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The pre-Islamic period
For more than two millennia prior to the arrival of Islam, Yemen was the home of a series of powerful and wealthy city-states and empires whose prosperity was largely based upon their control over the production of frankincense and myrrh, two of the most highly prized commodities of the ancient world, and their exclusive access to such non-Yemeni luxury commodities as various spices and condiments from southern Asia and ostrich plumes and ivory from eastern Africa. The three most famous and largest of these empires were the Minaean (Maʿīn), the Sabaean (Sabaʾ, the biblical Sheba), and the Ḥimyarite (Ḥimyar, called Homeritae by the Romans), all of which were known throughout the ancient Mediterranean world; their periods of ascendancy overlap somewhat, extending from roughly 1200 bce to 525 ce.
The Romans began expanding their power and influence to the Red Sea in the 1st century ce and soon learned the secrets of the Yemeni traders—namely, the true source of luxury commodities provided by the Yemenis and how to exploit the monsoon winds to traffic between Red Sea ports and those of southern Asia and eastern Africa, where these treasures could be found. It was only a matter of time before Yemen, unable to compete effectively against imperial Rome, went into economic decline, and the subsequent loss of revenue made it impossible for Yemen to maintain its extensive cities and attendant facilities. The most famous instance was the failure to maintain the Great Dam at Maʾrib—the heart of a monumental irrigation project and one of the engineering marvels of the ancient world. Its rupture sometime in the 6th century ce constitutes the symbolic end to the long era of the Yemeni trading kingdoms.
The last Ḥimyarite king, Dhū Nuwās (Yūsuf Ashʿar; c. 6th century ce), was a convert to Judaism who carried out a major massacre of the Christian population of Yemen. The survivors called for aid from the Byzantine emperor, who arranged to have an army from the Christian kingdom of Aksum (in what is now Ethiopia) invade Yemen in order to punish Dhū Nuwās. The leader of the Aksumite campaign was Abraha. After overthrowing Dhū Nuwās and conducting a massacre of Jews, Abraha stayed on to rule the Yemen. His attempt to extend his rule farther north, into the Hejaz (the western coastal region of the Arabian Peninsula), was ultimately a failure, though his effort to besiege Mecca is reported in the Qurʾān.
The Ḥimyarites grew resentful of the Aksumites, who they came to view as usurpers, and sought the support of the Sāsānian dynasty of Persia to expel them. By obliging, the Persians added the satrapy of Yemen to their domains. The last Persian governor of Yemen apparently converted to Islam in 628 ce, accepting the political dominance of the Muslim community.
The advent of Islam
Islam spread readily and quickly in Yemen, perhaps because of the century of economic decline and the atrocious behaviour of both Jews and Christians during that time. The Prophet Muhammad sent his son-in-law as governor, and two of Yemen’s most famous mosques—that in Janadiyyah (near Taʿizz) and the Great Mosque in Sanaa (said to have incorporated some materials from earlier Jewish and Christian structures)—are thought to be among the earliest examples of Islamic architecture.
Despite the fact that Muhammad’s first successor, the caliph Abū Bakr (served 632–634), managed to unify the Arabian Peninsula, it was not long before Yemen once again demonstrated its fractious nature. Often when the caliph sent a representative to put down rebellions or deal with other problems, the representative would establish his own dynasty. Such was the case with Muḥammad ibn Ziyād, who early in the 9th century founded the city of Zabīd as his capital. (See Ziyādid dynasty.)
For the history of Yemen, however, the most important event after the triumph of Islam was the introduction in the 9th century of the Zaydī sect from Iraq—a group of Shiʿi Muslims who accepted Zayd ibn ʿAlī, a direct descendant of Muhammad, as the last legitimate successor to the Prophet. Much of Yemeni culture and civilization for the next 1,000 years was to bear the stamp of Zaydī Islam. That same span of time was host to a confusing series of factional, dynastic, local, and imperial rulers contesting against one another and against the Zaydīs for control of Yemen. Among them were the Ṣulayḥids and the Fatimids, who were Ismāʿīlīs (another Shiʿi branch); the Ayyubids; and the Rasulids, whose long rule (13th–15th century) firmly established Sunni Islam in southern and western Yemen.
Yemen next appeared on the world stage when, according to one account, the leader of a Sufi religious order discovered the stimulating properties of coffee as a beverage, probably about the beginning of the 15th century. As a result, Yemen and the Red Sea became an arena of conflict between the Egyptians, the Ottomans, and various European powers seeking control over the emerging market for Coffea arabica as well as over the long-standing trade in condiments and spices from the East; this conflict occupied most of the 16th and 17th centuries. By the beginning of the 18th century, however, the route between Europe and Asia around Africa had become the preferred one, and the world had once again lost interest in Yemen. In the meantime, the coffee plant had been smuggled out of Yemen and transplanted into a great variety of new and more-profitable locales, from Asia to the New World. The effect of the redirection of trade was dramatic: cities such as Aden and Mocha (as the name would suggest, once a major coffee centre), which had burgeoned with populations in excess of 10,000, shrank to villages of a few hundred.