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
