Yemen Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Yemen. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Yemen produces coffee, Egypt cotton, Iraq dates, Palestine oranges, and Syria trouble.
John Gunther (Inside Asia)
Faith is the cure that heals all troubles. Without faith there is no hope and no love. Faith comes before hope, and before love. (Sheikh Muhammad ibn Zaidi bani Tihama)
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)
It would be so good to settle down and become part of somewhere again, instead of constantly passing through
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)
I have no reason to go, except that I have never been, and knowledge is better than ignorance. What better reason could there be for travelling?
Freya Stark (A Winter in Arabia: A Journey Through Yemen)
Contrast this with the use by modern Islamic scholars of Muhammad’s decision to marry a six-year-old girl, consummating their marriage when she turned nine, to justify child marriage in Iraq and Yemen today.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now)
I taught you to take the first step: to learn to believe in belief. And one day you will take the second step and find what is it you believe in.
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)
But I also realized that around the world, in places like Yemen and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, the lives of millions of young men like those three dead Somalis (some of them boys, really, since the oldest pirate was believed to be nineteen) had been warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings, or the schemes of older men. They were dangerous, these young men, often deliberately and casually cruel. Still, in the aggregate, at least, I wanted somehow to save them—send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads. And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
We believe that faith is the cure that heals all troubles.
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)
Answer a fool according to his folly” (Proverbs 26:4).
Maimonides (Epistle to Yemen: and Introduction to Helek)
The names of coffee beans mostly derive from where they are grown. In the case of mocha, the beans are grown in Yemen and Ethiopia and named after Yemen’s port city of Mocha, where they were traditionally shipped from. Kilimanjaro beans are grown in Tanzania
Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Tales from the Cafe)
Farrukh, tonight you have won a dishwasher
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)
Historically, Yemen, when not being invaded or colonized by outside powers, from the Ottomans to the British, was fighting itself.
Dave Eggers (The Monk of Mokha)
Sometimes you even wonder who makes the law in this strange land, where many girls and boys beg in the streets instead of going to school. Yemen
Nujood Ali (I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced: A Memoir)
[T]he people who are close to Allah worry so much about wasting time that they call themselves to account for every breath they spend - how many of us wonder about how we spend our day, let alone each breath?
Ethar El-Katatney (Forty Days and Forty Nights - in Yemen: A Journey to Tarim, the City of Light)
I believe in it because it is impossible.
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)
Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it. Or sink trying. The Saudis are on the brink, Egyptians are on the brink, all scared to death of Persia . . . Yemen, Sinai, Libya . . . this thing is bad. . . . That’s why Russia is so key. . . . Is Russia that bad? They’re bad guys. But the world is full of bad guys.” Bannon offered all this with something like ebullience—a man remaking the world.
Michael Wolff (Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House)
Who we are, how we think, and the manner in which we act, ipsis factis, are considered obnoxious, dangerous, and unpalatable to many fundamentalist Muslims around the globe, who endure manifestations of our power and influence daily, from DVDs in Kabul to text-messaging ads in Yemen.
Victor Davis Hanson (The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern)
Then in a moment, in that vast space of rocks and sky and scorching sun, I understood that he had not meant religious faith, not exactly. He was not urging me to become a Muslim or to believe in one interpretation of God rather than another. He knew me for what I was, an old, cold, cautious scientist. That was what I was then. And he was simply pointing out to me the first step to take. The word he had used was faith, but what he meant was belief. The first step was simple: it was to believe in belief itself. I had just taken that step. At long last I understood. I had belief. I did not know, or for the moment care, what exactly it was I had to believe in. I only knew that belief in something was the first step away from believing in nothing, the first step away from a world which only recognised what it could count, measure, sell or buy. The people here still had that innocent power of belief: not the angry denial of other people’s belief of religious fanatics, but a quiet affirmation. That was what I sensed here, in this land and in this place, which made it so different from home. It was not the clothes, not the language, not the customs, not the sense of being in another century. It was none of these. It was the pervading presence of belief. I believed in belief. I didn’t exactly feel as if I was on the road to Damascus, and I was aware I could not think straight because of the power of the sun, but now I knew what the Yemen salmon project was all about. It had already worked its transformation on me. It would do the same for others.
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)
I stood backstage watching the words roll on the teleprompter. In just two months, the world had turned upside down. We’d seen a regime fall in Tunisia, broken from a longtime U.S. ally in Egypt, and intervened in Libya. History, it seemed, was turning in the direction of young people in the streets, and we had placed the United States of America on their side. Where this drama would turn next was uncertain—protests were already rattling a monarch in Bahrain, a corrupt leader in Yemen, a strongman in Syria.
Ben Rhodes (The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House)
Without faith there is no hope and no love. Faith comes before hope, and before love.
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)
That’s where I operate. In the shadows. Let other people take the credit. Don’t be the story, shape the story: that’s my motto.
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)
The seven countries that voted against the Internation Criminal Court treaty in 1998 were Iraq, Israel, Libya, the People’s Republic of China, Qatar, the United States, and Yemen.
Tom Hofmann (Benjamin Ferencz, Nuremberg Prosecutor and Peace Advocate)
In the year 2000 at Camp David, Yassir Arafat claimed that ‘the Temple never existed in Jerusalem, but rather in Nablus’ – three years later he was claiming it was in Yemen
Andrew Roberts (The Modern Swastika: Fighting Today's anti-Semitism)
Education about Yemen will come through customers’ engagement with the product. And in the meantime you’ll employ actual Yemeni people. And you’ll do something tangible. And you’ll make a living. And you won’t have to ask for donations. And it won’t have to be about Islam. You’re not selling Islamic coffee beans. Sell Yemeni beans. Do that, and do it well, and the rest will follow.
Dave Eggers (The Monk of Mokha)
We are the rational managers of a modern democracy, taking the optimum decisions to safeguard and enhance the lives of busy citizens who haven’t got the time to work things out for themselves.
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)
More than any other nation, the United States has been almost constantly involved in armed conflict and, through military alliances, has used war as a means of resolving international and local disputes. Since the birth of the United Nations, we have seen American forces involved in combat in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Greece, Grenada, Haiti, Iraq, Korea, Kosovo, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Nicaragua, Panama, Serbia, Somalia, and Vietnam, and more recently with lethal attacks in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and other sovereign nations. There were no “boots on the ground” in some of these countries; instead we have used high-altitude bombers or remote-control drones. In these cases we rarely acknowledge the tremendous loss of life and prolonged suffering among people in the combat zones, even after our involvement in the conflict is ended.
Jimmy Carter (A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power)
There were twenty-five million people in Yemen and at least thirteen million guns -- after the United States, it was, per capita the world's most armed nation. Men wore AKs walking down the sreet. They brought them to weddings.
Dave Eggers (The Monk of Mokha)
The industrialized Order hasn’t simply enabled us to increase the total calories grown by a factor of seven since 1945; it has enabled vast swaths of the planet to have large populations when geography alone wouldn’t previously support them. Populations in North Africa are up by over a factor of five since 1950, Iran over six, while Saudi Arabia and Yemen have increased by over a factor of ten. Bulk food shipments originating a continent (or more) away are now a commonality.
Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
The United States and its NATO Alliance constitute the greatest collection of genocidal states ever assembled in the entire history of the world. If anything the United Nations Organization and its member states bear a “responsibility to protect” the U.S.’ and NATO’s intended victims from their repeated aggressions as it should have done for Haiti, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, now Syria, and perhaps tomorrow, Iran. The United States and the NATO Alliance together with their de facto allies such as Israel constitute the real Axis of Genocide in the modern world. Humanity itself owes a “responsibility to protect” the very future existence of the world from the United States, the NATO states, and Israel.
