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Houthis in the Making: Nostalgia, Populism, and the Politicization of Hashemite Descent

Les Houthis en devenir : nostalgie, populisme et politisation de la descendance hachémite
التحول الحوثي: حنين وشعبوية وتسييس السلالة الهاشمية
Luca Nevola

Résumés

Durant l’automne 2012, les Hachémites (sāda) d’une hijra située au sud-ouest de la capitale Sanaa, ont progressivement reformulé leur identité en termes politiques. En l’espace d’un an, la plupart d’entre eux sont devenus partisans des Houthis, provoquant une réaction égale et opposée chez les Arabes Qaḥṭānī du village qui ont adhéré par défi au parti Islah. S’appuyant sur un travail de terrain approfondi dans les hauts plateaux du Yémen (2009–2013), cet article aborde les politiques identitaires en examinant l’interaction subtile entre la vie et les histoires de famille, les modes de subsistance et les institutions sociales dans un monde « glocal ».
En explorant les histoires familiales de deux jeunes sāda, l’article soutient que les changements sociaux et matériels rapides et sans précédent qui ont intéressé le Kuthra au cours du siècle dernier ont jeté les bases de représentations nostalgiques d’un passé perdu. En s’appuyant sur cette base émotionnelle, l’idéologie houthie a fourni un récit politique capable d’orchestrer des sentiments nostalgiques en un projet de vie cohérent, offrant ainsi un outil puissant pour la politique identitaire.

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Texte intégral

I thank the Arabian Humanities reviewers for advice on the text. Earlier versions of this article were presented at SOAS, for The British-Yemeni Society, and at the workshop “The Roots of Yemen’s Ḥūthī Movement: History, Memory, Continuity and Ruptures”, held at the Institute for Social Anthropology in Vienna. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Thanos Petouris and Marieke Brandt for organizing these two events. The writing of this paper was funded by the VERSUS project (ERC n° 726504).

Of loss and longing

Setting the scene

  • 1 Kuthra is a fictitious name intended to protect my interlocutors’ identity. The names of neighborin (...)

1Between 2012 and 2013 I conducted twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in a populous village of the Yemeni Highlands located a few kilometers southwest of Sanaa, within Sanḥān tribal territory. The old part of this village — that we will call Kuthra1 — was perched on the slope of a mountain at the western end of a flourishing valley. Recently built houses framed the northern (qiblī) and southern (‘adanī) sides of the wādī.

  • 2 Caton, 2005.
  • 3 According to Vom Bruck, 2005, p. 38, protected hijra people were exempted from paying bloodmoney an (...)
  • 4 As noted by Brandt, 2017, p. 142, not all the sāda were muhajjar: a specific tribal-sayyid treaty i (...)
  • 5 The social landscape of the village was completed by the family of the servant (muzayyin) and by tw (...)

2Kuthra was considered both by its people and by the surrounding tribes as a hijra, a term that conventionally describes a sort of ‘sanctuary’,2 an enclave in tribal territory inhabited by ‘protected’ Hashemite people and, more generally, religious scholars.3 Indeed, almost 2/3 of Kuthra’s inhabitants identified themselves as sāda (s. sayyid), northern Arabs and Ḥasanī descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad. However, none of the male sāda of Kuthra fell under the protection of the so-called qabā’il (s. qabīlī), the tribesmen, as one would expect.4 Rather, they constituted a co-liable vengeance group with the remaining third of the inhabitants of the village — people of southern Arab origin identified as the arab (s. ‘arabī) — and insisted on describing themselves as qabā’il, arms-bearing farmers.5

  • 6 The tribal rules (qawā‘id) I collected during fieldwork attest to the name of the village and its s (...)
  • 7 International Crisis Group, 2013.

3This unusual alliance of lineages, termed ‘brotherhood’ (akhuwwa), was grounded on asymmetric kinship ties and reciprocal practices that had successfully reproduced the tribal corporate group of Kuthra for more than one hundred years.6 However, when I reached the village in August 2012, the situation was tense, both locally and on the national level. During my stay, President Abdrabbuh Manṣūr Hādī (elected in February in a one-candidate plebiscitary vote) started a radical restructuring of the military and security sector7 and inaugurated the National Dialogue Conference. Meanwhile, most sāda of Kuthra adhered to the Shiite-leaning Houthi movement, triggering an equal and opposite reaction from the ‘arab, most of whom joined the Muslim Brotherhood-leaning Islah Party. This rephrasing of traditional lineage identities in political terms (a phenomenon called izbiyya) exacerbated the already existing, latent tensions between the two groups and eventually disrupted the social fabric of the brotherhood.

4This paper is an attempt at making sense of this process from the perspective of two of my sayyid interlocutors whose life histories I shall present below. In what follows, I shall argue that the rapid and unprecedented social and material changes that invested Kuthra from the 1970s laid the groundwork for nostalgic representations of a lost past. Building on this emotional foundation, Houthi discourse provided a political narrative capable of orchestrating nostalgic feelings into a coherent life project, thus providing a powerful tool for identity politics.

Nostalgia: phenomenological, social and material foundations

“Trees covered our valley like an umbrella, not a single ray of light could pass and reach the land.”

5This image accompanied me during my one-year fieldwork in Kuthra. My eldest interlocutors had experienced the time when pear trees would still bear their fruit, and the youngest held on to their fathers’ memories. Memories of a landscape of incomparable beauty; memories imbued with nostalgia that poetically epitomized the feeling of most villagers towards their past, shaping the perception of a decaying present embodied in rotten and dried-up trees.

6The trees worked as a metonym for my interlocutors’ lifeworlds, abruptly overturned by massive political, environmental, economic and social changes. Following the 1962 revolution and the establishment of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR), most of Kuthra’s villagers became soldiers or civil servants, thus abandoning agriculture; they witnessed landscape change as cash crops advanced and the village expanded into the valley; above all, they saw a decline of the prestige attached to their traditional roles — either as religious scholars or farmers — and a weakening of the social texture of Kuthra’s brotherhood. These changes, which we will discuss below, pushed many of them to narrate their life experience in nostalgic terms.

  • 8 Lems, 2016, p. 420.

7The word nostalgia (from the Greek nostos, “return to the native land,” and algos, “pain”) was coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in 1688 to describe a mysterious disease affecting troops of Swiss soldiers serving in the Belgian flatlands. According to the story, the men fell into a melancholic delirium triggered by listening to a Swiss pastoral melody and became obsessed with memories of home.8 This anecdote seems to equate nostalgia with homesickness, but we will use the concept in a more elaborate fashion: first, considering its phenomenological dimension, and second, tackling its social and political implications.

  • 9 Hart, 1973, p. 399.
  • 10 Ibid., p. 401–402; Herzfeld, 2001, p. 78.
  • 11 Hart, p. 406.

8Paraphrasing the philosopher James G. Hart, I will define nostalgia as a “shift in the intentionality of consciousness”9 to an irretrievable past. This nostalgic past is not the actual memory of an experienced past, but rather a reverie: an “imaginative re-constitution of the past,” which is inescapably entangled with present hopes and wishes.10 The reverie can be grounded in the ‘non-nostalgic’, actual memory of an experience (as in the case of the Swiss soldiers, or of the elder inhabitants of Kuthra), but it can also direct the intentionality of consciousness towards a mythical, never-experienced past.11

  • 12 Ibid., p. 405.

9Indeed, the nostalgic narratives of Kuthra villagers — people belonging to different generations, who lived through disparate historical times — did not stem from the experience of a common past, but rather from the hopes and frustrations of an unfolding present. In this view, the nostalgic past, imagined and temporally undetermined, helped them give meaning and unity to their present life-project.12 Moving from this observation, we can address the socio-political dimension of nostalgic narratives. In fact, though grounded in individual experience, these narratives are often shaped by common tropes and structural features.

  • 13 Herzfeld, 2016, p. 139.
  • 14 Kenny, 2017, p. 257–258.

10In his masterpiece Cultural Intimacy, the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld demonstrates clearly how “structural nostalgia” can suppress the negative aspects of the past and serve the nationalist cause. Providing reassuring images of an unspoiled and irrecoverable Edenic era, nostalgia legitimizes “deeds of the moment by investing them with the moral authority of eternal truth”13 and thus mediates collective identities. Similarly to nationalisms, contemporary populist ideologies are “politically orchestrated forms of nostalgia,” and they call for the “restoration of national values and idealized images of the social order now passed.”14

  • 15 Van der Linde, 2014; Angé & Berliner, 2016, p. 2.

