Читать книгу The Last of the Lascars - Mohammed Siddique Seddon - Страница 12

PROLOGUE

MUCH OF OUR KNOWLEDGE and understanding of Muslims in the UK is informed by the post-Second World War economic migration of post-colonial and Commonwealth single-male, South Asian workers and labourers to the factories and industries of late twentieth-century Britain. This is because this particular migration phenomenon has had the most significant impact on modern Britain, indelibly changing and reshaping our society across its social and political spectrums. The contemporary British ‘migration experience’ has also produced a plethora of academic writings engaged with a multitude of disciplines, producing many sociological theories all attempting to explain and quantify the effects of large-scale Muslim settlement on wider society. But where the end of the twentieth century witnessed a proliferated interest of Islam and Muslims in Britain and the West, not just through academic studies, but also through media representations, social debates and political legislation, the beginning of the previous century was instead marked by indifference and a degree of colonial cajolery towards the subjugated Muslim ‘other’ in imperial Britain.

Yemeni migration and settlement to Britain not only spans the breadth of these two historical events and particular migration experiences, it precedes both events by more than half a century. As a result of the early migrations to Britain, Yemeni communities in Cardiff and South Shields represent the oldest continuous Muslim presence in the UK. Yet, their story has remained largely unknown and virtually untold. In exploring the unique history of Yemeni Muslims in Britain, this study asserts that the generally-accepted beginnings of Yemeni community settlement in Britain, thought to be around the 1880s, needs to be revised to a point some 50 years earlier. As this book suggests, there is some evidence to challenge current received opinion.

Although the British Protectorate at Aden was not established until 1839, after its capture by the British East India Company (EIC), the company’s vessels had been visiting the port from as early as 1609 when it was then under Portuguese control. By 1829, the EIC considered making Aden a coaling station for its various steam vessels travelling from the Far East, India, Africa and Europe, transporting raw materials from the colonies and then shipping out finished manufactured goods from Britain to the world. In 1835, Captain Haines, an employee of the British East India Company, docked at Aden and prospected the port on behalf of the Company as a possible major strategic coaling station and entrepôt for British vessels and goods sailing to and from India and the Far East. Almost immediately, Company ships began docking at the port. In much the same way that Indian lascars¹ found their way to British ports on EIC vessels from the ports of Calcutta and Bombay as early as the seventeenth century, it is reasonable to assume that Yemeni baḥriyyah (sing., baḥrī, meaning literally ‘of the sea’, but understood as ‘sailor’), extremely competent at negotiating the sea trade winds to India and China from the Arabian Peninsula for more than two millennia, also signed up on British ships either sailing from Aden, East Africa or India. What is certain is that, by the 1830s, Yemenis from the southern Yemen tribes, allied through treaties with Britain, would have joined British merchant vessels. This fact is also evidenced by the rapid population increase of Aden after the British occupation. Further, the Aden Protectorate was ruled by the British through the India Office from 1839 until 1937, when it finally received ‘Colony’ status and was then ruled as a separate entity from India. Before 1937, ‘Adenese’ subjects would have been administered and, therefore, considered as colonial Indian subjects, thus adding to the ‘invisibility’ of Yemeni sailors among the lascars residing in British ports. It is for the above stated reasons that the timeline for Yemeni migration and settlement in Britian needs to be located around 1836 rather than the 1880s.

0.1 – Saeed Hassan (al-Hubabi), his wife Josephine and their son, Saeed Kasseum in the living room of their family home in Liverpool, circa 1950.

But who are the Yemenis, from where do they originate and why did they settle in Britain? The publication before you is presented as a historical narrative that not only addresses the above important questions, but also captures the British Yemeni story by constructing a detailed and integrated account extracted from contemporaneous writings, newspaper reports, magazine articles, personal accounts, achieves and recollections collected through ethnographic research and both general and academic publications. The book is also largely informed by my own research on British Yemenis that was originally undertaken as a doctoral thesis.² The eclectic source material used in this publication has been woven together to produce a comprehensive social history of Yemeni Muslim migration and settlement in Britain from the earliest time to the present. The personal narratives, recollections and family histories of British Yemenis are an extremely important and unique source of material that both inform and shape the details of this book’s chronological narrative. An example of how rich a single family history can be in terms of individual members, their lived experiences and the specific events that mirror the wider context of British Yemeni history in which they unfold, are explored in this publication and briefly exampled below.