Francis A. Boyle (Destroying Libya and World Order: The Three-Decade U.S. Campaign to Terminate the Qaddafi Revolution)
close cooperation with Saudi Arabia against the Shiite Houthis in Yemen. Apparently, Trump figured that to demand cessations of these operations that others had started would call upon him the wrath of hawkish Republicans and fuel charges of isolationism
Victor Davis Hanson (The Case for Trump)
My roommate in college was from Yemen, and whenever anyone said anything nice to her she'd tell them they have beautiful eyes. The idea is whatever beauty you see is actually coming from you rather than the thing itself. Like the beauty is in the perception, not the thing.
Kemper Donovan
Christianity was found in places, notably in Yemen, and among the Arab tribes in the north under Byzantine rule; Judaism too was practised in Yemen, and in and around Yathrib, later renamed Madina (Medina), but the vast majority of the population of Arabia were polytheists.
Anonymous (The Qur'an)
He believes that the salmon and its long journey through endless oceans back to its home river is, in some strange way, a symbol of his own journey to become closer to his God. You know, a few hundred years ago, the sheikh might have been called a saint, if there are saints in Islam?
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen: The book that became a major film starring Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt)
Well before Africans were enslaved by Europeans, they were enslaved by other Africans, as well as by Islamic states in North Africa and the Middle East. Some of those states did not abolish legal slavery until recently: Qatar in 1952; Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962; Mauritania in 1980.
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity)
I admit to a feeling of pride that my father had saved the day yet again, although I also thought that nothing would have been better for me personally than for the mullah to force my father's departure within the hour. Either way, I know now that nothing would have stopped my father from his Jihad. If he could not remain in Afghanistan, he would go to Pakistan. If Pakistan pulled the welcome mat, he would go to Yemen. If Yemen threw him out, he would journey to the middle of the most hostile desert where he would plot against the West. Violent Jihad was my father's life; nothing else really mattered. Nothing.
Omar bin Laden (Growing Up bin Laden: Osama's Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World)
He carries home in the way he walks: an elegant, loose strut. He wears home on his skin in the form of attar, a delicious perfume that makes me dream of Somali coastlines, places where children play football amidst colonial ruins, and young men like Korfa flee in darkness on boats to Yemen and Kenya, determined never to look back.
Diriye Osman (Fairytales for Lost Children)
Be not as the horse or as the mule which have no understanding; whose mouth must be held with bit and bridle” (Psalms 32:9).
Maimonides (Epistle to Yemen: and Introduction to Helek)
Death doesn't choose who it favors. A missile does.
Threa Almontaser (The Wild Fox of Yemen: Poems)
It’s like the Stone Age over there, just sand and rubble and IEDs.
Tom Perrotta (The Leftovers)
I am sailing in uncharted water and my old life is a distant shore, still visible through the haze of retrospection but receding to a grey line on the horizon.
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)
We have got ethical in so many places I begin to wish I had not given up geography at school.
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)
Before settling in to work, we noticed a large travel case on the mantelpiece. I unsnapped the latches and lifted the top. On one side there was a large desert scene on a marble base featuring miniature gold figurines, as well as a glass clock powered by changes in temperature. On the other side, set in a velvet case, was a necklace half the length of a bicycle chain, encrusted with what appeared to be hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of rubies and diamonds—along with a matching ring and earrings. I looked up at Ben and Denis. “A little something for the missus,” Denis said. He explained that others in the delegation had found cases with expensive watches waiting for them in their rooms. “Apparently, nobody told the Saudis about our prohibition on gifts.” Lifting the heavy jewels, I wondered how many times gifts like this had been discreetly left for other leaders during official visits to the kingdom—leaders whose countries didn’t have rules against taking gifts, or at least not ones that were enforced. I thought again about the Somali pirates I had ordered killed, Muslims all, and the many young men like them across the nearby borders of Yemen and Iraq, and in Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, whose earnings in a lifetime would probably never touch the cost of that necklace in my hands. Radicalize just 1 percent of those young men and you had yourself an army of half a million, ready to die for eternal glory—or maybe just a taste of something better. I set the necklace down and closed the case. “All right,” I said. “Let’s work.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
Shaykha Sultana al-Zubaydiyya Shaykha Sultana al-Zubaydiyya, famous scholar and saint, was the dauther of 'Ali al-Zubaydi, a man belonging to the martial Zubaydi clan of the tribe of Bani Haritha, itself an offshoot of the major tribe of Kinda, one of the most ancient and best known tribes of Southern Yemen. [...] she became known as the Rabi'a of Hadramawt. [...] Shaykha Sultana became so engrossed in her spiritual pursuits that she never found it in herself to marry and beget children as was expected of her. Instead, she visited all the great men of the valley, sitting at the back of the mosques where the gatherings were held, and listening intently until she became well known and greatly respected by them. Mostafa al-Badawi, A blessed Valley, Volume One, Wadi Hadramawt & the Alawi Tradition, Chapter 10, S. 95-97
Mostafa al-Badawi (A Blessed Valley: Wadi Hadramawt and the 'Alawi Tradition)
Obama would prove to be one of the most militarily aggressive American presidents in decades. He authorized military operations in seven Muslim countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen; mandated a troop surge in Afghanistan; and vastly ramped up the CIA drone program. And he became the first president since the Civil War to authorize the assassination of a U.S. citizen: Anwar al-Awlaki.
Peter L. Bergen (United States of Jihad: Who Are America's Homegrown Terrorists, and How Do We Stop Them?)
Since 1945, when Jesus granted America air superiority, we have bombed Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Granada, Panama, Iraq, Serbia, Somalia, Bosnia, The Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Yemen. And Yemen only because the tenth one was free. How did we inherit this moral obligation of bringing justice to the world via death from above? Are we Zeus? It doesn't make any sense. Our schools are crumbling and we wanna teach everyone else a lesson.
Bill Maher
Stupid Americans. Didn’t they comprehend what was happening? They were killing themselves. While they foolishly spent their treasure and spilled their blood in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen, the very ideology they were fighting to defeat was moving into their cities, their schools, their very government. The freedoms the West championed so proudly would be their ultimate downfall. Those freedoms would be targeted and exploited. Their freedoms were their weakness. Know thy enemy.
Jack Carr (True Believer (Terminal List, #2))
Topkapı Sarayı'nda oturan bir devlet başkanına sahip cemiyetin duyguları ile, Ihlamur Kasrı'na sığınmış bir devlet başkanına sahip olan bir cemiyetin duyguları, hisleri, anlatım ve ifade vasıtaları aynı olamaz. Tuna'dan Yemen'e bir devletin tabâsı olmanın, vatandaşı olmanın getirdiği ahvâl başka, Meriç'le Fırat arasındakinin başkadır. Bu hiçbir zaman toprak egemenliği falan filan meselesi değildir. Zamanla beraber sanatın ifadesinin değişmesi çok tabii bir şeydir. Deden otuz odalı evde oturuyordu, sen üç odalı evde oturuyorsun. O kadar değiştik.
