Jebel Burah, Yemen

“Yemen is the most magnificent country I have ever seen”, announced one of my two traveling companions as we hiked the Harraz mountains south-west of Sana’a.  This most veracious observation was in reference to the spectacular countryside and the stunning architecture and quite before we were set upon by a riotous legion of school children who were in the yard for recess.  There may be security issues in Yemen but I am usually more concerned about being assailed by alarming hordes of ragged, if amiable, urchins collectively bellowing, “soorah, soorah, soorah”, (photo) at the top of their lungs. If this does not produce the desired result, then “bonbon, gullum, money” - French, Arabic and English, they have learned to speak a few words of any number of languages.

Ibn Battuta did not quite venture up Jebel Burah although he passed by its foothills, so this post is, like Socotra, rather outwith the writ of my journey. Having said this, Ibn Battuta himself had boundless curiosity and often went off on a non-sequential tangent, so he would have understood this side-trip perfectly. In Yemen one can easily escape many of the vexing inconveniences of 21st century life by venturing into the Harraz mountains, barely a couple of hours from Sana'a.   

Panoramic view in the Harraz mountains

We had just visited the Ismaili village of Hudhaib. Perched atop a volcanic plug, up 193 uneven stone steps, is a tiny white mosque, or rather it looks like a mosque but the Ismailis do not have mosques in the same way most other Islamic rites do. Above the lushly green panorama, eagles hovered on thermals, a flock of iridescent blue Somali starlings with orange-tipped wings fluttered wildly, and white doves circled gracefully above steep hillside terraces.  In the mountains of Yemen, the Zaidi sect prevails but the handful of Ismailis dates back to the 11^th century when the Fatimid influence reached Yemen from its base in Cairo through the Sulayhids. In the 12th century Saladin, who ousted the Fatimids and replaced it with his Ayyubid dynasty in Cairo, sent his brother Turanshah to govern Yemen, and gradually the Fatimid influence waned but the Ismailis prevailed in remote mountain fastnesses. 

Ismaili mosque

The sun was hot on the rocky overhang where we sat and drank in the drama of stone houses with white gypsum window decoration, rising vertically from the rock. Most of the villages are the fief of one family consisting of several households; for defense purposes there is usually only one gate in and out of the village while the defensive walls consist of the lower windowless storeys of the houses themselves, which stored animals, fodder and grain supplies.  The Ottomans conquered Yemen twice but not without a fight, in the early 17th century they were pushed out of the highland areas and relegated to the Red Sea coast but they came back in 1849 until the Ottoman Empire disintegrated in the wake of WWI and Yemen declared its independence in 1918. Many Turks lost their lives here and it does not require much imagination to see why.

Driving back through the dramatic scenery to Manakha, we had a splendid repast of saltah, the Yemeni national lunchtime dish, spiced with frothy green fenugreek, fasooliyah, beans, a spicy chicken stew, rice, bread and bamiya or okra, followed by the local honey pastry called Bint as-Sahn, and sweet tea. Thus fortified we set to doing absolutely nothing because everyone was chewing qat. Ahmed our driver/guide, had stopped on a hairpin bend shortly after leaving Sana'a to buy qat from some men who had set up shop in a row of what looked like elevated open-front kennels. Now he and the hotel staff were busy separating choice leaves from what looked like an indoor shrubbery, and were blissfully chewing away. Late afternoon we drove to nearby al-Hajjara, an iconic village where children charged out to greet us shouting, ‘what’s your name?” and “where are you from?” Yemen has one of the highest birth rates in the world and no matter where you go throngs of children follow you as if you were some latter-day Pied Piper of Hamelin. 

Village of al-Hajjara

 

We walked back to Manakha where at the guesthouse an evening’s entertainment of live music and dancing awaited; the gun dance and the jambiya dance both of which look deceptively simple as the feet seem to be doing nothing at all until you get up to try, as try you must. This was followed by a local game which consisted of three men standing side-by-side legs apart, feet touching the neighbor’s feet. The two on the outside stood, upper body facing the man in the middle, the left palm upright facing him, the right hand back ready to strike.  The man in the middle buzzed around trying to avoid being slapped by the other two - silly but hilariously funny.

