• 1 Institut de recherches et d’études sur les mondes arabes et musulmans. The institute is a “Joint R (...)

1In 2009, the archives of the leader for modernization and national movement in Yemen Ahmad Muhammad Nu‘mân (1909-1996) joined a French national scientific center for research dedicated to the Arab World in the south of France, the IREMAM, where they are now stored.1 They are waiting to be shared – as Ahmad Nu‘mân himself wished – among academics, in Yemen and elsewhere in the world. Ahmad Muhammad Nu‘mân is a central figure on the Yemeni political and intellectual scene of the twentieth century. He fought against the politics of isolation and the arbitrariness of the Hamid al-Din family Imamate (Imam Yahyâ until 1948, and then his son Ahmad until 1962) by advocating for education, considered as the indispensable tool to guarantee his fellow citizens not only survival, but also a place in the modern world. His archives, of course, are devoted to serve Yemeni history and Yemeni historians and researchers, and their digitizing (full or partial) is essential for their preservation and diffusion.

• 2 Ahmad Muhammad Nu‘mân, 2003; Douglas, 1987; Personal interview with Ahmad-Kamal Nu‘mân (grandson o (...)

3According to our sources,2 Ahmad Muhammad Nu‘mân was born in 1909 near Dhubhân, located in the region of Hugariyya, in the then Ottoman Liwâ of Taiz, on the top of the last mountains of Lower Yemen that goes down to the Adeni region, which was at that time under British rule (1839-1967). Ahmad Nu‘mân, whose family was allied with the Ottomans, went to school at the Turkish maktab (secularized school), and then decided, aged 14, to broaden his education in the famous Sunni school of Zabîd, on the Red Sea cost. In 1930, the death of his father pushed him to return to his village and he became a tax collector of the Taiz province. In 1934, he also decided to open a primary school, al-madrasa al-ahlîyya (local school), which is considered the first modern school in Yemen, at a time when Imam Yahyâ (1904-1948), who had taken control of the country after the Ottoman withdrawal in 1918, had closed all Ottoman schools. In 1937, ‘Alî al-Wazîr, the strong Wâlî of Taiz who is said by Nu‘mân to have imposed a harsh fiscal policy on the region’s villagers and to have rejected all forms of criticism, closed al-madrasa al-ahlîyya after Ahmad Nu‘mân tried to complain to the Imam. Ahmad, who would be known from this period onwards as “al-Ustâdh” (‘the Professor’), escaped to Cairo, where he met some other young Yemenis, but also some notorious Arab nationalist and Arab-Islamist leaders and thinkers like Shakîb Arslân, or the Algerian Muslim Brother al-Fudayl al-Wartilânî.

• 3 Al-Shabâb was known under the name of al-Shûrâ, the newspaper created in 1931 by Muhammad Alî al-T (...)

4From Cairo, Ahmad Nu‘mân collected the complaints of people from Yemen and of exiled Yemenis (in Aden, Africa, Maghreb and even America), and published them in al-Shabâb (The Youth) and in al-‘Âlam (The World), the newspapers held by Palestinian Muhammad Alî al-Tâhir3, and later in al-Râbita al-‘Arabiyya (The Arabic Link), created by ‘Abd al-Ghanî al-Rifâ‘î. He also wrote some pamphlets and stressed out in some articles the lack of communication between the Imam and the people, social and political injustice, oppressive taxation, and the values of political (and Islamic) reformism in order to convince Imam Yahyâ to open and modernize the country. He also held a correspondence with Prince Ahmad, whose culture and wisdom let him hope that he could influence the Imam, his father. In 1941, with the launching of the world war and the appointment of Prince Ahmad as Wâlî of Taiz in place of ‘Alî al-Wazîr, Ahmad Nu‘mân decided to return to his village, and accepted to serve as Inspector of Primary schools for the Province of Taiz.

• 4 According to al-Attar, there were approximately one million Yemenis living overseas in the 1950s ( (...)

5But at a time of political unrest facing the Imam’s inflexibility, and because of his links with the most important contesting Zaydi faction in Sanaa (Shabâb al-Amr), Ahmad Nu‘mân soon fled to Aden with his friend Muhammad Mahmûd al-Zubayrî. From 1944 to 1947, they formed the core of the Free Yemeni movement (Hizb al-Ahrâr al-Yamaniyyîn), which beneficiated from the existence of numerous Yemeni politicized merchants, Adeni journals, associations and clubs. Al-Ahrâr (the “Free” Yemenis), who were calling for democratic reforms and a constitutional imamate in Yemen, created in January 1946 the Grand Yemeni Association in order to attract support of the Yemeni communities overseas4, as well as a weekly newspaper called Sawt al-Yaman (Voice of Yemen).

• 5 See the document signed by Ahmad Nu‘mân issued from the “Documentation” file of his archives in Ai (...)

