r/islamichistory

A visual reflection on prayer, landscape, and Abrahamic continuity. Illustrative image.

Qurʾan 16:123 instructs Muhammad to follow the milla of Abraham, describing Abraham as ḥanīf. Similar formulations appear elsewhere in the Qurʾan, including 2:135, 3:95, 4:125, and 6:161.

What interests me here is not simply the theological claim of continuity, but the historical question of how that continuity was understood during the formation of early Islam.

Jacob Olidort’s chapter, “Portraying Early Islam as the milla of Abraham: A Look at the tafsīr Evidence”milla of Abraham: A Look at the tafsīr Evidence”, is particularly useful for framing the problem. He notes that Qurʾanic milla has been variously rendered as “religion,” “community,” and “law,” and examines Abraham as the exemplary prophet whose path Muhammad and the Muslim community are instructed to follow.

This raises a historical question about what exactly Abrahamic continuity represented as an Islamic identity was taking shape.

Was Abraham functioning primarily as:

• a theological ancestor associated with monotheism;
• a model for ritual and religious practice;
• a source of communal identity and historical legitimacy;
• a legal or normative precedent;
• or some combination of these?

I am particularly interested in whether historians see a development between the Qurʾanic presentation of millat Ibrāhīm, its treatment in early tafsīr, and its later use in Muslim discourse.

This question also grows out of a broader problem I have been working on in We Were Not Looking: Reconstructing the Patriarchal World Through Ancient Near Eastern Context: how prophetic memory persists while communities, political worlds, legal environments, and geography change.

I would especially appreciate recommendations for historical work on the development of milla/millat Ibrāhīm in the formative Islamic period.

Primary source: Qurʾan 16:123

Secondary source: Jacob Olidort, “Portraying Early Islam as the milla of Abraham: A Look at the tafsīr Evidence,”milla of Abraham: A Look at the tafsīr Evidence,” in The Late Antique World of Early Islam, pp. 313–338.

In the mountains of Huelva province, an hour from Seville, there is a hilltop that has belonged to almost every civilisation that ever passed through southern Spain.

Romans. Visigoths. Muslims. Christians. Each one building on the foundations of the last...and somehow, impossibly, all of it is still standing. This is not a place that chose one identity and kept it. It is a place that accumulated them all.

I went to find out what that looks like up close... guided by someone who has spent his entire life understanding it.

📍 Almonaster La Real — Huelva Province, Spain

► If you'd like to explore Al-Andalus beyond the obvious sites, I put together a little guide to hidden Andalusí heritage: https://travellove.lemonsqueezy.com/checkout

Chapters:

0:00 - Welcome to Almonaster La Real, Huelva, Spain
00:32 - Why this Mosque is special
1:07 - Starting the Journey
2:11 - Driving through Sierra de Aracena
2:32 - Arriving in Almonaster La Real
3:26 - Meeting my guide
5:11 - The Minaret
5:52 - Inside the Mosque
6:32 - Layers of history and civilisations
8:00 - Symbolism of the Mosque
8:45 - Patio of Ablutions
9:52 - The Bullring
11:32 - Reflections about Interculture

Story by Shuaib Almosawa and Jeb Boone
SANA’A, Yemen—In January 2012, Saudi Arabia’s then-defense minister, Salman bin Abdulaziz, issued a directive advising a shadowy Saudi government committee to widen Yemen’s northern war. In broad terms, the plan entailed engineering a rift between northern Yemen’s Shia majority and Salafi Sunnis when one previously had not existed.

The order came at a time when Yemen’s internal power structures were in disarray following a 2011 popular uprising against the longtime rule of Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh. Saudi Arabia, which shares a 812-mile border with Yemen, had long managed delicate relations with its southern neighbor and now looked with growing concern at the chaos unfolding within the country. By 2012, Yemen’s army had splintered into rival factions both camped inside the capital city, Sana’a. Saleh had stepped down after 33 years of power and his former vice president Abd Rabo Mansur Hadi stood prepared to take the reins through a single candidate election—hardly the legitimate figure the fractured political landscape demanded.

Worst of all for Saudi Arabia, its old rival Ansarallah—which was based in Yemen’s northern highlands with a stronghold in the city of Saada—stood poised to take advantage of the chaos.

Known as the Houthis, Ansarallah grew out of a revival movement among Yemen’s Zaydis, followers of a branch of Shia Islam that ruled the northern highlands for a thousand years until 1962. Zaydism sits closer in doctrine to the four orthodox Sunni legal schools than to the Twelver Shiism of Iran, and in the early 2000s most Zaydis hadn’t yet joined the Houthi cause.
Salman’s plan was essentially twofold: to arm the Yemeni tribes fighting the Houthi movement, most of them ultra-conservative adherents of the Salafi school of Islamic jurisprudence and educated in the kingdom’s own Wahhabi current; and to drive a wedge between Ansarallah and the wider Zaydi community.

