Today the largest and most populous city in Southern Arabia, Sana’a has been continuously inhabited for at least 2,500 years. Situated in a fertile basin over two thousand meters above sea level, the city remained economically and politically important over millennia because it sits on a major communication axis linking the mountains and rich fertile valleys of larger Yemen with the Horn of Africa and the Indian Ocean. Considered the ancestral heartland of the Arabs, the recognized Islamic heritage of the city allowed it in 1984 to become a recognized UNESCO World Heritage Site. With its 14-meter-tall walls surrounding the inner core of the city, a maze of over 6000 still largely intact multi-story tower houses makes Sana’a unique in the world. Its famous skyline consists of family homes that are at least five, if not eight or nine stories high. Along with these homes, the diverse Muslim population was serviced by more than 100 mosques (and associated evkaf properties) and 14 communal baths (hammams), all built before the 11th century.
Reflective of its continued importance to the larger region, the city has seen regular additions to its main administrative and religious studies infrastructure. For instance, the main gates outsiders use to enter Sana’a, the northern Bab al-Shaub and south-facing Bab Al-Yaman, date to the first Ottoman occupation in the 16th century. The highlight of the Islamic city, however, is the Great Mosque (originally built in 633), a short walk from the Bab Al Yaman. A magnificent amalgamation of architectural styles tracing back to the period of the prophet Muhammad, the Grand Mosque’s centrality to the development of Islam as a global religion is confirmed by archeological findings on its grounds and surviving scriptures found in its walls. This includes a famous, so-called Sana’a’ palimpsest, that scholars determine to be one of the oldest Quranic manuscripts. It conjoins non-Islamic fragments with early renditions of verses pre-dating the Holy Qur’an’s codification during the Uthman caliphate. The Great Mosque remained the largest in the city until the construction of the Al Saleh Mosque by the President of a unified Yemen in 2008, Ali Abdallah Saleh.
The survival and regular investment in refurbishing the Great Mosque points to the city’s key political and cultural role in the larger region. Along with the resulting unique urban characteristics is a corresponding migration of scholars and craftsmen over the centuries. The resulting communities drawn to the city over the ages reflects in the architectural patrimony that eventual gave each neighborhood its special connection to the diverse religious groups calling them home. This diversity of Muslim constituencies goes back to when the Prophet Muhammad sent his first delegation, led by his nephew ʿAli. The significance of ‘Ali’s delegation highlights the region’s importance to the early Muslim umma in Mecca, including the fact that Abraha, a Christian Yemeni king during the lifetime of Muhammad’s grandfather attempted to invade Mecca. More, Yemen’s Sassanian governor became an early convert to Islam, a choice many in Sana’a made after Ali’s delegation brought the Prophet’s message.
The growth of conversions within the first decades translated into a renewed political importance of the city as key families patronized the greatest scholars of the time. The resulting migrations of Muslims seeking an Islamic education there, including ʿAbd al-Razzāḳ b. Hammām b. Nāfī, (b.744-d. 827), apparently of Persian origin, correspond with the Sana’a’s incorporation into the imperial ambitions of most of the great Arab Muslim medieval states. During these occupations by empires originating in Egypt or Syria, a critical role of Sana’a’s Muslim scholars played in shaping the larger Islamic world included their outward migration, spreading various Sufi and early Shi’a traditions to the larger Indian Ocean. Already during the reign of the Umayyad Caliph al-Muʿawiyya, for instance, Yemen would be divided into two regions with the north centered around Sanaʿa. Within this administrative frame, the city’s political and economic elite, the primary patrons of Ismaili, Zaydi and Shafi’ scholarly traditions, thrived. This continued during the transition to the Abbasid caliphate and by the mid-9th century, a local dynasty of the Yufirids (847-997) took control of the neighboring highlands, helping incubate Sana’a even further from the larger doctrinal tensions experienced in the rest of the Arab Muslim world.
At the beginning of the 10th century, the leader Yahya ibn al-Husayn established a Zaydi imamate in the northern highlands of Yemen that resulted in centuries of co-habitation between Zaydi scholars-cum-political leaders and outside powers. With the incorporation of Sana’a by the Fatimids (1047-1099), the sultans of Hamdan (1099-1173), the Ayyubids (1173-1230) and then the Rasulids (1230-1381) all accommodated the thriving Muslim diversity that remained in the city. Indeed, during the occupation of Fatimid Egypt large numbers of Ismailis settled in Yemen contributing to a sharp codification of distinctive Shi’a traditions that lasted until the middle of the 15th century, an era when Sana’a was directly administered by Zaydi imams. By the time of the first Ottoman occupation in the mid-16th century, Sana’a established itself as the primary vehicle for the Shiʿa Zaydi legalism (entirely detached from the emerging Twelver Imamiyyah Shiism that was the Safavid Empire’s official religion), one that cohabitated with Shafiʿi Sunnis to produce a dynamic society impervious to the sectarianism afflicting Yemen today.
Still a thriving metropolis by the 16th century, larger Yemen’s importance to the global economy made securing political accommodation from Sana’a’s cultural and political elites essential for representatives of the Dutch, Portuguese, Mamluk and then Ottoman states. This helped once the Ottomans withdrew in 1630 due the rebellion of the Zaydi Al-Mansur al-Qasim for Sana'a to become the seat of an independent Imamate that ushered in a long period of prosperity for the city’s inhabitants. This is best reflected in the quality and quantity of buildings from that time. Indeed, most of the architecture still standing in the city dates from this period, suggesting a deeply rooted society with family networks assuring Sana’a’s diverse Islamic heritage continued well into the twentieth century. Among the most famous scholars to emerge from this period was al-Shawkani (1759–1834).