11Though grounded in individual experience, nostalgia is often anchored to a socially shared and localized dimension. Rarely is it placeless, since it needs a point of origin (which is also a point of return). The village of Kuthra and its trees became the place of my interlocutors’ nostalgic narratives, providing solid, material foundations to the past they yearned for. Indeed, between 1962 and the beginning of the 21st century, Kuthra suffered rapid and massive historical changes that triggered nostalgic feelings. We will thus explore the main features of this ‘acceleration of time’.15

Modes of livelihood, land and demography

  • 16 Casey, 1987, p. 363.

12Kuthra was, for my nostalgic interlocutors, more than a geographical site: it was “a way of life, a mode of being-in-the-world.”16 This world extended beyond the grasp of memory, reaching those youngsters who had never experienced it in the form of a mythical past. A fundamental dimension of this mode of being-in-the-world was agriculture as a mode of livelihood.

  • 17 Gudeman & Whitten, 1982; Mundy, 1995.
  • 18 A right of pre-emption (shuf‘a) was customarily contemplated, extending to the line of descent and (...)

13Before 1962, the most widespread economic pattern in Kuthra was a household (or domestic or oikos) model.17 The household was the primary unit of production and consumption, based on a division of labor between the sexes and a hierarchical relationship between the generations. The production system was based on agriculture and pastoralism. Land was owned predominantly by absentee landlords. Peasants worked it as sharecroppers (sharīk, pl. shurakā) and daily wage workers (shaqī, pl. ashqā). They cultivated coffee, sorghum, and qat on the rain-fed land (aqar) and used spate-fed land (musayyal) for pear (anbarūd) and apricot (barqūq) trees and also for grapes. Besides, each household also owned privately small plots of land, flocks of sheep, and a cow for milk and clarified butter (samn). The only common property was pastureland and the mosque. Every inch of the village, including roads, access routes, channels, and water shares, was privately owned.18

  • 19 Peters, 2007; Marx, 1967.

14The economic-production unit, the household, mostly coincided with the usra, a patronymic descent category that included three generations of co-resident people. Unlike other Middle Eastern contexts (especially nomadic ones) where property is associated with genealogies,19 the property of the usra was privately owned by individuals. Consequently, it functioned as a corporate unit for production as long as the pater familias organized the work of his descendants, and tended to split up after his death. When I moved to Kuthra, in 2012, this mode of production had entered a serious crisis, due to three main factors: demography, land fragmentation, and state salaries. Let us now examine the first point.

  • 20 This classification was provided to me by a shaykh mashaykh and independently confirmed by other el (...)
  • 21 Cf. Varisco, 2017, p. 234: the term can also refer to extended families sharing a kitchen, holding (...)
  • 22 Central Statistical Organization, 2004.

15In Imam Yaḥyā’s classification,20 a village (qarya) amounted to 600 adult men. Right before the September 1962 revolution, Kuthra was classified as 1/4 plus 1/8 of a village, meaning that 225 men lived in it. About twenty houses embraced the mosque of the village — built anew during the 1950s — and a couple more houses stood on the opposite slope of the mountain. Down the valley, another small village had been erected on the spur of a mountain. During the 1960s, Kuthra expanded by incorporating it, and yet it remained a small village, described by its inhabitants as dayma21 wāḥida (literally ‘one kitchen’) with the neighboring village of Arlin. In less than fifty years, Kuthra witnessed an exponential population growth. In 2004, according to the census, 976 people (of which 502 were males) and 141 families inhabited the village.22 In 2012, during my fieldwork, the amīn of the village listed about 2,000 inhabitants, and I counted 185 houses in the valley.

16This demographic explosion had devastating consequences on the traditional mode of production. Whenever I asked, “Why did you abandon agriculture?” one of the most recurrent answers was “My father was one, son of one, son of one.” This trope described the high death rate that characterized life before the revolution, when only a few men inherited property. However, with demographic growth, land became dramatically fragmented.

17During the 1970s, the installation of water pumps had two consequences: new houses were built along the valley along with new terracing for qat cultivation. This unprecedented exploitation of aquifers, combined with decreased rainfall, had an unforeseen consequence: pear and apricot trees, whose roots drew water from deep aquifers, dried up and died. Moreover, the new houses, becoming home for seed-eating birds, negatively affected grain production in the valley.

  • 23 For further insights into the qabyala see Adra, 1985.

18Almost concurrently, most of the villagers had the chance to access state salaried jobs as soldiers or civil servants. By making young families autonomous, a state salary undermined the traditional authority of the pater familias, and also triggered the construction of new houses. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, the salary went against one of the pillars of the so-called qabyala23 (the tribal ethos), namely self-reliance. As we shall explore below, Kuthra’s inhabitants defined themselves as qabā’il, irrespective of their genealogical origin. This label, in their eyes, identified self-sufficient farmers more than warriors. Buying grain from the market was considered as a shameful act (‘ayb), since subsistence crops had to be produced through hard work in the fields. Moreover, being that the entire system was oriented towards self-sufficiency, they stigmatized the cultivation of cash crops. As many would say, “Qat forbids people from [cultivating] the grain (bi-l-ḥubūb).” Yaḥyā ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd, a qabīlī of sayyid origin in his mid-forties, thoughtfully explained these concepts to me:

[The ancestors] said that it is shameful to buy from the ‘outside’ if you have land to plough. People would laugh at you. They would say, “No one buys but he who hasn’t got land.” He who had land, it was a shame for him to buy, because he could cultivate his own land.

19This excerpt well exemplifies the point I made above: Yaḥyā, a soldier and one of the most active farmers of the village, had not experienced the time before the 1962 revolution, yet he nostalgically recalled his ancestors’ way of life, a lost mode of being-in-the-world:

Despite the fact that the way we harvested and our operations were rudimentary, that we didn’t have modern tools, that we got tired. [...] Despite the obstacles, [agriculture] worked. Now we idle our day away. We all sleep in the house waiting for a state salary. [...] This is the biggest problem. And isn’t it hard for the state to give a salary to the whole [people of] Yemen? From where [to get it] even if the sea was made of money?

  • 24 Agriculture, self-reliance, and the ‘economic’ jihād are central themes of Ḥusayn al-Houthi’s malāz (...)

20At the time of the interview, Yaḥyā had already joined the Houthi movement. Moving from his ancestors’ way of life, he turned his narrative into a political critique of the Yemeni state. Eventually, he overtly attacked the ‘American Other’, singing the praises of self-reliance,24 while a nostalgic past turned into a plan for the future:

Look, if you rely on others (idhā rakant ‘alā ghayrak) It is from your weakness (hādhak min a‘fak). One day they [the Americans] won’t give you anything anymore. […] If you rely on them, you’re finished. Rely on Him who created you and ask God!

21In less than half a century, demographic and economic changes abruptly transformed Kuthra so that the landscape reflected a decisive transformation in the mode of production. However, social transformations were no less relevant, and the dying trees also represented the agony of Kuthra’s brotherhood.

Being brothers, beyond genealogies

22To fully understand how Kuthra’s brotherhood operated, how it was reproduced, and how it gradually changed after 1962, we first need to move a step back and tackle a classic problem of the anthropology of the Middle East, namely the relationship between ‘tribalism’ and ‘segmentary lineage theory’.

  • 25 Evans-Pritchard, 1974.
  • 26 Segmentary lineage theory combines descent theory, as formulated by Fortes, 1953, and segmentation (...)
  • 27 Brandt, 2017, p. 16.

23In a nutshell, segmentary lineage theory has been developed to explain the sociopolitical organization of acephalous, or stateless societies.25 It focuses on the structures that lead men to bind or divide when facing violence, positing that the boundaries of a corporate group (the ‘tribe’) are contextually defined by a system of structural oppositions framed in the language of patrilinear descent.26 In this theory, segments do not have a permanent political function (nor fixed boundaries), and they only mobilize under threat.27

  • 28 Abu-Lughod, 1989, p. 285.
  • 29 Dresch, 2006, p. 75–84.
  • 30 Dresch, 1986, p. 312.
  • 31 Dresch, 1989, p. 44.