A January 2012 cable directed to a secretive special government committee handling Saudi Arabia’s relationship to Yemen stamped “Extremely Secret, Very Urgent” with Salman’s signature at the bottom outlines the plan: “The Special Committee of the Council of Ministers should discuss and study supporting Yemeni tribes hostile to the Houthis if they fail to commit to reconciliation with Ahl al-Sunnah [Salafists] in Saada, enabling multiple fronts against them, fostering discord between Houthis and Zaydi followers, while ensuring the fighting does not appear as a Sunni-Shia sectarian war in Yemen or that the Kingdom is behind it.”

Salman did not want it to appear sectarian because a war between Ansarallah and Saudi Arabia framed as a purely sectarian conflict, Sunni vs. Shia, would drive northern Yemen’s majority Zaydi Shia population toward support for Ansarallah out of a sense of religious duty or alignment with the cause.

The kingdom’s proxy fighting force in northern Yemen at the time, the Salafist Sunni tribes, were just one part of their plan. In order to isolate Ansarallah from Yemen’s wider Zaydi Shia community, fighting needed to look like a local quarrel. If violence appeared to be carried out by Saudi-backed Sunnis against local Shia communities, the Houthis would quickly become the defenders of the sect rather than a local nuisance.
Salman’s plan to “foster discord” between the Houthis and other Zaydis meant drawing a sectarian line in Yemen where none yet ran. Saudi Arabia would fund the fight from one side of that line and keep its name off it.
But this attempt to carefully curate the narrative would ultimately go on to fail when Saudi Arabia launched an air war backed by the U.S. against Ansarallah in 2015 that began decimating Saada soon after Salman was appointed king.

The secret cable is part of a trove of classified Saudi cables obtained by Drop Site News. The cables were issued by the Special Committee of the Saudi Council of Ministers, the agency that has run the kingdom’s Yemen policy since 1962. Riyadh created the committee the year republican officers backed by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser toppled Yemen’s thousand-year-old Zaydi imamate, and charged it with managing “all matters related to Yemeni affairs.” The committee reports directly to the Saudi Prime Minister’s Office and the Saudi ambassador in Sana’a sits as a member. Its name does not appear in any official media in either country.

For more than half a century the special committee has been the kingdom’s primary instrument in Yemen. It helped organize strategy toward Yemen and kept individual files on Yemen’s tribal sheikhs, religious leaders, military commanders, and politicians in government and opposition alike. It also ran allowances—monthly stipends paid out to keep powerful Yemenis loyal to Riyadh. The secret cables date from 2010 to 2012. They record payments and informant reports, the wars the committee funded, and the terms it set for the men on its books.

Single pages from the set of cables obtained by Drop Site have been previously published by Wikileaks and by local media in Yemen, corroborating the larger tranche’s authenticity. Drop Site contacted several Saudi government offices to ask for comment on the cables but did not receive any response.
This is the first in a series of reports based on the Saudi Special Committee Cables by Drop Site News. We are publishing the cables in both Arabic and English here.
The cables help shed light on Riyadh’s machinations in Yemen at a time when Saudi Arabia and Ansarallah appear to be hurtling toward open conflict once again. An attack by Saudi Arabia on Sana’a earlier this month sparked retaliatory strikes by Ansarallah followed by a declared naval blockade on Saudi Arabia in the Bab al-Mandab strait. The latest developments threaten to completely upend a four-year-long ceasefire that could ultimately play a role in intensifying the U.S. war with Iran. The roots of the conflict between Ansarallah and Riyadh can be found in part in Saudi Arabia’s attempts to foment internal strife within Yemen.
The Plan to Open Multiple Fronts Against Ansarallah

The same January 2012 cable names two men tasked with carrying out Salman’s plan. The cable claimed Sheikh Mohammed al-Imam, who ran a Salafi institute in the city of Dhamar, “prepared 300 armed men to target Houthi positions” to relieve pressure on the Salafis of Dammaj who were battling the Houthis, though the claim could not be independently verified. Located in the Saada governorate of northwest Yemen, Dammaj was the base of Saudi-influenced Salafi seminary built in the Zaydi heartland in 1979, and by 2012 it had become the symbolic front line of the war. The cable also said that a serving Yemeni army officer, the artillery brigade commander Hussein Khiran, smuggled the fighters their ammunition.
It is not clear from the cables that Drop Site obtained whether these specific actions were taken, but Saudi Arabia did back, arm, and fund Salafi fighters to battle Ansarallah.

