Guerrilla History - Yemen's History of Resisting Empire w/Isa Blumi, P. 1 [Adnan Husain Show]

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

This week, we bring you an episode from our sister program The Adnan Husain Show.  Enjoy! In this first part of a two part series, Adnan has an epic conversation with Dr. Isa Blumi, historian and Professor of Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at Stockholm University, about Yemen’s modern history of resisting colonialism geopolitically and global capitalism. Author of Destroying Yemen: What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us about the World, Dr. Blumi masterfully analyzes and integrates the geographic, social, economic, cultural, political and religious dimensions of Yemen’s distinctive historical experience. If you want to understand why Ansarullah as a popular movement has taken leadership of active solidarity with the people of Gaza in confronting ZioAmerican empire, this episode will be indispensable. To consult more of Dr. Isa Blumi’s recent work on Yemen and the Gulf region: Blumi, Isa. Destroying Yemen: What chaos in Arabia tells us about the world. Univ of California Press, 2018. Blumi, Isa. Chaos in Yemen: Societal collapse and the new authoritarianism. Routledge, 2010. Blumi, Isa. "The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)." In Government and Politics of the Contemporary Middle East, pp. 545-652. Routledge, 2023.   Blumi, Isa, and Jaafar Alloul. "Guest-Editors’ Introduction: Re-Worlding the Gulf: Anomaly as Geopolitical Function." Middle East Critique 34, no. 2 (2025): 181-202. Blumi, Isa. "Imperial Equivocations Britain’s Temperamental Mobilization of the Caliphate, 1912-1924." Rivista italiana di storia internazionale 4, no. 1 (2021): 149-173. Blumi, Isa. "Iraqi ties to Yemen’s demise: Complicating the ‘Arab Cold War’in South Arabia." Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World 16, no. 3 (2022): 235-254. Support the show on Patreon if you can (and get early access to episodes)!  www.patreon.com/adnanhusain  Or make a one-time donation to the show and Buy Me a Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/adnanhusain Like, subscribe, share!  Also available in video on YouTube:  https://youtube.com/@adnanhusainshow X: @adnanahusain Substack: adnanahusain.substack.com www.adnanhusain.org

Hello, Salam. Welcome to you all to this show. I'm Adnan Hussein, a professor of medieval Mediterranean and Islamicate world history, back on the channel with a very important episode and a wonderful guest that I've been looking forward to speaking with for a long time about a very important topic, which is the history of Yemen and how to understand, contextualize and explain the remarkable commitment of the Yemeni people to the Palestine Solidarity Movement as almost the only active and continuing front in the axis of resistance. So there's a lot to explain there. But before I introduce my guest, I just wanted to say, as you know, this is a relatively recent and new channel and educational public educational project. I used to have a podcast called the Majlis associated with the Muslim Society's Global Perspectives Project here at Queen's University. But when in October 24, Francesca Albanese was invited to give a lecture and I endeavored with

her permission and that of the organizers to record it so it could be available in podcast form and for our students and for public knowledge. I was told by the university authorities that if I recorded the talk and disseminated it, they would cancel the lecture. So at that point, I abandoned the muddiless and all funding and support from the university and started this channel

so that we could continue to have unrestricted real, deep, scholarly analysis and discussion about the important topics in our world and bring on real scholars to do it. So if you like, please like and share this video, subscribe to the channel. And if you can, of course, we'll always make everything free and available to the public.

But if you can support, since we no longer have university support, you can go to patreon.com slash Adnan Hussein with our gratitude and help keep it free and available for all the others who can't support it. Without further ado, I'm really delighted to welcome to the show Professor Issa Bloomy, who is professor of Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at Stockholm University. And he's a very, you know, important scholar who researches societies that are in the process of social, economic, and political transformation. And he takes a global and comparative approach to how various European imperial projects in the Islamic world intersected with developments in the late Ottoman Empire. His work has continued from that like late 19th and early 20th century focus to other aspects of the region in kind of post-Ottoman successor states into the 20th century.

And he is also author of numerous books, including, given today's topic, Chaos in Yemen, Societal Collapse, and the New Authoritarianism, which came out in 2010. And more recently, in 2018, with University of California Press, Destoring Yemen, what chaos in Arabia tells us about the world. Issa, it's really wonderful to have you on the show. Welcome. Thank you very much, Dr. Hussein. up none for inviting me. And it's a pleasure to meet your audience. And I hope I could share some insights into a very important corner of the world, not only for current events, but for the last

hundred years. So thank you again for the opportunity. Well, I'm sure listeners and watchers to the show will be the ones who are thanking you by the end of it. You know, obviously most people who pay any attention whatsoever to what's going on in the news and in the world, most recently would associate Yemen with either the ongoing terrible humanitarian situation because of the siege and blockade. So if people are really witnessing right now siege and blockade on Gaza, there also was a similar kind of process that took place with the sanctions imposed upon Yemen and a vicious and brutal assault upon the people of Yemen by neighboring countries with U.S. support, all of which I'm sure

we will discuss in greater detail. But it led to awareness by many international aid organizations and the UN declaring that it was at that time in the late 2010s mid-to-learned. late 2010's the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. And subsequently, people are very aware, of course, of Ansarola's active interdiction of trade in the Red Sea to Israeli ports, which they see very directly as humanitarian intervention with the responsibility to protect, to stop an ongoing genocide and they are one of the few countries in the region and at least relatively we could say state level actors who have demonstrated that kind of solidarity so those are the kinds of things people have heard about they've also

heard a lot of very negative portrayals and stereotypes and misunderstandings and misimpressions that Ansarola or the Houthis as they call them are just just Iranian proxies in the region and so forth. So there's a lot to unpack, but before we get to those contemporary events, you are a serious scholar of history that as you just said is concerned with the significance of the region and its development for the past hundred years or so. I'm wondering what you can tell us that we should know to appreciate and interpret and understand these later events about the late 19th or the 19th century and British