Ömer Tuğrul İnançer
Analysis of your social network and its members can also be highly revealing of your life, politics, and even sexual orientation, as demonstrated in a study carried out at MIT. In an analysis known as Gaydar, researchers studied the Facebook profiles of fifteen hundred students at the university, including those whose profile sexual orientation was either blank or listed as heterosexual. Based on prior research that showed gay men have more friends who are also gay (not surprising), the MIT investigators had a valuable data point to review the friend associations of their fifteen hundred students. As a result, researchers were able to predict with 78 percent accuracy whether or not a student was gay. At least ten individuals who had not previously identified as gay were flagged by the researchers’ algorithm and confirmed via in-person interviews with the students. While these findings might not be troubling in liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts, they could prove problematic in the seventy-six countries where homosexuality remains illegal, such as Sudan, Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia, where such an “offense” is punished by death.
Marc Goodman (Future Crimes)
The fears of militarization Holbrooke had expressed in his final, desperate memos, had come to pass on a scale he could have never anticipated. President Trump had concentrated ever more power in the Pentagon, granting it nearly unilateral authority in areas of policy once orchestrated across multiple agencies, including the State Department. In Iraq and Syria, the White House quietly delegated more decisions on troop deployments to the military. In Yemen and Somalia, field commanders were given authority to launch raids without White House approval. In Afghanistan, Trump granted the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, sweeping authority to set troop levels. In public statements, the White House downplayed the move, saying the Pentagon still had to adhere to the broad strokes of policies set by the White House. But in practice, the fate of thousands of troops in a diplomatic tinderbox of a conflict had, for the first time in recent history, been placed solely in military hands. Diplomats were no longer losing the argument on Afghanistan: they weren’t in it. In early 2018, the military began publicly rolling out a new surge: in the following months, up to a thousand new troops would join the fourteen thousand already in place. Back home, the White House itself was crowded with military voices. A few months into the Trump administration, at least ten of twenty-five senior leadership positions on the president’s National Security Council were held by current or retired military officials. As the churn of firings and hirings continued, that number grew to include the White House chief of staff, a position given to former general John Kelly. At the same time, the White House ended the practice of “detailing” State Department officers to the National Security Council. There would now be fewer diplomatic voices in the policy process, by design.
Ronan Farrow (War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence)
I had to write a decalogue for journeys, eight out of the ten virtues should be moral, and I should put first of all a temper as serene at the end as at the beginning of the day. Then would come the capacity to accept values and to judge by standards other than our own. The rapid judgement of character; and a love of nature which must include human nature also. The power to dissociate oneself from one’s own bodily sensations. A knowledge of the local history and language. A leisurely and uncensorious mind. A tolerable constitution and the capacity to eat and sleep at any moment. And lastly, and especially here, a ready quickness in repartee.
Freya Stark (A Winter in Arabia: A Journey Through Yemen)
In response to this direct challenge to British authority, the Mandate authorities deported virtually the entire Palestinian nationalist leadership, including the mayor of Jerusalem, Dr. Husayn al-Khalidi, my uncle. With four others (he and another two were members of the AHC) he was sent to the Seychelles Islands, an isolated location in the Indian Ocean that the British Empire frequently chose for exiling nationalist opponents.61 The men were held in a heavily guarded compound for sixteen months, deprived of visitors and outside contact. Their fellow prisoners in the Seychelles included political leaders from Aden in Yemen and Zanzibar. Other Palestinian leaders were exiled to Kenya or South Africa,
Rashid Khalidi (The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017)
My family had been in a refugee camp for a year and I was thirty-one years old when the government of Israel arranged through secret channels to fly all the Jews of Yemen to Israel. It was unofficially called Operation Magic Carpet, and officially called Operation On Wings of Eagles. When our people refused to enter the airplanes out of fear—for especially our brethren from the North had no experience with modernity—our rabbis reminded them of divine passages. “This is the fulfillment of ancient prophecy,” they said. “The eagles that fly us to the Promised Land may be made of metal, but their wings are buoyed aloft by the breath of God.” Between June 1949 and September 1950 almost fifty thousand Yemenite Jews boarded transport planes and made some 380 flights from Aden to Israel in this secret operation.
Nomi Eve (Henna House)
A man on his deathbed left instructions For dividing up his goods among his three sons. He had devoted his entire spirit to those sons. They stood like cypress trees around him, Quiet and strong. He told the town judge, 'Whichever of my sons is laziest, Give him all the inheritance.' Then he died, and the judge turned to the three, 'Each of you must give some account of your laziness, so I can understand just how you are lazy.' Mystics are experts in laziness. They rely on it, Because they continuously see God working all around them. The harvest keeps coming in, yet they Never even did the plowing! 'Come on. Say something about the ways you are lazy.' Every spoken word is a covering for the inner self. A little curtain-flick no wider than a slice Of roast meat can reveal hundreds of exploding suns. Even if what is being said is trivial and wrong, The listener hears the source. One breeze comes From across a garden. Another from across the ash-heap. Think how different the voices of the fox And the lion, and what they tell you! Hearing someone is lifting the lid off the cooking pot. You learn what's for supper. Though some people Can know just by the smell, a sweet stew From a sour soup cooked with vinegar. A man taps a clay pot before he buys it To know by the sound if it has a crack. The eldest of the three brothers told the judge, 'I can know a man by his voice, and if he won't speak, I wait three days, and then I know him intuitively.' The second brother, 'I know him when he speaks, And if he won't talk, I strike up a conversation.' 'But what if he knows that trick?' asked the judge. Which reminds me of the mother who tells her child 'When you're walking through the graveyard at night and you see a boogeyman, run at it, and it will go away.' 'But what,' replies the child, 'if the boogeyman's Mother has told it to do the same thing? Boogeymen have mothers too.' The second brother had no answer. 'I sit in front of him in silence, And set up a ladder made of patience, And if in his presence a language from beyond joy And beyond grief begins to pour from my chest, I know that his soul is as deep and bright As the star Canopus rising over Yemen. And so when I start speaking a powerful right arm Of words sweeping down, I know him from what I say, And how I say it, because there's a window open Between us, mixing the night air of our beings.' The youngest was, obviously, The laziest. He won.
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
ASIO turned up on Hamza's doorstep a year ago, after he and his mate, both in their mid-twenties, returned from Yemen. They weren't charged with anything but they were placed on no-fly lists. Hamza is convinced ASIO is monitoring their phones and watching their homes. So, as a workaround, he, the paladin dwarf, and his mate, a gnome, skip through forests in World of Warcraft, chatting business over their headsets. I ask him what he was doing in Yemen. 'Okay, now this... what you're getting to now, is a dangerous area.' He pauses. 'I was eating pizza.' He asks for a selfie with me. He says the gnome will be stoked because they had to lie low at one point and were confined to a small apartment in Yemen. They passed the time watching Breaking Bad and John Safran vs God. Pretty chuffed by the inroads I've made into the jihadi demographic.
John Safran (Depends What You Mean By Extremist)
Bin Laden was emerging now as a politician, a rising force in the underground and exiled Saudi opposition. The Islamist backlash against the Saudi royals that erupted after the Gulf War continued to gather momentum in 1994. Bin Laden allied himself early that year with a Saudi opposition group based in London that used fax machines and computer lines to denounce the royal family’s “insatiable carnal desires.” Bin Laden set up his own group, the Advisory and Reformation Committee, which also published hundreds of anti-Saudi pamphlets, all filled with bin Laden’s picture. His tracts proposed the breakup of the Saudi state. Saudi Arabia’s borders marked the reign of a single and illegitimate family, the al-Sauds, bin Laden argued. He proposed two new countries, Greater Yemen and Greater Hijaz, which would divide the Arabian Peninsula between them.11
Steve Coll (Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan & Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001)
I argued that such an approach stood logic on its head. All disasters, all loss, all suffering, demonstrate that there cannot possibly be a God, for why would a deity who is omnipotent create a universe so prone to disaster and accident? Religious faith, I argued, was invented in order to pacify the grieving multitudes and ensure they did not ask the really difficult questions, which if answered, would tend to lead to progress.
