Yemen: The Unknown Arabia

Rating:
Summary: decent book at best
Review: Apparently a reprinted version of Travels in Dictionary Land (if it was different i didn't notice) it gives a good historical and social look at Yemen but mostly in an overly exotic manner. The book and its many anecdotes, however, are very useful as a basis for further research. The chapter on traveling to Socotra is fascinating as well. At times, the reading seemed difficult to an American who is not accustomed to British humor or idioms, but rarely is the meaning lost. While this book is good for light reading or to get an idea of some of the historical, geographical and social aspects of Yemen, the idealistic vision of traditionalism grows tiring. If you're looking for serious commentary on what it is like to live and work as a foreigner in modern day Yemen, look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: decent book at best
Review: Apparently a reprinted version of Travels in Dictionary Land (if it was different i didn't notice) it gives a good historical and social look at Yemen but mostly in an overly exotic manner. The book and its many anecdotes, however, are very useful as a basis for further research. The chapter on traveling to Socotra is fascinating as well. At times, the reading seemed difficult to an American who is not accustomed to British humor or idioms, but rarely is the meaning lost. While this book is good for light reading or to get an idea of some of the historical, geographical and social aspects of Yemen, the idealistic vision of traditionalism grows tiring. If you're looking for serious commentary on what it is like to live and work as a foreigner in modern day Yemen, look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: Gemillee- al Yemeen, Just to the Right of Target
Review: I enjoyed this work. The author spends time focusing on most areas of Yemen- the Hawdramat, Sana'a, Aden, the mountains, and Suqutra. It would have been nice to have more detail on the coastal areas and the writing at times isn't excellent, but it is a very serviceable text. MacKintosh-Smith writes from the perspective of someone who really got inside the culture- as much as a traveler can get. He retains an etic perspective, and does not live, grow, and die with the Yemeni. But this is one of the few travelogues where one can find information on qat, and even the author using it on a regular basis (though it remains classified as a drug at the same level as cocaine by the U.S. government).

It is also one of the few places where you can find a modern description of travels in Suqutra, which is worth getting the book by itself. The chapter on Suqutra describes a land isolated biologically for millions of years, displaying evidence of gigantisism as you find in Hawaii, where few predators have controlled the growth of fauna and especially flora. There are cucumber trees there, and others that look like upside-down umbrellas. Much of the flora and fauna are unique to the island. Further, severe storms six months of the year prevent access to the island. So, while over the years there have been invasions on the coast of the island by different parties, it has largely grown up unscathed into modern times. The language diverged from South Arabian in about 750 BC, and the people seem to be a mixture of Arabic, Greek, Portuguese, and Indian- but no one knows for sure. While they do now have cars (301 of them), the cigarette lighter is still an unknown machine. And since the government severely limits non-Yemeni visitors to the island, this is a rare and exciting bit of a story of what the people are like. I only wish there was more about the island.

Rating:
Summary: A Light Bauble
Review: Not a bad book really, rather light and amusing, and perfect for romantics who want to project an image of exoticism on Yemen. In classic Orientalist fashion, it celebrates a European perspective on the Arab world, one which insists that its culture is best when it is at its supposedly "traditional" - the antipode to (and, I would speculate, escape from) European civilization. The author is uncomfortable with the proudly multi-cultural traditions of Aden, positively angry with women in Yemen who challenge its social norms, and tied into the idea that Yemen is an unchanging paradise. Indeed, the essentialism of his portrait is summarized in this sentence: Yemen's 1,200 mile coast is "a tacked on sort of place. The essence of Yemen is here diluted in the ebb and flow of outsiders. If I treat the coast as an afterthought, I admit to prejudice." Having spent considerable time in Yemen, I certainly agree that Yemen is a charming and wonderful place, but am perhaps uncomfortable with the way the author ignores its changing political and social currents in favor of a search for an eternal essence. Such an essence doesn't exist except in the imagination and projections of Europeans. An amusing book, but ultimately Yemen is a far, far more complex, challenging place than the author is willing to confront. But, as light escapism, for fans of travel books it is reasonably entertaining.

Rating:
Summary: excellent travel book on a truly unknown part of Arabia
Review: Often times reviled throughout history as a backwater, often backward, author Tim Mackintosh-Smith does a wonderful job in showing Yemen as an intriguing land, an unknown section of Arabia, bringing to the reader some of the history, culture, people, and geography of this much neglected corner of the Middle East.

