From the Port of Mocha to the Eighteenth-Century Tomb of Imam al-Mahdi Muhammad in al-Mawahib: Locating Architectural Icons and Migratory Craftsmen

This article introduces and analyzes the tomb of the Qāsimī Imām al-Mahdī Muhammad (r. 1686-1718) in the village of al-Mawāhib, northeast of Dhamār. Unlike many of the mosques and tombs associated with the other Zaydī imams of Yemen, al-Mahdī’s mausoleum has never been published, but merits close examination. While most historians consider his imamate to have been an era of both religious and political decline, this period was marked by increased cross-cultural interaction and artistic production. In particular, the tomb of al-Mahdī features unique decoration above its mihrāb and a remarkable wooden cenotaph. In order to explain the meaning and context of these two individual features, the article posits a strong connection between al-Mahdī’s legacy and the lucrative port city of Mocha on the Red Sea coast, which was separated from al-Mawāhib by a considerable distance, but in close communication with the imam’s court. The projecting box over the mihrāb relates to the rawshan, or wooden projecting window, which appeared as a key visual icon of Mocha’s house facades. Additionally, the ivory inlaid wooden cenotaph was likely manufactured in Mocha, made by Indian artisans. In fact, it may serve as the single remaining Yemeni specimen of this provincial woodworking industry that was mentioned by Prisse d’Avennes in the nineteenth century

Reflections on the Red Sea Style: Beyond the Surface of Coastal Architecture

In 1953, a British architect named Derek H. Matthews introduced the idea of “The Red Sea Style” in print, with a modest article of that title. Although brief and focused on a single site, this article proposed that the architecture around the rim of the Red Sea could be conceived of as a coherent and unified building category. Since then, those who have written about Red Sea port cities have generally accepted his suggestion of a shared architectural culture. Indeed, the houses of the region’s major ports, such as Suakin in modern-day Sudan, Massawa in Eritrea, Jidda and YanbuΚ al-BaΉr in Saudi Arabia, and Mocha, al-Дudayda, and al-LuΉayya in Yemen share a number of visual similarities that support this cross-regional designation. Although many are in ruins, these coastal buildings appear to have more in common with each other than their landed local counterparts. This article delves into the perceived coherence of Red Sea architecture, but moves beyond the obvious common dimensions of material and decoration, to turn attention to the transhistorical aspects of these port cities, along with their specificities and implicit differences. As a nonmonumental building tradition that emerged at the southern edge of the Ottoman world in the sixteenth century and continued into the twentieth, the Red Sea style represents a tangible case of sustained cross-cultural contact across a linked maritime region and thus moves beyond the conventional modern limits of continent and nation

Greenlaw’s Suakin: The Limits of Architectural Representation and the Continuing Lives of Buildings in Coastal Sudan

Despite its ruined modern state, the coral-built architecture of the island city of Suakin on Sudan\u27s Red Sea coast is well known to scholars of vernacular architecture. Its enduring reputation may be attributed to the copious documentation of its houses, mosques, and public buildings that appeared in the 1976 publication The Coral Buildings of Suakin by the artist Jean-Pierre Greenlaw. This paper considers the visual project of Greenlaw and its legacy, with a focus on the intertwined relationship between the processes of architectural documentation, the writing of architectural history, and the directives of preservation during the last years of British rule in Sudan

Foreign Doctors at the Imam’s Court: Medical Diplomacy in Yemen’s Coffee Era

This article brings together trade records left by Dutch and English East India Company merchants, chronicles in Arabic, and a published French travel narrative to shed light on an overlooked phenomenon, that of early modern medical diplomacy to Qasimi Yemen during the early eighteenth century. In this era, foreign merchants flocked to the southern Arabian Peninsula, many with the interest of procuring coffee, a commodity that was then still difficult to purchase elsewhere. Along with them came doctors and ships’ surgeons, who were called upon to treat Yemen’s imam al-Mahdi Muhammad (d. 1718), who suffered from many ailments in the last years of his rule. This study illustrates that these episodes of early modern cross-cultural health care were not peripheral or secondary to the large-scale political interests of overseas envoys or the immediate commercial involvements of foreign merchants, but rather tightly intertwined with them. In addition to documenting heretofore unremarked upon events, the larger objective of this study is to investigate the role that foreigners played as both agents of exchange and recorders of events in Yemen’s early modern history

Yemeni Manuscripts Online: Digitization in an Age of War and Loss

In 2013, a corpus of manuscripts from Yemen became openly accessible to the public through the Princeton University Digital Library portal. Numbering around 250 codices, most were digitized and cataloged from three private collections held in Yemen, under the auspices of the Yemeni Manuscript Digitization Initiative (YMDI), a scholarly network that was underpinned by institutional support from the Princeton University Library and Freie Universität Berlin. This article delves into the YMDI project, as a significant case study, with the goal of considering how this group of digital surrogates functions as an online collection, rather than viewing the Princeton portal as a transparent access point for these manuscripts or examining any of the YMDI volumes or their contents individually. Mass digitization projects are often sketched as efforts of “salvage,” focusing on issues of both preservation and accessibility. By contrast, here, it is asserted that the meaning and significance of these manuscripts have not been sustained through the act of digitization, but rather transformed, particularly amidst Yemen’s current unstable political situation. It is hoped that this article will provide a critical backdrop to the YMDI collection, by situating the cultural act ofdigitization historically, thereby helping users to understand these collections more substantively and inspiring us to think critically about how and why we digitize historic manuscripts in a precarious contemporary world

Spatial Negotiations in a Commercial City: The Red Sea Port of Mocha, Yemen during the First Half of the Eighteenth Century

The city of Mocha in Yemen was one of the most important Red Sea ports of the early modern Arab world, handling the trade of spices, textiles, metals, local aromatics and coffee beans. This essay examines the urban structures that governed the needs and practices of merchants in the city during the first half of the eighteenth century. Drawing on contemporary Arabic chronicles, archival European trade documents, historical photographs, and field work in the city, it documents the conspicuous absence of a network of public trade structures, like the urban khan, the expected locus for trade in an Arab city devoted to international trade. Rather, the essay provides evidence for the use of the merchant’s house as the central location for trade activity, commercial negotiations, storage of merchandise, and lodging of foreign merchants. This case study presents a mode of commercial interaction that questions a fixed private identity for the house in Mocha and draws on a maritime system of interaction to account for this unique mode of trade in an Arab city that served as an important Indian Ocean node