Gadri Salih is a British Yemeni who was born in Eccles, Greater Manchester, in 1975. He is the fourth generation of his family to be born in Britain and also to have migrated to Britain over the last 120 years or so. Gadri’s incredible family story offers an amazing ‘snap-shot’ of a unique British Muslim history that is practically unknown to most. Gadri’s maternal great-grandfather, Said Hassan, a lascar sailor from Radā’, a provincial town in the northern highlands of Yemen, came to Britain in the late nineteenth century, most probably around 1890. Known locally in South Shields and Liverpool as ‘Al-Hubabi’, Hassan soon established himself as a boarding house owner in the Holborn area of South Shields, where a growing number of Arab-only lodgings were founded for the numerous lascar sailors. The term ‘lascar’, is an anglicized version of the Arabic term al-˓askar meaning, ‘one employed in military service’, and it was used by the colonial British to mean an ‘oriental merchant sailor’ originally connected to the British East India Company, established in 1600. The term is actually unfamiliar to most Yemeni sailors who instead used the Arabic term, baḥrī, to describe their merchant sailing profession. The former lascar, Hassan, became extremely wealthy as a result of his entrepreneurial skills, eventually owning several boarding houses, an import-export business between Aden and the UK, a small shipping company with a flagship called Sheba on which Gadri’s grandmother and her siblings travelled to the Yemen from South Shields in the early 1930s. Further, on 5 June 1929, Said Hassan applied to South Shield’s Town Council for a licence from the Watch Committee to operate a private bus service from South Shields to London. While Alderman Lawson could see no genuine reason why Councillor Cheeseman disagreed to the granting of the licence, on the racist grounds that South Shields had, he said, become a ‘dumping ground for other places as far as the Arabs were concerned’, additionally, Councillor Scott took further exception to the fact that Said Hassan, as an Arab boarding-house keeper, could afford to spend £2000 on a bus when, he said, ‘some English lodging-house keepers could not even pay their rent.’ However, despite the unusual and rather discriminatory objections, the council agreed to grant the licence.³ Hassan also met Prince Hussein, son of the ruling Zaydī Imām of what was then North Yemen, during the Prince’s visit to South Shields between 21st and 22nd May 1937. Richards Lawless’ book, From Ta˓izz to Tyneside (1995), contains a photograph of Said Hassan accompanied by his wife, Josephine Hassan (neé Irwin) meeting the Prince in his boarding house during the visit, in which Hassan was presented with a ceremonial jambiyyah (Yemeni dagger) by the Prince.⁴

Although a shrewd and accomplished businessman, Hassan’s many boarding house properties were actually legally registered in other people’s names and when economic depression led to mass unemployment among the Yemeni sailors in South Shields, Cardiff and Liverpool, many boarding-house keepers were bankrupted simply because their lodgers could not pay their keep. In October 1930, six Arab boarding-house keepers from South Sheilds wrote to the Under Secretary for India, requesting financial help for the stranded sailors and listing a number of boarding-house keepers who were owed considerable debts by their borders. Among those listed was, ‘Mrs Said [Josephine] Hassan of 10 Chapter Row, £672’, a huge amount of money at that time. It is possible that financial difficulties forced Said Hassan and his family to eventually relocate to Liverpool by the end of the 1930s where he purchased a large, detached, Victorian mansion house, ‘The Hollies’, former family home of Frank Hornby, MP, (1863–1936), the founder of the Hornby toy manufacturing company, creator of Meccano and Hornby Trains, and later an MP, on Station Road, in Maghull, Liverpool, complete with its own grounds. Gadri’s mother remembers visiting the house during her early childhood in the 1950s and sitting at a huge dining table where all the family would eat together, with grandfather al-Hubabi sitting at the head of the table.

0.2 – Muhammad al-Hubabi, in front of his father’s luxury car, taken in Liverpool, circa 1950.

