Zabid

Zabid was founded about 820 by Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn Ziyad, sent by the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun to put down a tribal rebellion on the Tihama, and it became the capital of the Ziyadid dynasty and of the dynasties that followed them until the 12th century. Its position between the Red Sea ports and the highland passes, on a wadi that carried flood water down from the mountains and made irrigation possible, gave it both trade and farmland, and it grew into the largest town of the coastal plain.

Its lasting fame is scholarly. Zabid was a centre of Sunni learning whose mosques, the Great Mosque and al-Asha'ir above all, were teaching institutions as much as places of prayer, drawing students from across Yemen and beyond, and the remains of its old university can still be seen. At its height the town was said to hold more palaces, gardens and religious institutions than any other in Yemen. The Rasulid sultans, who ruled from 1229 to 1454, moved the official capital to Taiz but kept Zabid as a winter residence and endowed many of its buildings.

Ottoman forces occupied the Tihama in 1539 and returned in the 19th century, while Zabid's commercial importance declined as Mocha and later Hudaydah took the coastal trade. In the 20th century it became a provincial market town whose historic fabric slowly decayed. UNESCO inscribed the town as a World Heritage Site in 1993 and added it to the list of World Heritage in Danger in 2000, citing the loss of historic houses to concrete rebuilding and general deterioration; the war that began in 2015 has made conservation harder still.

Zabid's identity rests on religious learning. The town is Shafi'i Sunni, and its mosques were teaching institutions as much as places of prayer, with circles of students gathered around a shaykh and Qur'an schools that still function in reduced form. Families descended from scholarly lineages retain prestige, and manuscripts held in the town have long been an object of study and, more recently, of preservation efforts.

Its material culture is the brick architecture that earned the World Heritage listing: single-storey houses turned inward around courtyards, their walls built of fired brick laid in patterns, carved and moulded into panels, friezes and pierced screens, and whitewashed in gypsum. The effect is entirely different from the tower-houses of the highlands, and it belongs to the wider Tihama, where brick towns alternate with villages of round thatched huts.

The plain has a culture of its own, shaped by heat and by centuries of exchange with Africa across the Red Sea. Drumming and dance styles here are closer to the Horn of Africa than to the mountains, women work in the fields and run much of the market trade in bright printed dress and wide straw hats, and weekly markets rotate between towns. The muhamashin, a marginalised community often described as being of African descent, live in the region's towns and face long-standing discrimination, although they are Arabic-speaking Muslims like their neighbours.

Zabid is a small town of a few tens of thousands of people, set among irrigated farmland on a plain that is one of the most populous rural areas of Yemen. Most households live from agriculture, small trade and services: sorghum and millet, cotton, sesame, dates, bananas, mangoes and vegetables are grown with water from wells and from the seasonal flood of the wadi, and livestock is kept in courtyards and on the edges of the town.

The day is arranged around the heat. Work in the fields and the market starts before dawn, the middle hours are spent indoors or in shaded courtyards, and activity resumes in the late afternoon, when the qat trade and social visiting begin and children fill the open ground at the edge of the old town. Electricity is intermittent and increasingly comes from solar panels, and water is drawn from wells whose level has fallen.

The war has pressed hard on the plain. Fighting and air strikes have affected the coast and the roads, fuel and food prices have swung violently, salaries have often gone unpaid, and families depend on aid, fishing, farming and money sent home by relatives working abroad. Health services are weak in a region that has suffered repeated cholera outbreaks. Inside the old town, historic houses continue to collapse or be replaced with concrete, and conservation work has largely stopped.

Tihama cooking is distinct from that of the highlands, hotter in spice and built around bread, sorghum and fish. Dough is slapped onto the inner wall of a clay tannur oven to make large flatbreads, eaten with beans, with stewed goat or lamb, or with fish brought up from the Red Sea coast, which is grilled over wood or baked in the oven and served with a sharp relish of chilli, garlic and tomato. Sorghum and millet porridges and breads remain everyday food in the villages around the town.

The irrigated plain supplies dates, bananas, mangoes, papaya and vegetables, and the markets sell honey, sesame oil and spices along with the fenugreek, cumin, coriander and chilli that flavour most dishes. Highland food travels down the road as well: saltah, the vegetable and meat broth crowned with whipped fenugreek and served in a stone pot, is eaten at midday here too, and Taizi smoked cheese reaches the market from the mountains.

Sweet things are simple and rich — dates, honey eaten with bread and ghee, and pastries layered with butter for celebrations, with bint al-sahn, the honeyed layered pastry, for special occasions. The drinks are qishr, an infusion of coffee husks with ginger that is more common than brewed coffee, and very sweet tea with milk and cardamom, drunk at all hours in the shade. Alcohol is absent.