Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes (2 page)

Nothing is left of what was once the busiest and richest port on the Red Sea - just sand and a few crumbling facades, the abandoned homes and ‘factories’ (trading posts) that used to ‘display a very handsome appearance towards the sea’.
¹

No one seemed to care that these vestiges of Mocha’s heyday lie half-buried under sand and strewn with plastic refuse, or that only dogs come to this wasteland between the sprawling new town and the shore. Modern Mochans‘ failure to derive any income from the fact that their town is the only Yemeni name still recognised all over the coffee-drinking world seemed surprising. No one had opened a café selling the authentic beverage. There were no postcards, or maps or guide books or key rings or T-shirts for sale. But the driver of a passing Toyota Land Cruiser hailed me in English across the sandy expanse, ’You are welcome! Come to my house! Meet my family!’ Better one personal invitation than a thousand tourist trinkets and packets of ‘authentic’ Mocha coffee, I decided.

On our way, bumping softly along a sandy track, my host introduced himself as a local agent for a Malaysian shipping firm. When I enquired whether any coffee still shipped out of Mocha, he told me, ‘No. Ships bring in palm oil and livestock mostly, but they usually leave empty.’ As a barely face-saving afterthought he added, ‘Sometimes we send sweets and biscuits to Somalia.’ We were headed, he told me, towards the third Mocha. The first, whose sad relics I had just been inspecting, was ruined and buried centuries ago, and replaced by a second which was suddenly drowned by a tsunami ‘about ninety years ago’. The third had a flimsy, provisional look about it; there were plenty of the rackety Japanese motorbikes doing duty as taxis, and the usual late morning hubbub around the qat shop.

A low door in a blank expanse of high white-washed wall opened off the sandy lane we had stopped in, straight onto a large, shady courtyard that was wet from a recent hosing down. In the main room of the house, sparsely furnished in the usual comfortable Arab way, with floor-level cushions and arm rests along all the walls and a television tuned to an Egyptian soap opera, I met my host’s daughter. Although advantageously married to an army officer in the capital, Sanaa, she was adamant she preferred to be here at home, in this decayed and steamy backwater, among people her father described to me as peaceful and calm - ‘as quiet as fish’. Implied by his simile was the usual distrust of the northern interior of the country, where Sanaa and Yemen’s northern highlands are located.

In theory, Yemenis have stood a better chance of success at forging themselves into a modern nation state than either Pakistanis or Afghans, or dozens of African peoples. They are proud of the fact that they have been regarded as a single, distinct people since at least the seventh-century era of the Prophet. Noting that his missionaries were getting a particularly warm reception at the southernmost end of the Arabian Peninsula, Mohammed reportedly declared that Yemenis ‘have the kindest and gentlest hearts of all. Faith is Yemeni, wisdom is Yemeni.’

These days, however, Yemenis’ pronounced sense of regional identity easily trumps their consciousness of belonging to a modern nation state. Accent and dress, let alone different histories, vastly varying geography and inequalities of life opportunities, all act as powerfully polarising forces which only the ubiquity of qat and the country’s swiftly growing network of roads have even begun to counteract. Few inhabitants of Tihama, where the pace and way of life closely resembles that of East Africans on the opposite side of the Red Sea, would think of wearing the traditional northern highland tribesman’s curved dagger, the
jambiyah
, let alone a gun. Half East African himself, my host was relaxed in
a futa
, suitably loose attire in the sweltering climate that prevails in Tihama as well as in Aden and Hadhramaut and Mahra to the east, but is much less seen in the highlands. Instead of offering me coffee or tea, the kind shipping agent showcased his coast dweller’s hospitality, his tolerance of strangers and their infidel ways, by serving me a can of black-market lager.

The impetus to unite all Yemenis into a single polity has usually been stronger in the country’s tribal northern highlands than on the coast, let alone in Hadhramaut, the high, baking plateau deeply etched with fertile
wadis
(canyons) to the east, for the simple reason that the northern tribes have always lacked the wherewithal - either in the form of arable land or other natural resources - to survive in their lofty fastnesses without exploiting the coast and the verdant southern highlands. But those same rapacious northern highlanders have also acted as the sole defenders of Yemen’s freedom from foreign domination through the centuries.