Once re-established in Liverpool, Hassan acquired a number of properties, possibly boarding houses to service the Yemeni sailors visiting and lodging in the port city. One Yemeni migrant worker, Muhammad Kasseum, originally from Ta˓izz in North Yemen, arrived in Liverpool in the late 1930s after living in Marseilles, the southern French port, for seven years. Kasseum eventually married Said and Josephine Hassan’s daughter, Attegar, and the couple first lived in Liverpool before moving to Eccles, Greater Manchester, in the late 1950s. Gadri’s family were one of the first Yemeni families to settle in Eccles and his maternal aunt, Farida Qarina Salih Ali Qaadiri, born in 1952 in Liverpool, is the first Muslim to be buried in the Eccles and Patricroft Muslim Cemetery, after she sadly passed away on 9^th September 1972, aged just 20. Kasseum and his wife had a number of children, some born in Liverpool and others in Eccles and he soon established two Arab cafés in the town. The first was located in nearby Monton, but, by 1969, Kasseum had established a new café on Liverpool Road, facing Eccles Town Hall. Kasseum was also a local Yemeni community organizer and, in 1961, on his initiative he organized Arab film shows at the local cinema. Eccles Justices gave Mr Swindlehurst, the proprietor of the Regent Cinema, permission to open on Sunday afternoons to cater for the town’s growing Yemeni population. In June of the same year, the film Samson and Delilah in Arabic, was screened and shortly after there were regular showings of Arabic films and musicals.⁵ By the early 1960s, a sizeable number of Yemenis had migrated to the industrial cities of the UK to work in the heavy industries of booming post-war Britain. This particular Yemeni migration to Britain is known as ‘second wave migration’. Gadri’s father, Salih Ali Audhali, originally came to Sheffield in the 1950s from Radā’, North Yemen, and he moved to Eccles in the early 1960s. ‘Audhali’ was not Salih’s real name but, rather, the name of a regional southern Yemeni tribe that was allied to the British Protectorate at Aden.

Once established in Eccles, Salih married Muhammad Kasseum’s daughter, a third-generation, British-born Yemeni. Gadri describes the transnational tribal marriage connections in his family as being comparable to a chess game in which, ‘the pieces are moving from the black squares to the white and from the left to the right until you get to the end [of the board]’.⁶ By the late 1970s, economic recession had gripped Britain’s manufacturing industries and large numbers of migrant Yemeni workers with very few transferrable skills were facing unemployment. As a result, a significant number took up employment opportunities in the Arabian Gulf, along with Gadri’s father, who initially moved to Saudi Arabia to work in the oil industry. In 1981, once established in Saudi Arabia, Salih sent for his family to join him from Britain. Gadri and his family soon settled into their new life in the Middle East, attending school and growing up in a culturally traditional and religiously conservative Saudi society relatively happily for ten years until the outbreak of the first Gulf war in 1991.

When the former president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, invaded Kuwait, Yemen, then one of 15 countries serving on the UN Security Council, abstained from the UN vote condemning Iraq’s actions. As a result, all Yemeni migrants in Saudi Arabia were expelled from the country. In effect this meant that almost one million Yemenis were forced to return to the Yemen virtually overnight. Salih was forced to leave his business and home with his family taking almost nothing with them but the clothes on their backs. Shortly after returning to the Yemen, Salih sadly passed away, forcing Gadri’s mother and younger siblings, as British subjects, to return to the UK in 1997 where they had extended family. As a then newly-married man, Gadri remained in the Yemen along with a couple of older married sisters but in 1998 he decided to pay a surprise visit to his mother and family in the UK. After his KLM flight stopped at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to take on more passengers to fly to Manchester via Amsterdam, his plane then suffered an engine fire immediately after take-off, forcing a return landing to Jeddah where it was discovered that both engines had actually failed! Nine hours later Gadri boarded a British Airways flight this time flying to London, Heathrow. Once in London, Gadri was obliged to make his own way to Manchester. However, disorientated by his difficult and redirected flight and unaware as to how he might find his way to Manchester, he approached ‘a very tall police officer’ saying:

I’m lost. He [the policemen] said, ‘What’s the story?’ I said I was on the KLM [flight], I was supposed to go to Amsterdam, then Manchester, this is what happened. … What am I supposed to do? I’m in London, I’ve never been here in my life. And he said, ‘You’ve got a Manchester accent!’ … He said, ‘[You’ve been away] eighteen years you say? You’ve still got that Manchester accent!’ But he helped me, and he took me [to the ticket office] to buy a ticket for the train. … He got me on the train.⁷

Gadri was then aided at Paddington Station by two Algerians who eventually helped him board a train for Manchester and contacted his family to arrange for them to meet him at the station in Manchester, after recognizing Gadri was an Arab, who was ironically lost in his own country! Gadri Salih’s family narrative crystallizes some of the key historical and sociological themes pertinent to British Yemenis explored in this monograph; migration, diaspora, discrimination, community settlement and formation, religion, culture, politics, being and belonging. This book traces the transformation of a nascent group of colonial, oriental merchant sailors into a thriving community as Britain’s oldest established Muslims, but who are practically invisible.

0.3 – Gadri Salih, great-grandson of al-Hubabi, and his fifth-generation, British Yemeni children at their home in Eccles, Greater Manchester.

