"كتيّب الجزيرة العربية المُعد تحت إشراف القسم التاريخي لوزارة الخارجية – رقم ٩٠". [‎٤‎٢] (١٤٨/٥٧)

42
POLITICAL CONDITIONS [No. 90
if we disregard the personality of the actual Imam, we
have a simple issue; for no Zeidi tribes are rebelling
against the Imamate as such. It must not be over
looked that this dignity is, in theory, a purely elective
leadership, to which the Council of Ashraf and Seyyids
may elect any undoubted descendant of Ali who is of
full age and an a Urn. If in practice the numerous
Kassite stock is alone considered eligible-—and heredi
tary succession is apt to be the rule owing to the
respect paid to any nomination made during his life
time by an Imam—there are many Rassite families
in which the office has been at some not distant
date, and other's not so favoured in the past,
who consider themselves equally entitled to supply
an Imam in the future; and no violence would
be done to Zeidi sentiment by either a change of family
or the selection of some Rassite Alid not of a family
which has held the office within memory. The father
of the reigning Imam, Yahya, for example, came of a
Rassite stock, among whose direct ascendants back to a
hoar antiquity no Imam can be traced with certainty.
Loyalty to the Imamate is therefore entirely compatible
with hostility to a reigning Imam. It is quite safe to
say that, whether he be for the Imam Yahya or against
him at this moment, every Zeidi from Saada to Kata-
ba stands by the Imamate, and would not be a willing
member of any State which was not coextensive at least
with the Zeidi tribal area; and, if the Zeidi would also
like to lord it, after the manner of a mountaineer, over
his Shafei rivals in the Tihama and the Aden hinter
land, sufficient and speedy pressure could be exercised
on him as producer and would-be exporter to make him
keep to his own hills.
The bond of an exclusive schismatic creed, which
will always keep the tribes of the Yemen highlands
together as against their neighbours, is not existent in
the Tihama. The common profession of Shafei Sun-
nism, which these lowland tribes share with those of
the Aden hinterland at one end of their territory and
with those of Asir at the other, will be ineffective to