both, you know, late Ottoman and British colonial periods and, you know, the consequences of the ways in which its early post-colonial history took shape during the Cold War up to around 2011, which is, I think, where, you know, much of our story will really take a more detailed analysis. But what would you tell the audience and listeners that they should be keeping in mind, and understanding about that longer history? Yes. Well, firstly, the peoples of this Southwest Arabian arena, whose territories are delineated in somewhat

a historical ways, they don't reflect the historical complexity, but also coherence of the peoples who interacted with each other, often in very different topographies, very difficult terrain, not only to live in, but more importantly for Yemenis to conquer from outside powers. So they've been able to demonstrate a resilience in a couple of important ways that I think is one way of understanding the nature of war against Yemenis, and it in many ways sheds light on the tactics. if you will, of a new kind of imperialism, one that I phrase often in its association with finance capitalism, because though the commandeers, the masters of finance, commandeered and

helped nurture a iteration of the states that takes its most dramatic, obtrusive, invasive, and violent form from the late 18th century onwards in various parts of the world. And Yemen has had to deal in face with such interventions by this external sets of actors. And much like the larger Ottoman Empire, in much of the larger Islamic world, whether it be in West Africa, in West Indian Ocean or Eurasia, the very complex societies that, word face. They kind of rise, if you will, of a new kind of modern violent state that appropriates violence to utilize and subjugate populations that historically have remained autonomous or were able to at least on a certain level negotiate their relationship with

the sinews of world history. And Yemen is one of those areas that for several thousand years have been interacting with the larger Indian Ocean, with what we would call the Red Sea complex, and by obvious connections by way of Islam, being a part of the Mediterranean story over 2,000 years. And what's important about Yemen itself and the societies that are built within this quite difficult, topographical universe, but also very much integrated into the ebbs and flows of global exchange, commercial, cultural, is that the peoples there were able to be the main, let's say, authors of some of the kind of global, circular. Venditions of increasingly modern notions of the application of law, of certain principles of exchange that were at direct conflict with those that were emerging from the Atlantic world, and would remain resilient until this very violent wave of intrusion. I mean, the Portuguese in the 16th and 17th century were their first iterations of an Atlantic world coming into the Indian Ocean World and hence larger Eurasia. But they were largely required to maintain a relationship

of commercial partnership as much as conquest. And the tricks of the trade, if you will, of empire would evolve over time to develop increasingly in efforts to avoid this very costly, if you think about in long term, costly partnerships that even the British East India Company would forge with polities throughout the Arabian Peninsula, let alone India, what becomes known as after 1850s,

British India, in South East Asia and East Africa. And one of those areas where the nature of the negotiations that kind of completed and agreed upon a relationship they would have with finance capitalism, on Yemeni terms, as opposed on terms imposed by the British East Indy Company, for instance, from the 1830s, first in Aden, where they were able to establish a base, if you will, of support for their fleets that were circumventing Africa at the time and trying to access the larger Indian Ocean world. Yemenis, by way of the very fact that many of these peoples, especially,

especially over the area called Haldramaut, which is the southern part of what used to be southern Yemen, and over a period from the 1838 to 1967, sometimes loosely, sometimes more directly governed by various British, either directly by British administrators or through proxies of those who signed treaties, very much similar to those that would formulate the ruling, families of, let's say, Kuwait, and Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and most notorious, perhaps, for all of us, Saudi Arabia.

The Sauds and the British would formulate a crucial relationship at the early part of the 20th century that would lay the groundwork, if you will, for a new kind of imperialism since then. But Yemenis have always been able, to a large extent, navigate in large part because they were so crucial to the global dynamics of the Indian Ocean world. I mean, Hadrami, those from Haddam, their ancestors, many of them established Emirates or small-time principalities in Java, in Sumatra, in Borneo, in the island complex of Sulu. in Mindanao, even in parts of Vietnam, southern Vietnam, these are policies that would help sustain a global kind of interlinking system of not only commerce, but the rules of regulations, the code of conduct, if you will,

that directly clashed with company capitalists or corporate capitalist kind of projects of the 18th, 19th century. And the clash shaped the nature of what eventually evolves into the classable European imperialist state with enormous use of violence when necessary, but more importantly, attempting to control the capacities of local indigenous populations to survive, to be self-sufficient. So managing and undermining the ability to feed a community becomes a strategy of this modern and Frankenstein iteration of the state

and the corporation and financial interests that it basically serviced. And the Yemenis blessed them well into the middle of the 20th century were able to,

at least in the mountains, resist pressures to subordinate themselves. And they remain quite interesting even within the context of

being integrated into the ultimate empire in the 1870s, a process by which internal politics in the highlands of Yemen demanded that some factions commandeered the wish of the Ottoman state to expand the influence in this crucial strategic zone because the Suez Canal had been opened, Egypt under Muhammad Ali and his descendants had made in modern, quite dynamic, almost superpower, if you will, up until the 1840s. That was somewhat reversed by coalition of European and certain Ottoman actors.

