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How a 17th-century Yemeni ‘sorcerer’ anticipated the modern playbook of the Houthis

The Houthis are the latest force seeking to dominate Yemen. Before them came Imams, Arab nationalists, Communists, jihadists and political entrepreneurs.

The emerald-green damask canopy, its finial mounted with the kingdom’s silver orb-and-pyramid and swaddled in vermillion silk, shielded the midday sun from the Imam’s splendour. To kettle-drums and oboes, two hundred cavaliers marched through the citadel guarding Mokha, their mounts covered with jewels and black ostrich feathers. Then came Al-Mahdi Muhammad bin Ahmed, chosen by God to prepare the pious for the sounding of Israphil’s trumpet on the Day of Judgment. Each Friday, the elderly Imam dismounted from his white horse to deliver the sermon, light pouring off the jewelled jigha on his turban and waistcoat, bound with a “belt of a monstrous size, set thick with large silver plates.”

For hundreds of years, winds carrying coffee, spices and gold also carried foreign gods past the walls Islam had put up against the world. Travellers to Aden encountered the story of a great well dug from Ujjain to the Seraj mountain by a spirit in the form of a monkey, to rescue a princess from Hind kidnapped by the ten-headed djinn al-Ghazāl Darsīr.

The Banias of Kathiawar, bankers to the Indian Ocean trade, built temples alongside the city’s synagogues and celebrated Diwali. “They are the cleverest arithmeticians in the world,” the French adventurer Jean de la Roque—son of the first coffee-maker of Marseille—wrote after his voyages to Yemen in 1708–1713. “They cheat with a wonderful deal of skill.”

Last week, as the Ansar Allah insurgents seized Mokha and Perim, the world was reminded that wars along Yemen’s coast never quite ended. Drawn largely from the Zaydi clan federations that sustained the Imamate for almost a millennium, Ansar Allah has given Iran a new means to choke global trade. The Red Sea and Suez shipping routes carry 15% of world trade and just under a tenth of seaborne oil and gas traffic.

The war isn’t just about the power-struggle between Iran and the American-led axis of Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Since the Imamate began to implode, Yemen’s leaders have........

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