and study archaeological and historical sites."^[62] Isma'il al-Akwa' has frequent footnotes identifying his eyewitnessed and personal communication material. In the early post-Revolutionary period, texts began to be supplemented by photographs, many of which provided further evidence of the author's presence on field trips.

On the title page of Selections , below al-Jirafi's modestly sized name and two smaller lines saying he held positions as an instructor at the dar al-'ulum (madrasa 'ilmiyya ) in San'a' and as a representative of the Ministry of Ma'arif to Egypt, there appears, in large bold print: "ordered to be printed by His Royal Highness, King of the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen, Imam al-Nasr . . . Ahmad bin Yahya Hamid al-Din." An association with power was nothing new for Yemeni historians, but some of these scholars of the first half of the twentieth century were "quasi-official," as Sayyid Mustafa Salim has put it,^[63] in a period-specific sense. Salim singles out al-Wasi'i and al-Jirafi for their marked official backing and their privileging of the history of the Zaidi imams, but the phenomenon was general. Historical studies had become the subject of the organizational interest of an evolving nation-state, beginning with the Committee of 1937, continuing after the Revolution with a similar Committee for Yemeni History,^[64] and following with the Center for Yemeni Studies founded in 1975–76.^[65] While most Yemeni historians of this century have been closely tied to the state, as members of state history committees, as secretaries in the imamic diwan,^[66] and

as appointed officials, many were also active advocates of reform or political opponents of the regime.

For all the shifts of technological and political terrain, however, the scholars of the transitional generations remained generalists of the "old school." All were trained in a core of knowledge centering on shari'a jurisprudence, which provided the common intellectual foundation for historical as for other branches of scholarship. Thus it is recorded in biographies, that al-Wasi'i taught the Sharh al-Azhar to his son and authored a short treatise on usul jurisprudence; that Zabara studied jurisprudence with the leading jurists of his day and served as a judge for seven years early in his career; and that al-Jirafi studied the Sharh al-Azhar with two different teachers. The same sort of curricular and career profile was shared by the succeeding generation of early republican historians as well. Sharply distinct from the manuscript products of the preceding period, the scholarship of this transitional period in Yemeni historiography is also decidedly different from that of the emergent contemporary historical discipline. Jurisprudence and history have now begun to diverge, into unrelated, parallel fields of inquiry, separately housed in a law school and a department of history.