Muhamasheen, Akhdam

The Muhamasheen ('the marginalised ones'), long called al-Akhdam ('the servants'), are a hereditary Black underclass of Yemen, the only country where they exist as a people: Arabic-speaking Muslims who stand outside the tribal system, at the bottom of a social order ranked by descent, and whom other Yemenis refuse to marry. Their origin is disputed. Yemenis commonly say they descend from the Ethiopian (Aksumite) soldiers of Abraha who stayed after the Persian conquest of about 570, or from the Abyssinian slave soldiers of the Najahid dynasty of Zabid (11th-12th centuries), reduced to servitude by the Mahdids who overthrew it; others place their roots in the Tihama coast, and genetic studies point to East African ancestry. They number between 500,000 (official, 2004) and 3.5 million (UN), up to a tenth of Yemen's people, and are found in every governorate, most of all in the Tihama, Taiz, Ibb and Lahij. Their own movement, led by the National Union of the Marginalised (2007), adopted the name Muhamasheen and frames their exclusion as racism. Joshua Project also applies the label 'Muhamasheen, Akhdam' (formerly 'Arabized Blacks') to Black Arab communities in Libya, Kuwait and Qatar that are not part of this people; those records are described in those countries' presences.

Muhamasheen families live in segregated settlements (mahwa) of tents, straw huts, tin shacks and small stone shelters on the edges of towns, often by rubbish dumps or on floodplains, with large households and close neighbourhood ties forged by exclusion. Men sweep streets and collect rubbish for the municipalities, shine shoes, wash cars and gather scrap; women work in the market, as domestic workers and vendors, and beg, and do not veil in the way other Yemeni women do, which outsiders hold against them. Marriage is within the community: marriages with tribal families are taboo and have provoked violence, and children of mixed parentage (muwalladin) remain stigmatised. On the Red Sea coast Muhamasheen musicians dominate the tibbal, an Afro-Arabian music of lyres, reed pipes and virtuoso drumming that accompanies weddings, acrobatic dances such as the habashi, and saints' festivals. Their life has been described in Yemeni literature, from Mohammad Abdul-Wali's 'Sana'a: An Open City' to Ali al-Muqri's novel 'Black Taste, Black Odour' (2008), set in a Taiz settlement.

The Muhamasheen are Muslims, mostly Sunni of the Shafi'i school like the people of the Tihama, Taiz and the south where most of them live, with Zaydi-affiliated communities in Sanaa and the north. Popular practice is strong: in the Tihama their drummers lead saint-day festivals and zar ceremonies of spirit possession and trance, and outsiders attribute sorcery to them. Poverty and exclusion from schools mean that few receive formal religious education, and mosques in mixed neighbourhoods can be unwelcoming; activists stress their piety ('black faces, white hearts') against the slur that they lack morals. In Houthi areas the authorities court them as 'descendants of Bilal' through Qur'anic culture courses, which also serve to recruit young men for the front.

Portions of Scripture exist in Ta'izzi-Adeni Arabic, the full Bible in Standard Arabic, and the JESUS Film in Arabic; most Muhamasheen adults cannot read (literacy about 20%), so audio and visual resources matter most. No Christian outreach to the Muhamasheen and no believers among them are known. Yemen bans proselytising and punishes apostasy with death, and aid, the main point of contact with outsiders, reaches them through local committees and sheikhs who often exclude them.