Five hundred years ago, when the Ottoman Turks sailed into the Red Sea to secure the precious Muslim Holy Places of Mecca and Medina and see off the Portuguese ‘Frankish’ threat, the Tihamans welcomed them in much the same open-hearted manner as my kind host had welcomed me.

Unlike the Zaydi Shiite
^a
northern highlanders who make up perhaps a quarter of Yemen’s population today, Tihamans are Shafai Sunnnis. Weary of exploitation by those hungry northern tribes led by a Zaydi Shiite priestly caste of descendants of the Prophet Mohammed, rulers known as imams, it was only to be expected that Tihamans would welcome Sunni Ottoman influence. But the Ottomans - intent on uniting the entire Muslim
umma
, Sunni and Shiite, under their caliphate - were not content with going where they were wanted. Penetrating inland towards those northern highlands, they soon encountered Zaydi resistance. Imam Sharaf al-Din and his tribes may have been too weak at the time to expel the Turks from Aden and the coastal regions, but he would not surrender his southern highland stronghold of Taiz, barely an hour’s drive inland from Mocha today, let alone his northern highland capital of Sanaa.

Nevertheless, during that first decade of Ottoman presence in Yemen, the 1540s, it looked as if the Turks would be able to complete their conquest. Not until 1547 was their progress halted by Imam Sharif al-Din’s son Mutahhar who, having retreated to Thula - a rocky highland fastness to the north of Sanaa - managed to withstand a forty-day siege there. At last accepting there was no dislodging him, the Turks acknowledged his dominion over swathes of the northern highlands and a gentlemanly truce was agreed when Mutahhar pledged a nominal obedience to the Ottoman Sultan. He could congratulate himself on having achieved what all future imams and the Zaydi highlanders would achieve up to and even beyond the formal abolition of the imamate four centuries later: the exclusion of any foreign invader - whether Muslim or infidel - from most of their northern highlands. He was to accomplish a great deal more than that over the next twenty years, largely thanks to the Ottomans’ waning interest in their distant and irritatingly inhospitable acquisition.

Increasingly preoccupied with the conquest of central Europe and especially Vienna, the Ottomans allowed South Arabia to slip down their list of priorities. With its ferociously hostile northern tribes and equally repellent terrain - craggily mountainous and cold inland, oppressively hot on the coast - the region had nothing whatsoever to recommend it except its strategic position at the lower opening to the Red Sea and its proximity to Islam’s Holy Places. The Sublime Porte would maintain a military presence there and collect as many taxes as possible rather than attempt to establish a full-scale occupation. Despite having subjugated much more than Tihama and Aden and all the southern highlands, the Ottomans were soon gladly delegating the tax farming and administration to local sheikhs. Naturally, for those sheikhs to agree to collect taxes to enrich the Sultan ‘it was necessary’, as a French historian puts it, ‘to constantly shower them with gifts’.
²
The sheikhs commanded a higher and higher price for their loyalty, which meant there was less and less profit to be made by a succession of pashas who bemoaned their miserable lot and pined for plum postings in places where the living was easier and the pickings far richer -Cairo, Damascus or Basra. They vented their spleen and frustrated ambition in savage over-taxation of the natives. Swathes of fertile land in the southern highlands were deserted by peasants fleeing taxes too punitive to pay. In this way, portions of the population who, like the Tihamans, had at first been amenable to Ottoman rule, were needlessly alienated.

A desperately greedy Mahmud Pasha meddled with the mint, devaluing the coinage by tampering with its gold content and pocketing the spare gold himself. Soon noticing that their local currency salaries were not buying them nearly as much as those of their peers in Anatolia or Egypt, Ottoman soldiers fell to making up the shortfall by extortion from the locals. When that resource ran dry they began flogging off their personal possessions and even their weapons. Mahmud Pasha bled Yemen as dry as he could for seven years before bribing his way into a posting to Cairo. His departure in February 1565 was a memorable enough affair to have warranted recording; his entourage comprised a personal guard of a hundred slaves and his luggage included a throne and many chests of treasure. A side effect of an Ottoman decision to divide the province of Yemen in two after his complaint that its extent and terrain made communications too slow, was that his successor’s opportunities for personal gain were dramatically restricted. The fiefdom of Ridvan Pasha who took charge of the north-western half of the province - in effect the fortified towns of Sanaa and Saada - was not half as rich a prize as the peacefully prospering Tihama with its Red Sea ports, and the central southern highlands where a promising export commodity, coffee, was starting to thrive.

