Ibrahim Bin Ali Alwazir: An Islamic Democrat

By Richard H. Curtiss

'”There is no justification for the existence of any dictatorial regime anywhere on this planet. This conclusion can now enjoy further support through the new world order which you announced. . .aided by a new United Nations, which is to play the role. . . Of protecting freedoms and human rights everywhere."

—Ibrahim Bin Ali Alwazir in a letter to President George Bush, March 29, 1991

While Arab leaders were debating the causes of events that led to the devastation of Kuwait in 1990 and Iraq in 1991, one prominent Yemeni political leader was already congratulating President George Bush on his support for justice and human rights in liberating Kuwait. Ibrahim Bin Ali Alwazir, a prominent democratic opponent to a succession of military governments in Yemen warns, however, that "This justice is a comprehensive one. It encompasses everything and addresses all issues."

In a March 29 letter urging the US president not to apply justice selectively, Alwazir, who was imprisoned in his native country as a teenager after his father and uncle were executed for opposition to a tyrannical government, cites the Qur'anic admonition to Muslims against hypocrisy:

''Why do you say one thing and do another? Most loathsome is it in the sight of God that you say what you do not do.''

Alwazir is a leader of Yemen's Democratic Consultative (Shurayoon) Party, which supports establishment of a parliament-like consultative council (shura) in his country. He also has good reason to rejoice over any setback to Iraqi President Saddam Hussain, who he suspects may have been implicated in an assassination attempt on Alwazir two years ago in Detroit. In his letter of congratulations, however, he challenges the US president:

"Democracy, by definition, should be for everyone, and it is a contradiction in terms if a state is built on a coexistence of democracy and discrimination, based on racial or ideological differences, or based on the accumulation of power by one group to the deprivation of others...This has, unfortunately, been a way of life in Palestine for a very long time.''

Living comfortably with his wife, Safiya, in Bethesda, MD, among three sons, a daughter, nieces and nephews, all studying in US schools or active in business or professional life in the national capital area, Alwazir is an inspiration to political followers in the newly reunited Republic of Yemen. For Americans who meet him, he serves as a reminder that there are Muslim Arabs who believe just as ardently in rule by the consent of the governed as did Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln.

The fact that on at least three occasions his devotion to popular representation nearly cost Alwazir his life, the last time in the United States, also is a useful reminder to Americans that "Middle East terrorism" does, in fact, reach across the ocean to the United States, but that its victims generally have been Arabs or Arab Americans.

Ibrahim Alwazir was born in 1931 in Santa, the present capital of Yemen, into a family renowned for producing both leaders and scholars. He was still a teenager and away at school when his father took part in the successful overthrow of the tyrannical regime of Yemen's Imam Yahya in 1950. The reform government was overthrown only a month later, however, by Crown Prince Ahmad, a son of the deposed ruler. Subsequently, Ibrahim Alwazir's father, Ali Abdullah Alwazir, and his uncle, Imam Abdullah Alwazir, were executed. Ibrahim's elder brother fled to India, where he died in exile, and Ibrahim and four other brothers were jailed.

There were several noted scholars imprisoned with Ibrahim, and he used the opportunity to further his education. In 1954, supporters of his family arranged Ibrahim Alwazir's escape to British-ruled Aden, now also part of reunited Yemen. The British put him on a ship leaving the port, and he left the ship in Sudan. He was welcomed there and, subsequently, in Egypt, until Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser developed different ideas on Yemen and Ibrahim's refugee status was terminated.

Mobilizing Fellow Exiles

Meanwhile, though, he had mobilized other exiled Yemenis into a reform movement called Cooperative Democrats, which also became the title of a book he wrote advocating political change in Yemen. Six months after another military coup, in 1963, Ibrahim Alwazir returned to his homeland.

In the continuing fighting between republican revolutionaries, eventually supported by Egypt, and the royalists, however, neither side embraced the democratic institutions young Ibrahim Alwazir advocated. Within a year, he and his followers, and all of the members of his family, were forced to leave Yemen again, this time for an exile that scattered them among many countries, and which continues to this day.

In the intervening 27 years, Ibrahim Alwazir's eight books on the application of Islam to contemporary political issues have made him well-known throughout the Muslim world.

While first in exile in Sudan, he wrote about the guest workers from North Yemen and elsewhere in his books Face to Face With Misery and A Talk to Yemenis in Exile. In Cairo, his differences with the then mainstream of Arab nationalist thought were expressed in his book Lest We Go On in the Dark.

