Imam Yahya of Yemen
Imam Yahya Muhammad Hamid ed-Din was the Zaydi imam of Yemen from 1904 to 1948, the ruler who fought the Ottomans to a standstill in the highlands from 1904 to 1911, was recognised by them as the autonomous lord of the Zaydi north in the treaty of Daan. He took the whole of the north when they left in 1918, and made himself king of the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen in 1926, the first Arab state recognised as independent after the war after the Hejaz. He ruled it for forty-four years as a medieval theocracy by choice. There were no foreigners without his leave, no schools but the Koranic, no roads to speak of, no doctors until his own illness. The tribes were held by hostages of their sheikhs' sons kept in his fortresses, and the Jews of Sanaa under the dhimma. The imam himself was judge, treasurer, general and the only importer, and the Turkish officers he kept were the army's core. A country of four million lived in the fifteenth century into the 1940s. That was his policy, since he had seen what the Europeans did to countries that opened. He was born in Sanaa in 1869, the son of the imam al-Mansur, a scholar of the Zaydi school, and was elected imam on his father's death in 1904 by the ulama. He took the title al-Mutawakkil ala Allah, he who relies on God. He lost the Asir and Najran to Ibn Saud in the war of 1934, ended by the treaty of Taif that the two kings kept. He claimed Aden and the British protectorates to the south until his death without pressing the claim past a few raids. The Free Yemenis of Aden and the reformers among his own sons and the ulama, who wanted a council and a constitution, plotted the coup of February 1948 with the Abdullah al-Wazir family. The imam, eighty, was ambushed in his car outside Sanaa on 17 February and shot with two grandsons and his prime minister, al-Wazir was proclaimed imam. Within a month the crown prince Ahmad had raised the tribes from Hajjah, taken Sanaa and given it to them to loot for three days. He had al-Wazir beheaded. The country he had sealed was opened by his son a little and by the republic of 1962 by force. The fourteen sons and the hostage fortresses were the memory the republic was made against.
- Lived: 1869 CE – 1948 CE
- Nationality: Yemeni
- Roles: monarch, imam, king