The first chapter of this book provides a brief history of Yemen from ancient times as a centre of the production of frankincense and myrrh that was much sought after in the ancient world. The incense and spice trade turned Yemen into a place of legend and myth, as well as a very wealthy region both through international trade and agricultural production in its southern highlands. The production of incense and export agriculture meant that ancient Yemen needed its established camel caravan routes to carry goods to Babylonia and Byzantium and its developed entrepôts, which included Aden, to ship merchandise to Upper Egypt, the Mediterranean and across to Abyssinia via the Red Sea and through the Gulf of Aden to the Indian Ocean to India, the Far East and China. The ruling Sabean and Ḥimyarite kingdoms shaped the changing fortunes of the Yemeni people as a combination of economic shifts and natural disasters afflicted the prosperous region and it fell into rapid decline. Arabia Felix or ‘Felicitous Arabia’, as the Romans had called it, soon went from being the ‘land of plenty’ to the ‘land of empty’. The northern highlands of Yemen had been influenced by Byzantine Christianity for many years both from the Hellenistic world and from across the Red Sea in Africa. But when the Ḥimyarite king, Dhū Nawwās converted to Judaism and began persecuting his Christian subjects in Najrān, the powerful Abyssinian kingdom invaded in the early sixth century CE (Common Era) to remove the king and re-establish Christianity as the dominant religion of the Yemen until the introduction of Islam in the early period of Muhammad’s mission.

Dominated for a millennia by the minority ruling Zaydī Imāms, a branch of Shii Islam, the harsh topography and differing terrains of the Yemen have meant that imposing total rule over the whole country has never been completely achieved and the ancient tribal hostilities between the dominant Kathīrī and Qu˓aytī tribes of the southern desert region of Ḥaḍramawt were eventually exploited by the British in the mid-nineteenth century who desperately sought to control the port of Aden to protect its imperial, global entrepreneurialism. It is at this juncture that the historical narrative of this monograph begins as thousands of Yemenis sought employment on ships sailing from Aden, with many sailing to Britain from as early as the 1830s. The establishment of the British Protectorate at Aden in 1839 effectively precipitated the creation of two Yemens; the former northern socialist, Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) and the former southern Marxist, Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY). Britain’s colony at Aden lasted until 1967 when they were eventually ousted after a fierce independence war. Throughout the changing fortunes of Yemen’s long history, migration and diaspora have been common themes, as Yemenis sought a better life elsewhere through trade or work.

The second chapter explores the earliest arrival and settlement of Yemenis sailors to the British port cities of Cardiff, South Shields, London, Liverpool and, later, Manchester, as recounted through the personal narratives and tales of lascars present in imperial Britain. The writings of the Reverend Joseph Salter, who worked as a Christian missionary amongst South Asian, Arab and Far Eastern Oriental sailors for many years produced two published accounts of his philanthropic missionary work amongst the abandoned and desperate lascars scattered across the port cities of Britain in the nineteenth century. They provide harrowing accounts of the deprivation and discrimination suffered by many of the early lascars. As the British Empire rapidly expanded, the terminologies and typologies relating to its colonial subjects became devoid of the details and nuances of specific ethnic subgroupings and instead the ubiquitous term ‘lascar’ was applied to any oriental sailor whether he came from Malacca, Bombay or Aden. In the use of this overarching term, ethnic subgroups; like the Malays, Indians and Yemenis, became subsumed as they were woven into the collective term, ‘lascar’. It is therefore more than likely that the ‘Arabs’ referred to by the Reverend Joseph Salter, during his nineteenth century missionary work among the Oriental sailors stranded in British ports, were in fact Yemenis. As my research confirms, Yemeni settlers were recorded in the port of Cardiff as early as the 1860s. This particular form of early migration was largely facilitated through the custom of the muqaddam (‘representative’) and the muwassiṭ (‘middleman’), who acted as subcontractors to the shipping agents and port authorities in providing ships’ crews, usually made up of around 12 Yemeni lascars from the same tribe. In the process, the muqaddam or muwassiṭ would invariably profit from a small fee and commission from both the shipping agent or port authority and the employed Yemeni lascar.

