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Research in Yemen: Facilities, Climate and Current Projects
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2016
Extract
Western knowledge of Southwest Arabia, the scene of an important ancient civilization and a flourishing center of early Islamic culture, has until recently owed as much to legend and hearsay as to analytical research. During the past few centuries access to Yemen by Western scholars and observers was sparse and intermittent, inhibition by the land’s forbidding terrain, its remoteness, and by the isolationist policy of its Zaidi monarchs. When the imamate was overthrown in 1962 there ensued a protracted civil war which opposed Egypt to Saudi Arabia in an intra-Arab “Vietnam”, and also prolonged the country’s inaccessibility to scholarly inquiry. Only in the late 1960s did research become even theoretically possible in Yemen on a scale approaching what had been going on for decades in most other Middle Eastern countries. Since then the territory has attracted a growing number of researchers, and information about Yemen’s past and contemporary life is now beginning to appear on a regular basis. It is widely dispersed, however, and the need is clear for a summary of the existing research tools and facilities both outside and within Yemen, the climate for scientific investigation in the country, the projects recently completed or in progress, and the researchers involved.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 1974
References
Footnotes
1 Dr. King’s “Some Astronomical Manuscripts from Medieval Yemen” will appear (1974–75) in Bulletin de l’Institut d’Egypte; another, fuller, article, “Sources for the Study of Mathematical Astronomy in Medieval Yemen”, is in preparation.
2 Dr. Poonawala’s History of Ismā’īlī Literature: An Annotated Bio-Bibliography will be published by Harvard Univ. Press in 19 75.
3 Dr. Madelung’s recent publications include “The Identity of Two Yemenite Historical Manuscripts”, Journal of Near Eastern Studies (19 73), and “A Muṭarrifī Manuscript” (forthcoming in Acts or” the Vlth Congress of Arabic and Islamic Studies).
4 Dr. Blackburn expects that his forthcoming “A Record of the First Ottoman Penetration of Yemen: An Annotated Translation of Ozdemur Bey’s Fethname for the Conquest of San’ā in Rajab, 954/August, 154 7” will appear in the form of a lengthy article of of a small monograph.
5 Articles in preparation include “The Ulama and Nineteenth-century Yemeni Society” and “Islamic Education and Sharia Justice in Zabid: The Survival of Medieval Patterns”; while a project of longer range is a socio-intellectual history of Yemeni ulama from ca. 1950 to the present.
6 Recently, Mr. Akel has reportedly been working on a socioeconomic survey in the PDRY.
7 Dr. Niewohner-Eberhard, who read a paper on “Geographische Charakteristik des Jemens” at the Bonn Symposium, expects to publish an article on Sa’da in a supplement to the University of Tubingen’s forthcoming Atlas of the Middle East.