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen: The book that became a major film starring Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt)
In this country faith is absolute and universal. The choice, if there is a choice, is made at birth. Everyone believes. For these people, God is a near neighbour. I thought of Sundays at home when I was a child, buttoned up in an uncomfortable tweed jacket and forced to go to Sunday communion. I remember mouthing the hymns without really singing, peering between my fingers at the rest of the congregation when I was supposed to be praying, twisting in my seat during the sermon, aching with impatience for the whole boring ritual to be over. I can’t remember when I last went to church. I must have been since Mary and I were married but I can’t remember when. I don’t know anyone who does go to church now. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? I know I live amongst scientists and civil servants, and Mary’s friends are all bankers or economists, so perhaps we are not typical. You still see people coming out of church on Sunday morning, chatting on the steps, shaking hands with the vicar, as you drive past on your way to get the Sunday papers, relieved you are too old now to be told to go. But no one I know goes any more. We never talk about it. We never think about it. I cannot easily remember the words of the Lord’s Prayer. We have moved on from religion. Instead of going to church, which would never occur to us, Mary and I go to Tesco together on Sundays. At least, that is what we did when she still lived in London. We never have time to shop during the week and Saturdays are too busy. But on Sunday our local Tesco is just quiet enough to get round without being hit in the ankles all the time by other people’s shopping carts. We take our time wheeling the shopping cart around the vast cavern, goggling at the flatscreen TVs we cannot afford, occasionally tossing some minor luxury into the trolley that we can afford but not justify. I suppose shopping in Tesco on Sunday morning is in itself a sort of meditative experience: in some way a shared moment with the hundreds of other shoppers all wheeling their shopping carts, and a shared moment with Mary, come to that. Most of the people I see shopping on Sunday morning have that peaceful, dreamy expression on their faces that I know is on ours. That is our Sunday ritual. Now, I am in a different country, with a different woman by my side. But I feel as if I am in more than just a different country; I am in another world, a world where faith and prayer are instinctive and universal, where not to pray, not to be able to pray, is an affliction worse than blindness, where disconnection from God is worse than losing a limb.
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)
And this is not just the United States’ problem, it is a global problem. One of the primary arguments used by apologists for this surveillance state that has developed across the United States and in every country worldwide is a trust of the government. This is critical — even if you trust the U.S. government and their laws[...] think about the governments you fear the most, whether it is China, Russia or North Korea, or Iran. These spying capabilities exist for everyone. This is not just an American thing; this is happening in every country in every part of the world. We first need to move beyond the argumentation by policy officials of wishing for something that is technically impossible. The idea ‘Let's get rid of encryption’. It is out of their hands. The jurisdiction of Congress ends at its borders. Even if all strong encryption is banned in the United States because we don’t want Al Qaeda to have it, we can't stop a group from developing these tools in Yemen, or in Afghanistan, or any other region of the world and spreading the tools globally.
Edward Snowden (Edward Snowden: The Internet Is Broken)
And then, as slowly as the light fades on a calm winter evening, something went out of our relationship. I say that selfishly. Perhaps I started to look for something which had never been there in the first place: passion, romance. I aresay that as I entered my forties I had a sense that somehow life was going past me. I had hardly experienced those emotions which for me have mostly come from reading books or watching television. I suppose that if there was anything unsatisfactory in our marriage, it was in my perception of it—the reality was unchanged. Perhaps I grew up from childhood to manhood too quickly. One minute I was cutting up frogs in the science lab at school, the next I was working for the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence and counting freshwater mussel populations on riverbeds. Somewhere in between, something had passed me by: adolescence, perhaps? Something immature, foolish yet intensely emotive, like those favourite songs I had recalled dimly as if being played on a distant radio, almost too far away to make out the words. I had doubts, yearnings, but I did not know why or what for. Whenever I tried to analyse our lives, and talk about it with Mary, she would say, ‘Darling, you are on the way to becoming one of the leading authorities in the world on caddis fly larvae. Don’t allow anything to deflect you from that. You may be rather inadequately paid, certainly compared with me you are, but excellence in any field is an achievement beyond value.’ I don’t know when we started drifting apart. When I told Mary about the project—I mean about researching the possibility of a salmon fishery in the Yemen—something changed. If there was a defining moment in our marriage, then that was it. It was ironical, in a sense. For the first time in my life I was doing something which might bring me international recognition and certainly would make me considerably better off—I could live for years off the lecture circuit alone, if the project was even half successful. Mary didn’t like it. I don’t know what part she didn’t like: the fact I might become more famous than her, the fact I might even become better paid than her. That makes her sound carping.
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)
Harriet turned round, and we both saw a girl walking towards us. She was dark-skinned and thin, not veiled but dressed in a sitara, a brightly coloured robe of greens and pinks, and she wore a headscarf of a deep rose colour. In that barren place the vividness of her dress was all the more striking. On her head she balanced a pitcher and in her hand she carried something. As we watched her approach, I saw that she had come from a small house, not much more than a cave, which had been built into the side of the mountain wall that formed the far boundary of the gravel plateau we were standing on. I now saw that the side of the mountain had been terraced in places and that there were a few rows of crops growing on the terraces. Small black and brown goats stepped up and down amongst the rocks with acrobatic grace, chewing the tops of the thorn bushes. As the girl approached she gave a shy smile and said, ‘Salaam alaikum, ’ and we replied, ‘Wa alaikum as salaam, ’ as the sheikh had taught us. She took the pitcher from where it was balanced on her head, kneeled on the ground, and gestured to us to sit. She poured water from the pitcher into two small tin cups, and handed them to us. Then she reached into her robe and drew out a flat package of greaseproof paper from which she withdrew a thin, round piece of bread, almost like a large flat biscuit. She broke off two pieces, and handed one to each of us, and gestured to us to eat and drink. The water and the bread were both delicious. We smiled and mimed our thanks until I remembered the Arabic word, ‘Shukran.’ So we sat together for a while, strangers who could speak no word of each other’s languages, and I marvelled at her simple act. She had seen two people walking in the heat, and so she laid down whatever she had been doing and came to render us a service. Because it was the custom, because her faith told her it was right to do so, because her action was as natural to her as the water that she poured for us. When we declined any further refreshment after a second cup of water she rose to her feet, murmured some word of farewell, and turned and went back to the house she had come from. Harriet and I looked at each other as the girl walked back to her house. ‘That was so…biblical,’ said Harriet. ‘Can you imagine that ever happening at home?’ I asked. She shook her head. ‘That was charity. Giving water to strangers in the desert, where water is so scarce. That was true charity, the charity of poor people giving to the rich.’ In Britain a stranger offering a drink to a thirsty man in a lonely place would be regarded with suspicion. If someone had approached us like that at home, we would probably have assumed they were a little touched or we were going to be asked for money. We might have protected ourselves by being stiff and unfriendly, evasive or even rude.