But the Red Sea nevertheless became a crucial zone of commercial capitalist rivalries that made Yemen once again a hub for intrigue that also invited the Ottomans for the opportunity in the early 1870s to become a part of this process. On call from Yemenis understood very well, they needed to form a coalition with certain actors they don't necessarily wanted to deal with in the past, but realized that this could give them leverage in their direct confrontation with French, Swiss, Austrian, British companies, German companies who are investing in this part neighboring their world and disrupting the trade connections that they had maintained and sustained for millennia. And that's crucial. While those,

what we would call today southern Yemenis and Hadramis, in particular, largely dependent on maritime trade, were compelled by the very nature of their economic and political associations to the larger world to more directly interact and forge alliances with the British or various other actors. Those who lived in the mountains could feed themselves and could sustain, I hate to use the term civilization, but is one that actually is useful to think in these terms, a very articulate accounting for how the world once worked and how it should

continue to work on a very moral, ethical lines, what we would today call it's generically Islamic ethics or the practice of Islamic law, the practice of a system of commercial regulation that was predicated on trust on an equitable exchange and equitable risk crucial right risk is eliminated by the financier so they will never have to suffer the consequences of their risky investments moving forward the subsidy of their disastrous economic activities would be the rest of the world in Yemenis have resisted this until today And this is one way that I like to introduce to listeners to think differently about the nature of the relationship that West Asia has, the entire Islamic world, if you will, but certainly the Indian Ocean world in which both sections of Yemen that we're going to be talking about today, what today would be considered northern Yemen, where upwards of 21 million people live in under siege, as you've mentioned since 2015. And in many interesting ways, they've lived since the end of the Ottoman Empire in the self-imposed isolation.

But one on their terms, one that they resisted very violently to assure they remained outside the clearly visible consequences, the negative consequences it has on your society at the cultural level, at the moral level, as well as economic level and political sovereignty. So this is crucial that Yemen is a much bigger entity, but its stories, its history of the 20th century, take quite different directions. And at some brief moment, there will be an attempt to interlock these trajectories,

not entirely on the terms that many Yemenis wanted, unfortunately, which I would suggest is an appreciation for a history of autonomy, of independence, where they have very strong confidence in a set of rules of how one engages each other and the larger world, that there is a very different way to approach the modern world and how to continue functioning in this world. Famously, Peter Grant once wrote there was actually a very different trajectory for capitalism, one in which the Islamic world produced by a remarkable series of interconnecting roots, if you will, of capitalism that is, in many ways, disrupted and destroyed very meticulously and programmatically by the

Atlantic powers, who would become the ascended ones, as we know, by the second half of 19th century. They would proceed to impose their civil. system of financing on how the larger global economy function, with the exception of key areas of resistance, including Yemen. So the brief period in which the Ottoman Empire is interacting with the northern population was one of a mutually beneficial moment of alliance making. But at the same time, it also became increasingly clear that larger events in which the Ottoman empire clashing political and economic elites often with through subterfuge and clearly

with a political class embracing liberalism and embracing capitalist finance capitalism and borrowing more and more money important parts of the Ottoman Empire including northern Yemen remained and kept this process of integration into modern North Atlantic-dominated global historical trajectories at arm's length. And it did so because, again, they could still feed themselves. They could still, when necessary, with guns pointing down at the valleys, stopping any army from marching up through those valleys. And they could survive siege for many, many years as necessary.

But more importantly, it had a very, I think, it was not a vacuum. It was not taking place in a vacuum. These are societies, these are communities with very rich and deep understandings of what is right and wrong. Whether we agree with it in the 21st century

is another thing, but they had very strong sensibility of what is right and wrong and what is the appropriate behavior moving forward. And I think that it actually serves us and it serves them if we actually start to listen more carefully to how they articulate what they understand to be what is right and wrong, not only because it proves that they are ethically far superior and they're actually willing to put words into action in the case of standing up in solidarity

for people in Palestine, which they have done since the mid-20th century, which I'll get to briefly in the second. But the very fact that this is a very complex society that needs a lot of cooperation. You don't feed yourself in these very difficult mountainous terrain when you have monsoon rains. They're blessed by monsoon rains, but they could also be flooding could lead to disasters unless you are working together to help each other. Even if you're in different parts of this valley, you need to actually cooperate. So there's a lot of interesting politics that completely undermined this language of tribalism that each region has, you know, are led by some Sheikh, patriarchal kind of pyramid scheme that is very useful for British American anthropologists,

for social scientists in the 20th century. It is certainly one way to try to upset the nature of politics in these societies by empowering figureheads, if you will, and giving power to those who will more than happy embrace, take their weapons, take the money, and become the kind of determining factor if people can actually maintain the relationship they need in order to keep those water wells full of water, making sure that the water is filtered when the rains come in the right direction. They doesn't destroy the villages down the valley.

Make sure that they have enough water stored for when the rains to stop. So this is just one example of a society that had long-needed cooperation beyond the village, beyond the kind of, let's say, even sectarian spread. Often Yemenists talk about in terms of being sectarian divided between north and south, between Zadi Muslims and Chashi Muslims of the South. That's two crews during long periods of time to actually not work as an analytical prism to understand what's going on. So the important thing about the transition from the end of the World War I was that Yemenis under this umbrella of a coalition that embraced the relationship with someone called Imam Yahya, who had been elected with a great deal of competition, but was ultimately elected and the communities of this diverse, topographically very difficult region of Southwest Arabia, had come.

to the necessary amount of agreement that Imam Yahweh is representative of not only small group of Zaidi, so-called Shia, but also Shafi, landowners, urbanites, merchants, and others. And it was able to forge a unified polity that ultimately, by 1980, 1919, forced itself on the world as an independent state. And that's, if you actually look at the map and think about in the Islamic world in 1980, 1990, how many polities were independent that did not actually, and were actually able to sustain resistance to overtures to upsets an independent sovereign entity from functioning independent of the global capitalist reach.

So that's crucial that there's evidence already in 19, 1920, despite every effort by British based in southern Yemen and Aden to forge through their alliances with Abdulaziz Ibn Saoud, the founder of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, so-called declared in the 1930s, which was on a mission. It was working, handing love with the British to help We destroy pockets of resistance, whether loyal to the Ottomans,

and then pushing for a unified Arab state and unified Islamic state, whether it would be the Rashidis in the north, whose territories would be encompassed in this Heshamite kingdom of Abdullah in Jordan, trans-Jordan, and the Sauds, which would take up much of that territory, the border today between Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is expanding at the expense of polities in Hasa in the eastern provinces, threatening the territories of the Sabah family in Kuwait, which the British were also supporting in these treaties that had discussed about in the 19th century.

