Yemen’s Brotherhood: Early Losses and an Unknown Future
Following the Yemeni revolution, the local Muslim Brotherhood has worked to expand alliances, but often at the expense of their revolutionary partners, which could cost them vital public support.
Sheikh Abdullah bin Hussein al-Ahmar, the founder and president of the Reform Party (Al-Islah), the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in Yemen, admitted that the party was established on Sept. 13, 1990, as part of a deal with former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, with the aim of opposing the Yemeni Socialist Party (Saleh’s partner in Yemen’s unification).
This is because Saleh and his own party — the General People’s Congress — could not do so themselves for ethical reasons because they were the Socialist Party’s partners in the declaration of unification on May 22, 1990. But Sheikh Ahmar died at the end of 2007, and the party that he established was transformed to lead, in 2011, the youth revolution against its former ally Saleh, with Ahmar’s son, Humaid, becoming Saleh’s most prominent adversary.
