Zaidi School

Zaidiyyah traces its name to Zayd ibn Ali, a grandson of Husayn ibn Ali, who led an unsuccessful revolt against Umayyad rule in Kufa in 740 and was killed in the fighting. His followers held a distinctive position within the wider Shia movement: that leadership belonged to any qualified descendant of Ali and Fatima who was willing to rise publicly in a rightful cause, rather than to a fixed line of divinely appointed and religiously infallible Imams as later Twelver Shia doctrine came to teach. That openness to a qualifying rather than a purely hereditary claim is part of why Zaidi legal method developed closer to Sunni practice than Twelver jurisprudence did, giving substantial weight to a jurist's own reasoned effort rather than resting rulings primarily on the transmitted sayings of a closed line of Imams.

The school's lasting legal shape came from al-Hadi ila'l-Haqq Yahya ibn al-Husayn, a descendant of Zayd who traveled to the Yemeni highlands at the invitation of feuding local tribes and, arriving in the town of Sa'dah in 897, established both a functioning Imamate and the body of legal teaching, later called the Hadawi school after him, that Zaidi communities in Yemen have followed since. Unlike Zayd's own failed rising, al-Hadi's state endured, giving Zaidi jurisprudence a territorial base its doctrine had not previously had.

The Zaidi Imamate al-Hadi founded in Yemen proved remarkably durable by the standards of medieval Islamic states, persisting in one form or another, sometimes reduced to a rump territory, sometimes expanding across most of the country, for over a thousand years. It survived Ottoman occupation twice, in the sixteenth and again in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, each time reasserting itself once Ottoman control weakened, and continued as an independent kingdom, the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen, after the Ottomans finally withdrew following the First World War.

That long continuity ended in 1962, when a military coup in Sanaa deposed the reigning Imam and declared a republic, triggering a civil war between republican and royalist forces that drew in Egyptian and Saudi intervention on opposing sides before the republic prevailed by the decade's end. The political Imamate the Zaidi legal tradition had underwritten for over a millennium did not return, but the Hadawi school itself did not depend on that office for its survival as a body of law: Zaidi communities in Yemen's northern highlands, the tradition's historical heartland, have continued to follow its jurisprudence in religious and personal status matters into the present, a legal tradition now separated from the state structure it was originally built to serve.