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)
During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat was invited to spend more time in the White House than any other foreign leader—thirteen invitations.303 Clinton was dead set on helping the Israelis and Palestinians achieve a lasting peace. He pushed the Israelis to grant ever-greater concessions until the Israelis were willing to grant the Palestinians up to 98 percent of all the territory they requested. And what was the Palestinian response? They walked away from the bargaining table and launched the wave of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks known as the Second Intifada. And what of Osama bin Laden? Even while America was granting concessions to Palestinians—and thereby theoretically easing the conditions that provided much of the pretext for Muslim terror—bin Laden was bombing U.S. embassies in Africa, almost sank the USS Cole in Yemen, and was well into the planning stages of the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001. After President George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively, bringing American troops into direct ground combat with jihadists half a world away, many Americans quickly forgot the recent past and blamed American acts of self-defense for “inflaming” jihad. One of those Americans was Barack Obama. Soon after his election, Obama traveled to Cairo, Egypt, where he delivered a now-infamous speech that signaled America’s massive policy shifts. The United States pulled entirely out of Iraq despite the pleas of “all the major Iraqi parties.”304 In Egypt, the United States actually backed the Muslim Brotherhood government, going so far as agreeing to give it advanced F-16 fighters and M1 Abrams main battle tanks, even as the Muslim Brotherhood government was violating its peace treaty with Israel and persecuting Egypt’s ancient Coptic Christian community. The Obama administration continued supporting the Brotherhood, even when it stood aside and allowed jihadists to storm the American embassy, raising the black flag of jihad over an American diplomatic facility. In Libya, the United States persuaded its allies to come to the aid of a motley group of rebels, including jihadists. Then many of these same jihadists promptly turned their anger on the United States, attacking our diplomatic compound in Benghazi the afternoon and evening of September 11, 2012—killing the American ambassador and three more brave Americans. Compounding this disaster, the administration had steadfastly refused to reinforce the American security presence in spite of a deteriorating security situation, afraid that it would anger the local population. This naïve and foolish administration decision cost American lives.
Jay Sekulow (Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can't Ignore)
THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE LEMBA       One of the most outstanding cases of  Black diaspora Jewry is the case of the Lemba of southern Africa. The Lemba have long claimed that they are Jews or Israelites who migrated to Yemen and from there to Africa as traders. Amazingly, DNA evidence has backed the Lemba claim of Jewish ancestry.   Today, the Lemba can be found in southern Africa countries like Malawi, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Many of their customs are similar to Jews such as the wearing of  yarmulke-like skull cups and observing kosher laws such as the requirement not to eat pork. Interestingly they also avoid eating rabbits, scaleless fish, hares and carrion. In short, the Lemba follow the requirements in the Torah, which is the first five books of the Old Testament.     The Lemba claim that about 2500 years ago, their ancestors left Judea for Yemen. Only males are said to have sailed to Africa by boat. The migrants took local wives for themselves. They built a city in Yemen called Sena. From Sena they traveled to Africa where they dispersed. Some remained in East Africa and others traveled to southern Africa. Lemba women do not have 'Semitic' admixture, and this is in line with their oral history.     Professor Tudor Vernon Parfitt, a professor of Jewish Studies then at the University of London, spent several months among the Lemba. He later travelled to Yemen and to his
Aylmer Von Fleischer (The Black Hebrews and the Black Christ)
Constantine soon began to renege on the promise of religious freedom as far as Jews were concerned. In 315, he issued a new edict, forbidding Jews—and only Jews—from proselytizing. Much later in the fourth century, however, Judaism demonstrated its continuing appeal for outsiders by attracting large numbers of Arabs, with whom the Jews had generally lived in amity throughout the early Diaspora, in Himyar (now Yemen). The Arab converts to Judaism proved just as intolerant of Christians as Christians were proving to be of Jews in late antiquity, and expended a fair amount of effort in the fifth century trying to wipe out the Christians among them. In the end, around 525, the Arab Jews of Himyar were vanquished when a much larger force of Ethiopian Christian troops crossed the Red Sea to attack them. (Today a tiny remnant of those Arab-descended Jews—no more than a few hundred—still live in a Yemen descending into chaos as militant Shia Houthi rebels—whose slogan is “Death to America, Death to Israel, Damnation to the Jews”—have seized power. The United States and Britain, which tried to get the remaining Jews out of Yemen, both closed their embassies as a result of escalating violence in 2015. Suleiman Jacob, the unofficial rabbi of a community of just fifty-five Jews in the capital of Raida, said in a poignant interview, “There isn’t a single one of us here who doesn’t want to leave. Soon there will be no Jews in Yemen, inshallah.”8)
Susan Jacoby (Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion)
Modern-day Iran has no such imperial designs, but it does seek to expand its influence, and the obvious direction is across the flatlands to its west – the Arab world and its Shia minorities. It has made ground in Iraq since the US invasion delivered a Shia-majority government. This has alarmed Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and helped fuel the Middle East’s version of the Cold War with the Saudi–Iranian relationship at its core. Saudi Arabia may be bigger than Iran, it may be many times richer than Iran due to its well-developed oil and gas industries, but its population is much smaller (33 million Saudis as opposed to 81 million Iranians) and militarily it is not confident about its ability to take on its Persian neighbour if this cold war ever turns hot and their forces confront each other directly. Each side has ambitions to be the dominant power in the region, and each regards itself as the champion of its respective version of Islam. When Iraq was under the heel of Saddam, a powerful buffer separated Saudi Arabia and Iran; with that buffer gone, the two countries now glare at each other across the Gulf. The American-led deal on Iran’s nuclear facilities, which was concluded in the summer of 2015, has in no way reassured the Gulf States that the threat to them from Iran has diminished, and the increasingly bitter war of words between Saudi Arabia and Iran continues, along with a war sometimes fought by proxy elsewhere most notably in Yemen.
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
(Note: The following was written in 2003, before the full implication of US military commitment in Afghanistan and Iraq could be fully appreciated. The passage also predates US drone attacks against targets in Pakistan and Yemen - to say nothing of Israeli affairs since 2003. It is unknown if and how the author's comments would change if he were writing the same today.) The value of Israel to the United States as a strategic asset has been much disputed. There have been some in the United States who view Israel as a major strategic ally in the region and the one sure bastion against both external and regional enemies. Others have argued that Israel, far from being a strategic asset, has been a strategic liability, by embittering U.S. relations with the Arab world and causing the failure of U.S. policies in the region. But if one compares the record of American policy in the Middle East with that of other regions, one is struck not by its failure but by its success. There is, after all, no Vietnam in the Middle East, no Cuba or Nicaragua or El Salvador, not even an Angola. On the contrary, throughout the successive crises that have shaken the region, there has always been an imposing political, economic, and cultural American presence, usually in several countries - and this, until the Gulf War of 1991, without the need for any significant military intervention. And even then, their presence was needed to rescue the victims of an inter-Arab aggression, unrelated to either Israelis or Palestinians. (99)
Bernard Lewis (The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror)
Alcune caratteristiche dell'ondata rivoluzionaria - in primo luogo gli aspetti di sincronia e concatenazione tra i processi - hanno motivato e in parte giustificano il confronto con alcuni precedenti come il 1848, il 1968 o il 1989, che hanno coinvolto e scosso diverse aree regionali o continentali - e per certi versi sovra-continentali. Tuttavia una delle tesi principali di questa opera è che il valore della rivoluzione della gente comune cui abbiamo assistito - e, per quanto ci riguarda, intensamente vissuto - risieda come in tutte le rivoluzioni autentiche innanzitutto nell'aver messo al centro alcune fondamentali questioni umane e nel come e quanto esse abbiano iniziato a cercare e suggerire risposte all'insegna della vivibilità, in un'ottica possibilmente aggregante e complessivamente migliorativa per tutte e tutti. Questi processi sono preziosi per chi cerca la liberazione e l'autoemancipazione, mentre sono stati ritenuti pericolosi dagli oppressori di tutto il mondo per il principio di rivoluzione umana che hanno incarnato, soprattutto in Egitto e in Siria, in termini diversi nell'enigmatico quanto importante Yemen. In ciò si trovano delle differenze significative rispetto alle rivoluzioni del Novecento, in cui spesso sin dall'inizio sono prevalse le logiche politiche, politico-religiose e/o politico-militari. Questi processi presentano tratti nuovi e di grande valore in cui abbiamo rintracciato un filo conduttore che ce ne ha fatto formulare un'idea sintetica e un'analisi, nonché trarre insegnamenti utili alla ricerca di un bene comune in chiave universale. Al principio e al centro ci sono le persone e le personalità - non gli Stati e i partiti -, le donne e gli uomini coinvolti di tutte le età e generazioni, ciò che hanno sentito, pensato ed espresso operando ancora prima che facendo: le persone e le idee, di cui valutare il valore e le contraddizioni, i meriti e i deficit.
