Yemeni Islah Leader Abdul-Majeed Zindani Passes Away

by Ibrahim Moiz for MuslimMatters

28 April 2024

Major Political and Da’wah Figure

One of Yemen’s most colourful politicians, and a major figure in Islamic proselytization, passed away this week. Abdul-Majeed Zindani was a founding leader of the Islamist Islah party, a major part of Yemeni political and public life for the last thirty years, and was energetically involved in Yemeni and regional politics and education since the 1960s, when the country first became a republic.

In effective exile in Turkiye when he passed away in his early eighties, Abdul-Majeed Aziz Hammoud Zindani was a long way from home. Born in central Yemen’s Ibb province into the Arhab clan, Zindani studied across Yemen before joining the still relatively small coterie of students who travelled abroad, a coterie that had a major impact in Yemeni politics during the period.

Regional Wars

At the time, North Yemen was ruled by an increasingly unpopular Zaidi imamate, while South Yemen was ruled by Britain from the port city of Aden. During Zindani’s youth in the 1960s, the situation changed dramatically: in 1962 a military coup in Sanaa, widely supported by North Yemen’s educated class and dissident clans, toppled the imamate, while nationalist and leftist militants in South Yemen agitated against and eventually ousted the British colony. North Yemen in particular became the focus of a regional war: Cairo sent a major military expedition to support the Sanaa regime, while Saudi Arabia and Jordan, backed by Britain and the United States, threw their support behind an insurgency built around Zaidi supporters of the former imamate. It was to be the first of several regional wars in Yemen in Zindani’s lifetime.

Moving in Conservative Circles

At that point, Zindani was studying in Cairo, where he came into Islamist circles led by Muhammad Zubairi, who was later assassinated after attempting to mediate in the civil war, and the underground Ikhwanul-Muslimin group. The latter association forced his deportation to Yemen, where, still in his mid-twenties, he was promoted to the information ministry.

With the end of the North Yemen war, Saudi Arabia withdrew its support for the imamate insurgency and instead cultivated conservative circles in the Sanaa government in the 1970s. Zindani was one such figure and eventually moved to teach in Saudi Arabia, beginning a long if often uneasy association with Riyadh that would last four decades.

Zindani was closely associated at this point with the Muslim World League, a Saudi-sponsored association that collected various Islamic scholars and activists from across the world for various educational and political endeavours. With a lifelong interest in science, he founded the World League’s commission to examine scientific miracles in the Quran and Sunnah in the mid-1980s.

Contact with Jihadists and Founding of Islah

Zindani also ardently supported – in the name of jihad – the 1980s Afghanistan resistance against the Soviet invasion, raising volunteers and travelling for the cause. In the event, he also made contact with famous Arab leaders in that insurgency, including the Palestinian preacher Abdullah Azzam and the then-Saudi-backed potentate Usama bin-Ladin.

Yemen during the 1970s and 1980s was preoccupied with questions of unification between North Yemen and South Yemen, and the specific terms of such unification. South Yemen, under a Marxist regime since 1969, backed leftist dissidents in the North, while North Yemen backed various often conservative dissidents in the South: often these dissidents mounted small-scale insurgencies.

When the two Yemens united under Northern dictator Ali Saleh’s leadership in 1990, Zindani worked to undercut leftist influence. He founded the Islah Party, along with the northern Hashid confederation chieftain and assembly speaker Abdullah Ahmar, in 1990. This was a mixture of Ikhwan-leaning Islamists, Salafis, and clansmen: Zindani qualified in each category. It became a major partner to Saleh’s ruling party, with Zindani promoted to the five-man ruling council in 1993.

By 1994 unhappiness with Saleh was mounting among various southern politicians, both the leftists and their former rivals, prompting them to break away and attempt to secede. The resultant war showed the limits of accord between Saudi Arabia and Islah. Riyadh, which had fallen out with Saleh, backed the separatists, but Zindani and Ahmar fiercely opposed them and framed the war as a jihad, for which they recruited both Islamist militants and clan fighters. It was only after the civil war that his relations with the Saudis were repaired.

Designated As a Terrorist

A decade later, the American “war on terrorism” – with Zindani’s former friend Usama bin-Ladin as its primary target – put the Islah leader in its gunsights. The USA designated Zindani as a supporter of terrorism, and warned Qatar and Saudi Arabia to cut funds to his institutions. Zindani’s protests and offers to appear in court were supported by Saleh, who instead turned on another target of the United States, the Zaidi Houthi group in the north.

Advocating a return to the imamate, the Houthis also attacked Saleh’s overtures to Washington and were soon embroiled in a war where Islah played a major role: the Ahmar family and Saleh’s cavalry corps commander Ali Muhsin, also affiliated with the party, led the campaign against the Zaidi rebels, in a faint repeat of the 1960s North Yemen war. As the war dragged on, Saleh’s alliance with Islah was increasingly frayed.

Switched Sides

In 2011, Saleh sent Zindani to mediate with protesters in Sanaa, part of a regional pattern of opposition to Arab dictators. Instead Zindani sided with the opposition, part of a general Islah pattern of turning against the dictator. The resultant government, led by Saleh’s former deputy Abdrabbuh Hadi, featured a significant Islah presence. This prompted Saleh to secretly side with the Houthis against the coalition between Hadi and Islah. In September 2014 Zindani had to flee Sanaa as the Houthis mounted a sudden takeover of the capital.

With the regional tables again turning, in 2015 Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates led a bloody campaign in Yemen, ostensibly to support the ousted government of which Zindani’s Islah party was a part. Even as it officially opposed the Houthis, Abu Dhabi also supported southern separatists and turned on Islah, which still maintained passable links with Saudi Arabia. Zindani uncompromisingly opposed the separatists once more. Like Hadi, he lived in Saudi Arabia until 2020, when he moved to Turkiye. There he ended his life, far from a homeland in whose history he had played a major part for decades.

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