The cable also said that Ansarallah leader Abdulmalik al-Houthi sent envoys to two estranged Zaydi figures, Mohammed Abdulazim and Abdullah al-Razami, to plead for fighters. “We now cannot resist the Wahhabis,” Abdulmalik al-Houthi reportedly said, referring to the Salafi tribes. “If you do not support us we will hand Saada over to them, because we cannot continue.” Abdulazim refused the request, while Al-Razami sent seventy men, according to the cable.
A separate cable records the money. Saudi Prince Mishal bin Abdullah, then governor of the border province of Najran, signed an Interior Ministry cable dated May 7, 2012 under the subject line “Regarding the Houthis and the Sunnis.” The cable states that Mishal’s office received an installment of five million Saudi Riyals (about $1.3 million) and passed the money to the Dammaj and Aahim fronts before requesting a second installment of funds. The cable also reports that the kingdom’s men armed and supplied the Aahim front in the province of Hajjah and were arranging to open a third front in Rahub. It also endorses a plan by a Salafi sheikh named Musleh bin Hamad Fanis Al-Athla to build a new branch of the Dammaj institute, calling it “a good thing” that “helps weaken the Houthi movement.”
Saudi Arabia had been financially backing anti-Houthi Yemeni border tribes for years. Before Salman’s 2012 plan to engineer a rift in the north, a special committee cable dated March 15, 2010signed by King Abdullah authorized the immediate release of 50 million Saudi riyals (around $13 million) to arm, supply, and financially support the tribes battling Ansarallah along the border.

A March 2012 report from the General Intelligence Presidency (GIP), a powerful Saudi intelligence agency, signed by intelligence chief Muqrin bin Abdulaziz describes former president Ali Abdullah Saleh secretly funding the Houthis as a counterweight to Salafi forces. By the report’s account, he steered some 12 billion Yemeni riyals (roughly $55.8 million) their way over an undisclosed time period, because the movement “poses an obstacle to the Salafi current in Yemen.” While Saleh did support the Houthis at various times, the Saudi intelligence assessment claiming billions of Yemeni riyals could not be independently verified and may have been exaggerated by informants in a bid to prompt Saudi to provide more funding to counter it.
Saudi Arabia armed one side. Saleh backed the other. The Zaydi north absorbed the war that both were funding and the damage was catastrophic. Fighting in Dammaj continued from October 2011 to January 2014 and spread to other Houthi strongholds in Saada, Hajjah, Amran and al-Jawf. Casualty numbers and damage reports appear throughout the Saudi cables, quoting Houthi commanders and often citing “large [casualty] numbers from both sides.”

The Red Cross documented more than 100 dead in the first siege of Dammaj in late 2011, among them four children. A report from Yemen’s health authorities counted 199 killed, 29 of them children, and 594 wounded in the final hundred days alone. When a ceasefire was implemented in January 2014, three hundred buses evacuated roughly 10,000 people, evacuating foreigners and those who sought to escape what was understood to be another round of inevitable fighting.

In early 2014, the Houthis overran Dammaj and expelled the Salafi students Riyadh had paid to protect. By September 2014 they had taken over the capital, Sana’a.

The covert war escalated into a full blown conflict in March 2015 when a Saudi-led coalition of Gulf nations, with American military, intelligence and logistical support, began a years-long bombing campaign of northern Yemen. While Salman wanted to ensure the fighting did not appear as a Sunni-Shia sectarian war, the kingdom did ultimately play on sectarianism to rally Salafist Sunnis to join its campaign against Ansarallah.
The bombing campaign lasted eight years across over 25,000 strikes, nearly a third of which struck civilian sites. The accompanying naval and air blockade contributed to the world’s largest cholera outbreak in history, and what the UN for years called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. By the end of 2021, the UN put the war’s toll at 377,000 dead, most of them from hunger and disease.

Ansarallah, the movement Salman’s ministry once hoped to fracture, has remained in control of most of Yemen for the past decade. It has fired sporadic missiles at Israel in solidarity with Gaza and targeted commercial ships in the Red Sea, most recently declaring a blockade on all Saudi vessels through the Bab al-Mandab strait. The cables show how Saudi Arabia tried to sideline and weaken Ansarallah by sowing division in northern Yemen only to escalate into an all out war that also ultimately failed to drive the Houthis from power. The Special Committee still operates as Saudi Arabia’s secret body that is running the kingdom’s policies toward Yemen.