Mamadou Ly (Dall'Egitto alla Siria. Il principio di una Rivoluzione Umana e i suoi antefatti)
Images of people in the Middle East dressing like Westerners, spending like Westerners, that is what the voters watching TV here at home want to see. That is a visible sign that we really are winning the war of ideas—the struggle between consumption and economic growth, and religious tradition and economic stagnation. I thought, why are those children coming onto the streets more and more often? It’s not anything we have done, is it? It’s not any speeches we have made, or countries we have invaded, or new constitutions we have written, or sweets we have handed out to children, or football matches between soldiers and the locals. It’s because they, too, watch TV. They watch TV and see how we live here in the West. They see children their own age driving sports cars. They see teenagers like them, instead of living in monastic frustration until someone arranges their marriages, going out with lots of different girls, or boys. They see them in bed with lots of different girls and boys. They watch them in noisy bars, bottles of lager upended over their mouths, getting happy, enjoying the privilege of getting drunk. They watch them roaring out support or abuse at football matches. They see them getting on and off planes, flying from here to there without restriction and without fear, going on endless holidays, shopping, lying in the sun. Especially, they see them shopping: buying clothes and PlayStations, buying iPods, video phones, laptops, watches, digital cameras, shoes, trainers, baseball caps. Spending money, of which there is always an unlimited supply, in bars and restaurants, hotels and cinemas. These children of the West are always spending. They are always restless, happy and with unlimited access to cash. I realised, with a flash of insight, that this was what was bringing these Middle Eastern children out on the streets. I realised that they just wanted to be like us. Those children don’t want to have to go to the mosque five times a day when they could be hanging out with their friends by a bus shelter, by a phone booth or in a bar. They don’t want their families to tell them who they can and can’t marry. They might very well not want to marry at all and just have a series of partners. I mean, that’s what a lot of people do. It is no secret, after that serial in the Daily Mail, that that is what I do. I don’t necessarily need the commitment. Why should they not have the same choices as me? They want the freedom to fly off for their holidays on easy Jet. I know some will say that what a lot of them want is just one square meal a day or the chance of a drink of clean water, but on the whole the poor aren’t the ones on the street and would not be my target audience. They aren’t going to change anything, otherwise why are they so poor? The ones who come out on the streets are the ones who have TVs. They’ve seen how we live, and they want to spend.
Paul Torday (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen)
Yemen was, in the years prior to World War I, the ‘Vietnam’ of the Ottoman Empire, but not that of Egypt. In Yemen, Egypt attained its political goals. The republic survived.
Fred Halliday (100 myths about the Middle East)
During its peak in the eighth to ninth centuries, the Babylonian version of Hebrew extended from Persia to Yemen. It declined in the tenth century with the disappearance of the main academies under the weight of Muslim power, and was replaced by the Tiberian system. However, the origins of the Yemenite system are still relatively obscure.
Angel Sáenz-Badillos
In general it must be concluded that the accentuation of the Palestinian Aramaic (derived from Aramaic of Babylonia) was the same as the Biblical Aramaic, the Nabataean, the Syriac, and as understood by the first Targumists. The same has been assumed for the Talmudic Aramaic .. Yemen MSS of Onkelos constitute one of the best guides to the vocalization of this Targum .. The Palmyrenes were of Arab race, and consequently connected ethnically with the Nabataeans .. Familiar features of the language clearly show its kinship with Palestinian Aramaic.
John Courtenay James (The Language of Palestine and Adjacent Regions)
Pivoting from Trump himself, Bannon plunged on with the Trump agenda. “Day one we’re moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s all in. Sheldon”—Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire, far-right Israel defender, and Trump supporter—“is all in. We know where we’re heading on this.” “Does Donald know?” asked a skeptical Ailes. Bannon smiled—as though almost with a wink—and continued: “Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it. Or sink trying. The Saudis are on the brink, Egyptians are on the brink, all scared to death of Persia … Yemen, Sinai, Libya … this thing is bad.… That’s why Russia is so key.… Is Russia that bad? They’re bad guys. But the world is full of bad guys.
Michael Wolff (Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House)
Remember that it is not right to take a passage out of its context and to draw inferences from it. It is imperative to take into consideration the preceding and following statements in order to fathom the writer’s meaning and purpose before making any deductions.
Maimonides (Epistle to Yemen: and Introduction to Helek)
Chroniques de la guerre contre le Yémen Aux 5000 enfants martyrs du Yémen tué sous les bombes de l'avion royal Aux oubliés du monde À sa mémoire
Abu Faisal Sergio Tapia (Chroniques Annoncées du Yémen)
In the social dilemma of the tragic commons, popularised by Garrett Hardin (1968),[51] a group of famers has access to a common grassed area upon which to sustain their individually owned herds of sheep. Each farmer, being rational, wishes to keep as many sheep as possible on the commons in order to make more money – the sheep being a mechanism for converting common property (grass) into individual wealth. However, if the grass is consumed faster than the rate at which it grows (because the number of sheep is unsustainable) the farmers are collectively disadvantaged. The dilemma is that a farmer who adds extra sheep to the commons receives all of the profit, while the cost of doing so is distributed to the group. Each farmer, therefore, has an individual incentive to increase their use of the land even though doing so reduces the productivity of the land, and affects them all adversely. The selfish, though rational, short-term individual preferences of the farmers undermine their longer-term individual interests. Furthermore, the agential behaviour of the farmers creates structural barriers to collective reform because once one farmer overuses the common resource without being punished the action becomes legitimised. The rational behaviour of individuals can thus create collective irrationality. Solving this collective-action problem is typically understood to require either the conversion of the common resource into privately owned property (the exploitation of which is, therefore, regulated by the private owners because they have incentives to maintain its productivity), or through the creation of a public authority that is capable of regulating the amount of the common resource available to an individual.[52] But there is also another option: that the farmers lobby wealthy landowners from the neighbouring village to give them more land and more grass and thus prevent an outbreak of violence between the famers that may affect those beyond the borders of the commons.
Sarah Phillips (Yemen and the Politics of Permanent Crisis (Adelphi Book 420))
Al-Shadhili became known as the Monk of Mokha, and Mokha became the primary point of departure for all the coffee grown in Yemen and destined for faraway markets.
Dave Eggers (The Monk of Mokha)
There were twenty-five million people in Yemen and at least thirteen million guns—after the United States, it was, per capita the world’s most armed nation.
