Mick Hartley

When I linked to the panoramic view of the Yemen capital Sana'a last week, I quoted the massive population increase as given by Wikipedia – from 134,600 in 1975 to 1,937,451 in 2005 – and wondered if that could possibly be right. Well, this Yemeni memoir by Toronto-based writer Kamal Al-Solaylee gives some indication as to how that might have happened:

One of the turning points in Yemen's recent history came in 1990, shortly after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August. Yemen stood out for its support of Saddam Hussein's invasion, and paid a dear price.

As hundreds of thousands of migrant Yemeni workers in Saudi Arabia and neighbouring Gulf countries were expelled in retaliation, many of them settled in Sanaa. A small capital city in an impoverished country, already ill equipped to serve its citizens, it cracked under the pressure.

Streets teemed with the unemployed, particularly young men, many of whom succumbed to the Wahabi brand of Islam that the exiled workers had picked up in Saudi Arabia and brought back.

Al-Solaylee's tale, of his secular cosmopolitan Yemeni family who in the space of a few decades became closed-minded Islamists, is a grim kind of story of our times: how, while our attention was elsewhere (the end of history??) that particularly regressive literal strain of Islam was spreading out from Saudi Arabia into the Muslim world, with consequences that are now all too familiar. 

He shows a 1975 photo of him with his brothers and sisters at the beach in Alexandria, in bikinis and swimming trunks:

In a black photo album tucked inside an old filing cabinet, I keep more recent family photographs, from my visits to Sanaa, or ones they send in the mail. I don't believe that even my closest friends have seen them. The rare times I look at them, I see only a family that has betrayed its secular, intellectual history and has either chosen or been forced to accept intolerance instead.

One photograph from April, 2006, particularly infuriates me. My family's penchant for group photos never wavers, but this time my eldest brother voices his concern about my sisters being photographed in their “indoor” clothes.

“What if the men who work at the photo-developing shop get to see your sisters in short sleeves or without a head scarf?” he asks, as if it's something I should have thought about myself. This is the same brother who is standing behind me in that 1975 picture I love so much.

My sisters immediately see his point. I'm stunned. We reach a compromise. I can pose with my sisters and mother if they wear the hijab , or at least long sleeves and skirts. I fake a smile as my heart breaks. The last thing I want is an argument on my last night in Sanaa.

I haven't seen my family since.