Imam Ahmad of Yemen
Imam Ahmad bin Yahya was the Zaydi imam and king of Yemen from March 1948, when he took Sanaa from his father's murderers with the tribes of the north and let them sack it, to September 1962, when he died in his bed at Taiz and his son Muhammad al-Badr was overthrown by the army a week later. It was fourteen years of a rule that the country remembered for its terror and its theatre. There were the bulging eyes that his subjects said could see the devil, the morphine he took for his rheumatism and the injections that nearly killed him in 1959. There were the beheadings in the square at Taiz and the heads on the gate, the sons of sheikhs still held as hostages. There were the survivals of the assassination attempts of 1955, when his brother Abdullah and a colonel besieged him in the palace and he talked the guards round through the window, and of 1961 at Hodeidah, when three officers shot him seven times at point-blank range and he lived, and the sorcerers he kept. It was remembered for the opening he permitted against his own inclinations. There was the treaty with Egypt and Saudi Arabia of 1956, the arms bought from the Soviet Union and the Chinese who built the road from Hodeidah to Sanaa. There was the union with Nasser's United Arab Republic in 1958 that he joined and denounced in 1961 in a poem calling Nasser's socialism un-Islamic. There were the students sent to Cairo who came home republicans, and the first schools and hospitals, which were the republic's cadres. He was born in Sanaa in 1891, his father's eldest. He was the imam's governor of Taiz and his general against the Saudis in 1934 and against the tribes for thirty years, the man the country called the Djinn for the ferocity it had watched. He was recognised as crown prince against the Zaydi rule that the imamate is not inherited, which his father had bent for him and he bent for his son. He moved the capital to Taiz, where he trusted the Shafi'i south more than the Zaydi tribes who had killed his father. He died there of his diseases on 19 September 1962, at seventy-one. Al-Badr was proclaimed and, on 26 September, shelled in his palace by the tanks of Abdullah al-Sallal, escaping to the mountains to fight the eight-year civil war that Egypt and Saudi Arabia fought through the Yemenis. The republic's textbooks made Ahmad the type of the tyrant. The Zaydi north that rose again in 2004 under the Houthis made him something else.
- Lived: 1891 CE – 1962 CE
- Nationality: Yemeni
- Roles: monarch, imam, king
