Last weekend I visited a village on the lower hills of the Haraz mountains, 3 hours from the capital, Sana'a. It is one of the few tourist destinations in the country that is currently open to foreigners, and has the benefit of being accessible by road, though only through tortuous highways and occasional roadblocks manned by armed Yemeni soldiers. Unlike in 2003, tourists are now restricted to areas considered thoroughly safe by the police, as the government is trying to recover from the fallout and negative publicity it received after 9 foreigners were kidnapped last month in the Northern region of Sa'ada. Yemen doesn’t have much going for it these days: a rebellion in the North, a simmering secessionist movement in the South (See here on the recent and possibly related pipeline bombing in Shabwa province), al-Qaeda insurgents in the East, and most recently, the Yemenia Airways plane crash off of Comoros.Anecdotally, most of the foreigners I know here in Sana’a, with the exception of dark-skinned non-Western men, have not been able acquire the necessary permits to leave Sana’a in recent weeks. In 2003, I was able to travel solo to the Hadramaut Mountains of Eastern Yemen, Aden in the South, Hudaydah on the Red Sea, and even Marib, the former capital of the Sabean Kingdom. Alas, I may be stuck in Sana’a for the remainder of my time here.
Below, where I slept for the night.
Rasas’s father’s is a sickly nonagenarian who spends his days reclined on a mafraj, or traditional couch, in the common room as his family tends to him. His memory is more healthy than his body, though, and when we arrived he told me in simple Arabic of life under the Ottoman occupation ("they were very bad, the Turks..."), when over 500 armed and mounted Turkish soldiers were stationed in what was back then a thinly populated coffee-producing region. He had fonder memories of Imam Yahia, the theocratic ruler who controlled much of Northern Yemen until the revolution in 1962. Though it now only takes three hours to reach his home by car, until not long ago it required a dangerous five-day donkey ride across the Haraz mountains, to where Yahia used to rule in Sana’a. "Things are much easier now," he said.
On the way we had purchased 6 large bushels of qat, the local leaf that is chewed as a narcotic. The leaf itself isn’t swallowed, but chewed and stored in the cheek until it bulges out like a professional trumpet player’s stretched jowls. It’s an amazing experience, sitting for hours upon end, chewing a ball of green mushy leaves, smoking, drinking chilled water, and conversing on subjects serious and not in a muggy, crowded room full of men. On this occasion, they conversed on a variety of subjects that are at the crux of how Yemeni society is changing. How should they understand the kidnappings in the North, and the slaying of a Jewish man by a conservative Muslim that led to the exodus of the remainder of the Sa'ada Jews? Is Islam growing in developed countries, and if not, is that a concern? At school, should their children's educations focus on the Hadiths and the Qoran, or are more modern subjects like math and English more important? The discussion concluded, from what I understood, with a note that Islam should be peaceful and welcoming of other faiths, that the Houthi fundamentalists in the North were crazy, and that their children should learn modern subjects as well as the traditional Islamic canon.
Below, the qat session.
A significant Jewish population used to reside in the area, but all left during Operation Magic Carpet, the massive enterprise that brought most of Yemen's 50,000 Jews to Israel in 1949-1950. Now, less than 200 Jews live in Yemen, near Sana'a. And they are leaving, slowly. Below, the old Jewish Quarter of al-Hajjarah.
