ABSTRACT
Imam Yahya (1869-1948), who in 1904 succeeded his father, the first member of the Hamid al-Din family to occupy the imamate, strove to contain the effects of the new ideas and practices that had come with the Ottomans. He and his son and successor, Imam Ahmad, were also able to limit the impact on Yemen of the rising tide of modernism and nationalism that engulfed the Arab world in the four decades after World War I brought an end to the Ottoman Empire. The imamate of Yemen was the political expression of Zaydism, the branch of Shii Islam to which most of the people of the northern highlands and the eastern slopes adhere. Zaydi doctrine made the welfare and protection moral as well as physical of the community of believers the primary responsibility of the imam.