 

The 'Gun Dance'

The next day we hiked between some nearby villages. In one, we climbed some steps through a narrow doorway where 12 families were living. An old woman took us through the village and into her house which was four storeys high; outside on the flat roof she was drying sorghum grain to make bread while against the parapet, stacks of the tall stems were drying in the sun to be used as animal fodder.  She led us to the top of her house where a tannour (clay oven) was stoked with dry twigs and bushes. It was a basic house with mud floors where several people lived although there was nobody there, there was nobody in the entire village until we rounded the corner and came upon the school. After extricating ourselves from the children’s frenzied clutches we continued down to Beit al-Amir, a small village in the valley surrounded by terraces of sorghum and wheat. It was one of the rare villages we saw that was built on low ground. The afternoon drive to Burah was uneventful except Ahmed bought twice as much qat as the day before as he said there was nothing to do on top of the mountain except chew qat. None of us had planned to chew but he was right - there was nothing to do except admire the jaw-dropping scenery; villages clinging to mountain ridges were transformed into vertical dots of light like a dangling necklace of lustrous pearls, matched only by the stars and Venus glittering in the cold night sky. We had a nighttime picnic in the light of kerosene lamps, while our host who had lost all his teeth, assiduously mashed his qat leaves with a mortar and pestle eventually to lean back contentedly as the mild amphetamine took effect. We slept in a simple stone hut on top of the mountain, snug in our blankets when the wind began to howl and moan in the early hours of the morning.  The mountain aerie was set amid finely crafted dry stone terraces with tiers of coffee trees spilling down the hillsides. Yemen is the home of coffee – Mocha being named for the Red Sea port whence it was shipped to Europe. Connoisseurs of the bean know that Yemen still grows some of the finest, most expensive coffee in the world.

Coffee terraces

We met another Ahmed our mountain guide in the village of Markaz where it should go without saying we attracted the attention of a gaggle of schoolboys waiting to start class at 0800.  We drove through the village and up the asphalt mountain road leaving Ahmed our driver to drive back down the valley where he was to meet us. We then proceeded to walk up the asphalt road which I firmly believe was at a impossible 90 degree gradient –  forgotten muscles seized up in shock and my feet would barely go one in front of the other. Ahmed walked up this unmanageable slope disconcertingly as if it was a flat stretch of plains highway.  Eventually we came to a village where mercifully it was all down hill, on stone steps cut into the mountain presumably for the women who have to walk up and down every day to collect water. In many villages all over Yemen women still have to walk a round trip often of more than 5 hours every day to get a plastic can of water which they carry on their head or their back. Other women we passed carried huge loads of animal fodder on their back. They wear a style of dress curiously similar to the Hmong of Vietnam, with straight black pants tight at the ankle in horizontal colored bands, a long black embroidered shirt tied at the waist with a wide cummerbund meant to support their spines for the back-breaking work they do every day. On their heads they wear extravagant colored turbans. The only difference is that the Hmong are not veiled. None of the women would allow us to photograph them although they were friendly and some were quite chatty. We walked down the mountain for 5 and a half hours passing donkeys laden with fodder and gypsum, boys carrying bags of gypsum on their backs skipping and running down the hill agile as mountain goats, toothless, stooped old men with sticks, children chanting and yelling “khwaja, khwaja” – a word of Turkish origin meaning foreigner, and women who if they were not carrying water and fodder were working in the yards hanging out washing or baking bread. 

Qat terraces in the Harraz Mountains 

Handsome chestnut-colored cows lowed and munched in their plots, and fat-tailed sheep and pretty goats nibbled on nothing. We ate delicious freshly-baked bread, gratefully received from a woman who was baking it in her yard, and stopped at another house for qishr, a delicious local drink made from dried coffee husks, ginger and sugar. The hillsides were speckled with euphorbia, and colorful wild flowers; alpine rock plants, blue gentian, pink asphodel, white dwarf bouvardia, little blue bells of something and red dwarf geranium. 

