Monthly Archives: August 2008

Al-Qaeda’s war in Yemen

Terrorism Issue, Yemen

By: Aqeel Al-Halali, The Yemen Times, August 7, 2008

SANA’A, Aug. 6 – A leading Al-Qaeda figure in Yemen has threatened to execute armed attacks “at larger scales” if the Yemeni government doesn’t release his detained colleagues from prison.

This comes a day after a government announcement that it is interrogating suspects in the July 25th suicide bombing that targeted a camp in Hadramout governorate’s Sayoun city, 794 kilometers east of Sana’a.

In a taped recording, Yemeni Al-Qaeda leader Hamza Al-Quaity stated, “Your worries are our worries, your sorrows are ours and your grief is our grief. We’ll never forget you, Allah willing. As for you, oh [Ariel] Sharon of Yemen, [Political Security director] Ghalib Ba Gumesh, you’ll see how our colleagues will be freed from your prisons, Allah willing.” Continue reading Al-Qaeda’s war in Yemen →

Peaks of Yemeni poetry he summons

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Poetry, Travel, Yemen


[The following is Najwa Adra’s review of two books by anthropologist Steven C. Caton, who conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Yemen in 1979-1981. It was first published in Yemen Update, #48 (2006):46-50.]


“Peaks of Yemen I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe, by Steven C. Caton
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990
ISBN # 0-520-06766-5
351 pp., illus., maps, hardcover

Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation, by Steven C. Caton
New York, Hill and Wang, 2005
ISBN-13: 978-0-8090
341 pp., maps, no illus., hardcover (also available in paper)

Reviewed by Najwa Adra

“Peaks of Yemen I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe and Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation, published 15 years apart, should be read as two complementary parts of a whole. They document Steven Caton’s field research on tribal poetry in Khawlan at-Tiyal in 1979-81. Together, these books are important contributions to theory in anthropology, the ethnography of Yemen, and perhaps literary theory and political science as well. The first book is a technical discussion of tribal poetry as cultural practice; the second is a personal, reflexive description of the author’s experiences in the field. It provides rich contextual data that shed light on, and help support, the author’s argument in the first book. Continue reading Peaks of Yemeni poetry he summons →

Ann Lambton

Iran, Scholars

Professor Ann Lambton: Persian scholar
From The Times, July 23, 2008

Ann Lambton, known as Nancy to her friends, devoted the greater part of her life to Iran and the study of Iran. Iranians who knew her thought she was either a saint, a scholar, a spy or all three. She was tough, physically and mentally, and almost an ascetic. She was a walker, a climber, a horsewoman and a squash player. She was a scholar who wrote some of the standard works on Iranian language, agriculture, land tenure and history. She was involved in some of the most dramatic of 20th-century Iranian political events. She was a devout Christian.

Lambton was the second child of the Hon George Lambton, fifth son of the 2nd Earl of Durham; and of Cecily, daughter of Sir John Horner. Her father trained racehorses, including George V’s, at Newmarket, and she was a good horsewoman herself. Her mother did not believe in education and kept her at home. She had almost no formal schooling and spent her youth in her father’s stables until she became too tall to be a jockey (a younger sister, Sybil, died in a riding accident in 1961). Continue reading Ann Lambton →

Holy Men and Social Discourse in Colonial Benaadir

Books You Should Read, Islamic History, Scholars, Somalia, Sufism

Renewers of the Age: Holy Men and Social Discourse in Colonial Benaadir
by Scott Reese (Leiden, Brill, 2008)

Studies of nineteenth and twentieth century Islamic reform have tended to focus more on the evolution of ideas than how those ideas emerge from local contexts or are disseminated to a broad audience. Using the urban culture of southern Somalia, known as the Benaadir, this book explores the role of local ʿulamāʾ as popular intellectuals in the early colonial period. Drawing on locally compiled hagiographies, religious poetry and Sufi manuals, it examines the place of religious discourse as social discourse and how religious leaders sought to guide society through a time of troubles through calls to greater piety but also by exhorting believers to examine their lives in the hopes of bringing society into line with their image of a proper Islamic society.

Table of contents
Chapter 1– Introduction— The Ê¿Ulamāʾ as “local intellectuals”
Chapter 2– Religious History as Social History
Chapter 3–Saints, Scholars and the Acquisition of Discursive Authority
Chapter 4–Urban Woes and Pious Remedies: Sufis, Urbanites and Managing Social Crises in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 5–When is Kafāʾa Kifayah? – Sufi Leadership, Religious Authority and Questions of Social Inequality
Chapter 6–The Best of Guides: Sufi Poetry, theological writing and Comprehending Qadiriyya popularity in the Early 20th Century

Scott S. Reese, Ph.D. (1996) in History, University of Pennsylvania, is Associate Professor of Islamic History at Northern Arizona University. He has published extensively on Islam in Africa including the edited collection The Transmission of Learning in Islamic Africa (Brill, 2004).

Exiled Egyptian activist sentenced

Egypt, Ethics

Al-Jazeera, August 2, 2008

Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an outspoken critic of the Egyptian government, has been sentenced to two years in prison.

The sociologist and human rights activist, who is currently in the United States, was convicted for “tarnishing Egypt’s reputation,” the country’s official MENA news agency said.

Shady Talaat, Ibrahim’s laywer, said the ruling by a Cairo court was flawed and that he would use his right to appeal. Continue reading Exiled Egyptian activist sentenced →