The unforeseen in the Yemeni crisis

Perhaps the average observer, who is far from the crisis and war in Yemen, nearly ten years after it began, will understand that what is taking place is a coup by the so-called Iranian-backed Houthi group against the Yemeni state, which it overthrew on September 21, 2013, and does not realize after that. The backgrounds of such a group, its motives, goals, roots, and ideas on which it bases its existence and practices, which makes a large part of the problem invisible. Thus, it builds its vision and perceptions, partially and inaccurately, of the Yemeni scene and its complexities.

The Houthi group considers itself an intellectual and cultural extension of the Zaidi sect, which has disappeared in Iran and the Arab Maghreb, and no longer exists except in the far north of Yemen, in the Yemeni Saada region and its environs. It is a sect that belongs to the general Shiite movement. Zaidiism is a sect attributed to Imam Zaid bin Ali bin Al-Hussein bin Ali bin Abi Talib, about whom history does not mention that he founded a sect, but rather that he was politically opposed to the Umayyad state, and was a student of Wasil bin Ata’ al-Mu’tazili, according to Al-Shahrastani and Ibn Khaldun. But what is historically proven is that the founder of the Zaidi sect, the Hadawi as in their books, is what they call Imam al-Hadi Yahya bin al-Hussein al-Rasi (254-298 AH), who migrated from the town of al-Rass in the Hijaz to Saada in Yemen (284 AH), establishing the Hadawi sect that they call it. The Zaidi school of thought is attributed to Zaid bin Ali, who, as we mentioned, has not been proven historically to have established a school of jurisprudence, and the Zaidis are in fact Hanafi jurisprudentially, and Mu’tazila doctrinally.


The dilemma of the current Yemeni moment is not only in the state of the ongoing and prolonged war, but in the return of Yemen decades, or even centuries, backwards, backwards and backwards at all levels, even from the system of abstract human ideas and perceptions, as well as the apostasy from the essence of Islam that is being fought over, today, Under its banners, the danger lies in the fact that this conflict takes Islam as a polemical material, and slogans for war and battle, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the era of major human revolutions in science, ethics, and technology, a group emerges to the surface that is still outside the context of the moment and reality, and everything related to it. With human political, moral and civil modernity.

The danger of what the Houthis are doing today is that they are once again establishing continuous wars, based on dividing people according to their genes, sects, regions, dialects, accounts, and lineages, and all of this is done in accordance with a law that enacts and legitimizes all of this for them, such as the one-fifths law that they issued. Thus, racism becomes an effective law that no one has the right to confront and object to. Anyone who objects to the racist law is an infidel and an agent of permissible blood, honor, and money. After all of this, you can imagine what Yemen will become in light of an abnormal coup situation like this, in which all abnormalities are legitimized and enacted. Regulating laws and regulations!

Whoever does not realize these complexities in the Yemeni file cannot, in any case, understand the dynamics of the ongoing conflict in Yemen, nor the horizon of this conflict and its consequences for Yemen and the entire region, and therefore, he cannot develop his approaches and solutions to what is happening without realizing this background. To the conflict that the international community is ignorant of or ignores in all its approaches to the Yemeni file, which has made them revolve in a vicious circle for nearly ten years, and in the same place they have not advanced a single step towards a solution and peace, and will not advance as long as they jump above these abstract historical facts, which should Understanding it to understand the nature of the conflict in Yemen, and how to resolve it.

*Quoted from Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed