Word: yahya
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...nine recognized sons of aging (77) Yahya bin Mohamed bin Hamid el Din, Imam of Yemen, in the southwestern corner of Arabia, are entitled to be called Saif el Islam (Sword of Islam). The Swords have frequently crossed each other, vying for succession to the black mattress with red cushions which is the Imam's couch of state in his capital, Sana. Yahya, who believes in one-man government, named his own successor-eldest son Ahmed, governor of Taiz province. But according to Yemenite tradition, a council of eleven elders should choose the new Imam. So the other sons...
Chief rival to Ahmed is Ali, who has two formidable assets: he commands the Sana garrison and is close to the Imamate's treasury, in the cellar under Yahya's palace. Brother Abdullah, Yahya's roving ambassador to various foreign posts (now in London), is too remote from Yemen to be a strong contender for the couch. Brother Hussein is amiable and popular, but used to be jailed now & then by his father for drinking bouts, is now in retirement on a farm. The eighth son, Ibrahim, fled from Yemen to British Aden a year ago after...
Grassy Meal. At week's end, Prince Abdullah said he had not yet signed any concessions. The oil industry's best guess was that Prince Abdullah had promised one, but first had to go home to get it sanctioned by his xenophobic father, crusty, many-wived Imam Yahya bin Mohamed bin Hamid el Din, 77, called "the world's most independent monarch...
...king who pays his chief of staff $153 month and his soldiers $2 could scarcely ignore the new $4 to $6 million airfield at Dhahran in the rival neighboring kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or the $6 million a year that blear-eyed Ibn Saud gets from U.S. petroleum concessions. Yahya's Yemen has no oil with which to bargain in the bazaars of international high finance, but it is strategically located near the foot of the Red Sea, across the Arabian Peninsula from the Persian Gulf, toward which Russia reaches south and east...
Thirty years ago Washington might have let the British handle the Yemen's invitation. But now the U.S. stake in the Middle East was vastly multiplied, and besides, the Imam Yahya disliked the British. He had even fought against them in World War I and subsequently managed to keep his independence, an extraordinary diplomatic triumph for a chancellery headed by a $22-a-month foreign minister...