A few days ago, some figures of the (Dhulaimah tribe) in the Hashidi areas in Ammran Governorate (Northern Yemen), issued a tribal honor code (Code of Conduct) declaring equality between all their inhabitants in the rights and duties. It renounces the contempt of professions, on the basis of which the population was divided between masters and slaves which is a very important step in the long struggle to break a very unfair and racist social hierarchy, which was perpetuated by the historical authoritarian forces, whether in this governorate or other parts of Yemen.
The following are excerpts from the declaration (Code of Conduct):
“We, the people of the Dhulaimah tribe of Hashid, the undersigned and the stamped ones below this declaration, have pledged to God Almighty to abandon all manifestations of belittling and contempt for honorable professions, businesses and crafts and those working in them. We affirm that there is no longer between us what is called an inferior profession, a seller or an intruder, and that all the sons of the Dhulaimah tribe of Hashid shall be brothers and equal in rights and duties, in fines and afflictions, prepared and guilt, and support the oppressed against the oppressor. And we deter every oppressor from his oppression, and we will work to reveal the truth with numbers and periods, in fulfillment of the Almighty’s saying: “And cooperate in righteousness and piety, and do not cooperate in sin and aggression.”
For such an initiative to come from the heart of a highly conservative tribal area, is further evidence that society needs only a real elite that holds its hand towards modern and civic values that are based on the principle of citizenship, to be able to make such a big and important breakthrough.
Such initiative comes in spite of the fact that these local tribal societies have, for centuries, suffered under the weight of racist and discriminatory concepts produced by the permanent structures of domination from the Imamate to the tribal sheikhdom, who stood as an impenetrable dam against any attempts to infiltrate the wall of public awareness among their communities. And these areas remained, just as a storehouse for the production of permanent fighters to guard such dark traditions, which strengthened such controlling forces to sustain their domination.
Today, the new Imamis are digging in their racist past, reproducing such discriminatory values and enshrining them in the popular consciousness, through the gateway to selection and entitlement to rule and domination, and the use of the people of these regions in their long battle to consolidate their compelling authority with the predominance of force and the predominance of backward concepts.
For many years, professions have been a symbol of social and class differentiation, and that the most vital and productive professions and related to people's lives, the process of their practice in the popular consciousness in these areas, is linked to the outcasts and the socially despised according to this distorted awareness, and these are the same professions whose rents are subsisted by those who see themselves superior to others.
In such concepts as these, the masters are a class that neither works nor produces, but rather lives from the toil and work of others, especially those with despised professions. Masters are always idle and want to stop life within the limits of their backward consciousness that protects their interests.
Such forces (the Imamate and its successors from the tribal sheikhs) worked to harden the wall of isolation in these areas, and prevented all attempts at modernization among their tribes. Additionally, they resisted education and rural development in order to keep the tribe in its rigid position, to protect its interests.
It is said that the sheikh of the tribe, months after the outbreak of the September revolution, reprimanded the President of the Republic, for a hundred educational scholarships for the sons of the tribes in various fields, offered by Egypt and some countries that supported the revolution and the republican regime. So the president thought that the number of scholarships was few, only to be surprised that the sheikh rejected them at all, on the grounds that they would corrupt his fighters, and that in the future he would not find any soldiers to accompany him; Because they'd have turned into useless "trousers" beings.
Today, the new Imamis are digging in their racist past, reproducing such discriminatory values, and enshrining them in the popular consciousness, through the gateway to selection and entitlement to rule and domination, and the use of the people of these regions in their long battle to consolidate their coercive authority with the predominance of force and the predominance of backward concepts.
It is a strong message from a tribal area that has long suffered from authoritarianism and discrimination. Can the elites pick it up and build on it? In that case, it would then be easier for the rest of the tribal structures to break such a solid barrier, and to make their voice heard to the new racist forces, to tell them that many waters flowed in the stream, and one of them must wash away the dirt of the past from the consciousness of the citizens of today.