Unfortunately, much of the city’s historic core has been overwhelmed by modernization beginning in the 1970s, a period after the decade-long war that began with the overthrow of the last Zaydi Imam from this era. Following a pattern of urban and demographic sprawl seen elsewhere in the world, the city’s population grew from about 55,000 in 1970 (more or less the same number of inhabitants during the second period of Ottoman administration that lasted from 1872 to 1918) to 1.7 million by 2004. Accounting for this sprawl was the influx of uprooted peasants from the countryside impacted by frequent violence in South Arabia. The resulting demographic expansion of the city well beyond its historic limits has change the religious function of the city.
The city’s limited natural resources—especially water and space for movement—shapes the sectarianism recognized since the 1980s. Despite the earlier noted tradition of ecumenical co-existence, the first wave of Yemenis moving to Saudi Arabia in search for work converted to their Saudi host’s Hanbali values. Their acquired intolerance thanks to the issuance of fatwas by Saudi-backed communal leaders like Muqbil bin Hadi al-Wadi'i led to open conflict in Yemen after Riyadh deported over a million Yemenis in 1991 because of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. With Yemen’s explosion of Saudi-backed “jihadism” mediated by the expansion of Muslim Brotherhood affiliated scholars like Abdul Majid al-Zindani, Sana’a became a city internally divided by competing networks of mutually hostile Muslim communities.
Crucially, the expansion of influence of some so-called Salafist groups by the late 1990s would serve the Yemeni government in a series of attempts to subdue political rivals both within and beyond the city. Known as the civil wars between the government of Ali Abdallah Saleh and former leaders of South Yemen in 1994 and the Sa’adah Wars that lasted throughout the 2000s, the state increasingly pitted inhabitants of the city against each other along sectarian lines. This impacted who lived in the city.
Because of growing sectarianism backed by the Yemeni state, old Sana’a families abandoned their houses in the historic center, leading to a shift of most of the shopping, educational, entertainment, banking, and government services beyond the old city walls. Lower income Yemenis moved into the old city, making conditions deteriorate further. Over the course of these devastating internal conflicts, the Saleh government experimented with dividing the administrative power of the city to so-called Local Councils in 2002. According to the Saleh government, these councils would offer a stabilizing mechanism that could supplant the authority of the government over now massive neighborhoods emerging since the waves of migration to the city. Negotiated at a time of duress, Saleh’s experimentation with allowing political parties formally displaying Islamic social and cultural agendas to thrive helped the national government contain the growing presence of refugees from the Zaydi regions north of Sana’a. The government’s offer to transfer some administrative and financial functions over to friendly Salafist political parties thus proved a tactic aimed protect the regime from opposition. Unfortunately, the allocation of resources and tax revenue to political parties allied with the state denied many inhabitants basic services.
While in theory the changes Saleh’s government would enable the local population to elect their own representatives, it became clear these representatives would also need to secure the approval their foreign government patrons. As such, the decentralization heralded as a model for Yemen’s future strengthened the rivalries between Qatari, Saudi, and Emirati supported religious parties and left Zaydi and secular parties out. The lack of a clear definition of hierarchical administrative prerogatives along with irregular attempts by Yemeni religious leaders to contribute a sectarian tenor to Yemen’s political debates led to a clash of interests and a sharpening of the doctrinal differences Saleh’s government sought. Despite the explicit attempts at pitting “Sunni” parties against Saleh’s Zaydi rivals, some prominent judges like Mohammed bin Ismail al-Amrani, himself followed by millions, issued a fatwa commanding his Sunni audience “not to consider the Shiites astray of Islam.”
To no avail. By 2010, the regime pitting rival Muslim traditions led to months of street protests that mirrored the larger “Arab Spring.” In time, once allied parties, including ones led by the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Abdullah ibn al-Ahmar, turned on Saleh’s government. The resulting violence led the United States in 2012 to impose an “interim” government led by a weak Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, a member of Saleh’s political General People’s Congress party. Undergirding this interim government was the role of the Qatari-backed Yemeni Congregation for Reform, or Islah, party and its charismatic representative, Tawakkal Karman. She would share the Nobel Prize in 2011 in recognition of her efforts against the Saleh regime and role in supporting the Hadi government. Despite this support, the Islamist alliance around the Islah leadership faced opposition from various Saudi-backed “Jihadists” while the large number of Zaydis who settled in Sana’a organized a broader coalition known as Ansarallah (Partisans of God). The subsequent inability of the Hadi/Islah interim government to accommodate elements of the population who also opposed the Saleh regime ultimately resulted in first low-scale violence targeting leading Zaydi personalities and then the removal of the interim government from its offices in Sana’a in late 2014 by Ansarallah and its most prominent Zaydi leaders, known as the “Houthis.” Hadi’s offence was introducing IMF and US supported economic and political “reforms” that legally required Yemen’s parliament to approve. In essence, Ansarallah and their broad coalition of supporters decreed that no further modifications of Yemen’s economic relations to the larger world could happen before a new parliament was elected. The resulting war initiated by a coalition organized by the Obama administration to expel Ansarallah from Sana’a had the initial support from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. Failing a quick victory, however, the result of the war has been hundreds of thousands of casualties and the isolation of Sana’a’s Ansarallah administration and its inhabitants from the rest of the world.