Dave Eggers (The Monk of Mokha)
There was a part of Islam in every Arab Christian. Shibil agreed. Whatever their beliefs, they acknowledged sharing a culture that bridged faiths, joined by a common notion of custom and tradition and all that it entailed—honor, hospitality, shame, pride, dignity, and a respect for God’s power. For many Muslims and Christians there was even a common origin, a fabled beginning in faraway Yemen. “If you cut me, you see Lebanon,” Hikmat said, somewhat dramatically. “You see the Prophet Mohammed, you see Imam Ali, you see the cedars.
Anthony Shadid (House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East)
It was tempting to compare the Arab world of 2011 to Eastern Europe of 1989, when one by one the countries of that region rejected communism until the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet era came to a close. But while the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Syria might be similar to each other in corruption and nepotism, and might employ the same brutal tactics to keep control, there had been no single ideology or dominant power uniting the Middle East. Every country was unhappy in its own way.
Lindsey Hilsum (Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution)
Yemen is paralyzed by the world’s first true civil war over access to fresh water. All but two of the country’s aquifers have run dry, prompting armed conflict to protect the sources of water still there.
Jeff Nesbit (This Is the Way the World Ends: How Droughts and Die-Offs, Heat Waves and Hurricanes Are Converging on America)
Neither of us is a starry-eyed idealist. We are both hardened realists with distrust for one another, and that mistrust is shared at the top levels of our respective governments. At the same time, we have seen the destructive consequences of crises in which our countries side with one or another government or movement involved in a competition for power — for example in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain or Iraq. While we each blame the other side for this pattern, we agree that the net result has been costly, has eroded the confidence of the people our governments serve, and has wasted incalculable resources and countless lives that should have been used to build a new Middle East, rather than tear it down. The time for dialogue is now, because the situations in the historic conflict zones are ripe for diplomacy.
Hossein Mousavian & Abdulaziz Sager
In one analysis, Richard Doner, Bryan Ritchie and Dan Slater argue that for a regime to experience an ‘extraordinarily constrained political environment’ there must be three simultaneous conditions: the credible threat of mass unrest resulting from the deterioration of living standards; an increased need for military equipment and foreign exchange; and serious budget constraints resulting from insufficient exploitable sources of revenue.
Sarah Phillips (Yemen and the Politics of Permanent Crisis (Adelphi Book 420))
While waiting for his flight at Coanda airport in Bucharest, Scorpion checked the news on his laptop. In Yemen, fighting had been reported between the Hashidis and a force comprised of AQAP allied with elements of the Bakil and Abidah tribes. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, there had been a massive demonstration in Kiev’s Independence those backing Davydenko and supporters of Iryna Shevchenko, who was calling for a vote of no confidence against Davydenko in the Verkhovna Rada. A Jewish synagogue in Donetsk had been torched, and a gang of Black Armbands killed two Jewish college students in Lviv. “Everybody wins,” Shaefer had said.
Andrew Kaplan (Scorpion Winter (Scorpion, #3))
Cuánto vale la vida de un niño yemeni, para la comunidad internacional? Más de 1000 días, 5000 niños mártires Cuál es la cifra de niños asesinados necesita las Naciones Unidas y la Comunidad Internacional en su escritorio para frenar este Genocidio…
Abu Faisal Sergio Tapia
When Obama took office, there had been only one U.S. drone strike in Yemen, in November 2002.6 By 2012 a drone strike was reported in Yemen every six days. As of August 2015, more than 490 people had been killed in drone strikes in Yemen alone.
Jeremy Scahill (The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program)
Eu incomodava. Por quê? Simplesmente porque não ficava em casa, como todas as outras... Tinha um restaurante, trabalhava com homens, tratava-os de igual para igual e: estava ganhando dinheiro.
Ugo Bertotti
Sob aqueles véus negros parece não haver mais mulheres de carne e osso. Parecem pássaros negros, misteriosos, inabordáveis.
Ugo Bertotti (O Mundo de Aisha: A revolução silenciosa das mulheres no Iêmen)
Nigeria is not alone, either in the prevalence of child marriage or in attempts to end the practice. In September 2008, Moroccan officials closed sixty Koranic schools operated by Sheikh Mohamed Ben Abderrahman Al-Maghraoui, because he issued a decree justifying marriage to girls as young as nine. “The sheikh,” according to Agence France-Presse, “said his decree was based on the fact that the Prophet Mohammed consummated his marriage to his favourite wife when she was that age.”23 It should come as no surprise, then, given the words of the Koran about divorcing prepubescent women and Muhammad’s example in marrying Aisha, that in some areas of the Islamic world the practice of child marriage enjoys the blessing of the law. Time magazine reported in 2001 that “in Iran the legal age for marriage is nine for girls, fourteen for boys,” and notes that “the law has occasionally been exploited by pedophiles, who marry poor young girls from the provinces, use and then abandon them. In 2000 the Iranian Parliament voted to raise the minimum age for girls to fourteen, but this year, a legislative oversight body dominated by traditional clerics vetoed the move.”24 Likewise, the New York Times reported in 2008 that in Yemen, “despite a rising tide of outrage, the fight against the practice is not easy. Hard-line Islamic conservatives, whose influence has grown enormously in the past two decades, defend it, pointing to the Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to a 9-year-old.”25 (The characterization of proponents of Islamic law as “conservatives” is notable—the Times doesn’t seem fazed by the fact that “conservatives” in the U.S. are not typically advocates of child marriage.) And so child marriage remains prevalent in many areas of the Islamic world. In 2007, photographer Stephanie Sinclair won the UNICEF Photo of the Year competition for a wedding photograph of an Afghani couple: the groom was said to be forty years old but looked older; the bride was eleven. UNICEF Patroness Eva Luise Köhler explained, “The UNICEF Photo of the Year 2007 raises awareness about a worldwide problem. Millions of girls are married while they are still under age. Most of theses child brides are forever denied a self-determined life.”26 According to UNICEF, about half the women in Afghanistan are married before they reach the age of eighteen.27
Robert Spencer (The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran)
Killing "unbelievers" has been part of — of course not all of — Islam since its inception. Within 10 years of Muhammad's death Muslims had conquered and violently converted whole peoples from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to Syria. Muslims have offered conquered people death or conversion since that time.
Dennis Prager (A Dark Time in America)
By the sixth century, Jews were so well established on the peninsula that the king of Yemen converted to Judaism.
Phyllis Goldstein (A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism)
Savage violence has erupted in recent years across a broad swathe of territory: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, suicide bombings in Belgium, Xinjiang, Nigeria and Turkey, insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand, massacres in Paris, Tunisia, Florida, Dhaka and Nice. Conventional wars between states are dwarfed by those between terrorists and counter-terrorists, insurgents and counter-insurgents; and there are also economic, financial and cyber wars, wars over and through information, wars for the control of the drug trade and migration, and wars among urban militias and mafia groups. Future historians may well see such uncoordinated mayhem as commencing the third – and the longest and strangest – of all world wars: one that approximates, in its ubiquity, a global civil war.
Pankaj Mishra (Age of Anger: A History of the Present)
The MDP proved wildly successful. It’s currently the longest-running disease-specific drug donation programme of its kind. It’s delivered 3.4 billion treatments to 29 African countries, 6 Latin American countries and Yemen in the Middle East, and now reaches 300 million people per year.