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/yemen-saudi-special-committee-cables-houthis-ansarallah-salman

Listen to the article here: https://www.dawn.com/news/2022714

EVERY August, we raise the flag and call ourselves free. But on the first morning of that freedom, in 1947, Faiz, in Subh-i-Azadi, looked at the long-awaited dawn and said it was not the one: ‘yeh daagh daagh ujala, yeh shab-gazida sehar’ — this stained, night-bitten dawn is not the morning we had set out for. Seventy-nine years on, our national day deserves an honest question: did we win a country and quietly postpone its freedom? In 1947, we changed the nationality of our rulers and left the harder task — changing the nature of rule — to a later generation. That is our unfinished independence — still ours to finish.

Begin with the one thing the British empire left behind that no repeal can reach: not a law, but a habit of mind. Colonial rule does not merely occupy a land; it occupies the imagination of those it governs, teaching them to see themselves through the ruler’s eyes — as subjects to be managed, not citizens to be served; supplicants at a counter, not owners of the state. Ashis Nandy called colonialism, above all, a colonisation of the mind — a condition that outlives the flag.

This servility was not an accident of empire; it was its design. In 1835, Lord Macaulay told the British that education in India should produce a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect — trained not to rule but to serve. That reflex — to defer, to request rather than require, to treat power as something that happens to us rather than something that belongs to us — is the empire’s most durable export.

A new nation needs strong institutions to hold power to account — parties with roots, a parliament with nerve. We did not yet have them: our leadership was thin and soon thinned further, our parties young and quarrelsome. India inherited a mass movement decades in the making and gave itself a constitution within three years. We took nine — nine years without the rules of a shared game, which are exactly the years in which a political culture is meant to grow.

Into that vacuum stepped the two institutions the empire had built to their fullest strength — the army and the civil service, disciplined and sure of themselves while everything else improvised. The old colonial master had sailed home; a new establishment, home-grown but colonial in instinct, took his chair. That is the quiet tragedy of our first independence: we did not defeat colonialism so much as change its address.

And here I must speak of my own house, for the gravest damage was done not by generals or bureaucrats but by judges. The judiciary was meant to be the citizen’s shield — the one institution whose purpose is to say no to power on the authority of law. But it too was a colonial inheritance, and carried the reflex in its bones: under the Raj it had served the sovereign, not the subject, and at independence it transferred that loyalty from the departed Crown to the new establishment, not the people. So when the tanks rolled, the courts, again and again, said yes. They fashioned a doctrine of necessity to legalise the seizure of power; they swore in usurpers; they dressed lawlessness in the robes of law. The colonial mind inside the judiciary has cost this country more than any single dictator, for it turned the guardian of the Constitution into the notary of its breach.

Why did they give in? For three human reasons that have nothing to do with law. The first is fear: independence has cost judges their careers, their liberty, at times their lives. The second, and the least confessed, is comfort — the office, the title, the house and the car. The third is isolation — the weight of standing alone when colleagues have already found reasons to look away. What resists them is the one thing a law degree does not issue: character.

So the question for our second independence is disarmingly simple: how do we raise citizens — and judges — with the strength to say no when power sits across the table, speaking softly and offering everything? Here I have reached a conviction that may sound strange: that strength is not built by law. It is built by the humanities. History dismantles the oldest alibi of every surrender — the plea that ‘these times are unprecedented’ and so exempt from principle; whoever knows history has heard that lie before, and knows how it ends. Philosophy teaches us to reason about ends, not merely means. Literature is our only sustained practice at inhabiting another human being, without which justice is merely filing.

That is why the second independence will begin not in a courtroom or a parliament but in a classroom. If we want judges who will not sign the unjust order, we must form them long before they reach the bench — students given not only the mechanics of the law but a settled conviction about what the Constitution is for. The student of conviction becomes the honest lawyer; the honest lawyer, the fearless bar leader; the fearless bar leader, the judge who says no. Give a generation that conviction and no amendment can take it from them, for a conviction cannot be amended.

Pakistan was dreamed by a poet and argued into being by a lawyer — Iqbal’s conviction, Jinnah’s case. Somewhere we kept the lawyer and forgot the poet, and were left with arguments but no convictions. This Independence Day, let us call the poet back — into our schools, our courts, and our idea of what an educated citizen owes his country. The dawn Faiz described is still stained. He told us to keep walking — ‘chale chalo’ — for the true morning has not yet come.

The writer is a former senior puisne judge of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. He is currently the Distinguished Chair in Constitutionalism & Justice and Professor of Practice at the Shaikh Ahmad Hassan School of Law, Lums.