As the lascar presence increased across British docklands, a series of discriminatory legislation aimed at limiting the numbers of lascars in the ports and shipping industry was put into place from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. The lascars faced an unbelievable degree of racism and discrimination and the contemporaneous accounts of their difficult and often squalid living conditions also document a number of unique examples of early Muslim ritual practices and religious rites within the then burgeoning British Muslim community. Amongst the new measures aimed at curtailing lascar settlement in Britain were ‘coloured only’ sailors’ rests and lodging houses. In the process, there was a pairing-off of lascars who wished to lodge with people of the same language and culture as themselves and, as a result, ‘Arab only’ boarding houses began to appear in South Shields, Cardiff and Liverpool. However, despite the exclusionary measures, Yemeni sailors not only continued to inhabit the port cities but many began to marry local women and raise families, forming tight-knit communities identified by their racial and religious otherness and contrasted with the wider society of the various cities in which they settled. The multi-racial, multicultural docklands communities largely settled by Yemeni lascars became exoticized by the locals and Cardiff’s Butetown docklands area became known as ‘Tiger Bay’, South Shields’ Holborn and Laygate areas were named locally as ‘Little Arabia’ and the Trafford Park area of Manchester Docks, was known as the ‘Barbary Coast’.

Chapter 3 explores the nascent formation of early Yemeni communities across the British port cities and the emergence of the Arab boarding houses and cafés that facilitated the cultural and religious needs of the settling lascars. The chapter illustrates that despite the development of small, ‘incapsulated’⁸ communities, many lascars faced extremely high levels of discrimination as their white maritime peers raised continued objections to the ‘black and coloured’ seamen commissioned at cheaper rates by the shipping companies. Ironically, the establishment of national labour unions in the British shipping industry were mobilized in an effort to reduce the numbers of non-white sailors employed on ships. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was estimated that the number of ‘coloured’ seamen working on British vessels was around a staggering 40,000. However, union pressure resulted in a huge reduction of almost a third by 1912. In a desperate bid for work, Yemeni sailors were forced to travel between the docks of Cardiff, South Shields, London, Hull, Liverpool and Manchester, a phenomenon known as the ‘Tramp trade’.

By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the situation of Yemeni lascars took a dramatic turn when the British government was forced to rely on its colonial subjects to aid the war effort. Thousands of Yemenis based in British ports volunteered to serve on seconded merchant vessels used to ship vital supplies to the troops deployed in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Additionally, the increase in demand for colonial sailors to replace the British men in military service provided further employment opportunities for Yemeni lascars while others found jobs in the munitions factories of Manchester or the shipbuilding and auxiliary industries such as the timber yards. By 1919, serious economic recession and major changes in the shipping industry meant that many Yemeni lascars became redundant. In the increasing racial tensions that flared up in the interwar period during the desperate search for work within the shipping industry, a number of so-called ‘Arab riots’ broke out across the British ports. Newspaper articles inflamed the situation by making a series of unfounded claims against the minority lascars. As the race riots continued, on and off until the 1930s, the army was often employed to quell the disturbances. The developing Yemeni community faced a litany of discriminatory abuse that was aimed not just at the settler migrants, but at their indigenous wives, who were accused of being sexually deviant because of their liaisons and marriages to the Arabs, and their ‘mixed race’ children, who were portrayed as the ‘half-bred’ byproducts of what were considered to be most unsavoury matrimonies. The social exclusion faced by the Yemeni communities directly after the First World War resulted in their effective marginalization across all realms of British public and social life, despite the huge sacrifices the community had made in defence of Britain during the war.

If invisibility is a recurring theme in the history of Yemeni settlement in Britain, Chapter 4 explores their growing visibility as a direct result of the later employment struggles that directly follow the First World War and the interwar economic depression of the 1920s and 1930s. Yemenis initially lost their visibility and became submerged into broader racist and discriminatory terms such as ‘blacks’ and ‘Arabs’ during this period. It was during the interwar years that three significant events occurred relating to British Yemenis. The first was the forced and voluntary repatriation from Britain of large numbers of unemployed Yemenis during the great depression of the early twentieth century. In addition to the imposed deportations, thousands of Yemenis returned voluntarily or sought better employment opportunities in the developing Arab Gulf countries. The second event was the introduction of a spiritually dynamic and well-organized religious movement that took root across the British Yemeni communities from the 1930s to the mid-1950s. This movement, the ˓Alawī Sufi ṭarīqah, introduced by the charismatic Yemeni religious scholar, Shaykh Abdullah Ali al-Hakimi, who transformed the lives of the Yemeni sailors, their British Muslim convert wives and their ‘mixed race’ (or muwalladūn) children.