And in the meantime, the hijazz, so the Heshamite kingdom, especially the two sons who were helping the British, undermined the ability of the Ottoman Empire to maintain economically as well as provide supply chains to defend its Mesopotamian, Palestinian, and Yemeni boundaries. They had, through the so-called Arab Revolt, with partnership with Gertrand Bell and Lawrence of Arabia, right? notoriously were then cheated out of what they understood to be a promise from some factions of the British Empire's Arab offices, right? You can become the king of the Arab world.

We will have you declared the caliph of the Islamic world. And these brothers were under the impression either their father or Faisal, the older brother, would become such a figure. with British support as a kind of gesture of thanks for supporting the war effort, but also as understood, this is a logical, strategic way of thinking for the British as well. They wanted a unified Islamic world in which they had firm control with a reliable caliph to represent that.

Vast polity. The problem is that there are other factions who saw Saud's relationship much more valid. and they abandoned the hijazz, the western part of Arabia, which included Mecca and Medina. And the expansion of Saudi Arabia has direct implications on Yemen. And unfortunately, for the rest of the 20th century, I mean, the creation of Saudi Arabia as an enterprise that is not only expanding to make its current borders, It has territorial disputes with Yemen, with Abu Dhabi, with Alman, with Kuwait,

with Qatar, with Bahrain, and its neighbors to the north. It is in regular conflict, even though it's often not reported as such. It's in regular conflict with its neighbors. It is an expansionist state that first work with the British and then work with the American, American industrials, who were first to recognize oil is going to become the big thing in Saudi Arabia, but on the East Coast. But they did think that Yemen had lots of oil. And so they had already Charles Crane, who was in the piping business, very famous from the Crane Commission sent to Palestine, and actually tried to advise, as an evangelical Christian, advised the American

presidency and therefore American allies to not proceed with this man. mandate in which Sykes-Piccoe and the Barford envisioned allowing for larger colonization of Europeans of Palestine. They thought this was going to be a disaster in the long term. And so Charles Crane had also engineers in his pay, very much like Rockefeller did. And one of them named Twitchell, and I mentioned him in my book, destroying Yemen in several chapters. It's crucial because he's going to want to start Aramco, Saudi Aramco. He's the guy who's going to discover all the oil in eastern, what becomes known as Saudi Arabia.

But he was initially in Yemen, a country by the middle of the 1920s, at war with his expansionist Saudi state that the British are still overtly paying, subsidizing, and getting weapons to. The Americans are saying, who are largely locked out of the Middle East, kind of in a classic understanding of that period in which the French and British determined that the region would be their exclusive domain, closing out American business interests. So Yemen was under the mandate period, yes.

This mandate period, League of Nations kind of evolved. Which is why also, you know, American business interests and, you know, geostrategic and political figures and advisors were very important in Iran at the same time, too. because they were opposing the older colonial powers kind of condominium of interest. They were sort of locked out, and so they were trying to find ways to get in. So that's the same pattern that you're saying is happening during this 20s and 30s in the mandate period. And so here again, like with the overtures to the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s by the Yemeni kind of coalition of leaders back then.

In the 1920s, the Imam Yahya coalition that is busy fighting off the British from the south, busy fighting off efforts by the French from Djibouti and the Italians from Eritrea to become players in the Arabian Peninsula. There is another state, it's called the Idrisi state, it's an Emirate, that was an Indian. independent state ruled by somewhat charismatic, but certainly religious figure of somewhat of a

dynasty, that south of Mecca Medina, south of Jeddah, up until around Houdeda, which is today a port in Yemen. This was a recognized polity in its own right until the mid-1920s, but it started to face enormous pressures from Saudi Arabia. So they were losing out large, large, the territory. And Saudi Arabia and Imam Yahyaz, Yemen, absorbed the territories of the Asir, which is the southwest province of Saudi Arabia today. But it was culturally, historically, commercially, Yemeni. If you look at the mountain ranges, the sources of water, animals would move constantly back and forth. This was Yemeni space. That by 1934, it was captured and incorporated into Saudi Arabia's sphere of influence and more or less

agreed upon by the great powers to the great frustrations of Yemenis whose economic livelihood depended on access to these regions that are now incorporated in a Saudi Arabian map which the Americans including this Charles Crane engineer is going to help facilitate. As I mentioned before, he was previously in Yemen on the invitation of Imam Yahyat to accept the offer of using technology. So modern signs, which often the accusation of the Imam Yahyaz and then his son, Imam Ahmed's regimes were that these were backward medieval regimes that were forcing its

population to live like they are in the Stone Age, which is an absolute lie, perpetrated in the 1960s and onwards by enemies of this regime that would be survive until 1962. But anyways, the recognition that there are the Americans who are desperately trying to gain access to the region, we will allow you to come, send your engineers, help build some roads, help us reinforce some of these bridges that we've been building for a thousand years with stone, you know, bring some of that steel. Yeah, we will help give us some money, sure,

we'll take some of this gold and silver coin. Yemen, by the way, was using exclusively silver coins its currency until the Egyptians come in 1962 and invade northern Yemen, then force them to accept bank-missar-backed paper currency. So central banking comes in. with a vengeance in northern Yemen, only in 1962.

That is actually amazing. I had not known that they were still operating under a kind of ancient model of metal coinage. That's incredible. Yeah. In theory, that's what the Americans were doing, right? I want to pause for just a moment. Yes, that's right. Well, exactly.

