Hakim woke up early on a brisk February morning in his home in a village outside of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. He had some important meetings in the city that day and he was eager to get going. He reached for the navy mawaz that he had worn the day before and had begun wrapping it around his waist, when his wife entered the room with a freshly ironed red mawaz in her hand. “Wear this one,” she said, her eyes alight. “It suits you better.”
Although Hakim’s wife was illiterate, over the 14 years of their marriage he had long since learned to defer to her opinion in household matters as well as her tastes regarding his attire. He was glad to please her as he handed her the navy mawaz in exchange for the red one, finished getting ready, and left. His wife’s final approving gaze was still lingering in his mind when he reached Sana’a mid-morning and got off the bus at a roundabout to walk to his first appointment. However, Hakim had only made it few meters from the bus stop before he noticed a shopkeeper across the street waving at him frantically. “Hurry!” the man called. “You’ve got to come inside!”
As Hakim made his way across the street, the man grew more agitated. “What’s the matter?” Hakim asked. “Does someone need help?”
“You’re wearing red!” the shopkeeper exclaimed as he practically shoved Hakim into his store. “They’ll arrest you! It’s Valentine’s Day!”
“Valentine’s Day?” Hakim asked, confused. “I don’t understand. What’s Valentine’s Day?”
“It’s something to do with love and roses and hearts and the color red—something forbidden,” said the shopkeeper. “The Houthis have been harassing anybody wearing red. They just beat some guys there at the roundabout and took them away. You just can’t be out in red today!”
At the back of the man’s shop, Hakim found a few other men about his age wearing red and looking just as bewildered as he felt. “Why did you wear red, if it wasn’t for this Valentine’s Day?” the shopkeeper demanded.
“It was my wife’s idea,” answered Hakim.
“Then she must know about Valentine’s Day,” said the shopkeeper. “Women are crazy!”
Hakim called his wife from the back of the shop and asked her why she’d brought him the red mawaz to wear that morning, “Did you know it was Valentine’s Day? Are you trying to cause problems for me? I can’t get to my meetings because I’m wearing red!”
Hakim’s wife insisted that she’d never heard of the strange holiday before. “I just like red,” she said. “What’s wrong with red? Since when has it been a crime to wear red?”
The Houthi militias arresting anyone wearing red that Valentine’s Day are rooted in a Zaydi Shia religious revivalist movement. The group succeeded in taking control of Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, and other northern provinces over the last quarter of 2014. In 2015, they ignited a war with their march south to Aden where Yemen’s Internationally Recognized Government (IRG) had fled. Since then, the Houthis have formed a quasi-state that currently rules about 80 percent of the Yemeni population, all the while battling a Saudi-led coalition seeking to re-instate the IRG ousted by the Houthis.
The Houthis’ ancestry can be traced back to the first Zaydis, who were seeking a refuge from Sunni persecution of their beliefs. These early Zaydis endeavored to establish a Zaydi state in Yemen due to its reputation for supporting Islam and protecting the oppressed. A widely circulated narrative contends that a prominent Zaydi who was born in Medina as a descendent of the Prophet Muhammad secured the Zaydi’s foothold in northern Yemen in the late 9th Century. According to the account, he was invited to resolve a dispute among Yemen’s highland tribes where his wisdom won hearts and minds. In time the Zaydis’ hosts accepted the rule of their guest mediators due to their own rising frustration with Islam’s Sunni dynasties. Thus, although Zaydi rule has endured in Yemen’s north on and off for the last thousand years, some Yemeni factions still see descendants of these original Zaydis as outsiders due to their North Arabian, Adnani roots. In this view, after a millennium of coexistence, families of Zaydi lineage remain “neither part of the Yemeni tribal society, which traces its ancestry back to Qahtan, nor of Yemen’s pre-Islamic history.” These Zaydi families became an increasingly distant aristocracy in Yemen’s northern highlands, and an age-old tension has persisted between Yemen’s ancient tribal culture and the imported Islamic morality of Zaydi elites.
