The Houthi are Highlanders
Published in Spectator magazine, 2024
The Houthi are highlanders, who come from the bleak, barren and magnificent mountains in the north-western corner of Yemen. These hills once guarded the ancient city of Sa’da, a cluster of tall handsome stone houses punctuated by the white-washed spires of venerable mosques and the tomb of their founder ancestor, Yahya ibn Al-Husayn, who was buried here on 18 August 911. Nothing of Sa’da’s old beauty now remains, flattened by six years of assault by its own central government, followed by eight years of targeted bombing by Saudi and Gulf jets.
Until a few months ago, the Houthi were an obscure footnote to the complex history of the Arabian peninsular, but now due to their habit of firing rockets at ships using the Red Sea, in a distant demonstration of support for Palestinian Arabs, they are very much at the centre of everyone’s attention. Their music videos have gone viral, which combine single voices of passionate integrity with gritty chorus refrains sung by male warriors. Tanks, jets, drones and rockets are set as the visual backgrounds to these sung poems. They reek of the horrific technical vocabulary of contemporary warfare, but the forms of this sung poetry are fascinatingly ancient, and tie in very elegantly with Houthi belief systems.
For the Houthi are proud of their provincialism, their rural identity, their traditions, their poverty and their faith, and stand like some fusion between a heroic Scottish Highland chieftain from the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson and a red-neck hillbilly populist from the Appalachian Mountains.
The Yemeni cut a striking figure of self-identity, wearing a lightweight kilt (izaar) and carrying a gun and a dagger as easily as we set off each morning with our wallet and keys. They are also very stylish in the manner of their turbans or caps, drape scarves elegantly over their shoulders, care passionately about their land, are very keen on observing the weather, funny, hospitable and potentially murderous all at one and the same time.
Yemen occupies the south-west corner of the Arabian peninsula, which you would have thought would make for a very particular and isolated community, except when you sit down for a chat and within five minutes identify something or someone in common. The reach of the seven million Yemeni international diaspora is vast, because just like the British the Yemeni are enthusiastic travellers and are not afraid to go abroad for work, which has over the last few centuries scattered traders and sailors all over the globe: be it Cardiff, Indonesia, the States, Malaysia or Saudi Arabia.
The other extraordinary wonder about Yemen is that this very tough, warrior society is addicted to chewing away the hot dull part of the afternoon, listening to chanted songs, dreaming, chatting and quoting poetry to each other. The animating heart of these chat sessions are little posies of Qat (looking like a bouquet of laburnum) which you slowly pluck, in order to chew the fresh, green leaves, which eventually get bunched up in one of your cheeks in a tennis ball of mulch. Qat chewing provides an arena for communication and community and seems less addictive than my requirement for coffee throughout the morning and wine at dusk. Yemen is dotted with dozens of ancient cities (that were already old in the time of King Solomon) but it is still a tribal society, with a surprisingly high rate of illiteracy in the countryside which stimulates a love of oral wit and a fine appreciation of how poetry can bring dignity and excitement to life.
Banish any thought of your experience of poetry recitals in England, a small gathering of shy poets (funded by the Arts Council) myopically from their slim volumes. Instead imagine a vast tent in which a cocksure young warrior, one hand on his sword, the other punctuating the air, is chanting his verses to a striking rhythm set up by a drum and supported by the melancholic melody of a flute, the entire audience excitingly singing along to the refrain-like couplets. This is zamil (plural zawamil) oral poetry that has not been sealed into precise rules of metre and intricate internal rhyme, but ready to be shaped for any of the great events of life. Praises can be sung to celebrate a wedding (and politely introduce the two families to each other), there can be duels between rival poets (zajal) brandishing rival politics with humour or deadly zeal, there can be eulogies of the dead (madih), praise of the tribe (qitah), denigration of the enemy (hija’) and (hamasah) calls to war. Most marvellously it can also be used by a revered old sheikh in an arbitration, not so making a judgement over a dispute, but settling an argument by summarising and praising both sides. Winds, either gentle lovable breezes or violent tornadoes, turning the dry wadi floor into a devastating flood are ever popular analogies.
So Zamil poetry can become the articulate free-talking spirit of the community, relishing intimate details of the local landscape, the local dialect, mythology and slang which may be incomprehensible to the next-door valley, let alone the rest of the Arab world. Yemen is thick with local identities, complete with recognizably different accents and old memories of self-governing sheikdoms and rival dynasties. The most loved verses can have a vast reach, initially made through cassette recordings, but now grown ever wider through the mobile telephone and the internet. This Zamil tradition in Yemen is exactly mirrored by Nabati, created by the rural, semi-literate Bedouin across Eastern Arabia and now much cherished by an annual television competition, Millions, screened in the Gulf.
