Sufism by Knysh Alexander;

Author:Knysh, Alexander;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

Hadramawt: Between Genealogical Privilege and Demands for Egalitarianism

Our second case study takes us to Hadramawt, an eastern province of the Republic of Yemen, which until 1990 had been part of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY), a client state of the Soviet Union in the Arabian Peninsula from 1969 until 1990.264 In the early 1970s, the radical Communist-Maoist rulers of the PDRY launched a violent atheist campaign against Islam, destroying or desecrating saints’ tombs and arresting and murdering religious scholars or forcing them to emigrate.265 However, it soon became obvious to the iconoclasts that Islam was too deeply entrenched in South Yemeni society to be eradicated overnight even with the harshest of measures.266 The state policy toward Islam had to be changed, and it was, gradually. Muslim scholars, who remained in the country, were left alone as long as they refrained from challenging directly the secular ideology promoted by the ruling elite educated in the Soviet Union or the Socialist countries of Eastern Europe. One should point out that the ideological precepts of the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP), which were alien and incomprehensible to the overwhelming majority of the Yemeni population, bore a close resemblance to the Soviet ones, as described in the previous section of this chapter in connection with Daghestan and Chechnya. Like other aspects of social, political, and economic life of the PDRY, its leadership’s atheistic attitude to religion was inspired by the official Soviet ideology. After studying Marxism-Leninism in the countries of the Soviet bloc, Yemen’s Socialists were eager to create a Soviet Socialist republic on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. They justified their policies toward Islam and its local exponents by citing the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of class struggle and proletarian revolution. Seen through this ideological prism, the members of Yemen’s religious establishment would appear to be backers of the “feudal, comprador classes” or a “parasitic religious aristocracy.”267 This ideological cliché seemed to be particularly actual for the province of Hadramawt where the overwhelming majority of men of religion came from the local families that claimed descent from the Prophet via his cousin ‘Ali and his daughter Fatima. Collectively known as al-sada,268 they had often occupied positions of authority in the governments of the local sultans before and after British rule,269 while also playing important roles in the transmission and preservation of Islamic learning not just in Hadramawt, but throughout the Muslim world as well.270 A British visitor to Hadramawt in 1959 observed:

The sherifs’ whole position rested on their descent, ritual competence, and the belief in their power to bring blessing, education, and knowledge of Islamic law.271

It is hardly surprising that after the departure of the British and the communist takeover of the country in 1968–69,272 the secular-minded leaders of the YSP came to see the sada as dangerous ideological and political rivals in the struggle for the hearts and minds of the local population.273 Using their newly acquired political power, Yemen’s communists visited severe reprisals on prominent representatives of the sada stratum,274 forcing many into exile to North Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

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