As we descended to the valley floor lush tropical vegetation appeared; shiny dark green banana trees, umbrella-like papayas, date palms and green in all its shades appeared in spikes, folds, patches, splashes and splodges as far as the eye could see. By the time we reached the bottom, we each were whimpering pathetically about our wobbly legs, our strained calf and thigh muscles unused to the steep terrain quivering like jelly.

We had reached the Tihama meaning hot lands, and nowhere was ever more aptly-named. Coming down from the cool mountain air, it is like opening the door of a blast furnace. After some much-needed sustenance of mutton stew, rice and hot sweet milky tea we set off towards Beit al-Faqih and Zabid. If there was an award for the worst micro-climate in the world, Zabid would win hands down.  But I dearly love Zabid because in a country liberally bestowed with superlative architecture, Zabid is in a league of its own. Along the coast there were several towns with a similar architecture but they are mostly all gone, victim of nature and neglect. Zabid almost went the same way until UNESCO stepped in. To avoid becoming a victim of heatstroke, one must take oneself off to the Zabid Resthouse for lunch and then do nothing until late afternoon. 

'Ladies Mosque', Zabid

A walking tour is then in order followed by more far niente and perhaps a local water pipe to jolly things along. No sissy shisha with its light, fruit-flavored tobacco, the Yemeni mada'ah is a manly piece of work. It is a suitably exotic 'Oriental' looking contraption but in reality is a most fearsome thing. Real tobacco is used and the pipe is much longer and thicker than the shisha pipe. If your lungs are not used to it they will seize up at once in great heaving gasps and spasms of uncontrolled hacking. It is as if you had decided to smoke an entire packet of unfiltered Gauloises all at once. I wanted to prove myself 'tough enough' to smoke it but the effect was lost as after each inhalation I was somewhere to be found under the charpoy. Soundly defeated, I gave up.  

As we drove back to Sana'a the next day arriving in the cool of the evening I reflected that if Zabid has the worst climate in the world, the Old City of Sana’a might just have the best.  

 

House in the Old City

Al Saleh Mosque, Sana'a

Sana'a, Yemen

I visited the brand new Presidential “Al Saleh Mosque” in Sana’a before it opened to the public this past Ramadan.

Exterior view of the new mosque.

For all that there have been rumblings among the populace about how the money could better have been spent building hospitals and schools - the mosque is said to have cost $60 million - it is really quite stunning. Most of the building materials were local; the frame is concrete with pale golden blocks of dressed limestone on the external walls, and polished speckled granite for the massive indoor piers. Red limestone is used to to accent design features. An exception was made for the colored marble flooring of the courtyard which came from India, Italy and Oman.

Exquisitely rendered courtyard in imported marble.

The mosque combines traditional Islamic elements of domes, minarets, arches, carved mihrab, and bands of incised and gold-leaf calligraphy, and blends it with uniquely Yemeni architectural aspects; the distinctive minarets, of which 4 of the 6 are 100 meters high, feature red brick and are banded and criss-crossed in white gypsum plaster, the drums of the five domes are pierced with qamariyya-windows of colored glass and Yemeni-style merlons decorate the exterior roof edging.

Inside the main hall which can hold up to 13000 worshippers, a mammoth Bohemian glass chandelier is suspended from the central dome, the carved doors are of Burmese teak, the coffered inlaid ceiling is American oak, and the carpet which was woven in Turkey is made of New Zealand lambswool. An additional 31,000 worshippers can be accommodated outside, while a large women’s prayer hall is located upstairs.


The Bohemian glass central chandelier

The exterior walls with bands of incised carving of Koranic verses in pale golden limestone are stunning.

