Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Read online

  Kayf – if you achieve it, and you will do if you choose the qat and the setting carefully – enables you to think, work and study. It enables you to be still. Kayf stretches the attention span, so that you can watch the same view for hours, the only change being the movement of the sun. A journey ceases to be motion through changing scenery – it is you who are stationary while the world is moved past, like a travelling-flat in an old film. Even if briefly, the chewer who reaches this kayf feels he is in the right place at the right time – at the pivot of a revolving pre-Copernican universe, the still point of the turning world.

  One day I was buying qat when a group of tourists walked past. Blue-eyed Muhammad said to me, ‘Why do people spend thousands of dollars rushing round the world, when they can chew qat?’ There is Africa and all her prodigies in us.

  I’ve chewed in taxis, on buses, on my motor cycle, on a truck-load of firewood, in a military transport plane, in an overturning jeep, on the 5.30 from Victoria to Sutton. In retrospect, the movement was incidental. Back in the Oriental Institute, they didn’t teach us the meaning of kayf – they couldn’t have. Now, I would venture to call it a form of untravel.

  In the room on the roof, sounds began to impinge: the rasp of a match; the noisy slurping of water; caged doves cooing; the snap of a twig to make a toothpick; someone buckling on his dagger. Then there was the click of the light switch. Everyone screwed up their eyes, blessed the Prophet, and went home.

  There are a number of things you can do after chewing qat. You might start digging up the paving stones in your entrance hall to look for Solomon’s Seal, as a neighbour of mine used to do. Or, like the Turk early this century who had not seen his wife for sixteen years and was noted for his abstemiousness, you might involuntarily ejaculate. I tend to go home, have a glass of milky tea, and do some writing. Out of the corner of my eye I used to see my pencil sharpener move very slightly, around midnight, until I stopped buying that sort of qat.

  2

  A People Far Off

  ‘When we are dead, seek for our resting-place Not in the earth, but in the hearts of men.’

  Jalal al-Din al-Rumi (d. AD 1273)

  IN THE WILDERNESS of Abyan, somewhere between San’a and Hadramawt, lies Iram of the Columns, the great city built by the people of Ad. The Adites, a race of giants, have disappeared, obliterated in a burning hurricane because of their refusal to heed the Prophet Hud and acknowledge God. ‘Have you not seen’, the Qur’an says, ‘what your Lord did to Ad?’ Iram awaits archaeological investigation. The problem is that no one knows where it is. In the seventh century, a nomad stumbled across it while looking for some lost camels but never found the way again. For the moment, Iram remains veiled from sight, an Arabian Atlantis.

  An extant Iram of the Columns may be a legend, a city-dwellers’ desert mirage; but Yemen is littered with more tangible remains of its early history. Some were already ancient when the Palace of Ghumdan was built. North of the Wilderness of Abyan and across the dunes of Ramlat al-Sab’atayn, a finger of sand thrusting south-west from the Empty Quarter, is the most famous of them all, in fact the most famous archaeological site in Arabia, the Marib Dam. The barrage wall is gone, but on either side of Wadi Adhanah, near the ancient Sabaean capital of Marib, the great masonry sluices are still in pristine condition more than 2,500 years after they were built.* Channels leading away from them once supplied the two gardens of Saba, the vast area of fields and orchards on either side of the wadi which is mentioned in the Qur’an.

  Upstream from the Sabaean construction is a new dam. With a capacity seven times that of its predecessor, it was finished in 1986 at a cost of $70 million, paid for by Shaykh Zayid of Abu Dhabi. Irrigation works have yet to be completed, but silt deposited before the foundation of Rome is now once more covered with crops.

  Shaykh Zayid’s reasons for parting with such a hefty sum were not purely philanthropic. The old dam is important not only as an archaeological site but also as a symbol of unity. For it represents the common source of those Arabs who trace their ancestry back beyond the time when nationalities were invented, to Qahtan, the son of the Prophet Hud, great-great-grandson of Sam and progenitor of all the southern tribes.