Alex Edmans (Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit – Updated and Revised)
Whether these politicians lack understanding of the law or simply seek to circumvent it by using corporate regulations instead is unclear. But in the case of both Hamas and Hezbollah, we need to ask: What is the impact in Palestine and Lebanon, where these groups are powerful players in local politics—local politics that have no shortage of violent actors? Azza El Masri is a media researcher from Lebanon who, for the past several years, has studied content moderation. “Is Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and its participation in the Iran-KSA proxy war tantamount to terrorist activities? Yes,” she told me in a text message. “However, this doesn’t absolve the fact that Hezbollah today is the most powerful political actor in Lebanon.” Lebanon’s political scene is, to the outsider, messy and difficult to parse. After the fifteen-year civil war that killed hundreds of thousands, the country’s parliament instituted a law that pardoned all political crimes prior to its enactment, allowing the groups that were formerly militias to form political parties. Only Hezbollah—an Iran-sponsored creation to unify the country’s Shia population during the war—was allowed by the postwar Syrian occupation to retain its militia. The United States designated Hezbollah (which translates to “Party of God”) a foreign terrorist organization in 1995, more than a decade after the group bombed US military barracks in Beirut.
Jillian York (Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism)
The caliphate of al-Nasir saw the first sustained involvement by the Umayyads in North African politics.26 Morocco at this stage was, compared with Muslim Spain, a very underdeveloped country. There had been very little Arab settlement and the country remained over-whelmingly Berber and largely rural, the inhabitants living either as pastoral nomads or settled farmers. Tribal allegiances and rival-ries remained the basis of political activity. Only Fes, settled in the ninth century by colonists from Qayrawan and Cordoba, was a really urban community, although Sijilmassa, the great entrepot for Saharan trade far to the south, was a large oasis settlement. In theory much of the area was under the authority of the Idrisids, based in Fes. The Idrisids were descendants of 'Ali, who had fled west in 786 after a failed rebellion against the Abbasids.27 They did not rule a state in the conventional sense but, somewhat like the traditional Zaydi Imams of Yemen, enjoyed a certain prestige among the tribal leaders because of their religious status and were acknowledged as mediators if not rulers. They seem to have had no organized administration or government apparatus. By the beginning of the tenth century, the Idrisid family had split into many different branches which vied ineffectually for such authority as the family name could still command. Smaller but more coherent were the political units based on Sijilmassa and Nakur. Sijilmassa on the fringes of the Sahara was ruled by the Midrarids, a Berber dynasty of Kharijite persuasions. Nakur on the Mediterranean coast was a small city-state ruled by a popular Sunni dynasty, the Banu Witt, who had had contacts with the Umayyads in the previous century. There had certainly been commercial and personal contacts between al-Andalus and North Africa in the ninth century, especially with the Rustamid dynasty of Tahert in central Algeria.
Hugh Kennedy
Americans assassinating foreigners in a foreign land for a foreign power. Yemen was a strange war.
Mark Greaney (Relentless (Gray Man, #10))
Two Yemeni Jews, Hannah and Saadya Akiva, gave a similarly bleak account of Yemen in the aftermath of the Second World War. Speaking to the historian Bat Ye’or, they recalled how it was forbidden for a Jew to work in agriculture, to write in Arabic, to possess firearms, or to ride on a horse or a camel. Jews could only ride on donkeys, and even then they were obliged to ride sidesaddle in order to jump to the ground whenever they passed a Muslim–as in the early days of the Covenant of Omar more than 1,200 years earlier. In the streets in Yemen, Jewish pedestrians had to pass Muslims on the left. Although Jewish cobblers made shoes for Muslims, they were not allowed to wear them. Hannah and Saadya Akiva explained: ‘The Arabs forbade us to wear shoes, so that we hid them when, as children, we went searching for wood for cooking. When we were far enough away, we put on our shoes; on returning we took them off and hid them in the branches. The Arabs frequently searched us, and if they found them, they punished us and forbade us to collect wood. We had to lower our heads, accepting insults and humiliations. The Arabs called us
Martin Gilbert (In Ishmael's House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands)
At this point, Saddam took Saleh aside at the Presidential Palace, walked him to his private quarters, and called on the presidential barber to get a haircut, and the presidential tailor to get him a well-fitted suit. An hour later, Saddam flattered Saleh saying, “Now you look Presidential.” The two leaders hit it off quickly after that... Excerpt from- Abdulaziz: Making Yemen a Good World Citizen, page 91.
Raidan AlSaqqaf (ABDULAZIZ: Making Yemen a Good World Citizen)
As soon as Saladin was in control of Egypt, he set his sights on a larger goal. He organized his state according to Islamic law and began removing Shiite influence in Egypt. This boosted his reputation and influence in the Muslim world, especially when he declared that he was the protector of the Sunni Orthodoxy. Saladin decided that he wanted to form a Muslim coalition, which would prove to be an extremely difficult task. The Muslim world was made up of highly independent states with their own rulers. Some of those states were made up of Shia Muslims, which meant that Saladin had to overcome regional and religious differences. Sometime in 1174, he uncovered a plot to put the Fatimids back in power, and he dealt with the traitors in a swift and brutal manner. He also built several mosques and madrasahs in order to expand Sunni influence within Egypt. His popularity among the Sunni Muslims grew, and he appointed Sunni Muslims to positions within the government and courts. Saladin allowed Egyptians to hold power within his government, which gave him insight into the traditions of the Egyptian populace. He was famously tolerant of other religions and allowed Coptic Christians and Jews to continue practicing their beliefs. During Saladin’s reign, the Egyptian economy continued to flourish as it had during the Fatimid Caliphate. Muslim Coalition In 1174, Saladin managed to capture Damascus, which was an impressive feat. From there, he went on to conquer Aleppo, Mosul, and Yemen. He soon came to control the Red Sea region, which brought him one step closer to his ultimate goal. However, Saladin didn’t simply rely on military methods to gain new territories. He was an adept diplomat who fostered strong relationships with other leaders, which gave him many allies. In order to establish the legitimacy of his rule, he married Nur al-Din’s widow since she was the daughter of a previous ruler of Damascus. Saladin also won widespread respect in the Muslim world by taking the lead in the efforts to protect Islam against the invading Christians. While Saladin proclaimed to be a protector of Islam, he had no problem fighting Muslim enemies. The caliph of Baghdad recognized most of Saladin’s authority, but Aleppo remained beyond his reach. It was ruled by Nur al-Din’s
Enthralling History (History of Egypt: An Enthralling Overview of Egyptian History (Egyptian Mythology and History))
The country that occupied this continent was the most powerful nation on earth. They held the keys to the deadliest military machines ever constructed. It was easy to get Americans to support involvement in a thousand little conflicts, because each only required a small fraction of the nation's military power. It only risked a few American lives. But millions of people around the world died. Women and children and old men and dumb, young boys from Yemen to Turkey to Guatemala. To justify those murders Americans had to make those people less than human. And once they'd done that, it wasn't such a great jump to do it to their neighbors" - Robert Evans, "After the Revolution
Robert Evans
Zulüm ve hakaret gördüğün bir vatana düşkünlük gösterme. Alçakları ulu kişiler mevkiine çıkaran bir memleketten uzaklaş ve Yemen'in yüksek dağında da olsa seni koruyan bir yere sığın.
Hariri (Makamat)
Many of the achievements assigned by the Bible to Solomon may describe Omri, who built the port-fortress at Tel Kheleifah on the Red Sea between Elath and Aqaba, to trade spices and ivory, via the kingdom of Sheba (Yemen/Eritrea), with Africa, Arabia and India.
Simon Sebag Montefiore (The World: A Family History of Humanity)