Making Yemen's Islamic History: Engineering, Monuments, Taxes and Stimulants
Panel 147, sponsored byAmerican Institute for Yemeni Studies (AIYS), 2014 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 24 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
Scholarship on Islamic history has paid less attention to Yemen than to Iraq, Syria or Egypt. Despite an important corpus of manuscripts and the publication of several significant primary sources, the historical reconstruction of Islamic Yemen lags behind these other regions. This panel brings together historians who work on various periods in Yemen to illustrate how the current historiography is being made. Archaeological fieldwork on the Islamic era has been limited with the notable exception of the Royal Ontario Museum project on Zabid. Based on the excavation of water works in Zabid, one paper compares the material evidence with the description of water engineering schemes in the 16th century Yemeni text History of Zabid by Ibn al-Dayba', thus showing the importance of archaeology for fleshing out the tantalizing details in written texts. Another paper focuses on the 10th century multi-volume al-Iklil of the Yemeni savant al-Hamdani, who provides a rhetorical landscape of monuments as an aid in the formation and maintenance of the South Arabian political identity in a fashion akin to modern cultural heritage texts. At the same time, al-Hamdani's reconstruction of Yemen's pre-Islamic past serves as a mirror of the politics of his own time, with the retreat of the Abbasid presence and the recent arrival of both Zaydis and Isma'ilis to northern Yemen, more than a century before the Ayyubid invasion. The Zaydi presence in Yemen's north since the late ninth century is the focus of a paper on the tax policies of the Zaydi imams, especially the tension between the traditional zakat on production and other kinds of taxes. This paper discusses both the theological debate about tax collection and recorded information on how taxes were actually collected. Another paper examines the evidence for the introduction of both coffee (Coffea arabica) and qat (Catha edulis) into Yemen, probably during the Rasulid era. Recent research has resolved the issue of the origin of the term "qat" and there is a need to update discussion of the stimulant in previous sources, including the EI. This paper will examine historical, literary, legal and lexical sources as well as Yemeni folklore. Overall the panel provides both an indication of current research and an invitation for other scholars to help make Yemen's history as well.
Two famous stimulants, coffee (Coffea arabica) and qat (Catha edulis), arrived to Yemen from East Africa at about the same time, probably during Yemen’s Rasulid era. Although there is a substantial literature on both of these plants in Yemen, there is still confusion about how and when they were introduced to Yemen. This paper examines the historical literature, literary texts, lexicons and folklore to piece together the various theories about the arrival of both plants into Yemen. Coffee probably spread to Yemen by the mid 1400s and became important enough for a conference on its prohibition to be held in Mecca in 1511. Yemen became an exporter of coffee beans, reflected in the use of the term “Mocha” to refer to coffee due its export from the Res Sea port of Mocha. Qat may have arrived as early as the 14th century during the reign of al-Malik al-Mu’ayyad Dawud, but thus far no reference to qat or coffee has been found in any surviving text from the Rasulid era. Based on the information in Ibn Fadl Allah al-Umari’s (d. 1349) Masalik al-absar fi mamalik al-amsar, it is clear that the Arabic term is derived from the Amharic. In this paper I trace how the term was transformed in Yemeni dialects. There was considerable debate about the legality of both coffee and qat, including a small treatise by Ibn Hajar in his fatawa collection. Yemeni poets also waxed eloquent about both stimulants. This paper will update the information on qat in both editions of the Encyclopedia of Islam and earlier references.
Engineering standards and technological traits are reasonably well documented for urban water supply and wastewater removal systems both in classical antiquity and medieval Europe. Their systematic investigation is only just beginning for the medieval Islamic city. In the written sources one may find general references to achievements in hydraulic engineering. However, they usually do not include a description of technical or functional details of everyday services, whose study requires archaeological excavation as an investigative tool.
