The Nearest Shia to Sunnism

This activist conception, named for Zayd ibn Ali who rebelled and was killed in 740, produced a tradition that accepts that a less excellent leader may in fact rule while the more excellent is passed over, a concession that brings Zaydism closer to Sunni positions than the other Shia branches. Zaydi imams governed highland Yemen for over a thousand years. The belief expresses a Shia loyalty to the family of the Prophet fused with a demand that authority be earned by knowledge and courage rather than merely inherited.

In recent decades some Zaydi religious currents, particularly the Believing Youth movement founded by Hussein al-Houthi in the 1990s and the Houthi movement it gave rise to, have moved doctrinally and ritually closer to Twelver Shiism, adopting elements of Twelver commemoration and rhetoric that traditional Zaydi scholars regard as a departure from the historic Zaydi and Hadawi position; other Zaydi communities and scholars, especially those associated with the older Sada religious establishment, have resisted this shift and maintained the tradition's distinctive closeness to Sunni legal method. The tension illustrates that even a centuries-old school with settled doctrine continues to be reshaped by contemporary political and religious movements claiming its name.