Page 133 - Arabian Studies (V)

The Yemeni Poet al-Zubayri 123
the Turks were driven out of the Yemen after the first Ottoman occupa­
tion, the Imams said that the lands they had held were lawful (halal—at
their disposal) because of the unbelief (kufr) of the Turks. When Imam
Yahya rc-took the Yemen after 1918, he considered the Isma‘III (Fatiml-
Tayyibi) areas lawful (abaha-ha) and turned their lands in the Manakhah
district and Taybah into waqf.
72. See fn. 50.
73. Ijtihad is defined as ‘exerting oneself to form an opinion’ in a case,
or to form a rule of law by applying analogy (qiyas) to the Qur’an and
Sunnah. It is opposed to taqlid, ‘the adoption of the utterances or actions
of another as authoritative in their correctness without investigating his
reasons’. (Cf. my ‘The Zaidis’ in Arberry-Beckingham, Religion in the
Middle East, Cambridge, 1969, ii, 292). Muh. b. ‘All al-Shawkanl, al-
Qawlal-mufidfiadillat al-ijtihad wa-j-taqlid, ed. ‘Abd al-Rahman ‘Abd
al-Khaliq, Kuwait, 1396/1976, has a chapter on the prohibition of taqlid
and against the tenet of sadd bab al-ijtihad, closing of the door of indepen­
dent judgement which he describes as a foul heresy (bid'ahsham*ah)\
74. An extensive if relatively little known Zaydl literature exists. Imam
Ahmad had a few major writings published in Egypt but now many more
are being printed.
75. The fourteen qualifications required of the Imam are set forth in R.
Strothmann, Der Staatsrecht der Zaiditen, Strasbourg, 1912, 80.
76. He seems to mean the shape given Islam by the four Sunni schools.
77. I.e. Malik, Ibn Hanbal, Abu Hanifah and al-Shafi‘I.
78. Al-Hadi was the first Zaydi Imam of the Yemen.
79. This is one of the fourteen qualifications. Muhammad b. Isma‘11 al-
Amir, Subul al-salam, 3rd edn., Muh ‘Abd al-‘Az!z al-KhulI, Cairo, 1369
H., iii 145, says, ‘In the province of the Yemen Fatimi women, (i.e. of the
Sayyids and Ashraf) have been prevented from that marriage which God
made lawful to them, on account of the doctrine (qawl) of some of those
following the school of the Hadawiyyah, namely that marriage of a Fatimi
woman to anyone but a Fatimi man is forbidden, without their citing any
evidence (dalil) to this effect. It is not a doctrine of the Imam of the
school/doctrine (madhhab) al-Hadl, on him be peace; on the contrary, he
married his daughters to the Tabaris and this doctrine only arose after him
in the days of the Imam Ahmad b. Sulayman (al-Mutawakkil, 532-66/
1138/71) and its (? the Hadawiyyah) leading house followed them and said,
in language which speaks for itself, “Their ladies (shara'ij) for the Fatimls
are forbidden except to those the same as themselves”. All this is without
knowledge (7/m), guidance or Book.’ He asks how many Believing women
(Mu’minat) have been deprived of marriage because of the pride and arro­
gance of their guardians? Marriage within a woman’s social group is of
course not a practice confined to the Fatimi Sayyids.
80. In Musnad al-Imam Zayd, Beirut, 1966, 358, 360, E. Griffini edit.,
247, no. 873, there is reference to fighting the ahl al-baghy and al-fi’at al-
baghiyah, but no theory is enunciated.
81. Zubayrl’s interpretation of history is tendentious. In the first place
ijtihad is not specifically ‘Alawi. As A. K. Kazi, ‘Notes on the development