Page 21 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

8 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

education returned in high excitement over what they had seen and heard of
the resurgence of Arab power, of the growing sense of Arab unity, and of the
impending triumphs that awaited the Arab peoples once this unity had been
achieved. Similar impressions of the desirability and irresistibility of national­
ism as a political force in Asia were brought to Aden by young Hadramis who
had derived these impressions from their travels to and from the Hadrami
communities in India, Malaya and the East Indies. Striking confirmation that
nationalism’s hour had come was held to be afforded by events in Algeria,
where revolt had broken out against French rule, and in Egypt, where revolu­
tion had swept away the monarchy and brought to power a young and vigorous
republican government under Gamal Abdul Nasser, committed to the expul­
sion of the British from their base in the Suez Canal zone.
A constant theme of the Aden demagogues was the ‘artificiality’ of the
separation of ‘south Yemen’ (Aden and the protectorates) from the Yemen
proper, and the inevitability and the sublime propriety of their unification. To
this insistent invocation of the spirit of pan-Arabism were linked denunciations
of British ‘imperialism’ and demands for swift independence from British rule,
couched in terms to appeal to racial and religious prejudices. Particular stress
was laid upon the unfair operation of the franchise in Aden, which gave the
vote to Europeans, Christians, Jews, Indians, Hindus, and other lesser beings
of God’s creation, while denying it to the far greater numbers of Muslim Arabs
from the Yemen and the protectorates. The question of the franchise lay at the
very heart of the political situation in Aden and the direction its future
development would take. With the introduction of elected members to the
legislative council the first step had been taken away from purely representa­
tive government of the type normally associated with Crown colonies and
towards the attainment of fully responsible government in which all members
of the legislature would be elected. To have extended the franchise during this
transitional period to the Yemenis and the protectorate Arabs would have been
to resign Aden’s political destiny into the hands of transient foreign labourers
who enjoyed no such political or civil rights in their own countries. Moreover,
since the campaign mounted by the leaders of the Aden TUC from 1955
onwards for the extension of the franchise to the Yemenis and the protectorate
Arabs was conducted in the name of Arab nationalism, it was subversive of the
very foundations of Adeni society. For the inhabitants of Aden, a multi-racial,
polyglot community imbued with a mercantile and cosmopolitan outlook,
subjection to the constraints implicit in a narrowly conceived nationalism
could spell nothing but ruination.
The political climate in Aden in the early and middle 1950s was further
unsettled, and the Aden nationalists correspondingly encouraged, by disturb­
ances in the hinterland, where a campaign of harassment against the Western
Protectorate rulers was being conducted by the neighbouring imam of Yemen,
Ahmad ibn Yahya al-Hamidi. Like his predecessors in the Hamidian line,