Page 123 - Arabian Studies (V)

The Yemeni Poet Al-Zubayri 113
the Qasr of San‘a’ and the matter was ventilated, but he decided
that al-Amir should stay in prison (Dar al-Adab) and he seems to
have been kept under comfortable house arrest in the Qasr with the
naqlb Almas, one of the Imam’s Emirs, for a month or two.
Muhammad b. ‘All on the other hand the Imam al-Mahdl threw
into prison, confiscating his 14 horses and his iqta‘\and in Dawran
and Hubaysh, and he died there. About thirty other persons of the
Imamic Family were imprisoned at the same time. He also dealt
with Yusuf al-‘AjamI al-Imaml, an Ithna'asharl ShTI an open
‘RafidT133 who had come to San‘a’ in the days of the Imam al-
Mansur and was a teacher at his court (mudarris bi-hadrati-hi), the
chief instigator of the trouble. Al-Mahdl expelled him from the
Yemen and quiet was restored. Al-Mahdl, though sympathetic to
al-Amir’s views and ijtihad in general, appointed a new preacher,
but al-Amir continued his teaching, writing, and giving Fatwas
mr
The real reason for the attack on al-Amir, his biographers main­
tain, was because of his reading (with students of course) the Sunni
books of Tradition (kutub al-hadith al-ummahat), and his preoccu­
pation with al-Sunnat al-Nabawiyyah—i.e., Sunnism, teaching it,
disseminating it from the pulpit and the like. There was, says al-
Shawkanl, no harm in this, since the Zaydl Imams used these
books in their compilations (musannafat) from the time the said
books arrived in the Yemen. The ordinary folk accused al-Amir of
nasb, hostility to the ‘Alawls, and people also suspected the
Khallfah, al-Mahdl, of being a Sunni and sympathising with
Sunnis.134
It seems to have been after this incident that the Dhu
Muhammad and Dhu Husayn of Jabal Barat, who were at that
time a strong confederation (jamrah) which none could withstand,
collected tribal armies and threatened to come out against al-Mahdl
in support of the (Zaydl) Doctrine/School/Rite (nusrat al-
Madhhab) since the Imam was supporting al-Amir on his course of
destruction of it. As ZubayrI says, they had to be bought off by a
bribe of an increase in their stipends of 20,000 riyals per annum.
Al-Amir, to judge from the histories, does not seem to have been
animated by any motive of struggling against the Imams as ZubayrI
avers, nor do the Imams seem to have been opposed to him. The
historians do not suggest that he made a deliberate gesture of
dropping their names from the prayer—which in Islam would be
tantamount to rebellion. Nor yet can the accusation of his enemies
that he was anti-HashimI/‘AlawI be justified. The Diwan speaks of
them in the highest terms as 'usbah ‘Alawiyyah hum zubdat al-
kurama* wa-*l-ashraf.135 Imam al-Mahdl entrusted him with the