Once again, the Yemeni community moved from being unassuming and unseen to becoming religiously and culturally distinctive and highly visible. The experience of the ˓Alawī Sufi ṭarīqah within the British Yemeni community is a unique and fascinating chapter of British Muslim history that completely transformed the British Yemeni communities. Al-Hakimi, almost single-handed, established a number of religious centres across the towns and cities where Yemenis were located. He also educated the many indigenous wives of the sailors, founding Islamic classes along with Qur’ān classes for their children. During significant religious festivals, street parades were organized across the port cities in which Yemenis were settled. The third event was the dramatic change in the shipping industry as vessels moved from steam power, provided by coal shovelled into the engine boilers by Yemeni lascar, ‘stokers’ or ‘donkeymen’ to oil-fuelled ships. This development forced an ‘inward migration’ of Yemeni communities into the industrial centres of urban Britain, away from their traditional maritime employment and isolated multicultural docklands communities. In the process, this migration created new communities of urbanized and industrialized British Yemenis shaped by the factories and steelworks in the manufacturing cities of Birmingham, Sheffield and Manchester.

The employment struggles of Yemeni settlers to Britain by the mid-twentieth century were compounded by the wider economic depression that plagued Western Europe for decades after the First World War. Added to this was the blatant discrimination Yemenis, their British wives and ‘mixed race’ children constantly confront. In the face of increasing hostility and exclusion, Yemeni sailors and industrial labourers began to mobilize through the trade union movement. Further, as the politics of the Yemen shifted by the late twentieth century, so too did the leadership of the British Yemeni community which had been led and motivated so charismatically by its spiritual guide, Shaykh Abdullah Ali al-Hakimi, for almost two decades. Al-Hakimi was originally welcomed by the British government and his spiritual reforms within the community were seen as a much needed antidote to the rising politicization of the British Yemeni communities and their increasing militant trade unionism. His inspiring spiritual leadership instilled the community with a sense of pride and belonging, both religiously and culturally. However, al-Hakimi’s efforts were thwarted by his political ambitions aimed at a free and united Yemen, rid of its archaic and outmoded, medieval, theocratic ruler in the shape of the Zaydī Imām in the North and the colonial occupation of British imperialists at the port of Aden. These ambitions were to prove extremely costly to al-Hakimi both upon him personally and upon the community and spiritual order he worked so tirelessly to establish. As al-Hakimi’s reformist aspirations increasingly began to focus on removing the autocratic Zaydī Imām, the British government began to distance themselves from him, fearing his revolutionary politics would not only disrupt their cordial diplomatic relations with the Imām in North Yemen, but would also lead to a revolt to their control of south Yemen. But when the dominant Shamīrī tribe, originating from the province of Ta˓izz, took exception to his anti-Imāmate stand and what they saw as his ‘meddling’ in the politics of Yemen, the rift between the Shaykh and his ṭarīqah adherents became irreconcilable and al-Hakimi was forced to leave Britain for the Aden Protectorate in 1953. This move saw the former assistant to Shaykh al-Hakimi, Shaykh Hassan Ismail, becoming the murshid (spiritual guide) of the ˓Alawī ṭarīqah in the UK. The chapter explores al-Hakimi’s far-reaching influence and indelible impact on the Yemeni community in mid-twentieth century Britain.

Chapter 6 follows the development of the ˓Alawī ṭarīqah when Shaykh Hassan Ismail, al-Hakimi’s former deputy and subsequent replacement, permanently returned to Yemen in 1956 after electing his adopted UK-born British Yemeni son, Shaykh Said Hassan Ismail, as the new murshid of the ˓Alawī ṭarīqah. The legacy of Shaykh Said’s consistent and loyal service to the Yemeni community in Cardiff spanned over 50 years and was rooted in a distinctly British Muslim context, largely reflected in the Shaykh’s own idiomatic British Yemeni identity. However, while claims to wider notions of Britishness became a developing feature of British Yemeni identity experiences in the latter part of the twentieth century, post-Second World War economic migrants coming directly from the Yemen into the industrial metropolises of Britain through a ‘second wave’ migration were experiencing varied degrees of cultural adjustment. The settlement of these new migrants was facilitated through the same tribal networks and muwassiṭūn (‘middleman’) systems employed by the Yemeni lascars to British port cities over a hundred years earlier. Although new Yemeni settlers still faced degrees of racism and discrimination in their places of work and settlement, social and political changes in Britain and Yemen meant that the migrant labourers were both better politically educated and actively organized as a result of both Marxist and socialist governments in North and South Yemen, respectively. In the UK this developed political awareness saw the establishment of the Yemeni Workers Union and the affiliation of many Yemeni workers with other established British Trade Unions.

