In short, you could travel around the country in peace — if you avoided areas dominated by wild and proud independent tribes, where you could have easily been taken hostage. But in other places, one could have walked without looking back, spoken without lowering one’s voice, and communicated at ease with the locals. For them, an exotic foreigner was new and aroused sincere and usually benevolent interest. This was in stark contrast to many other Arab countries, particularly Iraq, where I spent three years and was constantly provoked into silence by the local security services. And free communication with the Iraqi people was out of the question — it was deadly, especially for them.
In short, Yemen did not have an atmosphere of crushing, clammy fear like the one Saddam had created in Iraq or the one the Houthis are now creating in the country. The Saleh government, while not abandoning economic cooperation with the USSR, was still oriented toward the United States and other Western countries that supported Sana’a as a counterweight to Soviet influence. The USSR, on the other hand, turned South Yemen into its own semi-protectorate, claiming to have established some semblance of socialism there — in other words, failing to solve the problem of chronic shortages. In the north, however, the rial was freely exchanged for all Western currencies and capitalist plenty prevailed.
A temporary Sunni triumph
In those years, the Sunni Muslims were the country’s privileged religious community. In September 1962, they ousted the Shiite Zaydis from power in a military coup — officially termed a “revolution.” Before that, the country had been a Shiite state, an imamate, for more than a thousand years — a unique case in the Arab world. But by the early 1960s, Sunnis had become the majority of the population. They represented the emerging petty bourgeoisie and a kind of urban middle class, and they also held a dominant position in the army. Therefore, the transfer of power to them seemed inevitable and even progressive. The Zaydis remained in the majority only in the mountainous regions of the north, especially in the province of Saada on the border with Saudi Arabia.
At the same time, the Zaydis as such were considered to be very relative Shiites, and their dogma and rituals were so strikingly different from those of Iran that it was difficult for the ayatollahs to regard them as fellow believers. The key difference was that the Zaydis did not recognize Iranian mysticism, with its belief in a hidden Imam, a Messiah who would appear and defeat the false prophet Dajjal and all of Islam’s enemies and establish a just rule over the entire earth. They also did not recognize the authority of the ayatollahs. In general, Zaydi theology was considered very tolerant and liberal, and in some respects it was the successor to the theology of the Mu’tazilites, who believed in free will and considered reason to be the criterion of faith. They were once associated with unfulfilled hopes for an era of revival and enlightenment in the Islamic world.
The fact that the Houthis have now embraced Tehran and become loyal allies of the ayatollahs is considered heresy and treason by classical Zaydi theologians. Now Sana’a and other Houthi-controlled cities are festooned with green flags — replicas of those in Iran. There are also portraits of Khomeini, as well as of Qassem Soleimani, who commanded the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ most important unit, the Quds Force, until his assassination by the U.S. in 2020. And the Houthis’ official slogan is everywhere, almost identical to a similar motto from revolutionary Iran: “God Is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam!”