ABSTRACT
As in Saudi Arabia and Libya, the tribal levies in Yemen formed the basis of the imam’s military power. In Yemen encounter many of the symptoms that have by become familiar: an unintegrated society in which warlike tribes, united by religious doctrine, have subordinated a less bellicose and partly urban population of a rival Muslim sect and whose leaders are a shade less parochial by reason of their superior education and their contacts with the external world. The sayyids must have established themselves in Yemen through conquest, but over the centuries they lost all their original martial functions. Under the reign of the Hamid al-Din dynasty in the twentieth century, founded by Imam Yahya, the sayyids alone supplied the administrators, the royal advisers, the district governors, the judges, and the tax collectors. By the start of 1965, Yemeni republicans were running routine matters in many ministries under the supervision of Egyptian advisers.
