Page 111 - Arabian Studies (V)

The Yemeni Poet Al-Zubayri 101
populace. This is because profound patriotic sentiment and the innate sense
of unity34 are of such stubbornly unbending force that they cannot be
smashed into fragments by mere personal pacts between rulers [6] and colo­
nisers that are no more than scraps of paper.
(d) Moreover the discontent which is shared by and pervades all classes in
the independent part, and is widespread throughout every district, every
tribe, town and village, was and remains stronger than all the stratagems to
rend asunder and separate. On the contrary indeed it has created a sancti­
fied bond of suffering and has given a unity to the aims, sentiments, and
struggle of the populace, more especially once the Liberals assumed the
task of propaganda on behalf of popular unity, and drew the attention of
the sons of the populace to the diabolical plot35 which Tyranny and Colo­
nialism are engineering against their national patriotic entity.
(e) Local Yemeni unity—we mean by this only that it should be strength­
ened and pervade all parts of the independent segment as between each
other, and that it should be effected in the parts of the occupied segment
held under duress, but with the provision that a joint struggle of the sons of
the populace in both segments should rise up against Colonialism, Despot­
ism, and partition, to prepare the way for complete political unity between
the two principal parts ... although unification between them will not be
completed until after liberation from Colonialism.
[7]
4. The menace of the Imamate to national unity
(a) From its foundation the Imamate has been basically a sectarian
factional concept, embraced by a half36 of the sons of the populace from
ancient time, namely the Zaydiyyah, the inhabitants of the Upper Yemen
only.
(h) As for the majority of the populace in the Lower Yemen, Tihamah,
and the whole of the Occupied Yemen, they do not profess adhesion to this
Imamate, nor do they consider it has any right to dominate over them. On
the contrary they see in it an authority imposed upon them both politically
and spiritually. This Imamate does not stop at the limits of its political
authority but imposes tenets, religious rites37 and sectarian laws on half of
the populace, incompatible with the sect to which it adheres.
(d) It is of the nature of this arbitrary rule that it leaves a bitter feeling in
the majority of the populace, turning the division into a dark and fearful
shadow which envelops the country and perpetually threatens its progress
—so too, it makes the Imamic government in the eyes of this segment like a
government alien to it which expresses neither its own will nor its own
creed. Even worse than this is that it considers it (the Imamic government)
as a government particular to the Upper Yemen only, as if the inhabitants
of the Upper Yemen as a whole constitute a ruling stratum of society main­
taining for itself a monopoly of rule, and making a mere lebensraum for
itself of the Lower Yemen. So it is—while the inhabitants of the Upper
Yemen themselves are untouched by this false invention3? and injustice.
Yet, on the contrary, they (the inhabitants of the Upper Yemen) have
remained longest in endurance of the bitterness of Imamic tyranny, and