At the local British Yemeni community levels, the politicization of Yemenis sparked the establishment of many cultural institutions and community organizations that galvanized the emerging innercity Yemeni communities locally, nationally and internationally, through which diaspora Yemenis were able to mobilize and work towards seriously developing their communities in the UK and Yemen. By the 1970s, economic recession hit the UK’s manufacturing industries hard and the resultant mass-unemployment impacted directly on the ‘second wave’ Yemeni communities across the northern industrial cities. Britain’s Black and Asian communities, largely established through postwar economic migration, were ‘scapegoated’ and transmogrified by the media and ruthless politicians from loyal and hard-working employees into lazy and unemployed ‘scroungers’ almost overnight. The Yemeni response was a degree of ‘mass migration’ to the more prosperous and opportune climes of the developed Arabian Gulf, thus creating another transnational Yemeni link and migration narrative as witnessed by Gadri Salih’s opening story. For those who stayed, their fate was to be once again subsumed by invisibility into the wider debates of immigration, integration, loyalty and belonging and a perceived failed multiculturalism. In the ensuing and highly controversial debates, demonstrations and ultimate riots a distinct sense of British Yemeni identity emerged in the presence of a muchneeded role model and hero; the Sheffield-born boxing phenomenon, ‘Prince’ Naseem Hamid. As one young British Yemeni put it; ‘[When] “Prince” Naseem came on the scene…it was, “I’m from the Yemen, you know ‘Prince’ Naseem?” And, that made it like alright and cool.’ Hamid’s singular contribution to British Yemeni identity represented a tangible manifestation of the resultant hybrid and hyphenated multiple identities as British Arabs, British Yemenis and British Muslims that was increasingly experienced by succeeding generations.

The final chapter explores the contemporary setting, present conditions and current developments of the Yemeni communities across Britain through a number of leading research studies and publications by academics, journalists and writers. Some key observations offered by various studies conducted on British Yemeni communities assert a multitude of often conflicting interpretations from ‘invisibility’ and ‘incapsulation’ to the description of Britain’s oldest Muslim community as representing both a genuine expression of ‘British Islam’ and ‘English Muslims’. The phenomenon of ‘second wave’ migration of single-male Yemenis to the industrial metropolises of post-World War Two Britain is contrasted with the earlier port settlements of the nineteenth-century lascars. A number of commentators viewed the Yemeni communities, particularly the South Shields community, as fully integrated members of the wider societies into which they settled. This reality, they assert, has been largely established as a result of the intermarriages and subsequent generations of settlement in their various locales.

The chapter also explores the custom, merits and dangers of chewing qāt, a plant indigenous to the Yemen, whose leaves are chewed in communal gatherings of males on a daily basis in Yemen but less frequently here in Britain. Media scrutiny regarding the easy availability of qāt in the UK has periodically presented its consumption with the same panic and fear as that of ‘hard’ drug use, demanding an outright ban of qāt that is simply reactionary. This chapter instead offers critical assessment of the consumption and use of qāt amongst British Yemenis based upon an examination of its physical and medical affects as well as its cultural significance.

The chapter also investigates the various degrees of community development and capacity building across the British Yemeni communities by comparing the largest, settled in Birmingham, to the smallest, living in Eccles, Greater Manchester, and examining how population size affects the ‘visibility’ and, consequently, the amount of investment and support from the local authorities these communities might receive. The comparison details the successful development of Birmingham’s Bordesley Centre, managed by the largely Yemeni-run Al-Muath Trust. The Centre is an institute that serves, not only the large settled Yemeni community, but also the majority of ethnic minority communities within the locale. The current growing confidence and community development sprouting across the British Yemeni communities is predominantly absent from the studies examined in this chapter despite some writers speaking about British Yemenis as ‘successfully integrated’, even describing them as ‘English Muslims’. Conversely, the research monographs of Richard Lawless and Fred Halliday express the experiences of Yemenis in Britain as the ‘end of an era’ of a community that lives in the ‘remotest village’, whose lives are both separated and ‘invisible’ to the wider society in which they live, as ‘incapsulated’ communities.

The Epilogue to this social history discusses the British Yemeni community in the wider contexts of Arab communities in Britain and the related issues of visibility and recognition by local and national governments in terms of their specific needs and concerns. It is evident from the studies referenced and cited that there is a large degree of marginalization when it comes to addressing both the misrepresentations of the many diverse Arab communities in the UK, as either pathologized ‘Islamic terrorists’ operating as al-Qaeda ‘sleeper cells’ or ‘rich petroldollar Shaykhs’ who inhabit the nightclubs and casinos of London. Coupled with the subject of representation beyond misleading stereotypes has been the previous problem of establishing an accurate population statistic for the number of Arabs in Britain before the new inclusions in the 2011 census statistics.

