By Robert F. Worth
Most of the students at Dar al-Mustafa, the local religious school in Tarim, Yemen, are between 18, the minimum age, and 25.
TARIM, Yemen — This remote desert valley, with its towering bluffs and ancient mud-brick houses, is probably best known to outsiders as the birthplace of Osama bin Laden’s father. Most accounts about Yemen in the Western news media refer ominously to it as “the ancestral homeland” of the leader of Al Qaeda, as though his murderous ideology had somehow been shaped here.
But in fact, Tarim and its environs are a historic center of Sufism, a mystical strand within Islam. The local religious school, Dar al-Mustafa, is a multicultural place full of students from Indonesia and California who stroll around its tiny campus wearing white skullcaps and colorful shawls.
“The reality is that Osama bin Laden has never been to Yemen,” said Habib Omar, the revered director of Dar al-Mustafa, as he sat on the floor in his home eating dinner with a group of students. “His thinking has nothing to do with this place.”
Lately, Al Qaeda has found a new sanctuary here and carried out a number of attacks. But the group’s inspiration, Mr. Omar said, did not originate here. Most of the group’s adherents have lived in Saudi Arabia — as has Mr. bin Laden — and it was there, or in Afghanistan or Pakistan, that they adopted a jihadist mind-set.
Mr. Omar set out 16 years ago to restore the ancient religious heritage of Tarim. It is an extraordinary legacy for an arid, windswept town in the far southeast corner of the Arabian Peninsula.
About 800 years ago, traders from Tarim and other parts of Hadramawt, as the broader area is known, began traveling down the coast to the Arabian Sea and onward in rickety boats to Indonesia, Malaysia and India. They thrived, and they brought their religion with them. Nine especially devout men, all with roots in Tarim, are now remembered as “the nine saints,” Mr. Omar said, because of their success in spreading Islam across Asia.
NYT
(Submitted by reader)