The Republic of Yemen is a country located in the Arabian Peninsula in the Middle East. It is the second-largest country in the peninsula after Saudi Arabia, but the country consists mostly of deserts, with most of the population living in the cities on the shore or in the west of the country. The capital is Sana'a.
History[]
The location of Yemen
Yemen makes up the southernmost part of the Arabian Peninsula, and it has many influences, including African ones. Many Yemenis are mixed-race, a mixture of the Arabs from the peninsula and Africans from the Horn of Africa; the port of Aden was a hub for the Indian Ocean Trading System. The country was ruled by Zaidi Shia imams until 1962, when the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen was ousted in a coup by nationalists, and the country was divided between the North Yemen dictatorship and the communist South Yemen. On 22 May 1990, the two countries were reunited under President of North Yemen Ali Abdullah Saleh, who led the country until he was overthrown in the Yemeni Revolution in 2011 during the Arab Spring. The country of Yemen was still divided between a mostly-Shia north and a mostly-Sunni south even after reunification, and these divisions led to an insurgency by al-Qaeda against Saleh's Shia dictatorship and then the Yemeni Civil War after 2015, which saw the Sunni president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi fight against the Shi'ite Houthis with assistance from Saudi Arabia and the other gulf states. Yemen became a failed state, with hundreds of thousands of Yemenis facing starvation and dehydration and the country being divided between President Hadi's supporters in Aden and the Houthis in Sana'a.
Culture[]
Population in 1992
In 2014, 24,000,000 people lived in Yemen, with Arabs being the majority of the population, with Afro-Arabs, South Asians, and Europeans following behind. The population increased at a rapid rate; in 1978, there were 55,000 people in the city of Sana'a, but in the early 21st century, there were over 2,000,000 people. 99% of Yemenis are Muslim and 1% other religions, with 60% of the Muslim population being Sunni and 40% Shia. The country is an Islamic republic, with many judges also being religious judges and laws being governed by sharia, the strict interpretation of the Qur'an.