24As cogently noted by Lila Abu-Lughod,28 northern Yemen has turned into a “zone of theory” of the anthropological discourse by positing a link between honor and segmentary politics. In particular, Paul Dresch has emphasized that patrilinear descent groups share sharaf, the “public aspect of honor”, and that sharaf depends on the defense of a vulnerable symbolic space (‘ar) mainly constituted by daggers, women, and landholdings.29 In this model, the tribesmen are bound together by ‘aabiyya (or “esprit de corps”)30 in the defense of sharaf, which, in turn, is shared through male descent.31

  • 32 Nevola, 2015, p. 261–270.

25A full critique of segmentary lineage theory, which I have conducted elsewhere,32 is beyond the scope of this article. However, the theory seems unfit to describe Kuthra’s sociopolitical organization, for at least two reasons: first, most of Kuthra’s families did not share a common ancestor (neither real nor fictitious); second, Kuthra’s brotherhood was not, simply, a ‘temporary’ corporate group to be mobilized in case of threat, but rather a stable community reproduced on a daily basis through reciprocal practices. Let me expound the first point.

  • 33 Luling, 2006, p. 472–473.
  • 34 Cf. Varisco, 2017, p. 231.
  • 35 Luling, 2006, p. 473.

26As clearly demonstrated by Virginia Luling in the case of Somalia, lineages, political alliances, modes of production, and territory can combine in multiple ways.33 In Yemen the identification is mainly territorial, rather than genealogical,34 and the people of Kuthra constituted a sort of contractual “federation of lineages.”35 As noted above, Kuthra was inhabited by a population that was 2/3 sayyid and 1/3 arabī. On a ‘macro-genealogical’ level, the sayyid and the ‘arabī group obviously claimed different ancestors, namely ‘Adnān and Qaḥṭān. Each of the two groups was further subdivided into bidīn (s. badana), indicating the descendants of a five-generations-removed ancestor. The term bayt, though often deployed as a synonym of badana, also indicated a smaller unit of co-resident descendants of a living grandfather, so that each badana was further subdivided into several buyūt.

  • 36 Weir, 2007, p. 82. The term gharrām also implied the idea of an ‘ordinary’ tribesman as opposed to (...)

27Three a‘yān (s. ‘ayn) represented three different groups of bidīn, and a shaykh stood above them. In spite of this formal structure, each person in Kuthra belonged to the overall ‘village corporate group’ individually — and not as member of a badana — in his quality of gharrām (pl. gharrāma). The gharrām, or “citizen” in Shelagh Weir’s definition,36 was defined as a member of the community paying ghurm, a sort of corporate subscription. Paying ghurm materially implied the disbursement of a small tax to cover a share of the diya, the blood price, or other common expenses (e.g. the building of a mosque or of the ṣāla, a common hall). Symbolically, however, the meaning was thicker, and this brings us to the second point.

  • 37 Nevola, 2015, p. 271–282.

28The main duty of a gharrām consisted in adhering to mandatory reciprocal practices that produced and reproduced the corporate group’s boundaries. The enacting of these practices was termed akhuwwa, or brotherhood, and the members of the corporate group were also called brothers. Though blood vengeance and the protection of ‘ar are certainly the most common examples of the co-liability of a ‘tribal’ group, a number of everyday practices of sharing, apportionment, and reciprocity constituted the very fabric of Kuthra’s social texture.37

  • 38 Debits and credits can also be understood as an alternation of roles, as noted by Paul Dresch, 2017 (...)

29Reciprocal practices pertained to most domains of social life. Brothers helped each other in agricultural work and called this mutual assistance the āna; they collected money to help the sick travelling abroad or facing surgery, and called this collection ma‘ūna. A pivotal role was further attached to practices associated with life-cycle events. Weddings, funerals, birth ceremonies, and so forth were called mawājib (s. mawjib) and participation in these events was deemed mandatory. The absence of a brother was painstakingly noted and remembered, and he was paid back in the same coin. In this ambit, villagers explicitly referred to debts and credits. As one told me, “At my brother’s funeral people showed up from everywhere […]. But Fulān didn’t show up. […] I thought, ‘Ok, at the first chance I’ll pay you back (anāʿad aqḍīk)’.”38

  • 39 Appadurai, 1986. Meneley, 1996, applied this theoretical framework to the Yemeni case with a focus (...)

30In sum, exchange practices, rather than shared ancestry, united all the brothers in one cohesive community. However, with the demographic explosion, the “tournaments of value”39 associated with life-cycle events became prohibitively expensive, both in terms of money and, more importantly, of time. In 2012, the average number of bulls slaughtered during a wedding was four. A few decades before, two rams were slaughtered for the whole village plus guests. In 2012, a specific rule (raqam) had to specify a fixed menu for the ceremonies, to avoid a deplorable competition (qimr) between villagers and maintain affordable weddings for everyone. As the number of ceremonies skyrocketed, attending the mawājib became increasingly demanding, and by 2012 this way of maintaining political alliances and the corporate group had reached its structural limit.

31I witnessed the circular relationship between co-liability of the brotherhood and everyday reciprocal practices in November 2012, when a young ‘arabī soldier from the village, ‘Aysā, accidentally killed a girl in Sanaa. Many of Kuthra’s villagers feared that the corporate group might not react as “one hand” because, as we shall explore below, tensions between the sāda and the ‘arab had grown stronger during the previous months. When all the a‘yān showed up to solve the case, the soldier’s father broke down in tears. Standing, he cried:

I’ve seen my companions gathering and tears welled up in my eyes. I knew that my brothers truly stand beside me. No one can divide us (mā yifarriqnāsh ayyī mufarriq).

32However, after the a‘yān settled the case with the family of the murdered girl (ahl al-maqtūl), Kuthra’s brotherhood fractured again. Many of the sāda did not attend the burial, nor the three-day mourning of the dead (mujābara al-mawt), considered a mawjib. The collection of ghurm to pay the blood price proceeded slowly, and ‘Aysā’s uncle threatened not to accept it from those sāda. Indeed, many of them had become increasingly extraneous to the life of the brotherhood, absorbed by the activities of the Houthis. One day I witnessed a villager shouting in the face of the sāda’s‘ayn, “We won’t attend the weddings and funerals of those who don’t pay ghurm!” Another example of how the social capital accumulated in everyday practices lay at the foundation of co-liability.

“Why should they marry from us, if we can’t marry from them?”

  • 40 Hypergamy and hypogamy are related to the ‘classic’ three-tier model that describes Highland Yemen’ (...)
  • 41 With regard to women’s inheritance rights, what I observed in Kuthra was similar to that reported b (...)

33“We are all uncles (akhwāl) and nephews (abzyāʾ); the village is woven like a net (mashbūka).” The unity of the village was often represented by means of references to kinship networks. However, marriage exchanges were deeply asymmetric. Each single sayyid badana of the village had, at least, a kinship tie with an ‘arabī one. However, in all cases, the ‘arab practiced hypergamy40 — meaning that their daughters and sisters ‘married up’ with the sāda — while the opposite never happened (until 2005, as we will see below). This pattern caused fundamental structural consequences. On the material side, the ‘arab’s hypergamy gave the sāda the chance to inherit their lands and wealth without ever reciprocating.41 Moreover, in terms of kinship roles, it split society into two halves: for the sāda all the ‘arab were ​akhwāl (i.e. mother’s brothers), while for the ‘arab all the sāda were abzyā(i.e. daughter’s sons).

  • 42 The acquisition of ‘ilm was fundamental to sayyid identity. On this topic, see Vom Bruck, 2005, p.  (...)
  • 43 Ammārī, 2013, p. 16. According to Vom Bruck, 2005, p. 51, it was funded in 1926.
  • 44 The sāda’s cultural capital also included teaching, the ability to mediate and judge, and to perfor (...)

34This asymmetry rested on ideological constructs upholding the prestige of the sāda. As noted above, most of the sāda in Kuthra were humble peasants. However, a few of them pursued religious knowledge (‘ilm):42 one became a famous ākim and a few others studied in al-Madrasa al-‘Ilmiyya, the institute founded by Imam Yaḥyā in 1925 (ca.).43 Moreover, most sayyid families retained a higher level of instruction and transmitted ‘cultural capital’44 from father to son hereditarily. Up to the 1970s, many ‘arab took pride in consenting to their daughters’ marriage to the sāda out of awe (hayba).

  • 45 Serjeant, 1979, p. 94–96.
  • 46 To my knowledge, only one family of ‘arab origin fought with the Republic, for economic rather than (...)

