The famous forty and their companions: North Yemen's first-generation modernists and educational emigrants

Middle East Journal

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 81-97

  Burrowes, Robert D ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT; HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE; MIGRATION; RETURN MIGRATION;

ASIA; EASTERN HEMISPHERE; EURASIA; MIDDLE EAST; NORTH YEMEN; WORLD; YEMEN;

EID: 14044278640     PISSN: 00263141     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3751/59.1.15     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. The group was known more commonly as "the forty" (al-arba'in) or "the mission" (al-bi'tha). Moreover, some put the group's number at forty-four. Four other boys, chosen at the same time, left Aden in early 1948 on their own, instead of in late 1947 with the other forty; unlike the others, and because they had received some modem schooling in Aden, they went straight to Egypt for their further education.
2. But it is not all that arbitrary. Having gone abroad between 1947 and 1959, nearly all of these boys returned to Yemen as young adults shortly before or shortly after the 1962 Revolution, and thus were there to begin careers at or near the creation of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR).
3. The estimates of the number of boys going abroad to study over this period of time range from a few hundred to several hundred, but they are all just educated guesses. Kathryn Boals reports that Muhammad Said al-Attar estimated that five-hundred Yemenis were engaged in post-secondary education abroad in 1958; she found al-Attar's figures to be quite similar to William R. Brown's estimate for about 1960. See Kathryn Boals, Modernization and Intervention: Yemen as a Theoretical Case Study, Ph.D., Princeton University, 1970. (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Dissertation Services.)
4. See also, Muhammadl Said al-Attar, Le Sous-development economique et social du Yemen: perspectives de la revolution Yemenite (Algiers: Tiers-Monde, 1964), pp. 96-97;
5. and William R. Brown, "The Yemeni Dilemma," Middle East Journal, Vol. XVII, No. 4 (Autumn 1963), p. 354.
6. The Famous Forty had a handful of predecessors. By the mid-1940s, as Leigh Douglas indicates, a few young men had found their way out of North Yemen for education, especially traditional Islamic education - e.g., Muhammad al-Zubayri and Ahmad Muhammad Nu'man. (J. Leigh Douglas. The Free Yemeni Movement, 1935-62. Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1987, pp. 46-52.)
7. In addition, as noted by Kevin Rosser, Imam Yahya had sent aviation and public health missions to Italy in the late 1920s and mid- 1930s for brief periods of technical training. (Kevin Rosser. Education, Revolt and Reform in Yemen: The "Famous Forty" Mission of 1947). Unpublished thesis submitted towards the M.Phil. degree (St. Anthony's College, Oxford, 1998), p. 5.
8. Finally, by beginning with the Famous Forty, I am passing over the two small groups of young army officers sent by Imam Yahya for training to Iraq for short periods in the mid-1930s. The Imam ordered one of the groups home earlier than planned, apparently after he came to fear their being corrupted by "modern" Iraq and the Iraqis. His fears were justified, it seems; three of the officers - 'Abdullah al-Sallal, Hamud al-Jaifi, and Hasan al-'Amri - were all to have very important roles to play in the 1962 Revolution and in the early years of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR).
9. By no means does this research constitute a survey based on anything like a representative sample. The data collection and analysis that went into the first draft of this article were completed long before the publication of Douglas's book or the writing of Rosser's thesis. Indeed, a small part of the material for this study was made available to Rosser for his more detailed study of the Famous Forty and their activities in the 1950s and 1960s. The content of his interviews with particular individuals does correspond closely to earlier interviews with the same individuals for this study.
10. Countless hours were spent with Muhammad Anaam at countless qat chews and other small gatherings over these several years. For this I am most grateful.
11. Muhammad Anaam Ghaleb. Government Organization as a Barrier to Economic Development in Yemen. Bochum, West Germany: Ruhr University Institute for Development Research and Development Policy, 1979.
12. Kenneth Organski. The Stages of Political Development. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967, Chs. I and II.
13. It has been more state-building than nation-building, since the Yemeni nation and the sense of Yemeni nationhood is strong and goes back at least a millennium. This said, some of these men have been involved in deepening, fine-tuning and "modernizing" Yemeni nationalism over the years.
14. This area, for the most part coextensive with Taiz and Ibb provinces, is often referred to as the southern uplands of North Yemen or, in Arabic, al-yaman al-asfal (Lower Yemen).
