Civil Society and the City in the History of Northern Yemen (abstract)

Urban or civil (madanī) society appeared in Yemen neither after the Revolution of 1962, nor with Yemen’s entering modernity. The author draws together the notion of ‘civil society’ and that of ‘urban society/civitas (tamaddun)’ as depicted by al‑Hamdānī, a great Yemeni writer of the 10th century, who defines it as follows: tamaddun is co-existence of different linguistic groups in the same space. During the Islamic period, the urban society of the big cities in Yemen was organized as civil or..