35It is worth noting that already during the 1950s the antagonism between ‘Adnān and Qaḥṭān had been revived by Muḥammad Nu‘man with the intention of opposing the imamate.45 However, this macro-political narrative did not take root in Kuthra. During the 1962 civil war, most families of the village,46 both sayyid and ‘arabī, sided with the monarchy. The house of Kuthra’s shaykh, an ‘arabī at the time, was bombed and destroyed “by the Egyptians,” and the village fiercely opposed the Republican faction. The shaykh’s grandson explained that his grandfather genuinely loved and respected the sāda for their religious standing. He even believed that it was ḥarām to marry with the sāda’s daughters.

  • 47 The ‘imāma is a traditional sayyid headgear, symbol of religious instruction. The sāda ‘lost it’ i (...)

36However, after the 1962 revolution, most of the sāda “lost their ‘imāma47 and became state salaried employees. Schools allowed a gradual spread of knowledge, and hierarchical asymmetries gradually became unjustifiable. The new generations did not inherit their fathers’ respect for the Hashemites. The antagonism of ‘Adnān and Qaḥṭān became real, and not merely an abstract political theme, or a genealogical opposition, but rather, as the local experience of an asymmetrical social organization inscribed in inheritance, in kinship, in the way some notables were greeted, and so forth.

  • 48 Sharāʾif (s. sharīfa) is the term used to indicate women of sayyid origin. Cf. Vom Bruck, 2005, p.  (...)

37In Kuthra, a few incidents precipitated the grievances between the sons of ‘Adnān and those of Qaḥṭān into an overt conflict. For instance, during the 1990s, a sayyid brutally divorced his ‘arabī wife, insulting her in front of the men of her own family, causing tensions that lasted for years. Moreover, at the beginning of the 21st century, one boy of ‘arab origin explicitly stated in public “The sharāʾif48 can’t love us because you don’t let them go out from their house.” This assertion, implying a sexual reference and involving the whole sayyid group, triggered violent reactions.

38These apparently trivial examples were often recalled by my ‘arab interlocutors. Yet, according to them, the situation definitely degenerated when, in 2005, the first hypogamic marriage occurred in the village. A love story flourished between an ‘arabī boy and a sharīfa. The fact of their love was itself a scandal (faḍīḥa). As one sayyid confessed to me, “We educate our daughters so that they can distinguish between the sayyid, the qabīlī and the muzayyin, so that they can distinguish whom to avoid.” The girl confessed to her father, “I’m your sharaf [sexual honor]; I won’t do anything wrong. But I won’t marry anyone but him.” Her father gave his consent, and he fixed the date of the engagement. That very same day, his house was bombed by his fellows, the sāda. An inquiry by the police followed, without any result. The villagers solved the case internally, slaughtering two bulls as hajar, as a sort of fine, yet the wound did not heal. These events led the ‘arab to refuse any form of intermarriage with the sāda.

39When the Houthi discourse started spreading in the area of Sanaa, Kuthra was already a fractured village: its people nostalgically narrated a strong discontinuity with the past, and its two descent groups were growing increasingly distant.

Weaponizing nostalgia

40The populist dimension of the Houthi phenomenon

49
  • 50 Laclau, 2005, p. 74.
  • 51 Ibid., p. 88.

41Reflecting on populism as a discourse, rather than as an ideology or a movement, the political theorist Ernesto Laclau argues that a precondition for its emergence is “the formation of an internal antagonistic frontier separating the ‘people’ from power.”50 In turn, this division implies the emergence of signifiers apt to “condense in themselves the signification of a whole antagonistic camp,”51 namely one (or multiple) signifiers for the ‘people’ and for the people’s ‘enemy’.

  • 52 Holliday, 2019.
  • 53 Michelutti, 2007.

42As cogently noted by Shabnam Holliday, this establishment/people distinction always retains an international dimension next to a domestic/internal one.52 Accordingly, in what follows, I will briefly address the international and national dimensions of the Houthi populist discourse, as a premise to the analysis of its vernacular dimension.53 Indeed, I am not interested in enriching the nominalist debate around the notion of populism so much as in understanding how populism is ‘vernacularized’ and put at work in a local context.

  • 54 For a detailed account of the Saada wars see Brandt, 2017; for an analysis of Houthi ideology, see (...)
  • 55 Nevola & Shiban, 2020.

43The Houthis are a Zaydi revivalist movement that rose to the forefront in northern Yemen at the beginning of the 21st century when a handful of rebels in the northern Saada governorate opposed the government of former President Ali Saleh in six rounds of war (2004–2010).54 Inspired and led by Ḥusayn al-Houthi, these rebels harshly criticized the Yemeni government’s alliance with the U.S. in the global war on terror and aligned their discourse with the so-called ‘axis of resistance’, adopting an anti-imperialist narrative that opposed the ‘people’ — described as the oppressed — to the arrogant (mustakbir) power of the U.S. and Israel.55

  • 56 Holliday, 2019.
  • 57 Cf. Porter, 2017.

44This discourse reproduced the populist distinction put forth by the Iranian regime and other Shiite regional actors56 but, concurrently, it also articulated a definition of the ‘people’ on the domestic level. During the 2011 Youth Revolution, the Houthis broke out of their Saada stronghold and populated, among other forces, Change Square. They identified themselves as part of the ‘independent youth’ that upheld the ‘people’ (al-sha‘b) in overt contrast to the system/regime (niām).57 They not only shouted — next to the independent youth — “The people want the fall of the regime!” but also they cried “Our people want some rest (yishtī yirtāḥ)! No to the GPC [former President Saleh’s party] and no to Islah!” In sum, they identified the people’s antagonist with the totality of the parties represented in the Yemeni parliament, described as corrupt and self-interested.

  • 58 For instance, great emphasis was placed on the tasbī in accord with the malzama of Ḥusayn al-Houth (...)

45In 2012, when I first arrived in Kuthra, only a handful of sāda defined themselves as Houthis. They were connected by kinship ties to other Hashemites in the city of Saada. Encouraged by the Youth Revolution, this small group embarked on a mission to revive the Zaydi tradition of the village. It established a sort of headquarters in the maktab of the old mosque, a room once devoted to the teaching of the Qur’ān, and held daily meetings following what they called the barnāmaj (literally, “the program”). Above all, the barnāmaj aimed to structure the routine of the Houthis by meticulously disciplining ritual practices according to a written schedule.58 But it also entailed a daily reading of Ḥusayn al-Houthi’s pamphlets (the malāzim), gaining a critical understanding of their content, and interpreting contemporary political news through the malāzim, this last task aided by the establishment of the Houthi-leaning broadcaster al-Masīra. These various sources gradually constituted what I define as vernacular ‘Houthi discourse’: an ensemble of symbols, tropes, verbal expressions, images, myths and practices that the Houthis reproduced in their everyday speech.

  • 59 Dorlian, 2013, p. 169–170.
  • 60 Kuthra belonged to Sanḥan, Saleh’s tribe. The reader might suspect that this affiliation favored a (...)

46As noted above, in August 2012 the local Houthi group counted only a few adherents. Up to that point, most people in the village supported Saleh’s party, the General People’s Congress (GPC). This support was not categorical nor uncritical. Many among the sāda pointed out that, after the 1994 civil war, the regime had discriminated against them. Moreover, during the Saada wars, the government launched a campaign of denigration and repression against the Zaydiyya and the Hashemites.59 This also affected Kuthra to the extent that, in 2009, the village was guarded by a military checkpoint. Nonetheless, most villagers pragmatically remained loyal to the GPC. After all, as they said, “In Kuthra we are all soldiers or pensioners.” The regime guaranteed sustenance.60 During the Youth Revolution, many villagers even joined Saleh’s loyalists in Taḥrīr square.

  • 61 Mahmood, 2009, p. 71, explores the emotional importance of intimate attachment to the Prophet and i (...)

47However, this situation suddenly evolved in September 2012, when the news broke that an “American-Israeli” film entitled Innocence of Muslims had been released. Rumors spread that the film mocked the Prophet Muḥammad,61 and a massive demonstration was held in Sanaa on September 12. The protest degenerated into riots, and the American Embassy was assaulted: 4 people died and 48 were injured. On the same day, in Kuthra, a wedding and a funeral were planned, both involving the same ‘arabī family. A great number of sāda deserted the mawjib to join the demonstration in Sanaa, and many ‘arab interpreted this circumstance as an insult, describing it as the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  • 62 Echoing Ḥusayn al-Houthi’s malzama, 2002d, p. 10, one of the imams asked: “They mock the Prophet an (...)
  • 63 See Vom Bruck, 2005, p. 30, for background on al-Ghadīr. The celebration was revived during the 199 (...)
  • 64 Brandt, 2018, p. 160.