I mean, that's a really good point. And I think it will, obviously, that point really connects with the overall narrative that you started with, which was about the importance of finance capitalism and its interaction with the region. That's clearly a key moment. But I want to pause for a minute before we dive into kind of the post-World War II conditions of Yemen and the peninsula as the backdrop for more contemporary events in the early 21st, century, just to kind of recapitulate what the kind of key themes I heard from that wonderful survey and analysis of Yemeni, Yemen's position, which is that the northern areas in these mountainous highlands fostered a kind of independent and resistant culture that was not only a matter of its geographical inaccessibility and the ability to defend it from encroaching metropolitan powers,

whether those are Atlantic world European colonial powers or whether those are, you know, even the Ottomans, they have to negotiate these relationships with the peoples of the highlands and that there was a cultural sort of, well, a religious culture, you could say, that developed, that had its own moral economy of how you conduct ethical, commercial, and social relations under Islamic law, that was resistant to these, and that there were waves of periods of attempts to try and subjugate and control it that failed and that as a result you could say some of the early waves of globalization under say the British Empire in the Indian Ocean world or even you know there have been other groups but a really important one in the 19th century where the British get a foothold in the Gulf region

are interested in the Red Sea have India and they're looking you know to try and dominate the Arabian Peninsula, they get a foothold in Aden, in Oman, in some of these other future GCC countries that are really just negotiated treaty agreements with some coastal elites. But this one particular region of the highlands of Yemen manages to maintain its fierce independence and its unique particular culture and ethical orientation within this. And that this, of course, I think is very important for what we're going to be talking about later when we talk about why Ansar Allah, as you already alluded to, and the Yemeni people are so committed to solidarity with Palestine, is that they see themselves and saw themselves

as for a long period of their history as having a different moral or ethical approach. It was part of their indigenous culture, which they are committed to defending and protecting. And okay, so that seems to me that's kind of one of the major stories that carries forward. But you started to talk a little bit about sect and tribe. And you also talked a little bit about, of course, the difference between northern Yemen and southern Yemen that did get kind of incorporated within the British colonial empire. So when people discuss and talk about the Yemen, they usually give a shorthand and just say,

oh, yes, this is the Zaydi, a form of Shiism, Zadi North, and the Shafi, Sunni Muslim South, and that they're very culturally different and incompatible, and this helps explain why Ansar Allah is the way it is, is that they are affiliated with some kind of regional set of Shi'i alliances that distinguish them and put them in the orbit of the patronage and of the leading kind of Shi'i power that is Iran, right? So this is kind of often how people dissect the region. What can you tell us going forward that might complicate this or why wouldn't that be kind of the way or the best prism through which to analyze what happens in, you know, the post-World War II era where we have two separate kind of Yemen's, one under British colonial control until 67 was it?

Yeah, 67 when it becomes an independent country. And interestingly enough, a kind of communist, a communist state, you know, that is outside of the Western Alliance. So when they get rid of the British, they don't like the other Gulf states that eventually, well, those other states don't get rid of the British. The British just renegotiates, you know, it's positioned vis-a-vis them to give them, you know, more or less state, the symbolic operances. of, you know, state autonomy, even if they're not really fully sovereign, you know, they're still within, you know, some kind of Western modality as, I would argue, Comprador classes increasingly. But in any case, that's very different from what happens with northern Yemen. And so some people might say, well, yes, of course, that's because they have these historic, religious and tribal differences. So they're very different. And you really don't, can't think of them as Yemen all together because they're so, so different. And that that ex, right. Right. So, uh, so I'll, uh, right. So, uh, so I will still, uh, so I will

start by firstly dismissing entirely, I don't subscribe at all, being a student of Talal al-Assad at the new school many, many, many, many, many years ago. I was also very frustrated with how my own region of heritage, Albania, Albanians in the Balkans, had been kind of neatly confined to a kind of pathology, if you will, of permanent isolation or permanent backwardness because of the social formation, if you will, and how problems are resolved in our societies that is somehow uniquely different from its neighboring agents. And it's often framed in a very social anthropological terminology of tribes or tribalism, one that's almost a universally applied kind of way of looking at complex societies. And if you're a pretty

of the role of anthropology and social science in colonialism and the administration of indigenous peoples around the world. You begin to appreciate this actually is not universally helpful. And it's been successfully dismissed and discarded in how we study the past in large parts of Africa, certainly in the Americas, in the peoples of Northern America. They're not spoken of in terms of tribes anymore. tribes anymore, right? And unfortunately, there is a resilience. There's actually a lot of cachet to speaking in these terms because polities and the leadership who have been empowered since the end of World War I are been empowered on the basis that they represent the pinnacle of

this kind of hierarchy in which it's formed along with British social anthropologists called tribes. And so the ruling families all will in the Gulf will all embrace this terminology and understanding of their heritage, because its services a neat kind of way of acclying modern state power and influence in society. But if you just again take back to how Imam Yahya and post-World War I Yemen's polity was formed, the majority of population that lived in this independent, imamate, were technically not even from the same territory or region from which Imam Yahya and his Zaidi and say section or federation of tribal groups

that are often in Yemeni studies highlighted and platformed as the only way for us to understanding how the politics is conducted in these societies. Still today. And what Imamiyah's period demonstrates is that we cannot actually understand the nature of the public political kind of mass nations if it's determined primarily on relations between these patriarchs of these so-called tribes, who again in the 1960s, in 1970s, thanks to a new era of politics in Yemen, which he can maybe get to a little bit in a second, There was the empowerment from the outside, USAID, the British advisors, the Egyptians who also had this very dismissive idea what Yemenis were about. The educated technocrats in Nasser's government in Egypt were educated in British forms educational system. They thought the rest of the Arab world suffered from the fact that they weren't as modern as they were.

and that their task in Yemen in 1962 was to bring their model, which was incredibly corrupt kind of, you know, this alliance between factory owners, landowners, and this Nassirous populist state. It was a kind of a neat fusion, social democratic fusion, that sometimes carried to outrageous exploitation and abuse of this system. I just wrote an article about this, So this forthcoming, a very interesting kind of challenge to the role of Nasser in the 1960s through Yemen.