This paper uses as a starting point the History of Zabid by Ibn al-Dayba‘ (d. 1537). A native of that city, he spent nearly his entire life there and describes in his work the circumstances that have shaped Zabid from its foundation in 820 to the year 1518, including major water engineering schemes. From Ibn al-Dayba‘’s text we get a general sense of the significance of the water supply and wastewater removal system in medieval Zabid. Tangible evidence for this is derived from excavations. The features exposed include wells, water-storage tanks, open surface channels, covered conduits, lead water pipes, ablution facilities and toilets. Based on the archaeological context they can be dated to the 13th to 16th centuries. While the technical details provide information on the engineering skills of the builders, these features more importantly reflect upon the standards of water and waste management services that were available for ordinary people in Zabid, and thus upon the quality of life in a medieval Islamic city.
The first three centuries of Zaydism in Yemen (around 900-1200) were characterized by a complex and heterogeneous political situation with several competing Zaydi sects and networks operating simultaneously. By looking closer at tax policies, this paper focuses on the relations between various political-religious Zaydi rulers (imams), their subjects, competing Zaydi sects, and other Islamic dynasties. Both legal and historiographic sources allow us to look at the tension between the ideal Islamic taxes such as the zakat and those taxes that were legitimized by “necessity” such as the ad hoc tax called maʿūna. Zakāt was mainly limited to ten per cent of the annual crop from rain fed lands, however, the maʿūna could be much higher. Especially by referring to the expenses of holy war against unjust enemy rulers, the Zaydi imams could justify increasing the taxes more than what the Islamic law would originally allow for. The Zaydi imams often faced internal opposition from other Ashrāf-clans or from scholarly Zaydi networks like the Muṭarrifiyya who made counter claims by employing competing theological doctrines. Due to the unstable political situation at this time, the borders between different Islamic sects were constantly shifting and local elites often had to quickly change their loyalty to Zaydi, Sunni and Isma’ili rulers. Local elites had a prominent role in enforcing the tax collection in their respective areas and they were often allowed to keep a significant part of the taxes for themselves. The interdependency between local tribal elites and charismatic Zaydi religious leaders is therefore important in understanding a region of Yemen where the ideology of tribal autonomy was strong. By looking at a limited field such as tax policies one can see a picture that transcends concepts like politics, law and religion, allowing us to better see the richness of the sources available to us and by combining history, Islamic studies and anthropology one can better understand the political and social processes of the time.
With the departure of the Abbasid Caliphate from Sanaa in the mid-ninth century, the local tribal population of South Arabia at the beginning of the tenth century was in competition for control over the highlands with the recent arrivals of the Zaydis and Isma’ilis from outside the region. In this combative context the local scholar al-Hamdānī put together a ten volume compendium entitled al-Iklīl, which contained the history and other unique aspects of the inhabitants of South Arabia such as their genealogies and ancient language. This paper focuses on the first section of the eighth volume, which consists of a type of spatialized historiography organized around the landscape of their numerous monuments. Through celebratory descriptions of the structures and short narratives about events that took place in and around them, it shows how this text was constructed to aid in the formation and maintenance of the South Arabian political identity in a fashion akin to modern cultural heritage texts.
In order to emphasize various facets of their identity, al-Hamdānī reviews different types of monuments. Castles and other fortifications demonstrate the former glory and might of the ancient Himyarite kingdom. Polytheistic temples and Islamic mosques allow for acknowledgment of past religious practices, but more explicitly serve to emphasize the rejection of them and their early embrace of monotheism before the advent of Islam. Dams and other water management structures that carpet the highlands provide an opportunity to stress the extent of their achievement in the creation and exploitation of cultivable land to its fullest.
Finally, in some of the entries of these monuments al-Hamdānī layers multiple periods of history. This layering helps to define strategic collective memories for commemoration while at the same time drawing more immediate connections between the past and historical present. This historiographic technique is most effective when he parallels descriptions of previous invasions of South Arabia with the attacks that it was currently enduring by its latest invaders.