48Following this event, the presence of the Houthis became tangible, their slogan being painted on the walls of the Old City of Sanaa. In the village, a Houthi vocabulary entered the mosques.62 Many sāda started sympathizing with the movement: they spread its symbols (slogans, stickers, selected verses of the Qur’ān, and so forth) all along the valley; they organized conferences with Houthi speakers in the āla of the village; they invited Houthi religious singers (nashshādīn) to their weddings; they celebrated the Shiite festivals of ‘Ashūra and Yawm al-Ghadīr;63 and so forth. Eventually, they self-identified as Anār Allāh (Partisans of God), the name the Houthis had adopted since 2011.64

49Conversely, building on the pre-existing tensions between northern and southern Arabs, the bulk of the ‘arab joined Islah. At first as a joke, next as a reaction, and then as a conviction that gradually became stronger and stronger, they reacted blow-by-blow to any Houthi-marked practice. Unlike regular Zaydis, they started praying using the amma and pronouncing āmin as if they were Sunnis, and they admitted in their wedding ceremonies the mizmār (double-clarinet), forbidden in the Zaydiyya, and so forth. Episodes of violence erupted between the sāda and the ‘arab, and by July 2013, each group would avoid the other’s life-cycle events. Eventually, even the mosques of the village were split between Houthis and Islahis. The izbiyya, or politicization, had disrupted the social fabric of the village.

  • 65 Porter, 2017, p. 270.
  • 66 See Saleh’s self-written preface in Zubayrī, 2004.

50A straightforward explanation of the rapid politicization of the sāda could take into consideration their genealogical origin. The Houthis, who belong to a Hashemite family, are often accused by their detractors65 of planning to restore the Zaydi imamate and turn back the wheel of history, a rhetoric that was often deployed by former President Saleh.66 Following this line of reasoning, which was also adopted by the ‘arab of Kuthra, the sāda were blamed for supporting the Houthis in order to restore a Hashemite regime. However, as I shall demonstrate below, the Houthi discourse resonated at a deeper level in my interlocutors’ life experience. Vernacularized and adapted to the nostalgic representation of Kuthra’s decaying present, it provided a culprit for the sāda’s imagined losses and a trajectory for their future life-plans.

  • 67 Freeden, 2017, p. 6.
  • 68 Ḥusayn al-Houthi, 2002b, deployed the same rhetoric.
  • 69 Beck, 1999, p. 135.
  • 70 Many of the Houthis considered me an agent (‘amīl), or a spy. Though rephrased in a new language, t (...)

51Most populist discourses are imbued with a “permanent ideational emergency and manufactured crisis,”67 and Houthi discourse was no exception: many Houthis, in Kuthra, inscribed the imminent “danger of an American intervention in Yemen”68 in the landscape, in the products of consumption, in the media, in the vaccines, in the idleness of a life without agriculture, and so forth. Risk, the reality status of no-longer-but-not-yet,69 became a public frame of reference. Rumors spread that “10,000 marines disembarked in Aden;” that trees were dying because American or Jewish agents (‘umalā) poisoned them;70 that the ‘pornographic’ French (and Italian) satellite channels were an American conspiracy, an intellectual raid (ghazū fikrī) to disrupt Islamic values; that rainfall was decreasing because people abandoned religion; that infertility was caused by the vaccines, an instrument of the West to control population growth; and so forth. In sum, the sāda of Kuthra vernacularized Houthi discourse, adapting it to their nostalgic perception of the past and to their language. I shall now present two life histories in order to show how my interlocutors narrated their nostalgic feelings.

Nostalgic sayyid farmers

  • 71 De Leone, 1956, p. 64.

52In 1872, the Ottomans entered Sanaa by capitulation and triggered a Zaydi rebellion. In 1891, when Imam al-Manṣūr bi-l-lāh Muḥammad Ḥamīd al-Dīn (1891–1904) ascended to power, the revolt gathered strength. Zaydi troops besieged Sanaa and seized Taiz, but the Turkish governor Faizi Pascià crushed the rebellion. In 1895–96, the rebels took up arms for a second time,71 and it was around this period that Aḥmad ‘Abd al-Raḥman al-Maghribī, a sayyid from Kuthra, fought the Turks alongside al-Manṣūr.

  • 72 As noted by Vom bruck, 2005, p. 105, being a ‘proper’ sayyid entails holding knowledge (‘ilm). Uned (...)

53After the upheaval, Aḥmad entered the Great Mosque in Sanaa to study religious science (‘ilm): though he was merely a “peasant son of a peasant,” he felt the need to actualize his sayyid origin.72 One day, the young student saw his teacher’s daughter and fell in love with her. The teacher was Aḥmad Ismā‘īl, one of the imam’s cousins. At the time, people would not ask, “Who is this? (ayya hadhā?)” and so he asked to marry the girl. Her father replied, “This man studies science. I can give him my daughter; it’s normal.”

54This is how a sayyid from Kuthra, Muḥammad ‘Alī, recounted to me his great grandfather’s story, which continued as follows. The imam’s cousin visited Kuthra with his daughter. At the time, three families shared Aḥmad ‘Abd al-Raḥman’s tower-house in the old village and yet, notwithstanding the humble location, Aḥmad Ismā‘īl consented to his daughter’s marriage. She soon adapted to agricultural habits: “She wanted to cultivate, to work. Even if she was the daughter of the Imam!” Even when her father was about to visit her, she would not abandon the fields: warned by a muzayyin, she would complete her work and head back home to have a bath. “She had origins! (al, ya‘nī, al hī!).” “My grandmother was the daughter of Ḥamīd al-Dīn! She was wise.” Once she had to teach one of his sons the value of the work in the fields:

She grasped a wood-stick! “Come on! If you don’t plough, I will plough over you!” She was incredibly harsh… In order to teach him the value of land […] over which you get tired, you must learn its taste, the taste of its value, the taste of bread. “The bread from which you eat, taste it with strain and sweat!”

55Muḥammad ‘Alī was nicknamed al-Azraq for his bright eyes. He was a 40-year-old married man, a sayyid, a soldier, and the son of a shaykh. He recounted his life story recalling some of the hardships he suffered:

I have studied. At first, here, while cultivating qat and grain. Then I entered the high school; I entered Sanaa. I studied, and after studying I joined the army. I studied in high school to enter the military college. But I did not have an intermediary (wāsa). There has been a period during which… If you were hāshimī, sayyid, they would hinder you. It was a war against us. […] They didn’t let us in. They made us miserable soldiers.

  • 73 Similarly, the economic, political and religious marginalization of northern Zaydi communities was (...)
  • 74 Cf. Vom Bruck, 2005, p. 61, and Caton, 2005, p. 150. During the 1960s, official revolutionary rhet (...)

56Unlike his great grandfather, who pursued religious knowledge per se in order to revive his sayyid origin, Muḥammad acquired secular instruction with the aim of gaining rank in the army. Unsuccessful, he laid the blame for his miserable military career on Saleh’s government. Indeed, most sāda in the village complained that the state marginalized them.73 This present ‘oppression’ was pitted against the popular rhetoric that described the sāda collectively — as a social “stratum” (abaqa) — as the oppressors of the Yemeni people during the imamate.74 Against this backdrop, why didn’t Muḥammad embrace agriculture?

No, look… Here, there’s a war against agriculture. Corn or barley, they have no value anymore, no request, no encouragement from the state. So we left [agriculture]. They did not encourage the dignity of people working in agriculture. […] It first happened when the ‘Canada’ arrived, the wheat from abroad. Each bag was cheap: something like 300, 100 riyals. Whereas before it was expensive. Look: they attempted an intellectual raid (ghazū fikrī). They raided us with this grain, and people started joining the army. We used to say: I join the army and with the salary I’ll buy a car of grain: a car! And so did I… I entered Sanaa to join the army and abandoned agriculture. Everyone did like that. They raided us, an intellectual raid. […] And who raided us? America. They gave us grain.

