Iran And The Yemeni Hornet's Nest: The Latest Nation To Embrace The Khomeinist Ideology
03 April 2015
By Amir Taheri
Until a few weeks ago, Yemen hardly featured in the Iranian political
landscape.
Now, however, it gets top billing as the latest nation to embrace the
Khomeinist ideology.
''The people of Yemen have joined Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon in a common
struggle for the glory of Islam,'' said Ayatollah Ali Saeedi, the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corp's religious commissar. Last Monday, Iran's Kayhan
newspaper, reflecting the views of ''Supreme Guide'' Ali Khamenei, reported
that forces were being deployed to capture Aden and five southern Yemeni
provinces.
Are we witnessing a new episode in centuries of Iranian interest in what was
once known as Arabia Felix or Happy Arabia?
Iran's first intervention came in the 6th century CE when Yemeni Prince Sayf
Ibn Dhi-Yazan traveled to the Sassanid capital Ctesiphon (Mada'en to Arabs)
for an audience with Khosrow Anushiravan, known to the Arabs as Kasra.
Sayf wanted help to dislodge the Aksumite dynasty in southern Yemen and beat
off perennial Abyssinian incursions. Kasra obliged by sending an
expeditionary force of around 600 men led by Vahraz, a bombastic general and
a master of self-promotion, a bit like Gen. Qassem Suleimani today.
The project succeeded and Sayf was able to impose his Himyarite dynasty on
most of the territory. Legend has it that an army of jinns joined the Persian
expeditionary force to achieve victory. Sayf's mother was supposed to have
been a princess of the jinns.
However, developing grandiose ambitions, Vahraz refused to return home, and
carved out a mini-kingdom for himself.
According to history mixed with legend, as is often the case in our region,
the Persian colony in Yemen became a magnet for malcontents from other parts
of the empire. Salman Al-Farsi, a Persian aristocrat from Kazeroun, who later
converted to Islam and became a companion of the Prophet, is supposed to have
been among them after leaving his post as governor of Ctesiphon as a result
of royal court intrigues. However, within the first decades of the 7th
century all traces of a Persian presence in Arabia Felix had disappeared,
confirming the will-o'-the-wisp nature of imperial dreams.
The next time Yemen caught the attention of Iranians was in the 9th century.
By that time, Iran had largely converted to Islam and been drawn into the new
religion's endless schisms. While most Iranian converts were Sunnis, there
were also small Shi'ite communities in several places, notably the Caspian
littoral. Even then, Shi'ites were divided by dynastic and theological feuds.
One Iranian Shi'ite kingdom was that of Alavis, who regarded Zayd Ibn Ali, a
grandson of Al-Husayn—who was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad—as Imam,
while other Shi'ites followed another grandson, Muhammad. Located in Gilan,
the first state created by Zaydis lasted from 864 to 900 in its initial form
and from 914 to 928 in a smaller version.
As pressure from dynasties created by other Islamic sects grew, the Zaydis of
Gilan dispatched missionaries to other Muslim lands in search of converts
and, if possible, lands to rule. The enterprise succeeded in creating Zaydi
states in central Arabia, North Africa, southern Spain, and more importantly,
Yemen, which was to become the longest lasting home of Zaydism.
With Yemen falling under Ottoman domination—though it was never
annexed—contacts with Iran dwindled. Then, the imposition of Twelver Shi'ism
as state religion in Iran under the Safavids added a political dimension to
theological differences. Zaydis were accused of being crypto-Mu'tazilites,
preferring reason over faith.
Whenever sectarianism reached fever pitch in Twelver seminaries, Zaydis,
along with other offshoots of Shi'ism such as Nizaris, were branded
''deviants'' or worse.
For almost 1,000 years there was little direct contact between Iran and
Yemen.
Iranians knew Yemen largely as a concept—a shibboleth of myth and history.
They remembered that King (or Prophet) Solomon had had an affair with Bilqis
(the Queen of Sheba), and that Bahram, the Sassanid king, had a Yemeni
concubine. But that was almost all they knew.
In the 1960s, when Iran, worried about Nasserist domination in Yemen, started
raising its profile there, only one cleric in Qom, Ayatollah Wahid Khorasani,
knew something about Zaydism.
