A Taste of the Tihama

Yemen has never drawn great numbers of visitors. It's too isolated, uncomfortable and expensive ever to become a major destination for international tourism, and a vicious cycle of civil war and tribal rivalry has combined with recent incidents of hostage-taking to ensure that most outsiders stay well away. This is a pity, as Yemen (known to the Romans as Arabia Felix, or "Fortunate Arabia" to distinguish it both from Arabia Deserta, or "Empty Arabia", and Arabia Petraea, or "Stony Arabia" to the north) is a veritable wonderland of elaborate mediaeval skyscrapers, fertile terraced mountains and traditional Islamic hospitality.

Throughout the country this last quality stands out. Visitors--at least those who dress correctly and respect local custom--are the subject of constant amiable attention. Friendly smiles, salutations in Arabic, offers of food, drink, and even accommodation are commonplace. It's slightly unnerving, then, when you notice--as you do from the minute you fly into the highland capital, Sana'a--that every adult male is armed. To begin with, there's the jambiyya, a wickedly-curved dagger about thirty centimetres long which is worn at waist level, in front. To the side may be pistols, across the shoulder in rural areas a bandolier--and always close to hand, distinguished by the tell-tale curved ammunition clip, the ubiquitous AK47 semi-automatic.

So well-armed are Yemeni men that at cinemas in the capital special facilities exist to check not coat and hat, but dagger, pistol and machine gun. It's not that the authorities fear a gun battle in the stalls, though this has sometimes happened; rather, during action movies some excited Yemenis are given to firing their weapons into the ceiling; hence the arsenal by the ticket office.

It can readily be imagined that this unlikely state of affairs--a sort of armed amiability--makes for a volatile mix. And Yemeni hospitality has always been unique. The first British visitors, shipwrecked off the southern coast in the early 16th century, were pulled from the waves, fed, housed, and forcibly circumcised.

Perhaps because of incidents like this, and because of the country's isolation from Europe, Western powers were understandably reluctant to become involved in the mountainous tribal region. North Yemen, like Ethiopia and Afghanistan, is a natural fortress that does not submit readily to conquest. Not that this stopped the Ottoman Turks, who ruled the area from 1872 until the end of the First World War. Similarly the British, anxious for supply stations on the long voyage to India, absorbed Aden and the surrounding coastal region in 1839.

There is a third Yemen, however. The coastal plains of the Tihama, sandwiched between the Red Sea Coast and the mountainous region around Sana'a, is rarely more than fifteen to twenty kilometres wide. Hot, humid, sandy and remote, it remains the least known part of the country, lacking almost entirely in links with the outside world, and all but unvisited by tourists.

Such was not always the case. Time was when the Tihama--the name means "hot earth"--supplied both Europe and Asia with coffee beans through the then flourishing port city of Mocha. Coffee--more precisely coffee arabica, known in Arabic as qahwa--is indigenous to the terraced hills of the High Yemen, and for centuries was exported to Asia by dhow from Mocha, or by camel along the trade routes of the Red Sea to Europe. To this trade we owe both the word coffee (from qahwa) and the term Mocha, which is still applied to the rich and aromatic beans of al-Yaman.

In times past European links with the Tihama may have been limited to coffee, but this was not the case with Asia. The Yemen seems remotely situated, beyond the sand seas of Rub al-Khali, the "Empty Quarter" of Arabia, when viewed from Europe. Seen from an Asian perspective, however, it's just about the closest part of the Middle East and easily accessible by sea. Trade and cultural contacts between Yemen and the Far East go back a long, long way. The lowland Yemenis are a maritime people, and their sewn wooden dhows plied the South China Sea as far as China almost fifteen hundred years ago. Nor was the traffic all one way. Ships of the Ming Emperor Yung Lo dropped anchor at Mocha in the early 15th century, nearly a hundred years before the arrival of the first European mariners.

It was to look for signs of these Asian links that I climbed into the cab of a battered pick-up early one April morning, abandoning the cool and fertile uplands around Sana'a for the furnace of the coastal lowlands. The Tihama is never cool, and during the hot season--May through August--temperatures as high as 50°C are made all but unbearable by humidity levels of around 85 percent.

