Tawfiq al-Jund
Researcher and Senior Journalist
After a long and bloody battle, the armies of Yahya Hamid al-Din, led by Abdullah al-Wazir, captured the fortress of al-Maqatirah in 1921. The toll was hundreds of dead and captured tribesmen. Army commanders decapitated the slain and forced their relatives among the prisoners to carry the severed heads to Sana’a, shackled in chains and barefoot, marching for a month or more. At the same time, their homes were demolished while soldiers chanted: “O stone of the Jew, go and never return.”
All this simply because they refused to submit to clerical rule. Those who had resisted the Turkish occupation for decades were now branded by the Imams of Sana’a as “rebels and Jews.”
This background serves as a concise definition of the nature of the Imamate system that the heroes of September 26, 1962 rose against. Killing, house demolitions, and blatant racism were their registered trademarks. The only ones to resemble them in both ideology and practice are those who came after: the Houthis, who today replicate these same acts in the areas under their control, arresting anyone who raises the republican flag or celebrates its immortal revolution. For the Republic had ended all this and told Yemenis: “You are the children of the Republic – of freedom, dignity, and equal citizenship.”
Just days before the revolution, on September 18, 1962, after his father’s death in Taiz, Muhammad al-Badr – the last ruler of the Hamid al-Din dynasty, who reigned for barely a week – despite his dispute with his uncle al-Hasan (residing in the U.S.) over succession, wrote to him requesting his return to share power. In his letter, he outlined what he saw as the greatest challenge: that “the love of the Ahl (the family)” had diminished in the hearts of the people.
The central idea of their rule was the entrenchment of the concept of wilayah (divinely sanctioned guardianship) and sectarian-hereditary privilege in the minds of Yemenis, allowing them to rule in the name of heaven. They regarded authority as their exclusive divine right, entitling them to kill, exploit, and plunder Yemenis at will, without accountability or justice.
To this end, they propagated their favorite myth: that they had ruled Yemen for 1,200 years, thus claiming both divine and hereditary entitlement. In truth, however, they ruled intermittently, in limited areas – sometimes confined to a single town, sometimes with multiple Imams fighting over the same territory. Altogether, their periods of rule amounted to only 286 years, according to Ahmad al-Ahsub’s book The Identity of Power in Yemen: The Dialectic of Politics and History.
At one point, war broke out between two Imams in Sana’a. When they reconciled, one told the other, downplaying the losses: “The stone comes from the ground, and the blood from the tribesman’s head.” In other words, the casualties on both sides were from Yemeni tribesmen, not from the Hashemites – and therefore, in their view, not real losses at all.
The tragedy of al-Maqatirah was not unique. In Tihamah in 1929, after Ahmad Hamid al-Din’s army defeated the Zaraniq tribes, he forced civilians to sign over their lands in exchange for the release of prisoners. Once the deeds were signed, he expelled them from their land and executed the prisoners, or left them to die forgotten in Hajja prison by the hundreds. For those without captives, crushing levies were imposed: zakat, ushr (a tenth), khums (a fifth), and fees for the Imam’s men. His officials would grossly overestimate harvests – if a farmer reaped ten barrels of grain, the record would state forty or fifty. The result: even if the farmer surrendered his entire yield, it would not cover the tribute. Year after year, he sank deeper into debt to the Imam, forcing many to flee into exile to escape prison.
The great Yemeni poet al-Bardouni noted that Yemeni women helped ignite the revolution, chanting verses urging their husbands and brothers to return, as a new era without arbitrary levies had begun:
“Today we are a Republic, our words are noble.
Hasten your return – no zakat, no debt remains.”
The humiliation inflicted by the Imams extended not only to their rebellious tribal opponents but even to the sheikhs loyal to them. Every tribal chief, no matter his stature, was required to sign his letters or telegrams to the Imam with the phrase: “The humble servant before God… your loyal servant, kissing your feet.”
During a famine under Yahya Hamid al-Din, the Khawlan tribe – which had long fought alongside him – requested a loan of grain from the state granaries to survive. Although the stores in Jihana (within Khawlan itself) were full, the Imam ordered grain to be brought from Anis. Thus, starving tribesmen were forced to march for days under the scorching sun and hunger to carry sacks of grain on their backs, only to be required the following year to repay the same amount to the treasury in Anis. It was nothing more than systematic humiliation.
Are there clearer reasons than these examples – repeated across every region of northern Yemen – for launching a revolution?
Today, the Houthis arrest and violently suppress anyone who commemorates the September 26 Revolution, aiming to drag Yemenis back into that same dark past, reviving practices of blowing up the homes of opponents, killing them, and throwing them into prisons
