For roughly a millennium, Yemen was to some degree or other ruled by an imam of the Zaydi denomination, who claimed descent from Muḥammad, the prophet of Islam. Whereas Zaydism requires the imam to be from among the descendants of Muḥammad – commonly referred to as ahl al-bayt – as they are thought to possess qualities not found in the rest of humanity, through the course of history it was primarily their genealogical distinction from the Yemeni population that afforded them their position as rulers, as their status as outsiders permitted them to mediate and arbitrate in tribal disputes. With the fall of the Imamate in 1962, the ahl al-bayt lost much of their political and social roles and South Arabian genealogy – that is the claimed descendance form the mythical ancestor Qaḥṭān – became one of the primary markers of national belonging. Since its emergence in the early 2000s, the Huthi movement has sought to restore the ahl al-bayt to their former station in society and politics. Named after the al-Ḥūthī family, which belongs to the ahl al-bayt, the movement rose to power in 2015 and now rules large parts of north-western Yemen. Claiming a divine right to rule over Yemen as a nation state, the Huthis face the same problems encountered by earlier rulers, both imams and presidents. As ahl al-bayt they are not part of the nation, belonging to which became contingent upon being of South-Arabian descent, and with a large part of society organized in tribes, they rule over a population adhering to concepts of order and belonging antithetical to the state’s claim to singular authority and demands for undivided loyalty. The paper will investigate how the movement addresses these two conundrums. Analyzing the movement’s ideological output, the paper will argue that the movement employs a two-pronged strategy. By on the one hand trying to bridge the genealogical separation between ahl al-bayt and South Arabian lines of descent and on the other hand advancing projects such as the codification of customary tribal law and trying to bind the tribes through charters, the movement attempts to redefine the roles of both the ahl al-bayt as well as the tribes in ways as to make them integral and, in the case of the tribes, controllable elements of the “Yemeni people” (al-shaʿb al-Yamanī), which the Huthis frequently refer to.