Saudi-backed Yemeni forces train in the Midi desert in Yemen on January 26, 2020. Saudi interventions in Yemen were never the result of a sectarian foreign policy, writes Mohammed Ayoob. (Shutterstock/Mohammed al-Wafi)

Why the Yemeni Civil War Was Never a Sectarian Conflict

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Saudi Arabia once backed the political forces in Yemen that would later form the Houthi movement.

One of the more striking ironies in modern Middle Eastern history is the transformation of Saudi Arabia’s relationship with the Zaydi Shia of northern Yemen. As the largely Zaydi Houthi forces clash with Saudi-backed forces along Yemen’s Red Sea coast, it may come as a surprise to recall that the kingdom once armed and financed Zaydi royalists defending Yemen’s Imamate against an Egyptian-backed republican revolution in the 1960s. 

Today, the Houthis—who emerged from the Zaydi heartland in northwest Yemen and regard themselves as defenders of their political and religious heritage—are Saudi Arabia’s most determined adversaries. This reversal demonstrates that Saudi policy toward Yemen has been governed less by an unchanging Sunni–Shia divide than by shifting calculations of power, regime security and regional rivalry.

The Zaydi Imamate ruled almost all of northern Yemen for approximately a millennium. Zaydism takes its name from Zayd ibn Ali, a grandson of Imam Husain (himself the son of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed), whose unsuccessful revolt against the Umayyad dynasty in 740 AD became an example of resistance to unjust government. Unlike Twelver Shiism’s more rigid line of succession, Zaydi doctrine holds that any qualified descendant of Fatimah (Mohammed’s daughter and Ali’s wife) may claim the Imamate by demonstrating religious learning, personal probity, and, crucially, the willingness to rise against tyranny.

Zaydism is also jurisprudentially and theologically closer to Sunni Islam than Iranian Twelver Shiism. Zaydis do not accept the Twelver succession of twelve divinely designated and infallible imams, the last of whom is believed to remain in hiding to this day (occultation). Nor do they recognize an Iranian-style system in which senior jurists exercise authority on behalf of the Hidden Imam. These theological distinctions are essential to understanding why the Houthis should not simply be labeled as co-religionists of Iranian Shiism. In fact,........

© The National Interest