  Until a little over a hundred years ago, the divisions of Arabia were expressed in loosely defined geographical terms – al-Sham, ‘the North’, al-Yaman, ‘the South’, Najd, ‘the Uplands’, and so on – and in terms of ancestral origin. A particular region might develop a cohesive cultural identity, as Yemen did early on, but there were no fixed borders. ‘Territory’ equalled ‘sphere of influence’; boundaries were as mobile as people.

  This was not good enough for the expanding imperialist powers of the nineteenth century. While political officers on the ground knew where things stood, or didn’t stand, the bureaucrats of the British and Ottoman empires thought along more rigid lines. Gradually, borders were superimposed on the Arabian map, at first lightly, then with a heavier hand as oil came on to the scene. The need to decide who owned what began to arrest the old fluidity. As the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 showed, the process is not yet over.

  The British, who grabbed the port of Aden in 1839, and the Ottomans, who from mid-century onwards pushed into Yemen and entered San’a in 1872 (with the help of reinforcements shipped through the new Suez Canal), were eventually forced into drawing a border between themselves. They took a long time to do it. The Anglo-Ottoman Boundary Commission only started work in 1902, and its results were not ratified until 1913. The historical basis for the border was shaky, to say the least. Except for a brief period in the twelfth century, Aden had been politically part of the rest of Yemen until the al-Abdali family seceded from San’a in about 1730. The al-Abdalis, originally appointed as military governors of the Aden region by the Imam – the temporal ruler of Yemen and spiritual leader of the Zaydi sect – declared themselves Sultans of Lahj, and it was from them that the British took Aden. From 1839 onwards, the government in Bombay cultivated an Arabian mini-North West Frontier, raising other would-be potentates of this microcosmic Raj to the rank of Sultan and Amir. With the titles came treaties of protection and, more important, stipends: it was a border built on rupees.

  To the north, the Turks were implementing a similar policy. When they left after the First World War, Imam Yahya announced his intention to reunify the country. Border clashes during the 1920s led the British in Aden first to demonize him, then bomb him. The Yemeni reaction came in a famous verse:

  Go gently, Britain, gently,

  For the power of God is mighty:

  The power that long ago destroyed

  Pharaoh, and Thamud, and Ad …

  However, the two sides arrived at a status quo of sorts, which wobbled along until the British left in 1967. But the border remained for another two decades, shored up by ideological differences between the post-Imamic Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) and the post-Independence People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY). Only with Yemen’s reunification on 22 May 1990 did it seem that the imperial ghost had been exorcized, and this most artificial of Arabia’s borders effaced for ever.

  Shaykh Zayid, then, by bankrolling the new dam, was reminding the Yemenis and his own people that Marib was the land of his forebears, that ancestral roots still run beneath the lines of political demarcation. The chain of events that led his ancestors to settle in what was, until recently, an insignificant spot in the lower Gulf, is traditionally presented as starting with a big bang, a single massive damburst that deprived the wealthy farmers of Marib of their livelihood and forced them to emigrate to all corners of Arabia and beyond. One version says that the ruler who owned the dam had been forewarned of its collapse by a soothsayer. One day the king’s son returned from the hunt with news that he had seen a rat with iron teeth gnawing at the dam’s foundations. (A subplot records that the rat had come from Syria by jumping from hump to hump along an immensely long caravan of camels.) Knowing that the soothsayer’s prophecy would be fulfilled, the king ordered his so
n to strike him in the face publicly; the boy, perplexed but dutiful, carried out his father’s orders. ‘How’, the king then asked his subjects, ‘can I remain among you now that I have lost my honour?’ He packed his bags and sold the dam to a consortium of buyers for a heap of gold, which he measured by sticking his sword in the ground and waiting until the pile of coins had reached the top of the blade. Cheap at the price, the buyers thought; they hadn’t made a structural survey. The rat completed its task and the dam broke, drowning, among others, one thousand beardless youths upon one thousand skewbald horses.