But again, Yemen Miam Yahya's Yemen, even though he was a Zaydi ruler, even though in the 1960s onwards in the so-called Republican period of Yemeni history writing, where intellectuals of the areas of Thais, the southern cities of Yemen, northern Yemen, who would become the kind of chosen technocrats, those who would get scholarships to go and study it in Colorado or go and learn how to become to fly an airplane or something in Britain, those people who would be the beneficiaries of a new society, a new regime, with horrible consequences for the country, which I'll get to,

these people subscribe to this understanding and critique, if you will, of backward Middle East societies, including their own. That, of course, Imam Yahyah was a medieval leader. He didn't allow for modern banking system to come in. They were still using silver coins. What kind of savages were these people? These people didn't have national airlines flying back and forth. They didn't have cruise ships coming into port and Houdeda.

So the criteria of determining what was actually developed, development, in the era of modernization, maybe some of your listeners know that Daniel Lerner and these others under the period of the 50s and 60s under Eisenhower and JFK, who are promoting American assistance as an alternative to old-style European imperialism, that America will help bring Africa in the Middle East to a modern stage of development. They will abandon traditional societies. So tribalism becomes a very useful association and linked to a critique of a political class, an economic class, a different way of organizing society, including in northern Yemen. So I dismiss tribalism very emphatically and suggest that we look at how these societies actually cut across, not only the so-called tribalized, which again I won't even recognize.

but more importantly, sectarian lines. This was not a society of sectarianism yet. Now, unfortunately, it will become, very much like much of the Islamic world. By 1961, many people forget this now Frankenstein monster that the British Americans are cultivating in Saudi Arabia are going to start through the borrowing, the generous lending of money to build these institutions

in Medina, a program to train imams from Indonesia, from Kenya, from parts of Yemen, if they were allowed to go and travel there, in Belgium. So all these communities who had, for many generations, practiced forms of Sufi, tradition, tarigat, right, and celebrations of Islam and their faith in the larger world and the complexities of the world through different variations and veneers, it was often a very personal association. with their faith, are now going to see a flood of imams with financial and institutional backing. They will have a degree from a university from Medina that will promote this kind of very narrow what we're today would call the equivalent of takfirism and its affiliation to Wahhabism. Saudi Arabia would play this role and, interesting enough Qatar, still under the British indirect rule, in the 60s up until early 1970s,

which would also cultivate the relationship, especially with Egyptian members of the Brotherhood, Muslim Brotherhood, that under Nasser were considered to be the biggest enemies of the Egyptian modern project, as well as communist, by the way, right? We forget that Nasser persecuted the communist in Egypt. So those guys ended up in Qatar,

and Qatar would play eventually an important, parallel role to Saudi Arabia and offer an alternative within this umbrella of takfidrism that becomes very important in the Arab Spring period. Qatar's associated imams and spiritual leaders and its infrastructure of media dissemination through Al-Qaeda, I'm sorry, Al Jazeera and elsewhere, would make Qatar be the kingmakers of the the 2010s, if you will. But that's jumping a little bit ahead of answering that question of yours, but it is relevant because sectarianism was not the dynamic at play in the 1930s and 1940s.

A good example of this is, again, the point I wanted to make about these Yemenis of the North and those under British indirect rule in the South was that they had as much an interest in preserving and protecting themselves from the exploits of North Atlantic capitalism. They were not isolationists. They had never been isolated. Their schools, since medieval times, have been places of pilgrimage for scholars. I mean, you go to Zabit, and you go to Taiz and Ibb and Sana. You had scholars from all over the Islamic world regularly going there, let alone Tarim and others

famous locations in southern Yemen. So these are, again, are societies that are not only projecting outwards where members of the family go and find their success as traders, as merchants, as scholars, the outside world, they also come to Yemen. And increasingly in the 1920s and 30s, northern Yemen, under Imam Yahya,

who is making security alliances with the Italians in Eritrea. He's one of the first ones to be to recognize the Bolsheviks in Soviet Union, to forge a relationship with the Soviet Union. People forget this. So he is not adverse

to making alliances with those kinds of with Marxist orientations and have very complex relationship to Islam. And when necessarily the Americans, but when the Americans were pushing it and were proved to themselves under this Charles Crane

engineer, Twitchell, who would eventually be expelled from northern Yemen, because they couldn't trust him. He was doing all of these analysis. He wasn't digging wells for water. He seemed to be doing other things. He was kind of doing things in this, why are you going off there? There's nothing up there. I need to, you know, measure up there. So they basically didn't trust this guy. And he was doing what these engineers were doing in those days, basically creating a topographical map, trying to find out where would oil be, and Imam Yahyah's men were right to suspect this guy was up to no good, so they kicked them out. History would make that he would discover the oil for the Saudi family and make this incredibly powerful American imperial entity called a Ramco.

Robert Vittalus in many ways talks about this phase of the story very well. Recommend that book. So sectarianism out of necessity, when the larger population are actually don't fit those categories of Zaydi. They, in fact, numerically constitute a much bigger majority of Shafi, Sunni Muslims. We know that those who actually look closely at the way Zaidi judges adjudicated Islamic law, They were very open and often accessed the writings and rulings of other Madhap, right? So this is not something unique to Yemen, of course, but we know through the work of Brinkley Messick,

who has done some very good historical ethnographic work on judges in northern Yemen throughout the 1940s and 50s that we know that they had an economical backbone, that they understood very well they couldn't organize politically around a narrow sectarian focus. They couldn't eliminate making relationships with their neighbors.

Because again, the very function of an independent, self-sustained Yemen means cooperation. You can't have a civil war in that country. It doesn't make sense. This is where my book in 2010, chaos in Yemen,

identifies a very different approach under Alia Belisola, where in fact destroying the ability of Yemenis to actually form coalitions by making them adversaries for limited resources around sectarian lines, around so-called tribal lines, makes ruling Yemen for the purpose of extracting the wealth, for transferring the wealth to the outside world, much easier. So divide in rule if you want to make it simple.

