Page 127 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

124 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

brigandage and blood-letting were still far from uncommon, despite the trucial
system; and the Hadrami Bedouin Legion, a British-officered force raised by

Ingrams in 1939 to keep the peace, had to maintain a constant vigilance to
prevent or suppress outbreaks of tribal disorder.
With their traditional avenues of emigration to India and the East Indies
closed to them, many Hadramis in the 1950s began to search elsewhere for
work and mercantile opportunities. They journeyed in their hundreds to Aden
colony, to the oil states of the upper Gulf, and even to more distant lands.
Inevitably they were influenced by the heady notions they encountered, of
Arab nationalism, socialism, revolution and the like, so that when they

returned to the Hadramaut they were impatient to overturn the existing order
of things, more particularly the supremacy of the sada and sultans, and the
tutelary authority exercised by Britain. Discontent with the privileged position
of the sada was nothing new among the lower ranks of Hadrami society. It first
took organized shape in this century in the Hadrami community in the Dutch
East Indies on the eve of the First World War, when the community was split

by a controversy over the centuries-old interdiction upon marriage between a
woman of the saiyid class and a non-saiyid. At first the controversy was
conducted solely at the level of theological disputation, with each side soliciting
judicial opinions in its favour from eminent Muslim ulama. As time went by,
however, it took on more and more of a secular aspect, assuming the propor­
tions of a popular movement against the social and economic, as well as the
religious, ascendancy of the sada in Hadrami society, and against the trans­

plantation of this ascendancy by sada from the Hadramaut to the Hadrami
colonies overseas.
Although the Irshadi movement, as it was called (from the name of the
society created by non-sada Hadramis in Batavia in 1914 - the jamiyyat
al-irshad, or ‘Religious and Guidance Association’), was restricted to the

Hadrami communities in the East Indies and Singapore, knowledge of its
existence inevitably penetrated the Hadramaut between the wars. Now that
the dominance of thesada had been challenged overseas, it was only a matter of
time before it was similarly challenged by the non-sadtz majority in the Had­
ramaut. Whereas religion had been the catalyst which acted to bring the
Irshadi movement in the East Indies into being, the anti-sa^Za agitation which
made its appearance in the Hadramaut in the 1950s was inspired by Ara
nationalism. Nationalist precepts were spread through the agency of the soci ,

sports and welfare clubs which sprang up in the principal towns and viages
during the decade, and by the ubiquitous transistor radio, which enable t e
Hadramis to listen to the revolutionary nationalist propaganda broadcast rom
Cairo and (after the Yemeni revolution of 1962) from Sana. While nationa ism

supplied the vehicle for the expression of political discontent in t e a
ramaut, the springs of this discontent had little to do with nationalism perse.
They were what they had always been, viz., the jealousy and resentment e