As of October 4th, Houthi authorities were still detaining individuals in Sana’a’s Al-Sabeen Square—adding to the estimated 1,500 who had already been detained for participating in popular celebrations of Yemen’s September 26th national holiday and raising the national flag.[1] At the time, just 40 of the original detainees had been released after paying a fine of more than $400 USD and signing a written statement that they had made a mistake by observing the 61st anniversary of the ousting of Imam Muhammad Al-Badr. Those released were also required to provide a pledge from a tribal leader, merchant, or neighborhood official loyal to the Houthis and willing to vouch for their release.[2]
Of course, when Yemenis took to the streets in Sana’a, Ibb, and Hodeidah on September 26th, 2023, to celebrate the end of Yemen’s last Mutawakkilite Kingdom, it was indeed more than a remembrance of a historic revolution. The warning to the Houthis, de facto rulers of northern Yemen and ideological descendants of the Mutawakkilites, was clear: their reign, like that of Al-Badr’s, may well prove short-lived unless they give attention to the people’s grievances. Protestors used the national holiday as an opportunity to mass in the streets, demanding salaries, better government services, access to electricity and clean water, and measures to counter economic decline. Houthi forces, meanwhile, responded by confiscating flags waved by the demonstrators and using live ammunition to disperse crowds, resulting in numerous injuries.[3]
Ever since Houthi militias took over Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, in 2014, the movement’s leaders have been seeking to restore a system set up by Imam Yahya Muhammad—grandfather to the ill-fated Imam Al-Badr. Yahya had established a regime based on a theological system that limited the right to rule to self-proclaimed descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, known as Sayyids.[4] Prior to the 1962 revolution, Sayyid rule in Yemen had last been interrupted by the Ottoman Empire—which collapsed in 1918. Shortly after, in 1926, Imam Yahya declared northern Yemen an independent sovereign state, which he ruled until his death in 1948. Yahya was succeeded by his son, Imam Ahmad, who survived several assassination attempts and ruled until he died in his sleep on September 19th, 1962. This commenced Al-Badr’s reign, which would last just a week before Yemeni army officers supported by Egypt staged a coup to overthrow the monarchy on September 26th.[5] During those 36 years of Mutawakkilite rule in 20th Century Yemen, there was effectively no education or medical system or other public services—and whether for better or for worse, there were virtually no outside influences. Saif, who is now 80 years old, says he used to walk the nearly 40 kilometers from the Yemeni village of Kokaban to the capital in Sana’a barefoot. “We were poor, but everything we had came from Yemen,” says Saif. “We didn’t need anything from abroad. World War I and World War II came and went, and we didn’t even know about it.”
In the almost total isolation of northern Yemen, it was Imam Yahya himself who planted the seeds of revolution. Shortly after Saudi Arabia’s founding in 1932, King Ibn Saud sent an emissary to Yahya to settle a boundary issue. Yahya rejected the emissary saying, “Who is this Bedouin coming to challenge my family’s 900-year rule?”[6]
In the ensuing war Ibn Saud captured three border territories: Asir, Najran, and Jizan—an annexation made official by the 1934 Treaty of Ta’if. Thus, in the aftermath, Yahya undertook a project to create a national army and lessen his reliance on tribal militias during times of war. As a part of that project, Yahya sent a group of students to a military academy in Iraq—some of whom would later join the opposition movements that birthed the 1962 revolution. Meanwhile, Yahya’s son Ahmad, while still the crown prince in 1947, would sow more revolutionary seeds when he financed a study abroad program for another group of 40 mostly orphaned teenagers. Many of these students attended military colleges in Egypt, Iraq, and Lebanon—while others pursued advanced degrees in Europe and the United States. Ahmad had envisioned this group as his administration’s future leaders. However, to his dismay, they returned home not only with a superior education, but also a growing discontent with the Mutawakkilite’s repressive rule, the lack of domestic infrastructure, and the dearth of opportunities for economic and social advancement. Accordingly, Ahmad’s scholars, who would come to be called the Famous Forty, joined Yahya’s pupils before them in serving their country as the ideologues of the 1962 revolution, the founding fathers of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR), and the core of the nation’s civil service for the next seven decades.[7]
Colonel Abdullah Al-Sallal was a member of the first cohort that Yahya sent to Iraq, and as an orphan of lowly birth, he was a prototype of the Famous Forty. Imam Yahya and Imam Ahmed after him had selected for their study abroad programs those that they believed would pose no threat to them—young Zaydis who were not Sayyids and had no roots in big tribal families.[8] In September 1962 Al-Sallal was serving as the commander of the royal guard when he proved their calculations wrong by leading Al Badr’s overthrow and declaring himself president of the newly formed YAR to ignite the revolution. Meanwhile, Al Badr fled with his followers to the historic haven for Zaydi Shiites devoted to Sayyid rule in Yemen’s mountainous north. This set off the North Yemen Civil War with the Famous Forty and their companions representing a new generation of revolutionaries pitted against a staunchly conservative religious and tribal class that had dominated northern Yemen for centuries. Today, Saeed, a 47-year-old tribesman from central Yemen, says his elders remember the goals of the 1962 republican revolution as, “justice, eliminating class differences, building a national army to protect the homeland, and establishing democratic governance.”
