Mohammed Abdulwahab Al-Shaibani
Poet and Writer
Yemenis have a long history of dispersion and exile, ever since individuals lost stability in their homeland and geographic shelters due to drought and wars. A striking historical model of this can be found in the deployment of Yemeni manpower in the Islamic conquests, whose trajectories were meticulously recorded in history books. Even earlier, there was the migration of tribal groups to northern Arabia and its frontiers after the collapse of the Marib Dam.
Examining the subject of migration and asylum in modern Yemeni history (the twentieth century and its ongoing aftermath) also requires investigating both its coercive and non-coercive drivers, across diverse trajectories and patterns that form the lens for a critical and evidence-based reading. During World War I (1914–1918), for example, the Ottomans—during their second occupation of Yemen—needed hardened fighters to reinforce their forces defending territories under their control in Europe (the Balkans), Asia (the Levant, Iraq, and the Hijaz), and Africa (Libya).
As the empire was besieged by the new European colonial powers (France and Britain), who coveted its territories and resources, the Ottomans conscripted hundreds of young Yemenis, alongside recruits from other controlled lands, into battles to defend those holdings. This practice became known as “al-Jihadiya (Ottoman Conscription System).” Many of these conscripts were killed, lost, or captured; some survivors settled in the very countries where they had fought, building new families that still proudly assert their Yemeni lineage in Jordan, Palestine, across the Levant, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere.
With the war’s end, new colonial powers inherited Ottoman possessions. Expanding their economic and commercial reach to more distant lands, they required labor for their shipping fleets, ports, and factories. Aden became the departure gateway to worlds beyond the seas for many young men arriving from rural Yemen.
Examples of this can be seen in Yemeni workers recruited into American automobile factories during the 1920s, and in laborers active in British, French, and American ports during and after that period, as well as on board ships sailing the high seas. Two illustrative cases stand out here: Hail Saeed and Abdullah Ali Al-Hakimi.
The first began his career in the mid-1920s on French vessels before working with one of his brothers in an oil factory in Marseille in southern France—ten full years before moving to Somalia, where he launched his commercial career as an agent for a French leather trader.
The second initially joined the first Yemeni battalion established by the British Army in the early 1920s. Five years later, he left the army and worked aboard a French ship. In the early 1930s, he turned to Sufism, settling in Mostaganem near Sheikh Ahmad Mustafa Al-Alawi, from whom he acquired profound religious, legal, and linguistic knowledge.
Later, he traveled to Europe before settling in the mid-1930s in Cardiff, Britain, where he founded a mosque and dedicated land for a Muslim cemetery. Returning to Aden in the early 1940s, he established a religious lodge and school in Sheikh Othman and became one of the founders of Hizb al-Ahrar (the Free Yemeni Party). After the failed 1948 revolution, he launched the newspaper Al-Salam in Cardiff as the remaining voice of the Free Yemenis.
When the Yemeni Union was established in 1952 to replace the Free Yemeni Party, which had been banned by the colonial authorities in Aden, Al-Hakimi returned to Aden to head it. Yet the authorities fabricated charges of arms possession and incitement, imprisoning him; he soon died in custody, poisoned.
Following the path of these pioneering figures, early migrants would advance the cause of Yemeni freedom and herald the dawn of profound transformation. Among them shone Mohammed Abdulwasie Hamid Al-Asbahi, who migrated as an illiterate poor child to Aden and Djibouti, yet through sheer determination rose to become one of Yemen’s distinguished contemporary figures.
Similarly, Mohammed Saleh Al-Saidi, from a village in Ibb’s Al-Sha‘ir district, worked as a sailor aboard a British ship. His life story, later documented by historian Dr. Ahmed Al-Saidi, epitomized the collective experience of those who toiled in this arduous profession.
History will not forget the contributions of Ahmed Abdu Nasser Al-Ariqi and Abdulghani Mutahar, whose unconditional commitment and financial sacrifice for the Free Yemeni cause saw them dedicate the fortunes they had painstakingly accumulated in their African diaspora to fuel Yemen’s struggle for change from the mid-1940s onward.
Like them, dozens of Yemeni migrants played vital roles in paving this difficult path. The contrasts they internalized between the backward, closed geography dominated by a reactionary theocratic autocrat at home, and the more open societies where they settled, inspired them to persist along this arduous, obstacle-ridden road.
Today, a new image of Yemeni dispersal emerges, driven by war and its persistent consequences. Diaspora and asylum communities across all continents now host hundreds of thousands of Yemenis who fled their homeland to escape the inferno of war and despotism.
Unlike their forebears a century ago, today’s exiles embody a different spectrum of roles and contributions. They are either intellectuals and professionals enriching universities and research centers abroad, investors seeking healthy environments for their capital after finding none inside Yemen, or activists, artists, and creatives denied space for expression at home by authoritarian power cloaked in religious and political garb.
Just as earlier migrants forged the Free Yemeni cause from the early 1940s and paved the way for the September Revolution that gave birth to a new Yemen, today’s exiles—scientists, entrepreneurs, and creatives of all kinds—will inevitably drive the transformation long awaited by Yemenis of all classes and affiliations.
Yet a pressing question remains: do today’s dispersed Yemenis maintain the deep emotional bond with their homeland that their forebears once embodied? Or will the ease and comfort of their new abodes gradually absorb them, dissolving them into new cultural, social, and economic fabrics, producing a “cosmopolitan citizen” who transcends ancestral roots in favor of assimilated identities
