Jabal Rāziḥ is a high massif which lies on the western edge of the Yemeni highlands overlooking the coastal plain (Tihāmah) of the Red Sea next to the border with Saudi Arabia. Rāziḥ has impressive natural defenses. Jabal Ḥurum (alt. 2790m), its highest summit, which is crowned by two fortresses, guards the only pass into the massif from the north or east. The deep gorge of Wādī Khulab creates a formidable barrier with the Khawlān massif to the southeast. And in the west and south the slopes of Jabal Rāziḥ plunge from summits of over 2500 meters to meet the...

The people of Rāziḥ are differentiated and ranked according to several criteria, innate and ascribed, with profound effects on their potential for wielding power or influence. Men monopolize the politico-legal sphere as a taken-for-granted gender right, while discriminating among themselves on the basis of age, descent, and occupation. A minority of men is therefore socially and politically advantaged, while a majority of men, and all women, are disadvantaged or subordinated. This chapter outlines, in necessarily schematic fashion, the values, rituals, and behaviors which express and sustain this institutionalized inequality, with particular focus on those pertinent to understanding the politico-legal system...

Rāziḥīs have a strong sense of common identity based on inhabiting the same remote massif, and their limited contact, until recently, with other regions. A few Rāziḥīs traveled beyond their mountains for trade, for religious studies, to conduct the pilgrimage to Mecca, or to petition shaykhs or government officials. But in contrast to the people of poorer regions in the Tihāmah, Lower Yemen, and Hadramaut, few emigrated to work before the 1970s because they could make a living at home. Rāziḥīs were also too tied by agriculture and trade, and too far from state centers and most military engagements, to...

We have seen that the tribes of Rāẓiḥ are constituted by a contractual relationship between hereditary shaykhs and their constituents. In order to understand the operation and longevity of this tribal system we therefore need to examine the institution of tribal leadership more closely, and especially to consider how certain clans have monopolized shaykhships (sing.mashīkh) for centuries, and how shaykhs gain, maintain, or lose power and influence. This chapter will explore these issues by focusing mainly on the shaykhly dynasty of al-Naẓīr, Ilt Faraḥ.

According to Ilt Faraḥ, their dynasty was founded by an immigrant from coastal ʿAsīr. The...

We have seen that Rāziḥ is a zone of intensive trade, that each tribe is embedded in a matrix of other tribes, and that its people are interconnected by countless ties of friendship, marriage, and economic interdependence which necessitate their constantly crossing tribal borders to shop, work, or fulfill their social obligations. Local fortunes also depend on the free flow of trade within the whole of northwest Yemen. Rāziḥīs therefore need order and safety to be maintained over a much larger area than the territories controlled by individual tribes. These realities are reflected in centuries of formal agreements and alliances...

The high population density of Rāziḥ, the consequent pressure on resources, the high value of crops, and the constant human traffic between tribes create a favorable environment for disputes and crimes. But their destructive potential is offset by a countervailing drive for order fueled by religious and secular ideals, and by a vivid awareness that everyone’s livelihood is intensely vulnerable to major disorder (ghāghah) when people dare not leave home, and work and trade are paralyzed. Most therefore respect “the law” as an abstract ideal, and yearn for order and security (imin-wa-amān)—both within their own mountains, and throughout their...

Within the sanctity of the home, where outside interference would insult patriarchal “honor,” offenses are routinely dealt with, as elsewhere in Yemen, by members of the extended family (see Mundy 1995: 56). People can also order another family to “deal with your offender!” (liff khāmilak), on the understanding that families are responsible for the reckless behavior of their members, and best positioned to restrain them; “only the bark can enclose the stick,” as they say. But tribal or state authorities invariably become involved, and demand to be, when people cannot solve their own problems and endanger public order and security....

Theshibābof Rāziḥ strut and swagger, projecting a short-fused, uncompromising, tough-guy image. Men have boisterous public arguments. Leaders hurl abuse at their adversaries during confrontational meetings. Every market sells daggers, guns, and ammunition. Men wear daggers, and sometimes carry guns. There is much dagger-waving and celebratory gunfire at weddings, circumcision ceremonies, and religious celebrations. And men march in processions and attend meetings festooned with weapons. These displays of symbolic violence do not, however, usually signal imminent hostilities. They are rather intended to proclaim individual and group strength, deter insults, and publicize the ability to defend interests by peaceful legal...

For most of the four centuries considered in this final part of the book, Rāziḥ was “ruled” by Zaydīdawlahs. Before considering the effect on its tribes of constant state governance, it is necessary to summarize key features of Zaydism and the Zaydī state, with particular reference to the long period of Qāsimī rule which followed the first Ottoman occupation of Yemen between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹

The first Zaydī state in Yemen was founded over a thousand years ago by Yaḥyā b. Ḥūsayn (d. 298/911), a Hijazisharīfand scholar (ʿālim) of great learning and vaunting political ambition....

In the early 1870s the Ottomans again occupied ʿAsīr and parts of highland Yemen (though not this time Rāziḥ), and again stimulated a resurgence and expansion of the Zaydī state. In 1879 a non-Qāsimīsayyid, al-Hādī Sharaf al-Dīn (1879–90), announced his claim (daʿwah) to the imāmate, seized Ṣaʿdah from a rival, and from there launched an anti-Ottomanjihād. Soon after, the leaders of “the whole tribe of al-Naẓīr” agreed:

Should God send them a true imām, and all Rāziḥ accepts his rule . . . then the shaykhs anddawlahof al-Naẓīr should treat with him, and will comply...

Rāziḥīs realized they must accommodate to the republican state. But they still regarded the state-tribe relationship as subject to negotiation and contractual agreement, with reciprocal commitments. In early 1970, therefore, soon after the Civil War ended, they drafted the terms of their capitulation. These expressed their perennial political and economic concerns, all obviously intensified in the radical new circumstances. The government, they stipulated, should: rule justly according to the precepts of Holy Law; appoint only religious and reliable men, and dismiss corrupt ones; administerwaqfsas their creators intended; extract onlyzakāt, not customs dues (jamārik) “lest people abandon the...