And the Imamiyah was very privy to that. The people around him were very privy to that. And to highlight again, something that I wrote recently for a journal of contemporary Iraqi studies, thanks to our late-grade, Tariq Ismail, our colleagues from Canada who passed away recently, sadly. I wrote an article for his journal about the 1930s Imamiyahia states It's sending qualified young men to train as officers in Faisal's Hesemite Kingdom of Iraq. I mean, Faisal is Sunni, right? I mean, you can't, if you play along those lines of identifying groups along sectarian criteria,

this is seemingly the opposite of what the project in northern Yemen is about, where in fact there are obvious oversures to the Italians, to the Soviets, sometimes to the Americans. Clearly, they work and collaborate with people in the Shafi regions of northern Yemen that border those with the British, even though the British are constantly whispering in the ears of Shafi leaders saying embrace Shafism, embrace Sunism, embrace the brotherhood that the Saudis are trying to establish in this are expanding state to the north. There is all great things awaiting you if you support us. We will help you champion Sunnis.

And this was, for Yemenis, already in the 20s and 30s, this was an indication this was on the horizon, but they refused to subscribe to this way of thinking about their world. They knew their world. They're not stupid, isolated, dumb people. They have very rich book culture. They have people in every town who are very learned kind of oral history. They share with people who come and come. consult with them. Those who go and speak on Juma prayer, they have things to share.

And it's a quite remarkable experience still that I did in the early 1990s to travel throughout Yemen. And to be part of this communal sharing. And you'll note that there are men who are pray differently. They are of different sects, different traditions, but they're in the same mosque in the early 1990s. Even now emphatically, Ansar Allah highlights this. And we have to understand that the majority of those who are in this larger umbrella of Ansar Allah's alliance are Sunni. We forget that those who are now defending northern Yemen, who are building miraculously, this, using technology that they have reversed from the drones that have been fired at them or the other weapons that have come at them

since 2015. They've inherited a lot of weapons during the Ali Abdelah Sala period. They have well-trained men. 300,000 of them constituted the Republican Guard under Ali Dallal. And Ali Abdullah-Sala's Republican Guard were expected to be reliable, the top-notged soldiers, and the criteria was often being Sunni. What we don't talk about enough is that the revolution of 2014, 2015, and when the coalition was created against the Houthis, the Iranian Bakhuthis, who were the majority of the military who stood behind them? They were from the Republican Guard.

Ali Abdel-Azala's party, a large percentage of them, joined in coalition to stand up and defend Yemen at the time of need. And that was something that was clearly. a play in 1920s and 1930s. It's clearly you can see from Imam Yahyah's overtures to Hashemate Kingdom of Iraq to maintain

and you can see there's correspondence with Egypt, even though Egypt is already under direct British occupation. It's going to move towards independence again, but not very trustworthy, but Imam Yahir knows what's going on in Palestine. There

are ambassadors in Jerusalem. There are ambassadors in Jerusalem. They're ambassadors in French Damascus, and they're feeling out what's happening. So they're not isolated. They're not ignorant of what is happening around them, and they're adjusting accordingly. They're able to make overtures to larger Sunni world. Very little connections with Iran, by the way, because Shaft, I'm sorry, Zadis, Shiism is very different from 12ersheed. There is no infrastructure in Najaf for Zadis to receive training.

They receive training in Yemen, right? Even Ismailis have sometimes a hard time interacting with 12 or Shia. There are also large pockets of Ismailis in northern Yemen. And what used to be Assy or Saudis did largely destroy that community from the 30s onwards. So, again, you have to think about, if we're going to look at it in sectarian terms, how did this imamate survive after all these decades of constant pressure from the north? Constant pressure from the British and their cultivating allies within. There were attempted coups.

Ironically, some of the officers that were sent to be trained in Baghdad were being trained by British officers. and they only would come back and serve British interests by trying to assassinate Imam Yahya. Eventually, they learned about this and said, you know what, we're going to train our soldiers here. We'll bring Iraqis to Yemen so they can train. They also ended up trying to stage a coup.

In 1948, they successfully killed Imam Yahya. But his son, Imam Ahmed, after a brief period of potentially the whole regime collapsing, was able to gather forces. Again, amongst Zaidi, but also Southern Chaffee, most people did not trust the instrumentalization of division in their society. Again, because they have principles. They had deep principles that were still not penetrated and corrupted by new ways of thinking about how we should be interacting at each other.

They didn't subscribe to the promotion of liberal, economic policies that were basically imposed on Aden, on Mukhallah, in the southern Yemeni territories, which was forced to be in an open market economy with free trade not really being a reality by one that is predicated on making sure wealth is transferred to the outside world. So Yemenis were sophisticated. And by 1940s, after this horrors of World War II where Europe is yet again massacring its working classes on behalf of financial elites, more power consolidated around what happens after World War II, Europe becomes neatly divided into two kind of spheres, if you will. and they're pushing and promoting settler colonialism

obviously in northern Africa is still an ongoing violent project but it's something that is kind of find its final solution sorry for the pan no pun in Canada I guess is that the right way but Palestine and

continuing British direct influence in Palestine which is a crucial territory in its link to oil from Kirkuk. The pipeline goes to Jaffa through Transjordan, this weird shape of Jordan. Jordan and Israel, what will be created in Israel and 47, will basically be

the two British and UN back states dividing Palestine. And the first one, using the platform in the United Nations, you can actually go into the United Nations records and see the first ones who are standing up to the prior to the vote, Imam Ahmed.

So the northern Yemenis, the so-called medieval backward, they're walking around and with bare feet and they don't even have, you know, televisions and shame on them they're still using silver coins. They're already articulating

hostility to this principle. They're saying this is a horrible, horrible way of looking at our world. If you're going to divide our world along religious lines like this and encourage massive colonization of Europeans into the

heart of what is very important to all Muslims and to all Christians of the world, and Jews of course, Yemen has significant Jewish, indigenous Jewish population at this time. we must remember. Christians, not so much.