  • 75 The expression was typical of the ‘vernacular Houthi discourse’. A recent example of this usage is (...)

57In this second passage, Muḥammad complains about his personal situation and relates it to broader circumstances caused by an external actor: the United States. Some of the words he is using (e.g. intellectual raid)75 are clearly drawn from Houthi discourse.

58Muḥammad continues comparing the present image of a helpless and dependent country with that of a previous ‘golden era’ of independence:

  • 76 One qada corresponds more or less to 30 kg.

American Canada! And that’s the grain they give to animals, don’t think that they love us and give us something special. Our sorghum is homemade; the taste is different, what a taste! Something descending from divine wisdom! […] You would say that [the American one] is poisoned. We had everything, even the madfan [a storage for cereals]. […] At home, in the well we had water. In our house in Sanaa, we still have the hand well. We had the hand mill (maṭḥan). We had the madfan (grain store), for 100 qada76 of grain, at home. In case of siege, we could have resisted even ten years. Now, instead, it is as if they killed us with their own hands. And we are stupid, stupid, don’t think, Luca. We forgot what our fathers and our ancestors used to do.

  • 77 Casey, 1987, p. 367.
  • 78 Yemen’s isolation was considered a value by the imam and a problem by his detractors. Cf. El Attar, (...)
  • 79 Ḥusayn al-Houthi, 2002c, p. 11, upheld a boycott of American and Israeli products and theorized the (...)
  • 80 See Marshahi, 2019, for a contemporary example of this rhetoric.

59Triggered by the anthropologist, this nostalgic narrative depicts a world-under-nostalgement that exceeds the grasp of memory, calling for imagination.77 It turns a past, homemade bread into a living memory and compares it to the dreadful savor of the American bread. The Other, the enemy, thus becomes inscribed in Muḥammad’s lifeworld, in its very taste. At the same time, a return to the self, to the nostalgic world of the autonomous household, becomes a plan for the future. This nostalgic representation of a past ‘autarchic’ Yemen is often associated with the lost “Edenic era” of the imamate, an era of isolation and independence.78 This narrative is clearly an exaggeration: Yemen was never economically autonomous. Yet this theme was highly popular, and still is one of the key features of Houthi discourse: the movement, in fact, upholds a boycott of American-Israeli products79 and encourages the development of domestic agriculture. This autarchic policy is well symbolized by the image of the ‘grain (qam) of jihād’ where agriculture becomes a form of resistance to the oppressor.80

60Though one of the privileged sons of the village and a member of a rich and respected family of sāda and mashā’ikh, Muḥammad expressed his discontent for his present life as a soldier. Also, he emphasized the importance of his ancestors’ work as farmers and their ethos of self-reliance. These nostalgic feelings were widely shared by most villagers. However, most ‘arab people explained agricultural decline in material terms: low rainfall, state salaries, idleness, and so forth. Muḥammad, on the other hand, drew on Houthi discourse to conjoin nostalgia with a critique of present-day Yemen, blaming an external enemy and giving a new meaning to his future life plans.

Nostalgic sayyid scholars

61A contemporary of ‘Abd al-Raḥman al-Maghribī, ‘Alī Aḥmad al-Muṭahar also fought alongside the imam against the Turks, at the end of the 19th century. After the signing of the treaty of Da‘‘ān (1911), ‘Alī Aḥmad served the imam Yaḥyā Ḥamīd al-Dīn until the end of his days, and his story, recounted to me by his great-nephew, is exemplary of how some sāda managed to convert their genealogical capital into a state salaried occupation during the Mutawakkilite Kingdom (1918–1962).

  • 81 Fitna (temptation or trial of faith, Gardet, 1991, p. 930) is often associated with the power of fe (...)
  • 82 The mikhlāf is an administrative and tribal unit comprising around 20 villages.
  • 83 In Yemen each name is associated with a nickname referring to a quality: ‘Alī is al-Jamālī, the han (...)

62‘Alī was a man of outstanding qualities. Famous for his good looks, he wrapped his face in a veil (mulaththam) to prevent temptation (fitna)81 in women’s hearts (and also to protect himself from the‘ayn, or evil eye). He studied in Saada, and later worked as a judge in Hamdān, al-Ḥaymatayn, Madhḥaq, Bilād al-Ru’ūs and Bilād al-Bustān. In each place, he bought land and property, and often got married, at least six times. Yet his wives gave birth to only one son, Ḥusayn, and two daughters. Under the Imam Yaḥyā’s rule, he became ākim for the entire mikhlāf82 Dāyān in Banī Maṭar. There is an often-told story about the imam describing him by stating, “Yā Jamālī,83 you encompass three qualities: the mind of David in the study of the Qur’ān, the beauty of Joseph, who was handsome, and the modesty of Mariam, who was chaste.”

  • 84 Cf. Vom Bruck, 2005, p. 44–45.

63‘Alī worked in Sanaa at Yaḥyā’s court (in the diwān al-sharīf). Apparently, his wisdom and his handsomeness overshadowed the imam himself, who forced him to retire to Kuthra. ‘Alī wrote to the imam, complaining of his miserable condition: “Poverty already killed me with its sword.” The imam replied, “Be patient (al-ṣabr), Jamālī!” I was told this story as proof that, during the imamate, the sāda were not necessarily rich or privileged, even those working in state administration.84

64‘Alī Aḥmad died when he was just 55 years old. His son, Ḥusayn, attempted to follow in his footsteps. Greeted respectfully by the Imam Aḥmad (1948–1962) by virtue of his ancestry, he asked for a job. The imam asked him, “Have you studied?” He replied that he had not. The imam thus ordered, “Let the qabīlī son of ʿAlī study in Saada.” The term qabīlī, here, is used to describe a peasant, a simple person, someone without any religious knowledge. Ḥusayn studied in Saada for 12 years. He became mudīr al-qalam in the Ministry of Justice and ākim in Thulā’, al-Maḥwīt and many other places. However, Ḥusayn fell victim to his own reputation: driven by arrogance (kibra), he squandered the wealth of his family, selling lands and properties.

  • 85 Ibid., p. 183.

65His son, Yaḥyā, experienced a different lifeworld. Born while his father was ākim in Jibla, he studied the entire Qur’ān with the aḥkām (judgements) and the tajwīd (rules for the recitation of the Qur’ān). However, after the 1962 revolution, he joined the Republican army, and never studied religious science again: it was the end of an era. Many of Kuthra’s sāda followed a similar life trajectory, translating religious knowledge — especially literacy and a general disposition to learn — into an asset, joining the army and gaining rank. The anthropologist Gabriele Vom Bruck describes a similar process in relation to renowned sayyid families in Sanaa. According to Vom Bruck, after the 1962 revolution, many Hashemites pursued secular knowledge and professional occupations in the domains of law, education, medicine, engineering and so forth.85 Similarly, Kuthra’s sāda found no contradiction in cultivating secular knowledge. However, most of them pursued nonintellectual jobs, military positions, or business.

66Muḥammad, Yaḥyā’s son and ʿAlī Aḥmad’s great-nephew, recounted his family’s story with a mixture of admiration and regret. The descending parabola of his family’s religious education was the organizing principle of the narrative: “My great grandfather was a renowned religious scholar (ʿallāma). My grandfather “lā bas,” he had a good religious training. My father was a soldier.” Even though Muḥammad Yaḥyā studied in high school, he presented himself as the lowest rung of his family ladder: “I am a soldier and I work as a taxi driver with my motorbike,” he explained. Thus, he added:

Schools arrived, and we didn’t study such things [i.e. religion] anymore. […] Some people specialize in Islamic studies, but the old knowledge was different. […] And there are still people like that. I mean, al-Houthi, sīdī Ḥamūd al-Mu’ayyad, Muḥammad al-Manṣūr. If they had studied like we did, they wouldn’t be able to judge between their sons. […] You have to go back to these things. To the right knowledge, the real science. Which is the science of religion. Because our studies [nowadays]… […] I mean, you have social knowledge, but the religious one is zero.

  • 86 Cf. on this topic Messick, 1988, p. 646.

67By pitting secular instruction against religious science, Muḥammad touched on several points. First and foremost, he affirmed that “‘ilm [knowledge] is Islam” and adhered to a hierarchical view positing the primacy of Muslim scholars.86 He exalted a previous generation of jurists — all of them Zaydis and Hashemites — depicted as ‘survivals’ of a lost and better world. Moreover, he discredited modern state instruction. This entailed a rupture with the attitude of previous sayyid generations towards secular knowledge.