In addition to the driver and myself, the back of the vehicle held around fifteen Yemeni men, as well as--I made a surreptitious count--sixteen jambiyya daggers, eight visible pistols, two ageing Lee-Enfield rifles, three AK47s (a fourth, the driver's, was jammed over the steering wheel), and an assorted collection of bandoliers. A crashing of gears, much hawking and spitting, a muttered bismillah (Arabic: "in the name of God") from the driver to ensure a safe journey, and we were off. The road from Sana'a to Al Hudaydah, the main port of the Tihama, is a Yemeni lifeline, providing the capital with nearly all its imported goods. Well-surfaced and maintained, it nevertheless rides a switchback of high mountain ridges, winding through an apparently continuous series of hairpin bends and steep descents from Sana'a's 2,300 metres to sea level.

By dawn we had reached Manakhah, capital of the mountain district of Harraz, and the last highland town before the Tihama. Here, in an extraordinary setting of terraced hills and fortified villages clinging to the highest peaks, we stopped for tea, bread and dried fruit at a small funduq, or roadside inn. The long, solitary table was already crowded, but one of the diners, seeing I had nowhere to sit, gestured to the narrow bench beside him. I tried to sit, but there simply wasn't enough room. Smiling reassuringly, my benefactor--a vigorous young Yemeni with two gold teeth and a magnificent jambiyya dagger--increased the available space by emptying his jacket pocket of four hand grenades, which he nonchalantly piled in the middle of the table. Though grateful, I nevertheless made a swift breakfast and went out for a last breath of fresh mountain air before our descent to the furnace.

It soon became apparent that the Tihama was very different to the Yemeni highlands. With traces of Ethiopian and Somali ancestry, the people are noticeably darker. The women generally go unveiled, and are locally renowned for their business acumen in the market place. Town houses are of baked mud bricks, and rural huts more reminiscent of Ethiopian straw tukul than the skyscraper-castles of Sana'a. Another difference, which I personally was pleased to note, is that the men carry fewer weapons.

A further important distinction between the highlanders and the people of the coastal plain is that the former are Zaidis, followers of an early and moderate form of Shi'a Islam, whilst the lowlanders are generally Sunni Muslims of the Shafi'i school. To the non-Muslim this may sound obscure, but the Tihama's extensive and age-old links with Southeast Asia are in large part due to this connection, unlikely as it may seem.

The Shafi'i madhab, or school of law, is one of four recognised schools of Sunni Islam. Founded by the jurist Muhammad As-Shafi'i in the 8th century AD, it soon spread to the Tihama, where two important Qur'anic centres, Zabid and Bayt al-Faqih, were established. Zabid in particular became an internationally renowned centre of learning--it's main institution, the University of Zabid, having been founded in the mid-8th century, more than a century before the greatest of all centres of Islamic scholarship, Al-Azhar University in Cairo.

Andrew Forbes / CPA

Women of the Tihama.

The people of the Yemeni lowlands are fishermen and sailors par excellence. In their fishing boats and trading dhows they carried the religion of Islam, as well as the practices of the Shafi'i School the length and breadth of the Indian Ocean. From Zanzibar and Dar-es-Salaam in East Africa, through Southern India and the Maldive Islands, to Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, Shafi'ism became the dominant Islamic rite--so much so that today it might well be described as the Indian Ocean school. It spread through trade and intermarriage, not through conquest, and with it came Yemeni settlers who intermarried with the locals. In this way families from the Tihama--and the neighbouring southern Yemeni region of Hadramawt--established family businesses with associated branches in cities as diverse as Mombasa and Madras, Rangoon, Singapore and Jakarta. Relations with the Yemen were maintained, and the sons or rich families often returned to study at the mosque-colleges of Zabid and Bayt al-Faqih, sometimes accompanied by wives of Malay, Indonesian and even Chinese origin.