Prior to the Houthi movement, the last major Zaydi revival followed the collapse of the Ottoman empire, when two especially powerful Zaydi imams ruled Yemen’s north from 1918 until 1962. They strengthened the state, secured its borders, and used the imamate to insulate Yemen and revitalize its Islamic culture and society. During that period, northern Yemen seemed almost frozen in time, cut off from the political and economic modernization occurring in the outside world. Meanwhile, the Zaydi elites also continued to insulate themselves from the rest of Yemeni society—a trend that would continue after the fall of the imamate in 1962.
“When I was a boy, I used to long to go out and play with the other boys my age who ran together in the street,” says Ali, who is 48 and from a leading Zaydi family. “I could see them out playing together from the window in our sitting room, but I was never allowed to join them. The adults in my family told me it would be shameful because they were beneath me. We were from the Sa’adaand there were no other boys my age in our family so there was no one I could play with.”
Saudi Arabia supported Yemen’s deposed Zaydi imam throughout the 1960s—seeking to re-establish a royalist regime on its border over Yemen’s revolutionary forces supported by Egypt who were seeking to establish a republic. However, by 1970 North Yemen had adopted a democratic constitution and the Saudi monarchy reluctantly established diplomatic relations with the new state. Nearly 30 years later, Yemen’s Zaydis would re-emerge as the Houthi movement—founded by Husayn Al Houthi—this time in opposition to the influence of Saudi Arabian “Salafization” policies in Yemen. Meanwhile, Yemen’s dire economic and political conditions in the late 1990s and early 2000s, brought the Houthis broader support that would grow significantly following Yemen’s Arab Spring revolution in 2011. This helped facilitate the Houthis’ power grab in 2014. By then, another isolationist Shia state—Iran—was embroiled in a regional rivalry with Saudi Arabia and has taken the opportunity to arm the Houthis in defiance of their Saudi adversaries ever since.
Today, the Houthis continue to serve as the de facto rulers of Yemen’s north where they have successfully used propaganda tools including the popular and celebrated art form of zamil poetry to gain and maintain support for their cause. The movement’s founder, Husayn Al Houthi, was killed in 2004 and the group now follows his brother, Abdulmalik Al Houthi. A series of transcribed teachings delivered by Husayn was compiled to form the Malazim, which the movement refers to for religious and political guidance. The Malazim broke with traditional Zaydi ideas to incorporate elements of Iran’s Twelver Shia Islam and form a highly politicized, revolutionary, simplistic, and even primitivist interpretation of Zaydi ideology. Under its auspices, the Houthis have been enforcing ever increasing social restrictions in Yemen’s north, including a ban on Valentine’s Day—the celebration of which is deemed a form of “heresy and imitation of the West.” However, the centuries of isolation maintained by Zaydi dynasties in Yemen’s north mean that interest in the holiday is already limited to younger and urban Yemenis. Rural Yemenis like Hakim and his wife may be unaware of the forbidden holiday until they make the mistake of wearing red on February 14th.
1 Name changed to protect the identity of a vulnerable Yemeni family.
2 A skirt-like garment worn by Yemeni men that is wrapped around the waist.
3 Shiite Muslims are a minority community in the Islamic world and Zaydis are a minority of Shiites, significantly different in doctrine and beliefs from the Shiites who dominate in Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere. Zaydis take their name from Zayd Bin Ali, the great grandson of Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law. Zaydism does not differ markedly in doctrine from Sunni Islam and it is often seen as a crossover between Sunnism and Shiism.
4 Yemen would later become a mobilization base for rebellions against the major Islamic empires because it was far from the political centers of Islamic rule and benefitted from a strategic topography.
5 https://www.commonspace.eu/analysis/analysis-origins-houthi-supremacist-ideology
6 According to Arab tradition, the Adnanites are from the north of Arabia and descended from Adnan, a descendant of Abraham’s son Ishmael.
7 A semi-legendary ancestral figure—according to Arab tradition his 24 sons are the progenitors of Yemen who controlled the Arabian Peninsula.
9 Vincent Steven Wilhite, Guerilla war, counterinsurgency, and state formation in Ottoman Yemen, PhD Thesis, Ohio State University 2003, p. 130.
10 https://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam031/00029266.pdf
11 Name changed to protect the identity of a vulnerable Yemeni family.
12 One of five major family lineages that traces its roots to the Prophet Muhammed.
13 https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/yemen.htm
15 The Houthi surname refers to Huth, a village in Amran governorate situated between Saadah and Sanaa.
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