  Recent archaeological research and a pocket calculator have produced a more credible but less entertaining account. It has been estimated that Wadi Adhanah brought some 3.2 million cubic yards of silt down from the mountains every year. This necessitated periodic dredging by vast labour gangs. If left unattended, the silt building up would endanger the structure of the barrage. Inscriptions record emergency repairs, one in about AD 450 and the next by the Ethiopian ruler Abrahah a century later; but the routine maintenance and rebuilding that were necessary to keep the dam in one piece had long been neglected, probably since the focus of power had shifted to the highlands with the emergence of the Himyari state there several centuries before. The dam’s final collapse later in the sixth century was a recent event for the early Muslims. Referring to it, the Qur’an says, ‘We have given them, instead of their two gardens, a harvest of camel thorn, tamarisk, and a few ilb trees.’ Until recently, this was still an accurate description of the flora of Marib.

  Just as it is dramatically neater to present the long process of the dam’s decay as one cataclysmic event, so the diaspora it caused is usually seen as a single happening. ‘They dispersed like Saba’ is still proverbial for any sudden and irreversible break-up. But the history of emigration from Yemen began long before the sixth century, and continued long after.

  The Yemenis who left their homeland, Sabaeans or others, were not going into the unknown: communications with the rest of Arabia and further north, as well as with East Africa, dated back to the beginning of the first millennium BC. Colonies of Yemenis sprang up along the East African coast, in Ethiopia and in Syria and Iraq, and long-distance raiding parties are often mentioned by the early historians.

  Some accounts are impressively imaginative. The twelfth-century encyclopaedist Nashwan ibn Sa’id claims that there was an independent Yemeni state in Tibet, ‘the land whence musk is brought’, founded by men left behind when the Himyari King Shammar Yuhar’ish mounted an expedition to China. Nashwan also says that the king named Dhu al-Adh’ar, He of the Frights, was so called because he brought back as captives from the Land of the North some nisnas, ‘a race of men whose faces are upon their chests’. Here we are in a no man’s land of confusion and invention, first described in the accounts of Alexander the Great’s expeditions, and explored intrepidly by the monkish cartographers of Hereford’s Mappa Mundi and later by Sir John Mandeville. The nisnas seem, in fact, to be the same as the Blemmyes of European accounts, who are in turn identified with the Bejas of the African Red Sea coast. Fact and fiction had got mixed up in a geographer’s version of Chinese whispers.

  There was an upsurge of migration in the early Islamic period, with Yemenis in the vanguard of Islam’s conquering armies. The populations of the new cities in Syria and Iraq were largely Yemeni. Some Yemenis went as far as Dongola in Sudan; others settled in Tunisia, intermarrying with the local Berber population. Yemenis also founded colonies in Spain and briefly occupied Bordeaux.

  Yemeni blood flows across the Arab world. Some Arabs have forgotten their Yemeni origins; many have not. A taxi driver in Muscat who had identified my adoptive home from my speech refused payment, ‘because you live in the land of my grandfather. He was from Marib.’ The Omani was talking about an ancestor of perhaps fifty generations ago.

  Turning off the San’a-Marib road, I headed northwards. On the left was the escarpment of the highlands, skirted by the old incense road; on the right a shimmering gravel plain extended beyond Marib until the sand crept up on it. A few depressions dotted with tamarisks marked dry watercourses; when the rain came they would feed into the great wadi of al-Jawf, where the remains of the Ma’inian capital Qarnaw lie and where the main interest of the people is, and always has been, fighting.

  Tracks crossed and recrossed, all heading the same way. The borrowed jeep lurched and bounced, and a cloud of powdery dust streamed through its tattered canvas sides. I stopped for air and scanned the horizon: it shuddered perceptibly in the dead quiet of noon. Ahead, there was a smudge, slightly darker than its surroundings. For the next twenty minutes of driving I kept my eyes on it until it began to resolve itself into something more solid, a sight familiar from photographs but infinitely more impressive, crouched in isolation on a slight hump in the featureless plain. The sun was moving west and the sharp lines of bastions were beginning to emerge from the blank expanse of the walls of Baraqish.

  I left the jeep outside the fence erected by the Department of Antiquities and walked in, the only sound dust squeaking under my feet. Suddenly a shout from the left made me jump, and a slight figure with long wild hair and an assault rifle bounded down over a hummock of silt.

