Page 104 - Arabian Studies (V)

94 Arabian Studies V

lectures at Fu’ad I University, because of course he possessed no
university entrance qualifications. He is said to have returned to the
Yemen in 1360/1941 during World War II, and, according to one
writer, only to find conditions there worse!
In 1944, as has been seen, he, Ahmad Nu‘man and Sayyid Zayd
b. ‘All al-Mawshakl (the nisbah is to Mawshak, a village outside
Dhamar) fled to Aden where they set up a branch of the Liberal
Party and ran a newspaper. Zubayri was on a mission to Sa‘udl
Arabia when the ‘Abdullah al-Wazlr revolt of 1948 was quelled and
so escaped imprisonment in Hajjah. He spent some years in
Pakistan, but went to Egypt after Faruq’s deposition and
embarked on his long political campaign against the regime in the
Yemen. He published polemics in verse, notably Thawrat al-shi*r
(The Revolution of Poetry, Cairo, 1382/1962) just before the
officer coup in San‘a\ and also in prose. An enthusiast at first for
the ‘Revolution’, he soon became disillusioned6 and, trying to form
a break-away party, he was murdered at Rajuzah/Arjuzah of Jabal
Barat in 1965. A verse composed in his despair shortly before his
death is frequently quoted:
Bahathtu ‘an hibat-in ahbu-ka ya watani
Fa-lam ajid laka ilia qalbiya ‘l-dami.
Country mine, a gift to give you I sought
Save my heart, bleeding for you, I found nought.
In the spring of 1977 I attended the festival (mihrajan) of
Zubayri at San‘a’ University—perhaps it was a sort of triumph.7

Anti-Sayyidpropaganda: the ‘Adnan versus Qahtan motive:
Ahmad al-Shami’s counter-blasts
Sayyid Ahmad al-Shami who was appointed Yemeni Mutawakkilite
Ambassador in London by Imam Ahmad in 1961, and, after the
officer coup in San‘a’ on September 26th, 1962, became Royalist
Foreign Minister, a poet and writer, pokes sly fun at the Yemeni
Liberal (al-Ahrar) intellectuals who made the onslaught on the
Hashimites and developed the theme of antagonism in the Yemen
between ‘Adnan and Qahtan.8 ‘Adnan is the eponymous ancestor
of the northern Arabs and ergo of the Yemeni Hashimites/‘AlawIs
/Sayyids, while Qahtan is the eponym of the southern Arabs. ‘In
this present age of ours,’ he says,9 ‘some men of letters, such as the
author Ahmad b. ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Mu‘allimI10 and Mr
Muhammad Ahmad Nu‘man and their followers have attempted to
stir up the subject of Qahtanism and ‘Adnanism and revive ethnic
and sectarian chauvinism, but their propaganda would have won