Yemen

Yemen was a centre of civilisation and of religion long before Islam. The Sabaean kingdom around Marib, with its great dam, worshipped Almaqah and other South Arabian deities; Judaism took hold to the point where the Himyarite kingdom converted in the fourth century and its last king, Dhu Nuwas, persecuted the Christians of Najran, prompting an Aksumite invasion; and Christian communities existed in Najran and Sanaa before Islam. Islam came in the Prophet's own lifetime through emissaries, and Yemen contributed heavily to the early conquests. Two traditions then developed side by side.

In the northern highlands the Zaydi branch of Shiism, founded on the imamate of al Hadi ila al Haqq who arrived at Saada in 897, established a state that lasted with interruptions until 1962; Zaydi doctrine is markedly close to Sunni positions in law and rejects the idea of a hidden imam, holding instead that the imam must be a qualified descendant of Ali who claims the office and can be deposed. In the south and the coastal plain, Shafii Sunnism prevailed, and in Hadhramawt the Ba Alawi Sufi tradition produced scholars whose networks carried Islam along the Indian Ocean to Malabar, East Africa and the Indonesian archipelago.

The war that began in 2014 is routinely described as a Sunni Shia conflict, and that framing obscures more than it reveals. The Houthi movement is Zaydi, and Zaydism is doctrinally distant from the Twelver Shiism of Iran; it emerged in the 1990s as a revivalist reaction to the spread of Salafi teaching in the Saada highlands, most visibly at the Dar al Hadith institute at Dammaj, and to the marginalisation of Zaydi identity after the republic abolished the imamate. Its subsequent alignment with Iran is real but is a consequence of the war more than its cause, and it postdates the movement's formation.

Meanwhile the war has damaged the religious heritage of both traditions: the old city of Sanaa, a World Heritage site of tower houses and mosques, has been struck, and Sufi shrines have been attacked by militant groups on the other side. The clearest religious loss is older. Yemen held one of the oldest continuous Jewish communities anywhere, attested for roughly two thousand years, with its own liturgical tradition, distinctive silversmithing and a body of Judeo Arabic scholarship including the work of the family of Yihye Qafih. Operation Magic Carpet airlifted around fifty thousand people to Israel in 1949 and 1950, and departures and expulsions since have reduced the remainder to single figures. A community that outlasted every empire in the region did not outlast the twentieth century.