Yahya ibn Muhammad Hamid al-Din
1867 - 1948
Imam of Yemen, 1904 - 1948; king of Yemen, 1918 - 1948.
Yahya ibn Muhammad Hamid al-Din took the patronymic al-Mutawakkil ala Allah on becoming imam in 1904. He succeeded to the imamate upon the death of his father Muhammad ibn Yahya, who had inaugurated a new period of rebellion against the rule of the Ottoman Empire in the highlands of Yemen in 1891.
Although Yahya was sometimes amenable to concessions and negotiations with the Ottoman authorities, he approved of the desire of the Zaydi people to be free of Ottoman rule. When Yahya received the bayʿa (oath of allegiance), he immediately called for a full-scale revolt against the Ottomans; his major motivation appears to have been the May 1904 boundary agreement about Yemen's southern borders, signed between the Ottomans and British, since he considered himself to be the legitimate ruler of both "north" Yemen and the territories held by the British in "south" Yemen.
Imam Yahya continued to lead the revolt against the Ottomans throughout the period before World War I. His political shrewdness as well as his ability to wage irregular war against the Ottoman state forced it to negotiate with him, most importantly in the Treaty of Da'an in 1919, which granted most of his demands and gave him an almost free hand in matters of taxation, religious affairs, and judicial appointments.
During World War I, however, the imam sided with the Ottomans as fellow Muslims - the only Arab regime to do so. At the end of the war, the Ottomans departed Yemen and officially recognized Yahya as ruler there. For Imam Yahya, however, this was only the first step in creating the Yemen he perceived to be the patrimony of the Zaydi imams.
Yahya's primary policy objectives in the postwar period appear to have been: (1) to bring all of Yemen under his direct control; (2) to make Yemen completely independent of the influence and/or control of other states (to have complete autarky); (3) to weaken the cohesion and power of the tribes (to prevent them from developing a common front against the central government and resisting its policy objectives); and (4) to establish the ascendancy of Islamic law (Shariʿa) throughout Yemen.
The methods Yahya employed to bring about his goals were diverse, and some were, in today's light, brutal. At first he paid subsidies and bribes to various tribal elements; later, when the treasury could clearly not support the demands of these payments, he sent military units to quell uprisings against his decisions, and also employed a traditional Yemeni technique - he took hostages from the tribes, typically the sons of the tribal Shaykhs. These hostages were kept in the imam's fortresses (where they were also educated) to guarantee the good behavior of their own tribes or tribal alliances. Yahya was assassinated in 1948.
Bibliography
Fisher, Sydney N. The Middle East: A History, 3d edition. New York: Knopf, 1979.
— MANFRED W. WENNER
