Page 113 - Arabian Studies (V)

The Yemeni Poet Al-Zubayri 103
sort, but managed to convince the populace that no reward should be
expected in return for their support and service, their slogan handed down
by tradition being:
‘Whosoever loves us, the People of the House (Ahl al-Bayt), let him
make ready a cloak against tribulation.’59
It is sufficient for one of them to ascend the throne that he should then
say to the people: God it was who appointed him ruler. God it was who
commanded the people to obey, serve, and revere him, endure and die for
the sake of supporting him. His authority is not derived from the populace,
nor through the favour of the populace. On the contrary, it is a privilege
bestowed by Heaven. He is God’s shadow, God’s Vicegerent and Caliph.
[11]
6. The function of the Imam
In accordance with this psychology60 the Imam applies himself to the
burdens of his office, but these burdens are virtually confined to confiscat­
ing the wealth of the populace in the name of the zakat-iax,6] the suppres­
sion of popular tremors in the name of the Holy War,62 to doing battle with
oppressors, and then, to the building of a mosque with the name of the
Imam, to the vicinity of which generally is adjoined the dome of this Imam’s
tomb,63 to prolong his spiritual influence even when he is in the grave, then to
(bequeathing) a generous legacy64 of land which he leaves to his sons and his
grandsons, after stealing it from the populace by any sort of means.
As for the chief message the Imam takes upon himself (to deliver) it is the
propagation of the spirit of asceticism, abandoning building a thriving life,
along with finding fault in any inclination towards building and construc­
tion, apart from Imamic castles, mosques, and domes of tombs.65
Here lies the magic key to the secret locked up in the history of the
Yemen for over a thousand years, this era of rigid paralysis. When the
human race was still in its cradle, the Yemen had a civilisation, a culture
and diverse arts of living, the most important of which were the arts of
architecture and engineering of the dams without which the Yemen cannot
live, but these long Imamic era have gone by without a single dam
remaining in the whole of Yemen, whereas the barbarous colonising
Abyssinians, who stayed no longer than seventy years in the Yemen in the
remotest dark ages, [12] were inspired by the natural circumstances of the
Yemen and its agricultural requirements to renew the structure of the Dam
in Ma’rib after its collapse.
The other preoccupation of any Imam is to consolidate his spiritual posi­
tion among the tribes under the pretext of belonging to the party of the
People of the House, so that it becomes firmly established in the mentality
of the populace in the Upper segment ... that the Imam is the shadow of
God, his Vicegerent by right, and his standing like that of the Apostle of
God,66 God bless and honour him, whose relation with the people and
whose position with regard to them is ordained by Divine legislation in this
holy verse:
‘It is not for a believing man or a believing woman to have a choice in
their affair when God and His Apostle have decided an affair.’67