Fatima.Mernessi_The-Forgotten-Queens-of-Islam-EN

The Shi'tie Dynasty of Yemen 119
fifteen centuries. This conflict crushed thousands, maybe millions,
of Muslims of all races and ranks, since princes and soldiers were
its victims, and men and women, adults and children perished in it.
Both Asma and 'Arwa were Shi'ites. And this small fact would
explain the wide, sometimes abysmal gaps in memory. Starting out
in all innocence in search of them in the libraries of Rabat (musty
in autumn), I entered a realm which all those not concerned with
the memory of a libertarian Islam want to forget. It was a realm in
which the population, in search of justice, repudiated the legitimacy
of the Abbasids of Baghdad and so of Sunnism. They threw themselves
heart and soul into an adventure which at that moment
represented a revolutionary alternative - Isma'ili Shi'ism - and they
did this by giving power to the Sulayhi family.
The Sulayhis appeared in Yemen, a tyranically governed province
of the Umayyad (later Abbasid) empire, as heirs of the promise of
revolution and the ideal of national independence. 'Ali al-Sulayhi
was able to impose his rule without difficulty, as he was both a Shi'ite
imam and a descendant of the prestigious pre-Islamic sovereigns of
the realm of Sheba. His family history went back to the Yam clan
of the Hamdan tribe, a name which appears in Sheban inscriptions. 7
In many Arab countries with a culture different from that of the
tribes of Mecca and Medina, the Prophet's native town and adopted
town, Islamicization had come as the invasion of a foreign power.
The governors were named and sent by the central power without
any input from the conquered population, and this created a gulf
of non-communication and frustration between the emissaries of the
Muslim capital and the local elites.
Muslim history is, among other things, a chronicle of excesses by
the governors and revolts by the local populations, which always
systematically took on the look of religious conflict. From the time
of the Prophet the Yemeni people resisted by setting up their own
prophets in opposition to him. Of these the most famous is Musaylima
al-Kadhdhab (Musaylima the liar). After the death of the
Prophet Muhammad, Yemen was one of the centres of ridda,
the apostasy movement, and the first orthodox caliph, Abu Bakr,
mobilized his whole army in order to bring this country back to the
Muslim faith. Very quickly thereafter the challenge to the central
despotism took on the vitriolic aspect of Shi'ism. This development
occurred in many regions. Yemen was its pioneer, and had the
honour of endowing the Muslim political scene with the 'brains' of
Shi'ite subversion, 'Abdallah Ibn Saba, a professional agitator next
to whom the devil looks like a rank amateur.