Page 100 - Arabiab Studies (IV)

90 Arabian Studies IV

the Persians to help free South Arabia and a Persian army which
landed at Aden expelled the Ethiopians from Yemen; from which
time the country was governed by Persia until the conversion to
Islam of Badhan, the Persian satrap, in 628. Tradition has it that
Kamanin island became a Persian prison camp.4

Kamaran during the first centuries of Islam
The early Muslims of Arabia maintained the seafaring traditions of
their ancestors and it would be a reasonable supposition that
Kamaran was frequented by the Muslims as Islamic influence
spread from Arabia across and down the Red Sea to the Sudan,
Ethiopia and East Africa.5 There are, unfortunately, no references
to the island during these years.
In the early years of Islam the whole of Yemen—and thus
Kamaran—was under the central authority of the Caliphs in
Medina, then of the Umayyads ruling from Damascus and finally
of the ‘Abbasids in Baghdad. In the ensuing struggles during which
Yemen broke away from the central authority of Baghdad, the
country was ruled by a number of dynasties very few of which
could claim Yemeni origin. For some time the Qarmatian Ibn
al-Fadl, originally of Iraq, seized both the Tihamah and Kamaran
from the Ziyadites, themselves of foreign origin and whose founder
had been sent in 818 by Caliph Ma’mun from Baghdad to restore
the Tihamah to ‘Abbasid authority. Kamaran again fell under
foreign domination when it was seized by the Ziyadites’ Abyssinian
slaves who established the Najaljid dynasty in the eleventh
century. It was next the turn of the Isma‘IlI §ulaybids, acting under
the authority of the Egyptian Caliphs, to establish their ascendency
over the whole of Yemen in 1062, but less than a century later a
new dynasty, the Mahdites, restored the country to Yemeni rule.
This re-establishment of local authority was short-lived for in 1173,
after only fourteen years of Mahdite rule, all Yemen was occupied
by Saladin’s brother, Turanshah, founder of the Ayyubid dynasty
in Yemen. Their authority, too, was of short duration for, in 1229,
Nur al-Dln b. Rasul, a deputy of the Ayyubids, declared his
independence and founded the Rasulid dynasty. Nur al-DIn
claimed descent from the Himyarite Tubba's through the
Ghassanids of Syria, but he is usually regarded as being of Turkish
origin.6

.