The Convergence of Judaism and Islam. Religious, Scientific, and Cultural Dimensions

The Case of the Kuhlānī Synagogue in San ̔ā’, 1933–1944 r 143

in our lands.” Sharh al-azhār, 10:497n6. The twentieth-century Zaydī jurist Ahmad b. al-
Qāsim al- ̔Ansī also states that dhimmīs may rebuild destroyed synagogues. Ahmad b.
al-Qāsim al- ̔Ansī, al-Tāj al-mudhhab li-ahkām al-madhhab (San ̔ā’: Maktabat al-yaman
al-kubrā, 1947), 4:453.
On the problems that “new” synagogues posed to some Muslim jurists in North
Africa, see Matthias B. Lehmann, “Islamic Legal Consultation and the Jewish-Muslim
Convivencia: al-Wansharīsī’s Fatwā Collection as a Source for Jewish Social History in
al-Andalus and the Maghrib,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 6 (1999): 25–54, see 34–41; John O.
Hunwick, “The Rights of Dhimmīs to Maintain a Place of Worship: A Fifteenth-Century
Fatwā from Tlemcen,” al-Qantara 12, no. 1 (1991): 133–55, and Hunwick, “al-Mahīlī and
the Jews of Tuwāt,” Studia Islamica 61 (1985): 155–83, see 167–68.

19. In 1668 Imām al-Mutawakkil Ismā ̔īl destroyed most of San ̔ā’’s synagogues and
    sent its Jewish population, along with the rest of the Jewish population of Yemen, to
    Mawza ̔, a town on the Red Sea coast, to await deportation to India. After this expul-
    sion, called the “Mawza ̔ Exile” (galut mawza ̔) in Jewish sources, the oldest synagogue
    in San ̔ā’, the Kanīs al- ̔ulamā’ (Midrash he-hakhamim) was converted into the “Mosque
    of the Expulsion” (Masjid al-jalā). A poem by the jurist Muhammad b. Ibrāhīm al-Sahūlī
    in praise of the expulsion, rendered in an ornate calligraphic frieze, adorns its walls. Ser-
    jeant and Lewcock, San ̔ā’, 392, 398–400; Muhammad b. Ahmad al-Hajrī, Masājid San ̔ā’
    (San ̔ā’: Wizārat al-ma ̔ārif, 1941–42), 42; al- ̔Ansī, al-Tāj al-mudhhab, 4:454n1; Bernard
    Haykel, Revival and Reform in Islam: The Legacy of Muhammad al-Shawkani (Cam -
    bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 119. In 1762, following the fall of the Jewish
    grandee Sālim al- ̔Irāqī, Imām al-Mahdī ̔Abbās ordered the destruction of the syna-
    gogues of San ̔ā’. They were rebuilt in 1792. Serjeant and Lewcock, San ̔ā’, 394, 400–418.


20. Gamliel, Bate hakneset, 3:341, 346.


21. According to al-Jamal, al-Zubayrī’s appetite for bribes led him to prolong the
    synagogues controversy. Gamliel, Bate hakneset, 2:71–73. Imām Yahyā investigated his
    corruption but could not find witnesses willing to testify against him. Ibid., 3:201. Al-
    Zubayrī lured a young sayyidah into his home in al-Rawdah and raped her. Witnesses
    saw his crime, and Imām Yahyā had al-Zubayrī jailed. The imām’s wife questioned the
    girl, and she was exiled to Hūth. Lutf al-Zubayrī died in prison, and nobody would ac-
    company his body to the cemetery. Ibid., 3:202.


22. Muhammad Zabārah, Nuzhat al-nazar fī rijāl al-qarn al-rābi ̔ ̔ashar (San ̔ā’:
    Markaz al-dirāsāt wa l-abhāth al-yamaniyya, 1979), 491–93. On al-Zubayrī, see also ̔Abd
    al-Salām b. ̔Abbas al-Wajīh, A ̔lām al-mu ̔allifīn al-zaydiyyah (McLean, Va.: Imam Zaid
    bin Ali Cultural Foundation, 1999), 799; Ahmad b. Muhammad al-Shāmī, Min al-adab
    al-yamanī (Beirut: Dār al-Shurūq, 1974), 83.


23. On this movement within Zaydī jurisprudence, see Haykel, Revival and Reform,
    10–12.


24. Gamliel, Bate hakneset, 1:329.


25. Ibid., 2:34. Al-Jamal rendered this conversation in Hebrew, so Imām Yahyā may
    have said waq f when he intended the Hebrew term heqdesh.


26. Ibid., 2:34.


27. Ibid., 2:34–35.