10After Ahmad Nu‘mân was released from the Egyptian jail in 1967 and joined his son Muhammad in Beirut, where he recovered all of his documents, which Muhammad had taken with him when he managed to flee from Cairo in 1966. This shared refuge in Beirut was a key moment in Ahmad Nu‘mân’s life, during which he decided to protect and classify his documents and papers. There, he met Yusuf Kamâl Ibish, a professor of Arabic History at the American University of Beirut (AUB), who probably incited him to do so.5 Besides the classification and storage of the documents in a hanging file cabinet, around 30,000 pages of documents were copied onto 16 microfilms – one of the two master microfilms was kept by the Jafet Library of AUB, where they have been conserved until now. A general summary was made, which followed the chronological order of the papers’ production, by periods of Ahmad’s residence in different cities.

• 6 During this whole period, however (that is to say between 1975 and 1996), relatives and friends ca (...)

11After the assassination of Muhammad in 1974, the archives followed Ahmad Nu‘mân to Jidda, and then to Switzerland, where he died.6 In 2000, Ahmad-Kamal, his grandson and son of Muhammad (born 1953), had a digital copy made from the microfilm, and decided to store the pre-1969 papers in plastic files according to a new – and quite unclear – classification, and the post-1969 one’s in large sending envelopes (fig. 4). If the 1969 original classification of the papers was lost, a trace of its existence remains in the microfilms and, consequently, in the digital copy of them – a last resort to recover the loss, although the documents are not identified within the films, which makes it extremely difficult to locate them. In 2005, with no place to be stored, the whole collection was put into boxes, and kept in a furniture store in Geneva, from where it was extracted to the shelves of the IREMAM in Aix-en-Provence in 2009. The deposit of the Nu‘mân Archives at the IREMAM was intended to guarantee better conservation conditions, to check their classification, to digitalize the papers in order to conserve a copy of them and allow their communication, with the authorization of the Nu‘mân’s representatives, and with respect for personal data.

• 7 Memory of the World, Programme Objectives, URL: https://en.unesco.org/programme/mow, consulted on (...)
• 8 Rabah, 2009.
• 9 The Oral History program was developed by Joseph Malone, Professor of History at the Center of Ara (...)
• 10 Ahmad Muhammad Nu‘mân, 2003 (2004), p. 11.

12On September 15, 1969, during the filing and inventory of his archives, Ahmad Nu‘mân wrote a short testament. After thanking those who had participated in their constitution, preservation and classification, he gave a function and a direction to the archives: they were to be dedicated to scientific research in Yemen. More than twenty years before the UNESCO Program Memory of the World, which supports the idea that “the world’s documentary heritage belongs to all, should be fully preserved and protected for all and, with due recognition of cultural mores and practicalities, should be permanently accessible to all without hindrance”7, Ahmad Nu‘mân (who had then just been released from jail) seemed aware of the necessity of preserving his archives from politically oriented interests. The AUB was at that time a center of student protest against all forms of oppression,8 and it is there that Ahmad met Professor Yusuf Ibish, who also proposed him to share his memories as part of an oral history program. He accepted, provided that the recording would not be made public before his death9, as a sign of his desire to avoid any possible political use of his testimony.10 Scientific research and university appeared to ensure the guaranty of neutrality and political peace.

• 11 Sâdiq al-Safwânî, 2018. The dissertation was defended in 2010.
• 12 See the Proceedings of the Nadwat ihyâ’ al-dhikrâ al-mi’awiyya li-milâd al-ustâdh al-mufakkir Ahma (...)

13The transmission of the archives to academics only took place after Ahmad’s death. They were mobilized for research by a Yemeni student enrolled at ‘Ayn Shams University in Cairo during the 2000’s, Sâdiq al-Safwânî, who did his PhD investigation on “The Yemeni opposition movement in Egypt during the Hamîd al-Dîn rule, 1918-1962”.11 He actually did not have access to the original documents, and worked on the digital copy provided by Ahmad-Kamal in Cairo, despite its very poor quality, which could only allow a laborious and partial exploitation of the documents. Al-Safwânî was one of the very few researchers to have used the digital document when the commemoration of the centenary of Ahmad Nu‘mân’s birth was celebrated during a national academic conference at Aden University in 2009.12

• 13 Thanks to a collective mission, including a French archivist (Isabelle Weiland), Sâdiq al-Safwânî (...)
• 14 Three applications for calls for projects were unsuccessfully constituted in 2012, 2013 and 2017, (...)

14Unfortunately, now that they are stored in Aix-en-Provence, the whole records remain unexplored. In 2011, an attempt was carried out to identify the state of the documents and their classification13. The loss of the 1969 classification was experienced as a disaster. The entire interpretation of Nu‘mân’s life by himself had disappeared with it, as well as the order and layout in which the documents had made sense regarding one another at that time. The reconstitution of the original classification proved to be as indispensable as it was complex. In order to allow the digitization of the original documents (and to identify those that were possibly added or deleted from the original records), the only available strategy then seemed to reconstitute the original order of the papers by making careful comparisons with the microfilms, which, in the absence of numeration, had the disadvantage of not allowing the photographed documents to be finely tracked inside the reels. The re-digitization of the microfilms, which could have included a numbering of documents from which to work, was seriously considered. But it was the financial resources to cover the costs of reconstituting the initial order of the papers (through the long and tedious work of comparison between the documents in their different supports) that stopped the project. The method was considered too expensive to be carried out, especially in a context where research funding (French or European) was not very favorable to projects involving contemporary archives (less valuable than old manuscripts) that are not absolutely endangered, and a country as remote, poor and understudied (from a Western point of view) as Yemen14.