  He was grinning. ‘Did I frighten you?’

  ‘A bit.’ The blood was draining back into my face. ‘I didn’t expect to see anyone.’

  ‘I’m the guard,’ he said. He took my hand and led me towards the walls of the city.

  At the foot of one of the bastions he stopped and squatted, unshouldering his rifle and laying it across his lap. ‘Look … look at the stones.’ He caressed the fine ashlar. ‘What machines did they have to cut them like this?’

  ‘They had no machines. Only hand tools,’ I replied.

  The guard shook his head. I shrugged. The quality of the stonework was superb – it looked as if it had been cut from butter. (A belief used to be current among the country people that in ancient times stone would spontaneously soften in the month of August.) Inscriptions dotted the walls, recording the names of those who had paid for their construction over two millennia before, when for some three centuries the wealthy merchants of Ma’in formed a state independent of Saba. The inscriptions might have been carved yesterday. The masons of Baraqish put their successors to shame, and if evidence were needed of the high level of sophistication they had achieved, here it was: as building, it was not just defensive, but conspicuously, consciously beautiful; as craft, it was perfect. The epitaph on the Himyaris attributed to the poet-king As’ad al-Kamil applies equally to the people of Ma’in:

  These are our works which prove what we have done;

  Look, therefore, at our works when we are gone.

  Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.

  The guard seized my hand again and pulled me up a collapsed section of wall. Inside were the remains of later buildings, including a circular tower or nawbah. Potsherds and fragments of glass, mostly multicoloured bangles, littered the ground; many scraps of faded indigo cloth were embedded in the dust. Baraqish has had a series of occupants. Aelius Gallus, the Roman governor of Egypt, garrisoned it before his unsuccessful attack on Marib in 24 BC; twelve hundred years later Imam Abdullah ibn Hamzah, whose descendants still live in the villages nearby, used it as a base against the Ayyubid invaders. Both of them must have been overawed by the architectural achievement of their predecessors.

  The temple at Baraqish has now been excavated to floor level by an Italian team, but at the time of my visit you had to crawl between the columns with the ceiling a few inches above your back. The building is rectangular and of simple construction, with monolithic square-sectioned columns morticed into the beams which carry the ceiling slabs. Again, the quality of workmanship is outstanding and the limestone joinery executed so faultlessly as to suggest an origin, like that of Classical Greek architecture, in timber building. It pleases the eye in the same way as, say, Shaker furniture.

  I went and sat in the shade cast by the nawbah
. The guard chucked stones into an empty well while I read an article I had brought, ‘Baraqish According to the Historians’. The old name of Baraqish, Yathill, appears in Strabo’s account of the Roman expedition as ‘Athrula’. Al-Hamdani’s story of the renaming of Yathill runs as follows: the people of Yathill were subjected to a long siege. Their only source of water was a well outside the city walls, connected to the city by a tunnel.* One day the besiegers saw a dog emerging from the tunnel, which they had not noticed before: by following it back, they were able to take control of the city. They renamed it Baraqish, ‘Spotty’, after its betrayer.

  By the time I had finished the article, the guard had disappeared and the sun was heading for the escarpment. To the north lay the broad depression of al-Jawf. The ruins of Qarnaw glinted distantly. Then the scene slipped into monochrome, except for a few patches of green in the wadi’s far side that seemed to radiate the last remains of the sunlight.

  Ten minutes out of Baraqish on the way back to the Marib road, I stopped the jeep and looked back. The lines of the bastions had disappeared and the city looked like a work of nature – something not built, but dropped on to the plain.

  Baraqish, of course, has lost its context. Like Marib, it is surrounded by banks of silt, the remains of ancient field systems. The area covered is tiny compared with the land watered by the old Marib Dam, but it must have provided much of the city’s food. More important is the wider context of the trade routes on which Baraqish, Qarnaw and all the other cities of the ancient South Arabian states were staging posts. These routes were the arteries of Saba, Ma’in, Qataban and Hadramawt, channels for their enormous wealth – wealth generated by tight control of their major commodity: frankincense, the product of the unprepossessing tree Boswellia sacra.