Mackintosh-Smith provides an excellent primer of Yemni history. Yemen we find out once hosted powerful pre-Islamic civilizations, South Arabian states like Saba, Ma'in (whose massive and expertly produced stone works later overawed the Romans), Qaban, and Hadramawt, wealthy merchant kingdoms that grew rich on their tight control of aromatic gums - particularly frankincense and myrrh as well as cinnamon brought from India - in great demand among the Pharaonic Egyptians for medicine and for the process of mummification, by the Assyrians, by the Greeks, the Romans, the ancient kingdoms growing rich on spices rather than oil. Many of the lands were cultivated thanks to the Marib Dam - a massive structure that finally collapsed in the sixth century, that according to legend was destroyed by a rat with iron teeth - or to very impressive irrigation works, via stone tunnels cut into the living rocks of the mountains, some tunnels 150 yards long and big enough to drive a car through and still used to supply water to highland villages over 2000 years after they were built. With the collapse of this civilization - linked by many to the collapse of the Marib Dam - there was a Yemeni diaspora of sorts, as many Yemenis were in the vanguard of the early conquering armies of Islam, spreading throughout the Arab world as far as East Africa, Ethiopia, Iraq, Syria, Tunisia, and even Spain. Later on the Rasulid sultans ruled southern Yemen between the 13th and 15th centuries, making their capital of Ta'izz a wealthy and cosmopolitan capital, its rulers patrons of many of the sciences, producing astrolabes and magnetic compasses while the rest of the Islamic world was in ruins thanks to the Mongols. Modern Yemeni history is also well covered though I found it at times confusing.

The author visited many areas of Yemen. He hiked down canyons and dry wadi (seasonally dry river beds), warned by the locals of the tahish, a cow-sized, hyena like Yemeni bogeyman, though more likely in danger of the sayl, a roaring chest-high wall of water that can suddenly fill canyons thanks to distant highland rains. He viewed many mountain villages and homes perched precariously over such wadi, its citizens living on centuries-old terraces carved into the mountain, designed to catch and slow the descent of every bit of precious water that rains upon the mountains. He sampled a great variety of Yemeni foods, such as saltah (stew based on vegetables and broth topped by hulbah, fenugreek flour whisked to a froth with water), rawbah (soured milk from which the fat has been removed to make butter, popular on the island of Suqutra), qishr (a drink made from the husks of coffee beans, the bean of which have long been a major Yemeni export), and baghiyyah honey, said to the finest in the world and produced only in Yemen by bees pasturing only on ilb trees. He encountered a few of the Jews of Yemen, only a few thousand of which are left, identified by their corkscrew curl side locks. He viewed a bara', an Islamic tribal festival still practiced in the mountains, looking like a dance but more akin to a medieval tournament, a place to display skill with weapons and with heavy connotations of honor and tribal solidarity. He wrote of the qabili - the mountain tribesmen - who are regarded by city dwellers as yokels but also regarded with pride as part of their ancestry, regarding them as honorable people, ones practicing great hospitality to strangers, with many symbolically becoming a tribesmen by adoption of the asib, the tribesman's upright dagger. He visited those who were sayyid, male descendents of the Prophet, often whom devote their lives to Qur'anic knowledge, forming a class that has long had a critical role in Yemeni politics and religion. He visited Aden, one of the greatest ports in the world, its "craggy profile" formed by volcanic activity, a weird city thanks to local topography, not "one city but a series of settlements separated by outriders of the central peak, Jabal Shamsan," many of those settlements quite distinct in character, a city once contested by the Ottomans, the French, and held by the British for the better part of two centuries. He visited two sub-cultures within Yemen that don't always Arabic; the Mahris, located east of Hud along al-Masilah, racially distinct and following the very un-Arabic matrilineal descent system, and the native peoples of Suqutra, who until relatively recently many did not speak Arabic at all but rather Suqutri. Indeed the Island of Suqutra, once called the Island of Dragon's Blood thanks to one of its most famous exports, a blood red resin from the dragon's blood tree (_Dracaena cinnabari_, actually a member of the Lily family), is the subject of the last chapter, an island 260 miles from the Yemeni mainland, closer to Somalia than to Yemen, a country that once practiced very un-Islamic adult public circumcisions and witch trails into the late 1960s.

Well covered is one of the most famous and unique aspects of Yemeni culture, the chewing of qat. A dicotyledon known to science as _Catha edulis_, it is chewed by groups of men socially, the qat chews often important arenas for the transaction of business, discussions of politics and religion, to accompany weddings and funerals, or simply to unwind with friends. Qat is recognized to have a huge variety of sub-types by many Yemeni connoisseurs, with many esoteric rules; qat from a tree over a grave is to be avoided, and qat from lower branches (qatal) is the least prized of qat.

I really enjoyed this book, which boasted some interesting sketch book type illustrations, a glossary, and a good bibliography.

Rating:
Summary: Bring on the qat
Review: This work is outside the usual parameters of my taste in reading, but a stretch is good for everyone. I want to thank the author, first, for displacing the first image that comes to mind when I hear the word "Yemen": the desperately ficticious destination picked by Chandler as he trys to escape Janis on Friends. This is a wonderfully rounded depiction of a culture that somehow manages to exist in the past as well as the present. I especially enjoyed the visit to the isle of Susqatra. Mr. MacKintosh-Smith uses his insider/outsider status to great effect, and his mastery of observation and fluid description takes the reader on a journey of discovery. Bravo.