• 15 With the financial support of the IREMAM and the CEFAS.

15Ultimately, personal archives may drain only individual involvements, but these would remain vain if isolated. In 2017 and in 2019, Ahmad-Kamal, the grandson of Ahmad Nu‘mân, was invited for two one-month missions in Aix-en-Provence15 in order to work with me on the re-classification project, and to help me, as a researcher, to reconstruct what I now consider to be the “fabulous history” of the Nu‘mân archives. This historical reconstruction is carried out as a way to shed light on the political history of modern Yemen through the prism of the multiple journeys of these archives in a globalized world. It is also devoted to making them known in the academic field of digital humanities, in order to facilitate the quest of funding that will help to make them available online to researchers.

• 16 See http://www.mmsh.univ-aix.fr/mediatheque/Pages/iconographie-archives.aspx
• 17 Archimede, Archival Resources for the Mediterranean: http://archimede.mmsh.univ-aix.fr/
• 18 https://cinumed.mmsh.univ-aix.fr/en; the platform, created by Abdelmajid Arrif, also operates in F (...)

16In the meantime, the MMSH, which hosts the IREMAM (and the Nu‘mân archives) has developed a new program to digitize the numerous archives (mostly researchers’ archives)16 of its media library. The program first took shape in a still under construction archival resources portal of the library called Archimede17, which gives access to archives inventories and descriptions of archival documents, or directly to some digitized documents dealing with Mediterranean countries and their neighborhood. Archimede was recently connected, as one of the content providers of the library, to a platform –also under construction – called Cinumed, the Digital City of the Mediterranean, which has been developed by the MMSH’s digital resources service as a super aggregator of contents, for the pooling and sharing of knowledge in the field of Mediterranean studies in humanities and social sciences.18

• 19 “A collaborative portal that is rich in multimedia content”, URL: https://cinumed.mmsh.univ-aix.fr (...)
• 20 URL: https://cinumed.mmsh.univ-aix.fr/en/cube, consulted on 02/11/2020.

18The integration to Cinumed, which is still in progress, aims to create a virtual – and online – hub for Yemeni studies, which will bring together several archival collections directly or indirectly dealing with Yemen. With a number of French researchers from different disciplines (anthropologists, historians, political scientists) who worked in Yemen from the 1970s to 2011 (the French center for Archeology and Social Science research in Sanaa, CEFAS, had to move out the country after the “Yemeni Spring”), the library of the MMSH has created an important book collection on Yemen, but also an interesting collection of individual archives of researchers, such as Paul Bonnenfant, Marceau Gast or Eric Rouleau. In addition to these collections, historian Michel Tuchscherer, who was Director of the CEFAS between 2010 and 2014, facilitated the deposit of Claudie Fayein’s archives in the media library, following the publication of a book on the experience of this first French doctor in Yemen in the late 1950s (Tuchscherer 2012). Last but not least, Yemeni collector Fatima al-Zawiya al-Baydani, who found refuge in 2016 at the IREMAM, deposited copies of the important and very well documented “sound collection” she had built up over more than 15 years by recording tales and songs throughout Yemen. Both Archimede and Cinumed will enhance the visibility of the Nu‘mân archives and help re-connect the country’s culture and history to the wider world. Through Cinumed, the archives will join “a common taxonomic treatment: a semantic framework which enables users to cross-reference and create a dialogue, link by link”, between the sources.19 Thanks to “the Cube” instrument of the platform, the geo-referencing of documents will enable users to view and read the Nu‘mân archives in relation to other documents dealing with or coming from Yemen, as well as with others documents whose themes invite comparative analysis and re-situation in other regional contexts in the Mediterranean.20

• 21 As an example, the Yemen International School in Cairo, which has developed according to Yemeni cu (...)
• 22 See for example the Facebook list “Suwwâr Yaman al-qadîma” (traduction), which number of followers (...)

22Eventually, the angle adopted in the communication strategy concerning these archives is the struggle for education in contemporary Yemen. The theme presents the advantage of both respecting an important part of Ahmad Nu‘mân’s biography (which actually constitutes my own research interest as a historian), and aiming at (and contributing to) post-war reconstruction in Yemen. Indeed, as was the case for Ahmad Nu‘mân during his struggle against Imam Yahyâ and Imâm Ahmad’s rules, education appears to be a privileged political tool for mobilization and State (re)construction. Since 2015 and the war in Yemen, education (after food and health), has become a matter of primary importance for Yemeni families, whether they are still in Yemen or dispersed outside the country.21 In addition, the growing interest of Yemeni individuals in sharing editorial (and educational) or historical documents via internet and social networks (including Facebook),22 shows that the Yemeni civil society could be interested in learning more about Ahmad Muhammad Nu‘mân and his personal struggle for education in Yemen as a constructive and peaceful way to think the country’s future.