Over the next eight years, Egypt continued to support Yemen’s republicans as they sought to achieve those goals while fighting against Al-Badr and the royalists who were this time supported by Saudi Arabia in their struggle to re-establish the monarchy.[9] Egypt would eventually station as many as 60,000 troops in Yemen and some have even suggested that Egypt’s commitments there contributed to its defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war—after which Egypt’s support for Yemen’s republicans declined.[10] With Egyptian support waning, Al-Sallal was himself deposed by Abdul Rahman Al-Eryani who assumed the YAR presidency in a bloodless coup in 1967, after which neither the republicans nor the royalists were able to gain a decisive upper hand. Hostilities between the two parties finally ceased in 1970 in a compromise pact that promised social equality in place of the traditional hierarchy that had placed Sayyid families at the pinnacle. However, Saeed claims his revolutionary elders were suspicious of Saudi Arabia’s influence on the agreement even as it was signed. “The agreement between the republicans and royalists was merely a return of the monarchy in the clothes of a republic,” says Saeed.
In the aftermath of the war, both the royalists and the republicans suffered. The tribesmen who had supported Imam Al-Badr were marginalized and today their grievances are largely carried on by their children and grandchildren who form the core of the Houthi militias seeking to restore Sayyid rule today. Meanwhile, the republicans briefly hoped to see their goals achieved under the presidency of Ibrahim Al Hamdi—who replaced Al Eryani in a bloodless coup in 1974. However, those hopes were dashed with Hamdi’s assassination in 1977. “The assassination of President Ibrahim Al Hamdi made Saudi Arabia the de facto ruler of Yemen,” says Saeed. “They began to support the Muslim Brotherhood and other religious groups against the goals of the 1962 revolution.”
Four years after Hamdi’s death, Ali Abdullah Saleh assumed the YAR presidency and would remain in power for the next 34 years—overseeing Yemen’s unification in 1990. Although Saleh’s autocratic rule continued to gradually dilute the goals of the 1962 revolution, he presided over what many Yemenis today remember as a time of stability and progress. “It’s true that Ali Abdullah Saleh gave power to his benefactors and favored them, but we cannot deny that the basic services that citizens are entitled to—like electricity and water—were available,” says Belquis, a Yemeni woman who lived in both Yemen’s north and south during Saleh’s rule. “There was also more safety and security than we have in the current situation.”
Nonetheless, Saleh’s allocations of political power according to a presidential patronage network eventually sparked a new attempt to establish a civil democracy based on equal citizenship in 2011. That year, the Houthis joined with Yemen’s Arab Spring cohort of students’ unions, human rights initiatives, and other political parties as a revolutionary, anti-establishment group that shared the same political grievances as Yemen’s pro-democracy movement. Young and enthusiastic protestors welcomed the Houthis with open arms—believing that the group endorsed a shared vision for a pluralist democratic society. However, once Saleh finally ceded power to a transitional administration in 2012, Houthi delegations began regularly traveling to Lebanon and Iran where they met with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) with other revolutionary goals in mind.[11] On September 21st, 2014, Houthi militias entered Sana’a in a move to seize control of the capital in their own September revolution and began turning on the civil society and pro-democracy activists they had so recently marched alongside. By 2015, the Houthis’ aims of re-establishing Sayyid rule across Yemen were in full view—plunging the nation into war once again.
Today, through over eight years of conflict, the Houthis have managed to maintain control of some 70 to 80 percent of the Yemeni population. However, the events of September 2023 are a reminder that their theocratic rule has not quenched the spirit of the 1962 revolution. While the ideological descendants of the Mutawakkilites seek to reestablish Sayyid rule, the ideological descendants of the Famous Forty and their companions, first educated by the Mutawakkilite imams, still hold aspirations of a society based on democratic ideals—the first of its kind on the Arabian Peninsula. Those who still carry the revolution’s spirit, however, do so in defiance of an array of local, regional, and global dynamics that have consistently undermined the vision that the Famous Forty brought home. Thus, the hard work of laying the foundations of justice and equality still remains to be done.
[1] https://countervortex.org/blog/houthis-repress-north-yemen-nationalist-rallies/
[2] https://english.aawsat.com/arab-world/4587531-drone-strikes-syrian-military-ceremony-kill-and-wound-dozens
[3] https://www.jurist.org/news/2023/09/houthi-authorities-arrest-largely-peaceful-demonstrators-in-yemen/, https://www.siasat.com/yemens-houthi-group-sacks-cabinet-amid-mass-protests-2707551/
[4] https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/2531581/yemenis-mark-sept26-revolution-reiterate-rejection-houthi-agenda
[5] https://www.officeholidays.com/holidays/yemen/september-revolution-day
[6] https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/saudi-arabias-war-houthis-old-borders-new-lines
[7] Orkaby, A. 2017. Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-68. Oxford University Press.
[8] https://alternatifpolitika.com/eng/makale/a-political-history-of-civil-military-relations-in-yemen
[9] https://english.defensie.nl/topics/historical-missions/mission-overview/1963/united-nations-yemen-observation-mission-unyom
[10] https://adst.org/2015/07/the-proxy-of-my-proxy-saudi-arabia-against-egypt-in-north-yemen/
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