Although Iran supported Imam Badr Ibn Ahmad in the Yemeni civil war and began
to take fresh interest in that remote land, the Communists' takeover in South
Yemen persuaded Iranian policymakers to set up a Yemen Desk.
In the early 1970s, Iran's involvement in crushing the Communist insurgency
in Dhofar, Oman, further heightened Yemen's profile because the
insurgents—trained and armed by the USSR and its Cuban and East German
allies—were based out of South Yemen.
At the time, Tehran was concerned about Soviets gaining a presence in the
Gulf of Aden and thus being in a position to threaten the maritime shipping
lanes used by oil tankers. The Soviet navy had flown its flag in the Iraqi
port of Umm Qasar and the south Yemeni ports of Mukalla and Aden. Reports
often concocted by the CIA also spoke of a Soviet aero-naval base on the
Yemeni island of Socotra. Iranian strategists formulated possible responses
to the Soviets seizing control of Ras Musandam, dominating the Gulf of Aden
from Socotra and threatening the Bab El-Mandeb strait from Aden as well as
the Ethiopian and Somali coasts.
Though often fabricated or widely exaggerated, those fears helped make Yemen
an obsession in Tehran during this period. (In 2007, thanks to special
permission from president Ali Abdullah Saleh, I visited the island of Socotra,
where I ran into a herd of goats but found absolutely no trace of any Soviet
base.)
By 1974 Iran had found a strong ally in Col. Ibrahim Al-Hamdi, who seized
power in a coup with the help of future president Saleh.
As president, Hamdi visited Tehran and became the darling of the Iranian
establishment.
A paragon of charm, he had ambitious plans for modernizing Yemen, and the
Shah was more than willing to help, starting with an aid package worth an
estimated 100 million US dollars. Over 2,000 Iranian technicians, operating
under the label of the ''Universal Welfare Legion,'' were sent to Yemen to
help build roads, clinics and schools. A military mission headed by Gen.
Khorsand had the task of reforming the Yemeni army's Soviet-style structure
which was established during the period of Egyptian–Nasserist domination.
Work also began on building mooring facilities for the Iranian navy in Al-Salif
and Al-Hudaydah. Some mullahs of Qom and Mash'had were also reportedly bribed
to issue fatwas formally acknowledging Zaydis as Shi'ites.
However, by 1977, when Tehran policymakers believed they had it all worked
out in Yemen, Hamdi was dead, murdered in a coup which was, once again,
engineered by Saleh. I was personally deeply saddened by this, if only
because I had written that Yemen was my favorite Arab country and, having
interviewed Hamdi, presented him as ''a ray of hope in a world of darkness.''
In a state of panic, Tehran had to arrange for the speedy repatriation of
Iranian military and civilian technicians sent to help Yemen become
''modernized'' as ''Happy Arabia'' entered an unhappy period that was to
witness the murder of yet another president, Ahmad Al-Ghashmi, a series of
massacres in Aden and Sana'a, two civil wars, a reunion and a break-up, to
mention only a few incidents. The dream of an Imperial Iranian Navy policing
the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Aden vanished like smoke.
I remember a remark by the then-foreign minister, Abbas Ali Khalatbari: ''We
didn't know that Yemen was such a hornet's nest.''
Indeed, we didn't, and we still don't.
Amir Taheri was born in Ahvaz, southwest Iran, and educated
in Tehran, London and Paris. He was Executive Editor-in-Chief of the daily
Kayhan in Iran (1972-79). In 1980-84, he was Middle East Editor for the
Sunday Times. In 1984-92, he served as member of the Executive Board of the
International Press Institute (IPI). Between 1980 and 2004, he was a
contributor to the International Herald Tribune. He has written for the Wall
Street Journal, the New York Post, the New York Times, the London Times, the
French magazine Politique Internationale, and the German weekly Focus.
Between 1989 and 2005, he was editorial writer for the German daily Die Welt.
Taheri has published 11 books, some of which have been translated into 20
languages. He has been a columnist for Asharq Alawsat since 1987. Taheri's
latest book "The Persian Night" is published by Encounter Books in London and
New York.
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