For the Houthi the spirit of a Free People is framed in this tradition, consciously rural and self-sufficient, muscular and almost spontaneous. It is set in defiance of the formal poetry tradition of the great cities of Arab intellectual culture, such as Cairo, Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad working within that vast written tradition that includes Qasida (Odes composed to a structure that can grow to eighty lines) and Ghazal (shorter poems of mystical and profane longing). This heritage of Arab classical and modern poetry is of course, also alive in the cities of Yemen, but it has become associated with an urbane and urban elite, that in the 50s and 60s espoused Communism, Socialism and the Pan-Arabic secularism of Nasser’s Egypt and the Ba’ath party. Such is the close weave of politics and poetry in Yemen, that it was just such a poet from this urbane, Levantine tradition that announced the deposition of the last Imam of Yemen in the coup of 1962 on the radio, in verse of course. Just as Ghadaffi would do in 1967, whilst the street crowds in the first instance of the Arab spring (in Tunisia) chanted verses by Aboul-Qacem Echebbi - who has been compared to a desert-borne Keats for North Africa. The scholar Steven Caton, who had recorded Zamil in the obscure highland villages of northern Yemen in the 1980s was astonished to hear them chanted thirty years later by tens of thousands of demonstrators when the Arab Spring engulfed Yemen.
The Houthi were part of that alliance of popular forces brought together in opposition to the corrupt governance of President (ex-general) Ali Abdullah Saleh. The Houthi had first emerged as an organised movement (Believing Youth) in their home city of Sa’da in 1992, defending their own faith traditions (with school clubs and summer camps) from the aggressive preaching of Wahhabi missionaries from Saudi Arabia. In 2004 their leader (Hussein al-Houthi) was assassinated, and 800 of his followers were imprisoned which ignited the first armed resistance in the mountains of the north-west, which continued over the next six years under the leadership of his brothers, with the Yemeni government forces supported by Saudi airstrikes. So the al Houthi had every good reason to join in the protest marches of the Arab Spring in 2011 which by 2014 had evolved into a three-cornered civil war, with the remnants of the old regime now supported by an aggressive Saudi-Gulf military coalition with the bankrupted old Marxist state of Southern Yemen once more striving for independence. The Houthi, under the leadership of Abdul-Malik Badruldeen al-Houthi endured seven years of air strikes, drone rockets, naval blockades and marine landings, but now and then managing to lob a rocket at targets in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. 150,000 Yemeni were killed in this war, with an additional 230,000 dying through associated famine and disease, before a temporary truce called a halt in 2022. To survive against the extravagantly funded armies of all their oil-rich enemies, the al-Houthi have transformed Northern Yemen into a militant regime. Their poetry is the most successful part of their propaganda which stresses their piety, bravery, learning and poverty compared with the corruption, wealth, laziness and hypocrisy of their enemies, betraying their fellow Arabs with their open alliance with Israel, the USA and the UK, like a modern-day Yazid (the hated Caliph). There are constant references to the great Shia heroes, to the example of Imam Ali and the martyrdom of Husayn at Kerbala for it is part of the Shia tragedy that every generation that the good suffer.
The al-Houthi follow a very mild version of the Shia faith, that was first bought to Yemen by their ancestor, Yahya ibn al-Husayn who was buried in Sa’da in 911 AD. Yahya was not only a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, but followed the teachings of his saintly grandfather, who abjured the politics of violent struggle, but was emphatic in his teaching that to rule with injustice and oppression is a heresy from true Islam, and it is the duty of all-believers to remove themselves from such injustice. Though one of the most exalted scholars of his age, and one of the chief representatives of the holy bloodline of the imams, he exiled himself to an obscure village in the desert, 35 miles southwest of Medina. Here he taught that a true leader of the Muslims is identified from the many descendants of the Prophet not through hereditary descent or a blessing-like designation, or by acclamation or by election, but through fourteen identifiable virtues, that start with piety, bravery, learning and poverty. This ideal ‘guide to the truth’ is acclaimed by the Zamil poets.
“Until a few months ago, the Houthi were an obscure footnote to the complex history of the Arabian peninsular, but now due to their habit of firing rockets at ships using the Red Sea … they are very much at the centre of everyone’s attention. ”