  • 87 Al-Houthi, 2002c, p. 2.

68The role of ‘ilm was a commonly debated topic among Kuthra’s Houthis: following Ḥusayn al-Houthi’s malāzim, they argued that the state hindered religious schools (madāris ‘ilmiyya dīniyya);87 also, they considered modern science a product of Western cultural imperialism calibrated on the demands of ‘this life’, rather than oriented towards the afterlife. Again, this theme was not a Houthi monopoly: even Salafis upheld similar views. However, in Kuthra it was shaped in Houthi vocabulary and used as an identity marker. As a reaction, many of the ‘arab started overemphasizing the results of Western science, the benefits of technology and medicine, and the progress associated with state universities as opposed to the underdevelopment of the imamate.

  • 88 Lems, 2016, p. 433.
  • 89 Vom Bruck, 2005, p. 68, advances a similar argument by affirming that, for the sāda, “history is a (...)
  • 90 Shryock, 1997, p. 35.
  • 91 Ibid., p. 11.

69Returning to Muḥammad, he concluded our interview with a reassuring purpose. “For me,” he said, “it’s too late. But now I know how to educate my son.” In his narrative, a lost past was inherently entangled with a plan for the future: nostalgia organized a fragmented experience of self and world, past and present, by projecting an imagined past onto the future.88 This way of constructing the past closely resembles what Andrew Shryock defines as the “genealogical imagination,” and it brings to the forefront the ancestors’ role in crafting present selves.89 According to Shryock, “The past, for tribespeople, is inseparable from the present. History is now as it happened then.”90 Moral selves are thus referred to their past origin, and any claim to moral standing is also a comment on origins: it has to arise from a genealogical past.91 From a phenomenological perspective, this movement of the human consciousness is similar to nostalgia: a form of living memory that informs the present while directing the intentionality towards an imagined past.

70Muḥammad Yaḥyā’s narrative, like that of Muḥammad al-Azraq, is structured by a comparison with the ancestors’ lives. Their biographies are at once objects of critical reflection and models for action; Muḥammad’s self is a product of the consciousness of his family’s past, and yet this past is also drawn upon when making plans for the future. Moreover, these biographies are accurately localized, inscribed in the landscape and in the social fabric of Kuthra. Were he not the descendant of ʿAlī Aḥmad al-Muṭahar, his life would be quite satisfactory: an adequate schooling, two jobs, two houses, innumerable lands, a wife and children. However, Muḥammad describes himself as ‘lacking’ in comparison with his ancestors: lacking in morality, lacking in religious instruction.

Conclusion: Nostalgia, izbiyya, and the genealogical imagination

71This article explored the changing lifeworlds of my Kuthra interlocutors, focusing on the sāda’s perspective. Most of them yearned for a lost mode of being-in-the-world and expressed this feeling through nostalgic narratives. An acceleration of time, gradual and systematic, began in Kuthra during the 1970s. Layer by layer, ideological, structural, and material changes undermined the very base of its brotherhood, the mechanisms that upheld the political alliance between the sāda and the ‘arab. Notwithstanding, Kuthra’s social structure proved resilient to change up until the 21st century.

72Even after the 1962 revolution, political considerations did not fracture the unity of the brotherhood. For sure, when the ideological structures of the ancient régime gradually faded away, new generations of ‘arab people questioned the asymmetrical structure of the brotherhood and the prestige of the sāda. However, they framed this critique in a vernacular form, exemplifying injustice with everyday episodes. They avoided reproducing in the village broader political themes, like the antagonism of the sons of ‘Adnān and Qaḥṭān. Similarly, Zaydi revivalism did not enter Kuthra, nor did Sunni political reformism.

  • 92 Barth, 1998.

73This situation changed with the Youth Revolution. While most Kuthra villagers remained loyal to the GPC and upheld the established regime, a handful of sāda embraced the Houthi movement. What needs to be explained is why, in a few months, most of the sāda identified with Anṣār Allāh, while most of the ‘arab drastically rejected it and joined the Islah party. Explaining this process in mere genealogical terms might seem a form of reductionism: after all, outside Kuthra, many Qaḥṭānī Arabs felt attracted by the Houthi discourse; seemingly, notorious Hashemites joined Islah. For sure, in Highland Yemen, social structures and semantic frameworks are widely shared. However, they are also locally interpreted and vernacularized. In Kuthra, lineages constituted a social boundary,92 and for this reason they favored a neat polarization of political identities.

74My analysis moves necessarily from the sāda’s perspective, since politicization occurred directionally: it started from the sāda and, later, it reached the ‘arab as a reaction. In part, the politicization of sayyid identity was certainly favored by genealogical considerations. Most sāda reckoned that former President Ali Saleh discriminated harshly against the Hashemites and incubated a strong resentment against his regime. Adhering to the Houthi movement was, for them, almost a ‘natural’ choice to redeem the prestige of their lineage and its centrality within the Zaydi school. However, genealogy alone cannot explain the sāda’s politicization.

  • 93 Nevola, 2015; 2018.

75The expansion of Houthi ideology was, for many Hashemites, a fundamental step in gaining awareness of their social condition by reflectively looking at their past. As noted above, reflecting on one’s origin (al) is a key feature of the Middle Eastern historical imagination, and most northern Yemenis are prone to craft their selves in accordance with their ancestors’ legacy.93 The life stories I have presented well exemplify the role of genealogical imagination in shaping future life trajectories. Houthi ideology provided an additional layer, merging the individual — and familiar — dimension of this form of imagination with a broader national and global perspective; drawing on nostalgic narratives, it mediated collective action according to its own political agenda.

  • 94 Casey, 1987, p. 362.
  • 95 Freeden, 2017, p. 4.

76As cogently noted by the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, nostalgia — as a “felt lack” of adequate hearth-and-home in the present — implies a return to sameness and, consequently, a refusal to confront the Other.94 Houthi nostalgic discourse masterfully combined a refusal of the Other on the global, domestic, and vernacular level with a return to sameness, a characteristic shared by most populist ideologies. As it emerged during the 2011 upheavals, it reshaped the ‘people’s will’, into a coherent political agenda to oppose the Other and return to a lost and truer Yemeni essence, thus appropriating a “self-assumed past timeline” that needed to be restored.95

77As for the ‘arab people, they politicized their identity in reaction to the sāda, as an act of resistance against an asymmetric social structure. As one of them told me, “If the sāda had joined Islah, we would have joined al-Houthi.” Indeed, only a few ‘arab joined Islah with conviction, and many criticized the spread of the so-called ‘izbiyya’, a term that indicated the prioritizing of political affiliation over other forms of identification, including the brotherhood.

78In conclusion, the izbiyya ultimately helped in reshaping the community at the structural level. As noted above, the demographic explosion, along with other factors, had posed a significant challenge to the reproduction of the brotherhood and new identities were needed to restructure the corporate group. Indeed, the use of politically marked cultural traits in the organization of life-cycle events and everyday ritual practices disrupted the unity of the village. However, concurrently it helped in creating a new social boundary and two separate spheres of exchange.

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Notes

1 Kuthra is a fictitious name intended to protect my interlocutors’ identity. The names of neighboring villages have been changed as well.

2 Caton, 2005.

3 According to Vom Bruck, 2005, p. 38, protected hijra people were exempted from paying bloodmoney and from fighting. The hijra also provided material sustenance.

4 As noted by Brandt, 2017, p. 142, not all the sāda were muhajjar: a specific tribal-sayyid treaty is required to award hijra protection.

5 The social landscape of the village was completed by the family of the servant (muzayyin) and by two families of ‘non-protected’ residents (naqā’il, s. naqīl) who had no ‘citizen right’.

6 The tribal rules (qawā‘id) I collected during fieldwork attest to the name of the village and its social organization already existing at the end of the 19th century.

7 International Crisis Group, 2013.

8 Lems, 2016, p. 420.

9 Hart, 1973, p. 399.

10 Ibid., p. 401–402; Herzfeld, 2001, p. 78.

11 Hart, p. 406.

12 Ibid., p. 405.

13 Herzfeld, 2016, p. 139.

14 Kenny, 2017, p. 257–258.

15 Van der Linde, 2014; Angé & Berliner, 2016, p. 2.

16 Casey, 1987, p. 363.

17 Gudeman & Whitten, 1982; Mundy, 1995.

18 A right of pre-emption (shuf‘a) was customarily contemplated, extending to the line of descent and to the four cases listed by Varisco, 2017, p. 236: joint ownership, partnership in water allocation and in access route, and adjacent neighbors.

