There are no rules of hereditary succession to the feudal throne of the Imam of Yemen, and the reigning Sword of Islam wields it only so long as he can keep his enemies at bay. The enemies are ...

In 1962, Yemeni revolutionaries overthrew the country’s centuries-old Zaydi Shia imamate to found the Yemen Arab Republic, an Arab Nationalist state, in the northwestern half of present-day Yemen. But ...

All the 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 ...

For its part, northern Yemen’s imamate gained de facto independence after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the revolution in Turkey.

Yemen specialists say the Houthis are a political movement, ... mission for the Houthis is to "revive the legacy of his ancestors," a project she described as installing a Zaydi imamate, ...

Yemen was ruled by A Zaydi imamate for 1,000 years, until it was overthrown in 1962. Stripped of their political power since then, the Zaydis struggled to restore their influence in the country.

In the nineteen-sixties, Egypt became embroiled in a war in North Yemen, after it had supported a coup d’état by military officers that toppled the country’s imamate and installed a republic.