During his brief return to Yemen, he was dismayed by the new police state and also by the fact that followers of the Zaidi School of Islamic Jurisprudence seemed unaware of this school's advocacy of freedom and justice and opposition to oppression. As a result, he wrote Out of Error's Way and Zaid Bin Ali: A Chronicle of Constant, True Jihad.

In the period of Arab introspection that followed the Six-Day War of 1967, he wrote The Bitter Harvest. Then, during the era when Colonel Al-Hamidi ruled Yemen as an absolute despot, ignoring warnings to introduce the democratic reforms in whose name the absolute monarchy had been overthrown, Ibrahim Alwazir wrote The Moral. He warned that rulers who achieve power without introducing measures to achieve popular consent lose their lives when they lose office. Similar points were made in his book An Epistle to the Nation, written after Colonel Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen's incumbent president, assumed power.

Alwazir's most recent book, keyed to the beginning of a new century of the Islamic calendar, is On the Eve of the 15th Century After Hijira. It calls upon Muslims to study the lessons of their history, and apply them to realize truth, justice and freedom in the century to come. He feels he speaks for a silent majority in the Islamic world that seeks constitutional government based upon Islamic principles to make rulers accountable and bureaucracies responsible to the governed.

In 1981, at the third Islamic Summit of the Organization of Islamic Conference, he asked rulers of Muslim countries to demonstrate their respect for human rights, the will of the people, and the principles of shura, or consultation. As a follower of the Zaidi tradition of Islamic jurisprudence, he warns against sectarian obstacles to the unity of the Ummah, or Islamic world.

An Opponent of Despotism Everywhere

Such beliefs make him an opponent of despotism everywhere. His escape from imprisonment by the regime that executed his father, therefore, was only the first of a series of brushes with martyrdom. In 1978, he narrowly escaped assassination in his other home in exile, Jiddah, Saudi Arabia.

More recently, on Nov. 24, 1988, he was lightly wounded and one of his students crippled for life in a foiled assassination plot in Detroit, which has a Yemeni-American community of several thousand. Most of these Yemenis originally emigrated to Michigan to take up jobs at the Ford Motor Company production plant in Dearborn.

During a three-day visit, Alwazir was speaking at schools, social clubs and mosques to Arab Americans and Muslims. He proceeded directly from one such talk to a restaurant gathering hosted by the Yemeni consul general in Detroit.

As Alwazir and three of his Detroit hosts left their parked car to walk across the street to the restaurant, he was telling them a rueful joke based upon two successive assassinations of Yemeni presidents who had accepted invitations to dinner from treacherous colleagues. At that moment, a dark blue Cadillac drew up beside them and a gunman inside began spraying bullets at the three.

Naji Isa, a 30-year-old Detroit student, was seriously wounded when he stepped between the assassins and Ibrahim Alwazir, the obvious target of the assault. As a result, Alwazir was not hurt, although one bullet ripped through his overcoat and passed between his knees. As his two unwounded companions pushed him through the restaurant's front door and onto the floor, they found the other patrons lying on the floor and learned that their host, the consul general, had hurriedly exited through a back door when the shooting began.

Alwazir's situation, he suddenly realized as he lay on the floor, was not different from that of the Yemeni presidents about whom he had been speaking. Fortunately, however, he lived to tell the tale.

His supporters lodged complaints with the Detroit police, who turned up one non-Arab witness, whom the would-be assassins had apparently mistaken for Alwazir and had nearly shot a few minutes earlier. So far, however, there have been no arrests.

Alwazir and his followers publicly accused the current Yemeni government of the attempted assassination, which came 40 years to the month after his father's execution. Other followers expressed their suspicion that Iraq's Saddam Hussain, or some of his followers in Detroit, might have had a hand in instigating this attempt to murder a leading Arab critic of autocratic regimes.

Whoever the perpetrators may have been, their attempt to silence this determined advocate of formalized consultation between ruler and ruled in the Islamic world has only drawn more public attention to this erudite, brave and witty spokesman for human rights. It also has made Alwazir more certain than ever before that Muslims in the Middle East and American advocates of closer ties with the Islamic world are ready to listen to his ideas.

This certainty motivates his correspondence with President Bush, as the United States once more launches an effort to broker a land-for-peace settlement between Israel, its Arab neighbors, and the Palestinians. Ibrahim Alwazir and his followers are determined to put forward the ideas of Arab proponents of Islamic democracy while the eyes of the world are upon the Middle East.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.