15. This percentage has been disputed. Two of the forty boys were apparently Shafi'is from Ibb province and mistakenly counted as Zaydis. If the Famous Forty is taken to consist of forty-four boys, however, then Douglas' assertion that 16 of the 44 boys were Shafi'i assumes relevance. Since it is known that the four boys not included by some with the other forty were Shafi'i, then the figures become 12 of 40 Shafii - or 30%. It seems safe to assert then that only 25% to 30% of the boys were Shafi'i.
16. All of these numerical assertions and calculations, unless otherwise indicated, are based on data collected by the author.
17. After the 1962 Revolution, the Zaydis started to go abroad for education in large numbers, but the Shafi'is continued for some time to have an edge when it came to modern education and the skills it imparted.
18. Indeed, most of the Famous Forty were probably selected by Imam Yahya's agents in part precisely because they were not well-connected. Modern ideas and skills notwithstanding, men of modest backgrounds were not likely to pose a threat to the existing order when they returned to Yemen.
19. Some of the boys went to the Orphans' School in Sana'a, although this was probably less because they were orphans or all that poor than because it was one of the few available schools in Sana'a in the 1940s and 1950s.
20. Before their departure from Aden, the boys of the Famous Forty publicly protested over the refusal of their supervisor to provide them with the fez (tarbush) with which to cover their heads. Most of the "modern photos" the boys had to go on dated from late Ottoman days, and most of the smartly and differently dressed men in those photos sported the fez - and certainly not the mashada (kafiyya) worn by most Yemenis. The boys did not know that the fez had gone out of fashion in the "modern" Middle East more than two decades earlier. Later, in Egypt, at the first sit-down dinner at which they were guests of honor, the forty boys were confronted with roasted half-chickens and, for the first time in their lives, modern dining utensils. After a long, awkward pause, a leader among them, with all eyes fixed on him, seized his knife and fork and boldly addressed the chicken on his plate, only to have it seemingly come alive and "fly" off the table and across the room - or so the story goes.
21. Interview by the author, Sana'a 1979.
22. See Rosser, pp. 11-14.
23. They did not stay or study in Beirut, already on its way by the late 1940s to becoming under French influence a place not thought appropriate for a group of young Muslim boys from Imamate Yemen. Sidon and Tripoli were thought to be more appropriate venues.
24. Interviews are packed with evidence of the galvanizing effect in the mid-twentieth century of these many emigrant workers from this part of the southern uplands. The many village associations they created and funded to "improve conditions" and to end "backwardness" are among the evidence. The very rapid growth and development of Aden by the British after the second World War, and especially after 1950, as a military base, port and site of a new oil refinery, made the city a magnet for North Yemenis from the southern uplands. Many came to work in Aden, and many others then went abroad from Aden as sailors, laborers, and shopkeepers.
25. For the roles of Ta'iz and Aden as stations on this "railroad," see Douglas, pp. 39-41, 70. See also Robert D. Burrowes, The Yemen Arab Republic: The Politics of Development, 1962-1986. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987, pp. 19-22.
26. A small group sent out by the imam in the mid-1950s was called "the Princes Group," and included a few members of the royal family and boys married to members of the royal family.
27. Created in the early 1950s and following on the Free Yemeni movement, the Yemeni Union was a "non-political" political organization that fostered the cause of Yemen and the Yemeni nation - and soon came to oppose the autocratic rule and "backwardness" of the Yemeni imamate. See Douglas, Chs. V and VI, pp. 159-207.
28. Information on the exodus was obtained through many interviews by the author with many of the first-generation modernists, Sana'a, 1976-79.
29. Unable to do justice to this subject in this short paper, I can touch lightly on only a few points and, unfortunately, can tell none of the wildly funny and wrenchingly poignant tales of Yemeni student life abroad. Recall your highs and lows in college, and multiply by ten; or imagine a Yemeni La Boheme with many variations.
30. Interview by author, Sana'a 1976.
31. This report, titled "The Favored Few: Yemeni university Graduates" (US Embassy/YAR, April 17, 1965) was passed on to the author by a member of the US Embassy staff in Sana'a in 1978. In turn, the author passed it on to Kevin Rosser who refers to it in his study but dates it April 17, 1965 (Rosser, 38).
32. As elsewhere in the developing world earlier in the century, the term "graduate" was often used in Yemen as a synonym for "modenist," by them and by others. However, not all graduates were modernists and not all modernists attended, much less graduated from, universities abroad.