The works of Madawi al-Rasheed and Camilla Fawzi El-Solh provide startling and powerful arguments for more nuanced representations and greater academic research into Arabs in Britain. The emergence of Arab community mobilization as a direct result of 9/11 and the subsequent US-led ‘War on Terror’ initiatives; the invasion of Afghanistan and, then later, Iraq, the intensive securitization of Arab communities in US, Britain and Europe, and the high numbers of ‘extraordinary renditions’ – the cruel euphemism for the numerous unexplained disappearances of Arab Muslims from across the globe into US-facilitated incarcerations, devoid of any human rights – have all witnessed a high degree of organized British Arab responses. For example, the ‘Stop the War’ campaign supported by the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) attracted large numbers of young British Yemenis into its ranks. Further, the current pro-democracy movement sweeping across the Arab-Islamic Middle East has seen rallied support from the Arab communities in Britain, manifest through many demonstrations, fund-raising events and representations of the various revolutionary movements in the British media. This is particularly true in the case of the British Yemeni community towards the final days of Ali Abdullah Salih’s presidency.

Another issue is the question of Fred Halliday’s asserted ‘invisibility’ of the British Yemeni community which is addressed in the Epilogue through a specific case study of the population statistics according to the 1991 and 2001 Census for the Yemeni community of Eccles, Greater Manchester, and the subsequent local authority’s responses to the prevailing socio-economic conditions of that community. The case study records the dramatic shift in local authority funding and resources once a serious discrepancy between the ‘official’ population figure and a much higher figure, based on quantitative ethnographic research, had been established for the Yemeni population. Thus, almost immediately transforming that particular community from being ‘invisible’ and underdeveloped into one that is both visible and organized.

The politicization of Muslim identity appears to be an increasing inevitability for Muslim minorities in the post-9/11 political climate of western societies. Yet how much is this phenomenon actually internal to the experiences and realities faced by young British Yemenis is an interesting question. Current research into ‘British Muslim Arab’ identity has been undertaken by Carol Nagel and Lynn Staeheli, which included a significant proportion of young British Yemeni respondents. Their research findings have been examined as a means of exploring the idea of ‘Muslim’, as both a public and political identity, based on the qualitative research interviews in their study. Surprisingly, they noted that while levels of personal religiosity varied, most respondents appeared to reject the idea of a ‘British Muslim’ identity because it was both inherently politicized and largely unrepresentative of their personal experiences of religion and politics. What is clear from the detailed study is that the majority of the views of the young British Arabs questioned are in counterdistinction to the perpetuated association between Islam and political extremism, whilst acknowledging the place of religion and religious identity in the public realm.

Finally, this study concludes with a concise discussion on the notion of traditional tribal belonging in the particular context of transnational and diaspora Yemeni networks. Translocal tribal politics often forms part of the intra-community dynamics of the British Yemeni communities. However, the tensions and disputes between various tribal allegiances only occasionally surface and may even remain invisible to the outsider. Moreover, the need to conform to the collective conventions of tribal traditions and mores is essentially self-imposed, particularly in the diaspora. Global dimensions of Yemeni identity, both religious and cultural, have become unique features of ‘Yemeniness’ and aspects of ‘translocal tribalism’ are important facets of identity for young British Yemeni males. The cumulative affects of the modern manifestations of prologue | what it means to be both British and Yemeni have produced an amazing and resilient community of Arab Muslims in the UK who have established themselves for almost 200 years as the country’s oldest settled Muslim community, complete with its own unique and fascinating historical narrative.

As Arabic is the literary language of Yemenis and Islam, Arabic terms have been used and explained throughout the book, and a glossary of the major words appears at the end. Spellings considered to be correct by the wider Muslim academic community have been adopted: for example ‘Shaykh’ and ‘Muslim’ rather than ‘Sheikh’ and ‘Moslem’. Diacritical marks have been used for unfamiliar Arabic terms except where standard names, placenames and terms are commonly used. In quotations, the terms and spellings used by the original authors have been reproduced so that variant spellings such as ‘Mohammed’, ‘Moslem’, ‘tariqa’ and ‘sheikh’ are found. The italicization, punctuation and spelling in the quotations all appear as they do in their original texts. It is customary for peace and salutations to follow the names both of Islamic Prophets and Muhammad’s companions, but these have been omitted in this book.