the local British Yemeni community levels, the politicization of Yemenis sparked the establishment of many cultural institutions and community organizations that galvanized the emerging innercity Yemeni communities locally, nationally and internationally, through which diaspora Yemenis were able to mobilize and work towards seriously developing their communities in the UK and Yemen. By the 1970s, economic recession hit the UK’s manufacturing industries hard and the resultant mass-unemployment impacted directly on the ‘second wave’ Yemeni communities across the northern industrial cities. Britain’s Black and Asian communities, largely established through postwar economic migration, were ‘scapegoated’ and transmogrified by the media and ruthless politicians from loyal and hard-working employees into lazy and unemployed ‘scroungers’ almost overnight. The Yemeni response was a degree of ‘mass migration’ to the more prosperous and opportune climes of the developed Arabian Gulf, thus creating another transnational Yemeni link and migration narrative as witnessed by Gadri Salih’s opening story. For those who stayed, their fate was to be once again subsumed by invisibility into the wider debates of immigration, integration, loyalty and belonging and a perceived failed multiculturalism. In the ensuing and highly controversial debates, demonstrations and ultimate riots a distinct sense of British Yemeni identity emerged in the presence of a muchneeded role model and hero; the Sheffield-born boxing phenomenon, ‘Prince’ Naseem Hamid. As one young British Yemeni put it; ‘[When] “Prince” Naseem came on the scene…it was, “I’m from the Yemen, you know ‘Prince’ Naseem?” And, that made it like alright and cool.’ Hamid’s singular contribution to British Yemeni identity represented a tangible manifestation of the resultant hybrid and hyphenated multiple identities as British Arabs, British Yemenis and British Muslims that was increasingly experienced by succeeding generations.
The final chapter explores the contemporary setting, present conditions and current developments of the Yemeni communities across Britain through a number of leading research studies and publications by academics, journalists and writers. Some key observations offered by various studies conducted on British Yemeni communities assert a multitude of often conflicting interpretations from ‘invisibility’ and ‘incapsulation’ to the description of Britain’s oldest Muslim community as representing both a genuine expression of ‘British Islam’ and ‘English Muslims’. The phenomenon of ‘second wave’ migration of single-male Yemenis to the industrial metropolises of post-World War Two Britain is contrasted with the earlier port settlements of the nineteenth-century lascars. A number of commentators viewed the Yemeni communities, particularly the South Shields community, as fully integrated members of the wider societies into which they settled. This reality, they assert, has been largely established as a result of the intermarriages and subsequent generations of settlement in their various locales.
The chapter also explores the custom, merits and dangers of chewing qāt, a plant indigenous to the Yemen, whose leaves are chewed in communal gatherings of males on a daily basis in Yemen but less frequently here in Britain. Media scrutiny regarding the easy availability of qāt in the UK has periodically presented its consumption with the same panic and fear as that of ‘hard’ drug use, demanding an outright ban of qāt that is simply reactionary. This chapter instead offers critical assessment of the consumption and use of qāt amongst British Yemenis based upon an examination of its physical and medical affects as well as its cultural significance.
The chapter also investigates the various degrees of community development and capacity building across the British Yemeni communities by comparing the largest, settled in Birmingham, to the smallest, living in Eccles, Greater Manchester, and examining how population size affects the ‘visibility’ and, consequently, the amount of investment and support from the local authorities these communities might receive. The comparison details the successful development of Birmingham’s Bordesley Centre, managed by the largely Yemeni-run Al-Muath Trust. The Centre is an institute that serves, not only the large settled Yemeni community, but also the majority of ethnic minority communities within the locale. The current growing confidence and community development sprouting across the British Yemeni communities is predominantly absent from the studies examined in this chapter despite some writers speaking about British Yemenis as ‘successfully integrated’, even describing them as ‘English Muslims’. Conversely, the research monographs of Richard Lawless and Fred Halliday express the experiences of Yemenis in Britain as the ‘end of an era’ of a community that lives in the ‘remotest village’, whose lives are both separated and ‘invisible’ to the wider society in which they live, as ‘incapsulated’ communities.
The Epilogue to this social history discusses the British Yemeni community in the wider contexts of Arab communities in Britain and the related issues of visibility and recognition by local and national governments in terms of their specific needs and concerns. It is evident from the studies referenced and cited that there is a large degree of marginalization when it comes to addressing both the misrepresentations of the many diverse Arab communities in the UK, as either pathologized ‘Islamic terrorists’ operating as al-Qaeda ‘sleeper cells’ or ‘rich petroldollar Shaykhs’ who inhabit the nightclubs and casinos of London. Coupled with the subject of representation beyond misleading stereotypes has been the previous problem of establishing an accurate population statistic for the number of Arabs in Britain before the new inclusions in the 2011 census statistics.
The works of Madawi al-Rasheed and Camilla Fawzi El-Solh provide startling and powerful arguments for more nuanced representations and greater academic research into Arabs in Britain. The emergence of Arab community mobilization as a direct result of 9/11 and the subsequent US-led ‘War on Terror’ initiatives; the invasion of Afghanistan and, then later, Iraq, the intensive securitization of Arab communities in US, Britain and Europe, and the high numbers of ‘extraordinary renditions’ – the cruel euphemism for the numerous unexplained disappearances of Arab Muslims from across the globe into US-facilitated incarcerations, devoid of any human rights – have all witnessed a high degree of organized British Arab responses. For example, the ‘Stop the War’ campaign supported by the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) attracted large numbers of young British Yemenis into its ranks. Further, the current pro-democracy movement sweeping across the Arab-Islamic Middle East has seen rallied support from the Arab communities in Britain, manifest through many demonstrations, fund-raising events and representations of the various revolutionary movements in the British media. This is particularly true in the case of the British Yemeni community towards the final days of Ali Abdullah Salih’s presidency.
Another issue is the question of Fred Halliday’s asserted ‘invisibility’ of the British Yemeni community which is addressed in the Epilogue through a specific case study of the population statistics according to the 1991 and 2001 Census for the Yemeni community of Eccles, Greater Manchester, and the subsequent local authority’s responses to the prevailing socio-economic conditions of that community. The case study records the dramatic shift in local authority funding and resources once a serious discrepancy between the ‘official’ population figure and a much higher figure, based on quantitative ethnographic research, had been established for the Yemeni population. Thus, almost immediately transforming that particular community from being ‘invisible’ and underdeveloped into one that is both visible and organized.
The politicization of Muslim identity appears to be an increasing inevitability for Muslim minorities in the post-9/11 political climate of western societies. Yet how much is this phenomenon actually internal to the experiences and realities faced by young British Yemenis is an interesting question. Current research into ‘British Muslim Arab’ identity has been undertaken by Carol Nagel and Lynn Staeheli, which included a significant proportion of young British Yemeni respondents. Their research findings have been examined as a means of exploring the idea of ‘Muslim’, as both a public and political identity, based on the qualitative research interviews in their study. Surprisingly, they noted that while levels of personal religiosity varied, most respondents appeared to reject the idea of a ‘British Muslim’ identity because it was both inherently politicized and largely unrepresentative of their personal experiences of religion and politics. What is clear from the detailed study is that the majority of the views of the young British Arabs questioned
