Electric Josh

Colonies
The cover story in the Atlantic this month is A Tale of Two Colonies. The main idea is that here are two shady, backwater countries that the US has to deal with, which kind of makes us the colonial power on the block (or something), but what's far more interesting is the fantastic detail in which Yemen and Eritrea are described. It's the sort of storytelling about places that American white kids (me) never study, totally fascinating in their own right, that hits a really nice intersection of history and current politics. I shoulda been a political science major.

Take, for example, the Wadi Hadhramaut, a hundred-mile-long oasis in southeastern Yemen, surrounded by great tracts of desert and stony plateau and inhabited since 1,000 B.C. Despite its isolation and a history of insular tribal feuds, the region has for centuries maintained links with India and Indonesia, among other places. The Nizam of Hyderabad, in south-central India, recruited his bodyguards exclusively from among Hadhrami tribesmen. The Hadhramaut is also linked to Saudi Arabia, by Bedouin trails that in antiquity were caravan routes. Today all this makes for a convenient social and economic network in which an organization like al Qaeda can conduct global business—especially since Osama bin Laden's family has its origins in the Hadhramaut region.

Yemen is central to the destiny of Arabia and, therefore, to the war on terrorism. It was the political tensions in the Arabian Peninsula that spawned most of the September 11 terrorists, almost all of whom were Saudi nationals. Though Yemen has only a quarter of Saudi Arabia's land area, its population is almost as large, so the demographic core of the peninsula is here in its mountainous southwest corner, where sweeping basalt plateaus, rearing up into sandcastle formations and volcanic plugs, embrace a network of oases densely inhabited since the classical age.

Separated from one another by mountain fastnesses and rich from the production of funerary spices, ancient tribal kingdoms such as Saba, Hadhramaut, and Himyar fought wars even as their merchants cultivated contacts with Africa and South Asia. These kingdoms were followed by a bewildering array of medieval Shiite and Sunni Arab dynasties, among them the Ziyadids, the Zaydis, and the Rasulids, and while they reigned each valley or oasis remained sovereign unto itself. Though the Ottoman Turks ostensibly conquered Yemen in 1517, large swaths of tribal lands never came under their control. The British officers who followed the Turks and manned the Aden Protectorate were kept busy maintaining peace among the feuding tribes in the Hadhramaut and adjacent wadis. Freya Stark, a British explorer and Arabist who traveled in Yemen in the 1930s, wrote of "wild little men of some earlier world" who spent a lifetime in "guerrilla warfare."