A Law That Outlasted the State It Was Written For

The Zaidi Imamate al-Hadi founded in Yemen proved remarkably durable by the standards of medieval Islamic states, persisting in one form or another, sometimes reduced to a rump territory, sometimes expanding across most of the country, for over a thousand years. It survived Ottoman occupation twice, in the sixteenth and again in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, each time reasserting itself once Ottoman control weakened, and continued as an independent kingdom, the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen, after the Ottomans finally withdrew following the First World War.

That long continuity ended in 1962, when a military coup in Sanaa deposed the reigning Imam and declared a republic, triggering a civil war between republican and royalist forces that drew in Egyptian and Saudi intervention on opposing sides before the republic prevailed by the decade's end. The political Imamate the Zaidi legal tradition had underwritten for over a millennium did not return, but the Hadawi school itself did not depend on that office for its survival as a body of law: Zaidi communities in Yemen's northern highlands, the tradition's historical heartland, have continued to follow its jurisprudence in religious and personal status matters into the present, a legal tradition now separated from the state structure it was originally built to serve.