Now approaching 11 months, the ongoing war in Yemen is first and foremost a war against people, with upwards of 10,000 killed and many more wounded. This is one of the most dire humanitarian crises on the planet, but it is barely covered in the news media. A coalition of super rich states, able to purchase billions of dollars worth of weapons and mercenaries from as far away as Colombia, is pummeling the poorest country on the Arabian Peninsula. This proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran for rhetorical control of the Islamic faith has been nothing but toxic for Yemen. War crimes are committed daily by all sides, as pointed out by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. At this point everyone is a potential victim in the flurry of violence by the alliance of the so-called Huthis (or Ansar Allah) and former President Salih’s troops against the Saudi-led coalition, al-Qaida (now known as Ansar Shariah), ISIS or Daesh and a host of militias and gangs. A blockade of food, medicine and much more has intensified the suffering and ground the economy to a halt. Unlike the situation in Syria, Yemeni refugees have nowhere to go.
As disastrous as this war is for the Yemeni people, it is also a war against future generations who will lose parts of their rich historical heritage. The latest loss is the Taiz National Museum, a victim of Huthi bombing. This museum was the house of the last Zaydi Imam, Ahmad, and was left exactly as it was when he died in 1962. Earlier in the campaign the Dhamar regional museum was destroyed by Saudi bombs, blowing up local archaeological relics collected by an expedition from the University of Chicago. Bombs have also been dropped on the pre-Islamic site of the Marib dam and centuries-old traditional buildings in the capital Sanaa. The director of Awqaf for Sanaa reports that 136 mosques have been destroyed or damaged since the bombing campaign began. Last May the millennium-old mosque of al-Hadi ila al-Haqq, the first Zaydi imam, was bombed in the town of Sa’da, which the Saudis have labeled a military target and have virtually leveled. In December another mosque in Sa’da was destroyed. The Saudis are aided in their war against Islam past by the extremist al-Qaida and Daesh elements in Yemen, which have been destroyed centuries-old Sufi shrines in the south.
The war on Yemen’s heritage is an extension of the Saudi penchant to replace anything pre-Wahhabi with shopping malls and monuments to their regime. It is reported that 95% of the millennium-old buildings in Mecca have been destroyed in the past two decades alone. Even the house of Khadija, the Prophet’s first wife, was leveled. As Ziauddin Sardar laments, “The dominant architectural site in the city is not the Sacred Mosque, where the Kaaba, the symbolic focus of Muslims everywhere, is. It is the obnoxious Makkah Royal Clock Tower hotel, which, at 1,972 feet, is among the world’s tallest buildings. It is part of a mammoth development of skyscrapers that includes luxury shopping malls and hotels catering to the super rich. The skyline is no longer dominated by the rugged outline of encircling peaks. Ancient mountains have been flattened. The city is now surrounded by the brutalism of rectangular steel and concrete structures — an amalgam of Disneyland and Las Vegas.”
The usual term for heritage in Arabic is turath. The war in Yemen has turned into a virtual “turathocide”, where political madness determines the fate of remembrance of Yemen’s rich and varied history, both before the coming of Islam with the major South Arabian kingdoms and the long span of the Islamic era. But the past can never be completely erased, nor can a religion be restarted by cleansing what a particular group does not like about the past. Preservation of Yemen’s heritage is not only damaging to the people of Yemen, but to everyone who believes that history matters. The events of this war will be remembered long after the last bombs have exploded because only a total genocide can eliminate a people’s memory.
Daniel Martin Varisco is President of the American Institute for Yemeni Studies. He is Research Professor of Social Science at Qatar U. Since 1978 he has conducted ethnographic and historical research in Yemen, Egypt and Qatar. His latest book is Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (U of Washington Press, 2007). He currently serves as editor of Contemporary Islam and Editor-in-Chief of CyberOrient (www.cyberorient.net).