Dissatisfied, Ridvan Pasha lost no time in trying to improve his situation. Insisting on a renegotiation of the thirteen-year-old truce with Mutahhar al-Din, he sent a tactlessly high-handed
qadhi
^b
to open talks, with predictably damaging results. Deciding that he was no longer bound by the truce, Mutahhar began to foment fresh trouble for the Turks and Ridvan Pasha’s determination to extend taxation to Mutahhar’s northern highlands gave him the perfect
casus belli.
He fired the first shot, at a Turkish tax collector. What followed was the steady reconquest of the country by and for Mutahhar’s Zaydi high-lander tribesmen, beginning with the capture of the fortress at Saada, the only stronghold north of Sanaa that the Ottomans controlled. By January 1567 all the northern highlands except for Sanaa and Amran were under his control, with Ridvan Pasha suing for peace before being recalled to Constantinople to be punished for his incompetence with three years in jail. While besieging Sanaa, Mutahhar ensured that the southern and western routes to the capital were closed to prevent any Turkish reinforcements under the pasha of the south, Murad the One-Eyed, coming to Sanaa’s aid.

When Murad the One-Eyed did belatedly stir himself to relieve Sanaa, Mutahhar was ready for him. In June, in a narrow defile, Muttahar’s Zaydi fighters managed to ambush a hundred Ottoman horsemen and slaughter every one of them. Playing on mounting popular hatred of the Turks, Mutahhar then called for a general uprising against Ottoman domination, whipping up righteous outrage at the Turks‘ lax standards of Muslim observance: ’So where is the fury? Where has the passion gone? While these men [the Turks] degrade women of high status, taking them off to evil haunts where they can take their pleasure … you eat, drink, dance and play music.’
³

Soon even the Sunni southern highlands and coastal regions were heeding the Zaydi call to rise and throw off the Ottoman yoke. After guaranteeing its Turkish garrison’s safe passage back to Taiz, the southern highland town of Jiblah took a gleeful revenge by slaughtering every Ottoman soldier as soon as they left their fortress. Abandoning Sanaa to its fate, desperate to return to the southern highland town of Taiz where the Ottoman treasury was kept, Murad the One-Eyed risked relying on a local tribesman to guide him back south. Immediately, he was double-crossed. In a narrow mountain pass, his cavalcade was bombarded by boulders hurled by tribesmen infesting the mountains. In a valley transformed into a mud bath after tribesmen had flooded it by diverting a stream, his soldiers blundered about helplessly, sitting ducks for the enemy above them.

Sanaa fell to Mutahhar in the summer of 1567 and the new pasha who arrived to take up his post in the south was appalled to discover how little land there was left for him to squeeze for taxes. Encircled by hostile tribes, Taiz and its treasury was perilously isolated and nearby Zabid overrun with Turks who had fled there from every other part of the province. No wiser than any of his predecessors, the newcomer delegated the job of raising more taxes to an unscrupulous
qadhi
from Mocha. By October 1567 he had lost Taiz and his treasury. To the south in Aden a tiny 200-strong Turkish garrison surrendered without a fight, its Ottoman governor fleeing by sea.

Only then did alarm bells start clanging at the Porte. In the words of one contemporary Turkish writer, it was only the loss of one of the world’s finest natural harbours that finally awakened a terror in the Ottomans. They feared ‘the cursed Franks’ would seize Aden. They knew that the Europeans‘ superior ’knowledge of artillery and cannon fire and their care for ports and castles’
⁴
would make it hard to recapture again and they trembled at the prospect of losing their Holy Places. Only a massive task force, mustered in Egypt, could save the situation, they believed, but, despite an Ottoman chronicler’s proud boast that every Egyptian, ‘save the useless, such as a very old sheikh, or child, or the like’
⁵
rushed to sign up for the Yemen campaign, inefficiency and power struggles delayed its departure for nine months. Not until December 1558 did a fresh pasha cross the Red Sea with an army of 3,000 to start the reconquest, and it was not until spring the following year that the Ottomans turned the tide in their favour with the overland arrival of the then Ottoman ruler of Egypt, Sinan Pasha, at the head of a main force that rejoiced in 4,000 horses, 10,000 camels, ‘great pavilions, pedigree horses dressed in gold with bridles of gold and silver, weapons, armour and helmets’, to say nothing of the heavy guns and supplies sent by sea.