During almost three decades of travel in Asia and Africa, I have met Yemeni families in a wide range of Indian Ocean ports--a mangrove-wood exporter in Mombasa, a cloth importer in Colombo, a university professor (fluent in English, Chinese and Arabic as well as Malay) in Singapore--even a shopkeeper in Narathiwat, South Thailand. All remained conscious and proud of their links with the "Old Country". But what signs of this Diaspora would I find in the Tihama itself?

Eschewing the 19th century port city of Al-Hudaydah, with its crumbling Turkish minarets and litter of cardboard, polystyrene and fish-waste piled ankle deep in the streets, I left the pick-up at the small, dusty village of Al-Marawi'ah and caught a battered bus south to Bayt al-Faqih. Much of the Tihama is stony desert, and in the north there are wide salt flats. Where irrigation works exist, however, fields of millet and sesame wave in the hot wind, and on the outskirts of settlements orchards of banana and papaya trees flourish in shades of vivid green.

In its prime, Bayt al-Faqih--in Arabic the name means "House of the Scholar"--was a flourishing trade station on the old incense route between Yemen and the Mediterranean. Today, in a period of decline, there is little beyond the dusty madrassa of the old Friday Mosque to mark the town's former status as a centre of learning. Signs of links with Asia are few, too--until you notice the futah, or woven cloth wraps worn by all Tihama men. Bayt al-Faqih is a major centre of production of these garments, which are all but identical to the sarong of Southeast Asia. This might be purely coincidental, of course. What wasn't was the style of architecture--a world away from the stone castles of High Yemen, and strikingly similar to the low, cool, arched cloisters and narrow rooms of East Africa and the Malabar Coast. Even less coincidental--indeed positive olfactory evidence of a Southeast Asian link--was the unexpected aroma of Indonesian kretek clove cigarettes wafted on the wind.

Andrew Forbes / CPA

Crenellated gateway, Zabid.

Heartened by this discovery, I pressed on to Zabid, the cultural capital of the Tihama and home to one of the great centres of Shafi'i tradition. Founded in 819, the city is surrounded by massive but crumbling city walls, and looks every year of its age. Behind the squat, Turkish-built citadel lies the ancient suq, or market place. Here women in the tall conical straw hats of the Tihama bargain shrilly over mounds of tomatoes, potatoes, papayas and goat meat. Over the centuries the dust and detritus of ages have raised the level of the old city, so that many alleys and back passages are semi-subterranean. Exploring one of these I heard the familiar Arabic greeting As salaam-aleikum--"Peace be upon you"--accompanied by a loud clanking. Peering through an ancient barred window it took a moment or two to make out, in a shaft of mote-filled sunlight, a line of men lying on their backs with their legs chained to a heavy wooden beam. Zabid jail, seemingly, has not changed much since the Middle Ages.

On a happier note, the city still retains a reputation for Islamic learning. Today there are an estimated eighty Qur'anic schools and mosques in Zabid, the most important of which is the Al Asha'ria Mosque. This venerable building is approached by a series of narrow lanes covered with rush awnings as shade against the fierce sun. Just as I was turning into the mosque I glanced up at the high window of a neighbouring stucco house and thought, briefly, that I saw the face of a Malay woman. Later, in conversation with the imam in charge of the mosque, I mentioned this and enquired after Zabid's links with Southeast Asia. The imam himself had relatives in Singapore, as he hastened to assure me. Another branch of the family--who claimed the status of sayyid, or descendants from the Prophet Muhammad--were settled in Mombasa. Yes, they all kept in touch--from time to time.

Finally, and rather diffidently, I asked about the female face in the stuccoed window. To my surprise, the lady in question was called and briefly introduced. Wearing a typical Malay telekung, or head-veil, she could have stepped straight out of a scene in Kelantan. There was no question of conversation, but after a brief, formal introduction in Arabic, I was able to say selamat datang--Greetings--in Malay. Though not the only evidence I found of Southeast Asia in the Tihama, the radiant smile this salutation evinced was by far the most gratifying, and it stays with me today.

This article was originally published in The Nation (Thailand).

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