Book review 2

LOST HISTORY; The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers and Artists by Michael Hamilton Morgan                 Published by National Geographic, 2007

History is not written by the vanquished, and so most people in the Western world have no idea of the debt owed to the great Muslim thinkers of Islam’s Golden Age for much of the knowledge that fuels the modern world. Names that were known in Europe, or sometimes not, before the Renaissance; al Biruni, al-Kindi, al-Khwarezmi, al-Jazari, al-Uqlidisi, Omar Khayyam, al-Tusi, Ibn Sina, al-Razmi, Ibn al-Haytham, al-Zahrawi, Ibn Rushd – between them they mapped the stars and planets, calculated with astonishing accuracy the circumference and diameter of the earth, understood the rotation of the earth on its axis, measured the angle of the tilt of its axis, explained eclipses, equinoxes, comets, introduced the decimal point and zero, invented the discrete disciplines of algebra, trigonometry, and chemistry (then known as alchemy), set empirical rules for the testing of drugs, noted the link between health and diet, and invented tens of surgical instruments including the scalpel and forceps. 

In many cases these Muslims were credited with their discoveries even if they were later forgotten, but in many more cases hundreds of years later Europeans were given credit for Muslim inventions and discoveries in what has become the ‘lost history’. The Muslims gained much of their learning from the Greeks and Indians whose works had been translated by scribes at the Abbasid court in Baghdad into Arabic. The initial knowledge of zero came from the brilliant Hindu mathematician Brahmagupta, whose work they refined. In those days scholars wandered from court to court and through them was this learning transmitted to Europe and the Ummayad court in Cordoba, where the Arabic texts were translated into Latin. The Europeans took this learning and half a millennia later developed it, as the Arabs had done with earlier science. Sometimes these Islamic thinkers sailed perilously close to the wind - charges of heresy were leveled much as Galileo faced from the Catholic church several hundred years later with his acceptance of heliocentrism.

The difficult question is why did it all come to an end? There is no single answer but by the 14th century, the religion that had given the freedom to think eventually became the organ of institutionalized thought that trapped, just as the medieval church had done in Europe until the 15th century Renaissance and the 18th century Age of Enlightenment. Muslims sank into intellectual apathy, falling prey to superstition, sorcery and self-serving charlatans - a decline 'foretold' by the great social historian Ibn Khaldun who wrote in the 14th century of the cyclical rise and fall of empires. With women now forming the majority of students and graduates in universities across the Islamic world, we may yet witness a new cycle in the ascendant.

NO GOD BUT GOD - THE ORIGINS, EVOLUTION AND FUTURE OF ISLAM

by Reza Aslan

Published by Arrow Books 2006 

Highly readable and exceptionally informative minus the arcane academe that often accompanies such subjects, this book should be required reading for anyone interested in more than the inane platitudes parroted by politicians and so-called experts about the Muslim world today. Reza Aslan lays out defining moments in the development of Islam, from the succession struggles immediately after the death of the Prophet to the killing of Hussein at Kerbala in 680 by the Ummayad army, which solidified ineluctably the schi’sm between the Sunni and Shi’a. He gives examples of how the Prophet gave rights to women regarding inheritance, marriage and divorce, moves that were highly unpopular among the men, and how after the death of the Prophet, such men ‘took back’ their ‘rights’ by ‘re-interpreting’ the Quran and the Prophet’s words. He describes the efforts by scholars to lay down a body of law necessary to accommodate the requirements of the growing Islamic empire, and explains the ‘Traditionalist’ and ‘Rationalist’ thinking that for a time uneasily co-existed, to the ultimate triumph of the ulema who in the 11th century succeeded in carving out for themselves the role of sole authority to interpret the Qoran and the Sunna. In a fateful move, they decided that the Quran could in no way be considered a historical document and therefore the answers to all questions that arose from now until eternity were contained within the Qoran. This decision seriously impaired critical thinking and intellectual innovation, and Islamic intellectuals from across the broad spectrum of Islamic thought have periodically questioned it, sometimes fatally. He outlines the effect colonization had on the Islamic world, from the savage retribution meted out by the British overlords after the Indian Mutiny of 1857 to the plundering of colonized countries’ natural resources to enrich the Europeans at the expense of the indigenous people, and the hypocrisy of the colonial powers for whom the ideals of enlightened governance in the form of political pluralism and democracy were in no way to be applied to their colonial subjects. He ends in the present, arguing persuasively against the simplistic notion of a ‘clash of civilizations’ in favor of a current Islamic reformation in which the West though implicated and often complicit, is a spectator.

