44

The Najāḥids

412–553/1022–1158

Yemen, with their capital at Zabīd

With the demise of the Ziyādids (see above, no. 42), one of their black Ḥabashī viziers, Najāḥ, managed to kill a rival and establish himself in Zabīd as an independent ruler, acquiring honorifics from the ‘Abbāsid caliph, whom he acknowledged, and extending his dominion northwards through Tihāma. Najāḥ and his successors, like the Ziyādids before them, imported into Yemen contingents of Abyssinian military slaves to support their power, thereby contributing to the mixture of races to be found until today in lowland Yemen. Sa‘id b. Najāḥ was on more than one occasion dispossessed by the Ṣulayhids (see below, no. 45), and al-Manṣūr b. Fātik I reigned as one of their vassals. The Najāḥids of the twelfth century ruled amid growing confusion and under increasing pressure, latterly from the Mahdids (see below, no. 48), and despite the deposition of Fātik III b. Muḥammad as the price of military help from the Zaydī Imām Aḥmad b. Sulaymān al-Mutawakkil, the Mahdids entered Zabīd in 554/1159.

Lane-Poole, 92–3; Zambaur. 117–18; Album, 26.

EI² ‘Nadjāḥids‘ (G. R. Smith).

H. C. Kay, Yaman: Its Early Mediaeval History, 14ff.

H. F. A. al-Hamdani and Ḥ. S. M. al-Juhanī, al-Ṣulayḥiyyūn wa ‘l-haraka al-Fāṭimiyya fi ‘1-Yaman, with a genealogical table at p. 339.

G. R. Smith, The Ayyūbids and Early Rasūlids in the Yemen (567–694/1173–1295), II, 559.

idem, in W. Daum (ed.), Yemen: 3000 Years of Art and Civilisation in Arabia Felix, 131– 2, 138.