Roots

I · Before the movementA community in decline

Zaydi imams ruled much of northern Yemen for centuries. The 1962 revolution ended the imamate and, with it, the social order that had placed the Hashemite families, who trace their descent to the Prophet, at the top of Zaydi society. Many Zaydis of the north carried a sense of loss from that change into the decades that followed.¹ ■ Documented

Saada, the historic heartland of Zaydism, also received little state investment. In the 1980s and 1990s, Salafi teaching, linked to Saudi Arabia, spread into Zaydi areas, including the school of Dar al-Hadith in Dammaj. Zaydi revivalists came to see their faith as under siege.¹ ■ Documented

II · 1992The Believing Youth

In 1992 the Zaydi scholar Mohammed Azzan founded the Believing Youth (al-Shabab al-Mu’min) to preserve and revive Zaydi identity. It ran religious summer camps and social programmes for young people across the north.² ■ Documented

Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi, son of the senior Zaydi scholar Badr al-Din al-Houthi, joined the network in the 1990s. From 1993 to 1997 he sat in parliament for al-Haqq, a Zaydi party.² According to the Arab Center Washington DC, the movement gained ground in the 1990s with the tacit support of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who later turned against it.³ ■ Documented

III · 2000–2004The slogan and the lectures

Hussein al-Houthi’s sermons were first given in closed settings: mosques and summer camps. His followers recorded them and printed transcripts as leaflets called malazem. The Malazem circulated through several northern governorates and became the movement’s core curriculum.⁴ ■ Documented

The Houthis say Hussein first voiced the movement’s slogan, the sarkha (“scream”), in 2002, at a time of anger over the second Palestinian intifada and the approaching US invasion of Iraq.⁴ The Mapping Militants Project dates the slogan to 2000.² Its words, chanted at every Houthi gathering since, are: ■ Documented · date disputed

In 2000 Saleh signed the Treaty of Jeddah, settling Yemen’s border with Saudi Arabia, and moved to disarm the Houthis.³ ■ Documented In June 2004 the government moved to arrest Hussein al-Houthi. Chapter 02 begins there.