33. It was more than just a matter of youthful camaraderie, though. During these formative years, these young men were bound together by the challenging world around them. For one thing, for most of them it was a world of scarcity, and the stories of how they shared stipends, food, clothing and spare living quarters are quite moving.
34. As late as the mid-1990s, a close friend and member of the Famous Forty declined to organize a seminar around this paper. He thought the paper made too much of the Zaydi-Shafi'i cleavage, even though it explicitly asserts that most of the first-generation modernists claimed not to embrace this still-important distinction. He could have lived with a euphemism, it seems, and he and others have suggested north-south, tribal-nontribal or upper Yemen-lower Yemen as alternatives to Zaydi-Shafi'i. These suggestions were respectfully declined.
35. Coming from Lebanon to Yemen for the first time in late 1975, the author was struck by the conscious desire of Yemenis to avoid what one new friend called the "Lebanese model" - i.e., a pattern of sectarian politics that held out the possibility of civil strife drawn along religious lines.
36. It was not only the politics and the political ideas of the Arab world to which some of these young men were exposed. Over the course of ten years of study in the US, 'Abd al-Karim al-Iryani experienced to one degree or another the last years of Eisenhower republicanism; the era of JFK and Camelot; and the saga of the Great Society, the Vietnam War and the fall of LBJ. In a more active mode, while in Austin at the University of Texas, Muhammad Anaam Ghaleb somehow got caught up in the US civil rights movement, joined the Young Democrats, and involved himself in the campaign in Texas to secure the presidential nomination for JFK. (Interviews by author, Sana'a, 1976 and 1978.)
37. Douglas, pp. 63-68.
38. Interview by the author, Ta'iz 1976. For many in this first generation, being a "partisan" was not nearly as bad as being "sectarian" - i.e., a person who used religious identity for political purposes. Still, many thought of being a partisan as not good and something to be avoided.
39. The statist orientation of most of this generation in the late 1970s was strikingly apparent in many interviews. Most seemed prepared to sacrifice democracy for state-building and development, at least in the immediate future. I once echoed the concerns of a second-generation modernist over the lack of democracy and equality in the agricultural development program on the Tihama. Perhaps a bit impatiently, a leading first-generation modernist replied that these things would come, but that building the dams and canals and establishing extension services had to come first.
40. For many years, one of the returned educational emigrants appeared daily as "the lecturer" at Sana'a's main gate, Bab al-Yemen.
41. These elements are poignantly captured in Muhammad Anaam Ghalib's collection of his existentialist-like poems, Strangers on the Road.
42. Again, these figures and generalizations are based on the analysis of interview data.
43. However, some of the earliest non-military returnees, those who returned a few years before the 1962 Revolution, complained that the Imam was unwilling or unable (maybe even afraid) to put them into responsible positions and make good use of them. A few of these earliest returnees again left Yemen for a time or took jobs with the first of the foreign aid projects in imamate Yemen - e.g., the US's Sana'a-Ta'iz road project or its Ta'iz water project, the one later renamed the John F. Kennedy Water Project.
44. Interview by the author, New York, 1977.
45. Al-Attar's dissertation became his book, (Le Sous-development economique et social du Yemen: perspectives de la revolution Yemenite [Economic and Social Underdevelopment in Yemen: View-point from the Yemeni Revolution]), an important early work on socio-economic conditions at the time of the 1962 Revolution.
46. He did serve three times as YAR ambassador to the UN; he also served as ambassador to Indonesia.
47. Al-Aini doubled as Foreign Minister on three of these occasions.
48. These assertions are based on an analysis of ministerial lists first done in 1981, and then updated in 1990 and again in 1995.
49. In addition, Dr. Makki was acting Prime Minister for a short time after the War of Secession in 1994.
50. Interview by the author, New York, 1984.
51. Interview by the author, Sana'a, 1979.
52. Al-Kurshumi was possibly the oldest of the Yemeni students in Cairo during these years, and he was certainly one of their leaders and very active politically.
53. Reflecting on his career many years later, in an interview with Muhammad al-Khohali of the Saba News Agency (10 June 2004), al-Aini said that over the years the tribal shaykhs, the "men with jambiyyas" (traditional Yemeni curved daggers), won out over the modernists, himself included.
54. The tribalists in Yemen have long referred disparagingly to the Yemeni modernists as "men in pants." Interestingly, in post-Taliban Afghanistan after 2001, the warlords referred in distain to the returning modernists in the new central government in Kabul as "men in neckties."
55. Ahmad Abdu Said withdrew to Ta'iz from Sana'a, where he had held ministerial rank in ten governments over the decade beginning in 1967.
56. Interview bythe author, Sana'a, 1980.