A Tribal Order

"Shelagh Weir was one of the first anthropologists to work in Yemen after the civil war ended in 1970. A Tribal Order follows her fieldwork in a beautiful place called Razih. Rebellion and warfare have been rife since 2004. Weir examines the area’s historical archive of tribal records and documents. You see how Yemen structures itself from a sociological, political and cultural perspective. That’s right. They have a highly complex legal order, with conventions and laws based on precedent. It shatters the stereotype of tribesmen as violent, cultureless, devoid of history or tradition. That comes out in Dresch’s book, too. That’s because the overbearing state in Sana’a, its capital city, has undermined the structures she describes. Because the state has neglected the area and its traditional leadership, it has encouraged a resistance movement. You find these movements in other parts of Yemen: there’s a secessionist movement in the South. Al Qaeda, with its presence in Yemen, is taking advantage of the feeling of oppression and humiliation. Al Qaeda certainly makes that case. The US and Saudi Arabia are helping the present government in Yemen financially, militarily and, to some extent, economically. There’s a story doing the rounds in Yemen about the nature of its government. The current president of Yemen is Ali Abdullah Saleh. The story goes that he teaches his son how to rule the country. He gives him a bagful of mice and says: ‘I’ll release the mice. You collect them and put them back in the bag.’ His son spends the entire night chasing mice and putting them back; he’s utterly exhausted. Saleh says: ‘Now I’ll show you how I rule Yemen and how you should rule Yemen.’ He twirls the bag around his head and lets the mice out. They’re dizzy and can’t run away. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . That’s essentially how he runs the country: by keeping everyone off-kilter. He doesn’t build institutions or run the place in an organised or transparent way. And because he’s made himself indispensable to stability in the country – others call it controlled chaos – there’s no solution or alternative. All good autocrats do this. They don’t allow you to think someone else could replace them. Indeed it is. The Americans and Saudis throw money at him in the hope he will keep the place together. But Yemen is on the verge of becoming like Somalia: you could have a civil war and large numbers of refugees. It’s running out of water and oil, rebellions are happening, and of course you have the presence of al Qaeda. It is. A complicating factor is that the president is not clearly against al Qaeda. He’s used al Qaeda against his own internal enemies."