The Graves of Tarim
by Engseng Ho
Buy on AmazonThe Graves of Tarim narrates the movement of an old diaspora across the Indian Ocean over the past five hundred years. Ranging from Arabia to India and Southeast Asia, Engseng Ho explores the transcultural exchanges—in kinship and writing—that enabled Hadrami Yemeni descendants of the Muslim prophet Muhammad to become locals in each of the three regions yet remain cosmopolitans with vital connections across the ocean. At home throughout the Indian Ocean, diasporic Hadramis engaged European empires in surprising ways across its breadth, beyond the usual territorial confines of colonizer and colonized.…
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"This is a fantastic book. It’s an anthropologist’s view, once again. It explores a particular group of Yemenis called the Sayyids, descendents of the prophet Mohammed. They come from the Hadramawt region, a beautiful green valley in the middle of a desert. That’s also where Osama bin Laden comes from, by the way. The book shows you how the Sayyids colonised the wider region: South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Africa, Somalia, Zanzibar, Tanzania and all the way down to Mozambique. They brought Islam with them. The Indian Ocean was really a Moslem commercial lake. This book is about this community, its ideology and culture. They sacralised their original homeland and it helped them maintain their identity wherever they went. This has gone on for at least 500 years. They do. They send their children back home; they marry back home. Many obtain lucrative positions in Indonesia, Malaysia and East Africa and send money back. They’ve built beautiful houses in Hadramawt. Drive through this beautiful valley and you’ll see pastel-coloured mansions, clearly Indonesian in style. It’s the most amazing place and a remarkable community. It forged global connections before globalisation really happened. The ideology of the community centres on graves and ancestors. Tarim is the town in Hadramawt from where many come. Its graves are the epicentre for an identity and ideology. His father was from Hadramawt. Al Qaeda has always had a presence in Yemen. The first attack was in 1992, in Aden, against American troops en route to the relief effort in Somalia. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is a group of Yemenis who allied with a group of Saudis. The Saudi members showed up because they were defeated militarily in their homeland. Al Qaeda has a longstanding presence in Yemen through marital and ancestral connections. Its members have taken advantage of those links and the protection offered through the tribal system. But there’s so much more to Yemen than al Qaeda. We’re talking about 300 or 400 people. To think of Yemen through the lens of al Qaeda is unfair on the remaining 24 million Yemenis."
Yemen · fivebooks.com