But this is, again, another example, at the beginning stages of the horror, the crisis of Palestine for the peoples of the entire West Asia, there was a well-understood and articulate challenge to this establishment of these principles of the United Nations. Soviet Union included, the Americans and the French, obviously, in the British,

they were all going to promote this ethno kind of religious identity politics to justify dividing territories. And the Yemenis were the first one to say no. And I want to emphasize this. Not only was it wrong on principle, it was very dangerous for their own society. So they cannot separate, recognize, what is potentially going to ruin us

with what is happening to our brothers and sisters in the larger world. And this is, again, we have to be very careful. They are not partisan along sectarian lines. Again, the majority of the population under Imam Yahyah and Imam Ahmed were Sunni. And significant portions of their military, of their commercial class, of those who made up the government,

those who were traveling the world alongside one of the brothers or sons of the imams to lobby the world to stop this process in Palestine. These were people who would be considered potentially enemies on sectarian lines and that none of them wanted this stuff. They didn't want this nonsense

and they certainly saw the dangers of it happening in their own neighborhood and there's not much, unfortunately, archival records from what we would call the foreign ministry of northern Yemen, of the imamate of northern Yemen. But we do have occasional reports from British or American or German, especially when in the beginning of 1950s, when Imam Ahmed's, this is now the son of Imam Yahya, right, Imam Ahmed, he's now making overtures to the larger world.

and irregardless, regardless of doctor. So he's making overtures to Maoist China. He's making overtures to Yugoslavia. To Sweden, Swedish pilots are running his airlines. That would be a fascinating story to get their testimonies. But unfortunately, some of them are still alive. You know, good for them. But I can't get their records because it's not possible.

But they even had the Soviet Union. I think Yugoslavia, I mentioned Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and the Americans. And again, I make this clear in chapter three and four of my destroying Yemen book. So if anyone's interested in the details, it's there. But here again, it's not an isolated stake. They're willing to work with anybody. This is a so-called backward country that was still feeding itself. Sometimes there would be periodic threats of famine.

This was always a danger in this country, depend on rains, right? It was never an over-disaster where they would become, basically, a destroyed society. And they maintained independence. This is crucial. They were able to balance off and get Yugoslavs to build, you know, the town square in Houdeda. They were able to get the Swedes to help maintain the small airlines. The Soviets were building Houdeda port.

Maoist Chinese engineers brought many Chinese labors, but also working with Yemenis, giving them the technological know-how. We're building the main roads from the coast, which is a largely flat, desert-like area from the Red Sea, and then shoots up very quickly into the mountains. Incredible roads that still are usable until 2015, at least, and Chinese, Maoist Chinese, were building in that. The only ones who proved to be the problems were the Americans, who were corrupt as hell, and you can see it in the documentation, the complaints that the American embassy representative in Taiz

was getting from the Imam's office, the accusations of various companies who were not, you took them forever from Zabid to build 10 kilometers outside of Zabid. So eventually the Americans were kicked out again. So here again, impervious to the fact that the United States, USAID, whatever else they represent in the Cold War. If you're not going to accomplish and provide what you promised,

we're going to throw you out. And we'll find, and indeed the Soviet Union finished the road that the American companies refusing to hire Yemenis. They were hiring cheap labor from Somalia and from Eritrea with partnerships with Italian companies. It was just really nasty gave the Americans, continues to the play like this, still today with the development projects they have around the world.

But again, independence. Yemenis are independent. And this is something that despite the fact that Egypt will come and remove this family's dynasty and very rapidly transformed this country into a country in civil war for eight years. So from 1962 to 1970, Northern Yemen was in the throes of war, where Egyptian troops occupied the cities and the so-called royalists, those who were defending, trying to stop this juggernaut of modernity, modernization, of republicanism, that supposedly Egypt and its American and Soviet supporters, they both recognized the new republic. At some point in 1965, 66, Nasser with partnership to Saudi Arabia and the American said, you know what?

We need to cultivate a real, rural presence of our interests. And we have to cultivate tribalism, tribal leaders who embrace sectarianism. And it's the beginning, if you will, of the kind of rise of takfidism in Yemeni politics at this time in the late 60s. And it's going to become one that translates into a very conservative under Prime Minister Irani. He will eventually, his family will be kind of like this dominant family in Yemeni politics ever since.

And with the exception of a brief period in 1973, 74, 75, a man named Ibrahim Hamdi, very principled nationalist Yemeni, He embraced this idea that was promoted already under the imamate, self-sufficiency, when necessary building industries for local consumption, not so much import substitution as perhaps we would see in other parts of the global south, but nevertheless, also strong solidarity to the idea of being independent, joining an alliance with others.

So Yemenis are regularly over the course of the 20th century, making overtures to the larger world, not just to Palestinian brothers and sisters who are under the siege of the same forces that are threatening Yemenis in South Yemen or by way of the Saudis in the north, but also making overtures to those struggles in Africa, Algeria being one of the more obvious points of solidarity,

but throughout sub-Saharan Africa, throughout Southeast Asia, you will have, until today, regular juxtapositions, shared space of the wheel of, let's say, a representative of the Yemeni struggle, the Palestinian struggle, and the face of Chirgavarro. Or not just like Karl Marx, I don't think they're that's kind of doctrinal and narrow anymore. But, and again, this is something that they're regularly been trying to communicate, which is so frustrating for me as a scholar of.

Yemans, I know very well what they're doing. They are a very localized and insistent on being indigenous and protecting what is Yemeni, but they're also understood that what happens in the outside world, it packs them, and that they have to somehow make overtures the outside world and, if possible, resolve the Palestinian problem in a just way, in order to make sure that they can preserve their own demands and quest for autonomy, independence from this, juggernaut of finance capitalism.