Weddings, funerals and a controversial Soap opera.

Sana'a, Yemen 2008

Weddings are a daily occurrence in the months leading up to Ramadan when weddings do not take place. In the Islamic world, the time frame between the official marriage contract signing and the wedding may be a few days, or it may be months.  But although the contract signing is the official one, the couple do not live together until the actual celebration of it, married or not. There may be many reasons for the delay; financial, waiting for distant family members to be there at the same time, a death in the family etc.  Weddings in the Islamic world are extremely expensive affairs and Yemen is no exception;  hospitality is expected to be lavish and the whole neighborhood or community is invited, everyone must be fed and a meal is nothing without meat, qat must be procured at the very least for the males of the families involved and in the case of wealthier families, for everyone, women need clothes and the bride needs a dowry including jewelry, and everything has gone up in price including gold, qat and lamb!

Women celebrate at home and/or in special halls rented for the occasion with fancy food, shishas and qat, as well as loud music live or taped, while for the men, huge tents are erected throughout the city where they wander in and out as and when they can, gathering to chat, smoke, chew qat and dance. There is almost always an oud player. (An oud being a fretless, 11-stringed instrument shaped like an old-fashioned lute – the word lute itself coming from the Arabic – 'al-oud'.) 

Fortunately the oud player and singer who sings at weddings in my area is excellent and I am treated to a free concert every second or third week. I say fortunate, because he plays until 0315 and then the Imam takes over. 

The Silk Road - Part III

Kyrgyzstan & Uzbekistan, May/June 2008

We camped in a yurt opposite Tash Rabat an isolated ‘caravanserai’ 15 kilometers off the main Silk Road and what is still a main national road. The function of this building which dates back to the 10^th century, has never been fully explained. It could not have been a straightforward caravanserai because it lies so far off the road in a remote, cul-de-sac of a valley, and there is no courtyard for pack animals which was obviously a central feature of a caravanserai. One of the meanings of the verb ‘rabata’ in Arabic is “to be garrisoned”, and Tash Rabat has two large halls each with a raised platform, ostensibly where the soldiers slept. Garrisoned caravanserais in Central Asia were relatively common due to banditry but this still does not satisfactorily explain the lack of space for animals or why it was built so far from the road. North African ‘ribats’ on the coast were built as defensive structures, (see Girl Solo in Arabia/Tunisia/Pearl of the Sahel) but also came to have the additional meaning of being retreats where pious men lived on charity usually extended by the local ruler. This desolate place is much more likely to have been some kind of a religious retreat but why was it built in the middle of nowhere especially if soldiers were needed to protect it?

The splendidly isolated Tash Rabat

In the 10th century, Islam had already arrived in this area principally via the ruling Turkic Karakhanids who held sway until another Turkic tribe, the Seljuks, gained ascendancy in the 11th century. But by the 15th century after the Uzbeks had ousted the Ferghana-born Babur, great-great-great grandson of Tamerlaine and founder of the Moghul dynasty in India, the Kyrgyz were in decline, and Buddhism re-appeared with the Dzungarians, ethnic Tibetan Mongolians, who briefly ruled this area as well as Kashgar. (See previous post, the Silk Road II.) There have been oft-repeated assertions that Tash Rabat was a Buddhist temple and this interpretation may stem from the Dzungarian era, however the high iwan portal and dome over a covered hall with examples of squinches, is a classic early example of Seljuk 11th century architecture albeit more crudely constructed than one finds further west along the Silk Road. The present structure is said to date back only to the 15th century which is even more surprising, unless it was built by the occupants themselves who were not trained masons.  Given this area’s history of constant incursion, perhaps it was an outpost from which early warning of impending invasion could be relayed, or were the soldiers protecting Sufi adepts in the time of the Buddhist Dzungarians?  Tash Rabat remains shrouded in mystery.