Despite Yemen’s ubiquity in recent headlines, there’s still a lot of confusing elements about the situation playing out in the country, especially when it comes to the Houthis.
The rebels attempting to oust the internationally recognized government, led by Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, are most often described as Iran-backed Shiites.
But this is not the whole picture.
To start out: The Houthis are not really Shiites. At least not in the way you think. The group prescribes to a rare sect called Zaydism. And while Zaydists technically fall under the Shiite umbrella, they’re ideologically much closer to Sunni Muslims. Until the 1960s, a Zaydi Imamate ruled swaths of Yemen and lived peacefully with Sunni tribes. Today, it’s not uncommon for the two sects to share mosques and imams.
Now Yemen’s plight is all over the news, but it’s not as black and white as the giant Sunni-Shiite proxy apocalypse many international headlines have painted.
Take a closer look at Zaydism, the Houthis and the international tug-of-war that’s going on in the Gulf nation right now.
As journalist Abubakr al-Shamahi noted recently, people say Zaydis are the “Sunnis of Shiites.” At the mosque he attends in Yemen, for example, he says an Egyptian Sunni sheikh gives the sermon, while a Zaydi call to prayer rings out from a Zaydi imam, all to a split congregation of Sunnis and Zaydis.