19 Peters, 2007; Marx, 1967.

20 This classification was provided to me by a shaykh mashaykh and independently confirmed by other elders in the area.

21 Cf. Varisco, 2017, p. 234: the term can also refer to extended families sharing a kitchen, holding property in common and maintaining close economic ties.

22 Central Statistical Organization, 2004.

23 For further insights into the qabyala see Adra, 1985.

24 Agriculture, self-reliance, and the ‘economic’ jihād are central themes of Ḥusayn al-Houthi’s malāzim (cf. 2002c, p. 4).

25 Evans-Pritchard, 1974.

26 Segmentary lineage theory combines descent theory, as formulated by Fortes, 1953, and segmentation theory. However, as demonstrated by Herzfeld, 1984, segmentation can occur in the absence of a genealogical framework.

27 Brandt, 2017, p. 16.

28 Abu-Lughod, 1989, p. 285.

29 Dresch, 2006, p. 75–84.

30 Dresch, 1986, p. 312.

31 Dresch, 1989, p. 44.

32 Nevola, 2015, p. 261–270.

33 Luling, 2006, p. 472–473.

34 Cf. Varisco, 2017, p. 231.

35 Luling, 2006, p. 473.

36 Weir, 2007, p. 82. The term gharrām also implied the idea of an ‘ordinary’ tribesman as opposed to a shaykh.

37 Nevola, 2015, p. 271–282.

38 Debits and credits can also be understood as an alternation of roles, as noted by Paul Dresch, 2017, p. 2, for the “laws of protection.” In one of my interlocutors’ words, “Today it happens to me, another day it will happen to anyone else in the village.”

39 Appadurai, 1986. Meneley, 1996, applied this theoretical framework to the Yemeni case with a focus on the town of Zabīd.

40 Hypergamy and hypogamy are related to the ‘classic’ three-tier model that describes Highland Yemen’s hierarchical order bestowing the sāda the highest rank (cf. Mundy, 1995, p. 39). In contemporary Yemen, the model is contested, but still reproduced (Nevola, 2015, p. 16–17).

41 With regard to women’s inheritance rights, what I observed in Kuthra was similar to that reported by Gerholm, 1985, p. 136–137 and Mundy, 1979, p. 179. Women chose their inheritance and favored jewelry over land for various strategic reasons.

42 The acquisition of ‘ilm was fundamental to sayyid identity. On this topic, see Vom Bruck, 2005, p. 108–111.

43 Ammārī, 2013, p. 16. According to Vom Bruck, 2005, p. 51, it was funded in 1926.

44 The sāda’s cultural capital also included teaching, the ability to mediate and judge, and to perform semi-magic rituals. Also, they were believed to hold supernatural powers (Nevola, 2015, p.152–513).

45 Serjeant, 1979, p. 94–96.

46 To my knowledge, only one family of ‘arab origin fought with the Republic, for economic rather than ideological reasons.

47 The ‘imāma is a traditional sayyid headgear, symbol of religious instruction. The sāda ‘lost it’ in two senses: symbolically, since they abandoned religious knowledge; and literally, because, after 1962, the title ‘sayyid’ became a “swearword” (cf. Vom Bruck, 2005, p. 61), and some of Kuthra’s sāda stopped wearing the ‘imāma out of fear.

48 Sharāʾif (s. sharīfa) is the term used to indicate women of sayyid origin. Cf. Vom Bruck, 2005, p. 35.

49 Canovan, 1999, p. 3; Mazzarella, 2019, p. 47.

50 Laclau, 2005, p. 74.

51 Ibid., p. 88.

52 Holliday, 2019.

53 Michelutti, 2007.

54 For a detailed account of the Saada wars see Brandt, 2017; for an analysis of Houthi ideology, see Dorlian, 2013, and Lux, 2009.

55 Nevola & Shiban, 2020.

56 Holliday, 2019.

57 Cf. Porter, 2017.

58 For instance, great emphasis was placed on the tasbī in accord with the malzama of Ḥusayn al-Houthi, 2002a.

59 Dorlian, 2013, p. 169–170.

60 Kuthra belonged to Sanḥan, Saleh’s tribe. The reader might suspect that this affiliation favored a connection with the regime. In reality, up to 1962, Kuthra belonged to another tribe, Banī Maṭar, and the villagers never confirmed a privileged connection with the regime.

61 Mahmood, 2009, p. 71, explores the emotional importance of intimate attachment to the Prophet and its connection with the force of images “[…] that is transformative of the social context in which it unfolds.”

62 Echoing Ḥusayn al-Houthi’s malzama, 2002d, p. 10, one of the imams asked: “They mock the Prophet and then they don't want us to scream death to America?”

63 See Vom Bruck, 2005, p. 30, for background on al-Ghadīr. The celebration was revived during the 1990s in northwestern areas, e.g. Raziḥ, and prohibited by the government between 2004 and 2008 (Salmoni, Loidolt & Wells, 2010, p. 66).

64 Brandt, 2018, p. 160.

65 Porter, 2017, p. 270.

66 See Saleh’s self-written preface in Zubayrī, 2004.

67 Freeden, 2017, p. 6.

68 Ḥusayn al-Houthi, 2002b, deployed the same rhetoric.

69 Beck, 1999, p. 135.

70 Many of the Houthis considered me an agent (‘amīl), or a spy. Though rephrased in a new language, this is an old way of representing westerners (cf. Caton, 2005, p. 25).

71 De Leone, 1956, p. 64.

72 As noted by Vom bruck, 2005, p. 105, being a ‘proper’ sayyid entails holding knowledge (‘ilm). Uneducated sāda can “reactivate their potential by becoming knowledgeable once again.”

73 Similarly, the economic, political and religious marginalization of northern Zaydi communities was one of the factors that led to the Zaydi revival during the 1980s (Dorlian, 2013, p. 158–165).

74 Cf. Vom Bruck, 2005, p. 61, and Caton, 2005, p. 150. During the 1960s, official revolutionary rhetoric mainly targeted the ruling elite (cf. Zubayrī, 2004, p. 25–26) and not the sāda collectively.

75 The expression was typical of the ‘vernacular Houthi discourse’. A recent example of this usage is found in al-Houthi, 2018.

76 One qada corresponds more or less to 30 kg.

77 Casey, 1987, p. 367.

78 Yemen’s isolation was considered a value by the imam and a problem by his detractors. Cf. El Attar, 1964.

79 Ḥusayn al-Houthi, 2002c, p. 11, upheld a boycott of American and Israeli products and theorized the precedence of this economic jihād over military action. The boycott was translated in a stencil and in stickers that gained widespread popularity in the village.

80 See Marshahi, 2019, for a contemporary example of this rhetoric.

81 Fitna (temptation or trial of faith, Gardet, 1991, p. 930) is often associated with the power of female beauty. This case proves that it can also be considered an attribute of beauty in a general sense.

82 The mikhlāf is an administrative and tribal unit comprising around 20 villages.

83 In Yemen each name is associated with a nickname referring to a quality: ‘Alī is al-Jamālī, the handsome; Aḥmad is al-afī, the pure; and so forth.

84 Cf. Vom Bruck, 2005, p. 44–45.

85 Ibid., p. 183.

86 Cf. on this topic Messick, 1988, p. 646.

87 Al-Houthi, 2002c, p. 2.

88 Lems, 2016, p. 433.

89 Vom Bruck, 2005, p. 68, advances a similar argument by affirming that, for the sāda, “history is a form of kinship reckoning, and their moral construction of the person is tied to the memory of their ancestors.”

90 Shryock, 1997, p. 35.

91 Ibid., p. 11.

92 Barth, 1998.

93 Nevola, 2015; 2018.

94 Casey, 1987, p. 362.

95 Freeden, 2017, p. 4.

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Luca Nevola, « Houthis in the Making: Nostalgia, Populism, and the Politicization of Hashemite Descent »Arabian Humanities [En ligne], 13 | 2020, mis en ligne le 07 juillet 2020, consulté le 06 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/arabianhumanities/5917 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cy.5917

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Luca Nevola

University of Sussex

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