Implicit Civil Society and Reform in Yemen: Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The fact that cross-border forms of civic activism in Arab countries during the “Arab Spring” are similar is commonly attributed to their socio-cultural commonalities, which provide markers of their identities. The manifestation of this interaction, in the author's view, is the phenomenon of an implicit civil society that draws on the hidden springs of Islamic culture, but that functions in a completely different way. The author's attempt to describe it in this article using the example of Yemen includes three aspects: as an active participant in the watershed events of contemporary Yemeni social history; as a centre of civic strategies that fundamentally differentiate it from religious and political groupings; and as a mechanism for adapting the indigenous cultural identity of a society to new ideological environment. The article spans the period from its emergence at an early stage of modernisation in a deeply archaic society united under British colonial rule in the first third of the twentieth century, to its culmination in the early twenty-first century. The article is based on publications examining relevant cases from different historical and cultural regions of Yemen. Early examples include the “Nadi al-Islah al-Arabi al-Islami” Club in Aden and the Irshadist Movement in Hadramaut extremely active at the turn of 1930s when the national intelligentsia started to reach prominence and managed to convert reformist narrative from the religious frames to the public discourse. They have elaborated the number of tools inherent also to the modern implicit civil society performances like educational work through clubs, preference to dialog between rivals, high attention to maintaining the continuity of cultural traditions, etc. The recent diversity of this phenomenon is illustrated by the experience of the “Shabab al-Mumin” Club, founded in the mid-1990s in the Saada Governorate of northern Yemen, as well as the spontaneous urban youth committees that emerged during the 2011 uprising, which channelled a huge wave of social activism into peaceful activity. The aim of the article is to explore the phenomenon of implicit civil society using a descriptive method. The practical significance of the proposed approach lies in a better understanding of the reasons for the heightened permeability of the boundaries between civic and political activism so characteristic of such societies.