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When I met Houthi rebel leaders in Yemen in 2014, at a graduation ceremony for honor students, they had us repeatedly chant: "Allah is the greatest; death to America; death to Israel; curse on Jews; and victory to Islam."
That slogan captures the psychology and ideology of the Houthis, who are a Shia Islamist movement whose ideology is rooted in jihadism, a violent interpretation of our religion. Like Hamas and Hezbollah, the Houthis collaborate with the regime in Iran, from whom they receive strong support.
The Shia Houthis, now in the news for their attacks on international shipping and a recent exchange of strikes with the U.S., are starkly symptomatic of a larger problem. They are engaged both in a religious war and in a war of ideas. They enforce their ideology on the people of Yemen, who are condemned to live under their theocratic and tyrannical regime. Although Yemen, like many Muslim countries, is too tribal for democracy to be viable, many hereditary or dictatorial Muslim regimes could permit freedom of religion and of speech, if they were awakened.
In 1962, Sunni Yemenis overthrew the Shia Houthis' thousand-year-old kingdom, installed a Sunni government and suppressed the Shia religion. In a reversal 52 years later, in 2014, the Houthis overthrew the Sunni government and are similarly suppressing Sunni Yemenis. Thus the Shia Houthis and Sunni Yemenis are alike — both victims and perpetrators of religious tyranny. Houthis were victims then, but are perpetrators now; Sunni Yemenis were perpetrators then, but are victims now. All this religious tyranny, loss of life and suffering could have been avoided if both Shia and Sunni had embraced freedom of religion.
Having lived and studied in the United States for almost eight years now (I am now a Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota), I have acquired an insider-outsider vantage point that has helped me clarify an understanding of the Houthis and the threat they represent, not just to Yemen but to American interests in the region. The United Nations calls the Yemeni situation one of the worst humanitarian crises in modern history. The country is entrenched in a seemingly endless civil war, analogous to the Reformation era of religious war in Europe, when Christians slaughtered each other over sectarian differences.
Houthis believe that they are descendants of the prophetic family and, on that basis, are entitled by Allah to rule all of Yemen. This Houthi ideology is traced through their lineage to Islamism. Islam is a spiritual religion; Islamism is a political regime that enshrines Islam through political and violent means. The Houthis are an Islamist group that enforces its parochial ideology by law, allowing neither freedom of religion nor freedom of speech. They are both religious zealots and a large tribe, giving them the vision and the manpower to seize Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, and to run the northern provinces through brute force and indoctrination campaigns.
