Arab, Hadrami

The Hadharem (singular Hadrami) are the Arab people of Hadramawt, the long valley and high plateau of south-eastern Yemen, whose region reaches into southern Oman and southern Saudi Arabia. Hadramawt was one of the incense kingdoms of ancient South Arabia; it accepted Islam in the Prophet's lifetime, was Ibadi for a time from the 8th century and Sunni from 951. They speak Hadrami Arabic (ayh), with valley (Wadi) and coastal varieties: in many towns jim is pronounced as 'y', qaf as a hard 'g', and words avoid final consonant clusters (binit for bint). About 1,300 tribes are counted among them.

Hadrami society is ranked by descent. The sada, descendants of the Prophet through al-Husayn, led by the Ba 'Alawi families who settled in the valley in the 10th century, stand at the top as unarmed religious leaders; then the scholarly mashayikh (Amudi, Ba Wazir, Ba Abbad); the armed tribesmen (qaba'il), settled or Bedouin, among them the Kathiri, Yafa'i (the Qu'aiti sultans), Nahd, Hamum, Sei'ar and Manahil; the townsmen, artisans and cultivators (masakin); and families of slave descent. Until 1967 the region was divided between the Qu'aiti and Kathiri sultanates under British protection.

Hadramis are among the great emigrant peoples of the Indian Ocean: by the 1930s about a third of them lived abroad, in the Dutch East Indies, Malaya and Singapore, Hyderabad (where their descendants are called Chaush), Sri Lanka, the Swahili coast, Somalia and Harar, and the Red Sea ports, above all Jeddah, where Hadrami houses such as Bin Ladin, Bin Mahfouz and Bugshan became leading Saudi business families. Most descendants in Southeast Asia and East Africa now speak Malay, Indonesian or Swahili and are counted as 'Arabs' of those countries; Hadrami Arabic survives there as Indonesian Arabic and in loanwords such as 'sarong'.

Wadi Hadramawt is built of sun-dried mud brick: Shibam, the 'Manhattan of the desert', packs about 500 tower houses of five to nine storeys inside its walls, re-plastered with mud to survive the rains, while Tarim and Seiyun have whitewashed mud palaces built with Southeast Asian remittances in Javanese and Singaporean styles. Food mixes Arabian and Indian Ocean tastes: rice with goat or fish, haneeth and mandi (pit-roasted meat, a Hadrami dish now eaten across Arabia), harees, and the prized sidr honey of Wadi Do'an. Men wear the futa or sarong with a turban or cap; women in the Wadi wear black robes and a tall pointed straw hat in the fields. Marriage follows status lines, and sada women rarely marry outside the sada. Religious chanting, the dan poetry-song of the Wadi, coastal drum dances and the zamil chant of the tribes mark weddings and festivals.

Hadramis are Sunni Muslims of the Shafi'i school. Tarim, in Wadi Hadramawt, is the home of the Ba 'Alawi tariqa, a quiet, scholarly Sufi path led by the sada: recitation of litanies such as the ratib al-Haddad, weekly gatherings of remembrance, the mawlid of the Prophet, and the hawl, the anniversary visit to saints' tombs. Each year in Sha'ban thousands go on pilgrimage to the tomb of the prophet Hud (Qabr Hud) east of Tarim for several days of prayer. Tarim's institutes, Dar al-Mustafa and al-Ahgaff University, train students from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, East Africa and the West, and the Ba 'Alawi network links Hadramawt with the Lamu Maulid in Kenya and with Indonesian Islam. Salafism, carried by migrants returning from Saudi Arabia, is strong on the coast and opposes saint veneration; al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula ruled al-Mukalla in 2015-2016. Belief in the blessing (baraka) of saints and their descendants, amulets and healing by recitation are widespread.

A Hadrami Arabic translation, apparently portions, is listed from 2010, and the Lumo 'Luke' film exists in the dialect; there is no JESUS film in Hadrami Arabic. Educated Hadramis read the Standard Arabic Bible. No community of Hadrami believers is known in Yemen. Hadramis abroad, in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, East Africa, the Gulf and Britain, live in more open settings, though descent-based religious prestige and family control remain strong barriers.

Hadrami emigration began in earnest in the 18th century and peaked in the early 20th, driven by drought, poverty and tribal insecurity and carried by sada religious networks and merchant houses. In the mid-1930s some 90,000-110,000 of about 260,000-350,000 Hadramis lived abroad. Official counts of Arabs in the Dutch East Indies rose from 27,399 (1900) to 71,335 (1930); Indonesia's 2010 census counted 118,866 Arab Indonesians, mostly of Hadrami descent. Singapore's Arab quarter (Kampong Glam) grew with Raffles' encouragement; about 8,200 Arab Singaporeans were counted in 2015, and 15,000-20,000 Singaporeans have Yemeni roots. In Saudi Arabia, Hadramis settled in the Hijaz from the early 19th century, and families such as Bin Ladin, Bin Mahfouz, Bugshan and al-Amoudi became business leaders; many hold Saudi citizenship. Larger claims (14-25 million Hadrami descendants) count partial ancestry and cannot be verified.