Naturally biased in favour of the Ottomans, the main Turkish chronicler of the reconquest refers to Imam Mutahhar’s forces as heretic Zaydis and takes cheap shots at the lame Imam himself by referring to him as a ‘cripple’ and emphasising his pathetic inability to ride anything but a donkey. But there is much that rings thrillingly true and vivid in his description of the miseries the Turks faced in recapturing Yemen. The appalling harshness of so much of the highlands struck the chronicler again and again: ‘there was nothing human or friendly there: the land was lost only to gazelle and camels the colour of the desert: behind every rock lurked a pack of monkeys or a pride of lions… nothing but the howling of jackals, the hooting of owls and the sound of crows.’
⁶
Oxen could pull their heavy gun carriages on flat land, but only manpower could heave them over mountain passes too steep and narrow for wheeled transport. The author complains of a
wadi
that ‘curves like a snake and anyone who takes it would risk being poisoned by the string of vipers coiled in its dangerous crannies’, where ‘horses would wade up to the belly and stirrup’. He describes a place whose mountains ‘pierce the clouds, a place where there was only pain’.
⁷
He also details an engagement in which Zaydi tribesmen ‘of extreme coarseness’
⁸
were occupying a mountain top, ‘spreading out behind the rocks like cockroaches and beetles’ and rolling giant boulders down onto the Turks, who responded with great blasts from their cannons, ‘throwing up sparks like castles’.
⁹

The Zaydi tribes were no match for the Ottomans’ determined assault with their new-fangled artillery. Imam Mutahhar, who had fled to Kawkaban, another rocky mountain-top fastness not far from Sanaa, was forced to descend to parley with Sinan Pasha, an occasion apparently ominously marred by his donkey transport breaking wind on departure. Sinan Pasha graciously granted Mutahhar the governorship of the area around Saada, but the Ottomans were back in charge by 1571, reunited in a single
vilayet
under his firm rule. Imam Mutahhar’s death the following year spelt the end of his dynasty. Rival families disputed the succession until, in the closing years of the sixteenth century, a new dynasty of imams emerged, the al-Qasim, to trouble the Turks again. Yet another 8,000-strong force of Egyptians was mustered, but only with great difficulty. Many soldiers had to be forced on board ship at Cairo and the army was soon decimated by casualties, desertion and disease.

This third and final effort to secure Yemen for the Ottoman caliphate lacked conviction. The Porte was losing interest in holding Yemen. With the golden prize of Vienna still untaken, the
vilayet
of Yemen was judged just too costly in manpower and materiel to be bothering with any longer. With Portuguese power in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean waning, the Turks’ terror of Franks capturing the Muslim holy places was also fading, especially as they were on better terms with the latest Frankish powers to take an interest in the region - the British and the Dutch - than they had ever been with the Portuguese. Mocha, their last toehold, was growing rich by its coffee trade and already home to both the British and Dutch East India companies’ trading posts by 1636, when the last Ottoman governor of the port acknowledged the obvious, gathered up his tiny remaining garrison, and boarded a ship for Egypt.

Yemenis were slow to realise it, but the British and Dutch vessels crowding into Mocha to buy coffee in the early seventeenth century represented a far greater long-term threat to their prosperity and independence than any Ottoman army intent on subjugating their precious highlands. English East India Company merchants had first put in to Ottoman Mocha in January 1609, twenty-three years before the Turks abandoned Yemen. In spite of finding it ‘unreasonable hot’, a merchant named John Jourdain had judged the port ‘a very plesaunt place to bide in, were it not for the Turkes ‘tyrannie’.
¹⁰
He had soon been disappointed to discover that he would need special permission from the Sultan in Constantinople if he wanted to set up a ‘factory’ (trading post) there and begin buying a commodity he called ‘cohoo’.
^c
Coffee’s special stimulating effects were a secret known only to the Muslim world at the time, so the plant intrigued Jourdain. On his trek inland into the mountains to Sanaa to parley with the pasha, he had noticed how jealously the Yemenis guarded their lucrative export, wrapping it in mystery and wonder - ‘it is reported this seede will growe at noe other place but neere this mountaine’,
¹¹
he wrote.