Al-Abna' Erotic

The Abna' were the descendants of Persian soldiers who took Yemen for the Sasanian Empire in the 570s and stayed. They became a military ruling class centered on Sana'a, accepted Islam during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad and blended into the Yemeni Arab population over the following centuries. Their name means the sons, and it fit. They were not the Persians who arrived but the children those men had with Yemeni women. They were local by birth and before long by speech, yet still set apart by descent and by their standing as the Persian crown's men in Arabia.

Their story starts with a request for help. Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan, a Himyarite noble, wanted to drive out the Aksumite rulers from across the Red Sea, who had held Yemen for roughly two generations, and he turned to Khosrow I. Khosrow sent a small force under the commander Wahriz, a few hundred men. According to later Arabic accounts, many of them had been released from Persian prisons for the venture. It won anyway. Yemen became a Persian dependency, first through local client rulers and then under Persian governors. The soldiers settled, married into local families and ran the country for a distant court.

The decisive turn was religious. Islamic tradition holds that Khosrow II ordered the governor Badhan to bring Muhammad before him. Instead, Badhan embraced Islam once news came that Khosrow had been killed in 628. The Abna' followed him and were among the first non-Arab communities to convert. In the last months of Muhammad's life, al-Aswad al-Ansi, a rival claimant to prophecy, seized Sana'a, killed Badhan's son Shahr and married his widow. Abna' leaders, Fayruz al-Daylami and Dadhawayh among them, arranged his killing from inside his own household. Soon after Muhammad's death, the chieftain Qays ibn Makshuh turned on them, murdered Dadhawayh and tried to expel their families. Fayruz rallied tribal allies and, with support from Medina, won their place back.

What came next was quieter. Middle Persian gave way to Arabic, intermarriage continued, and the line between the Abna' and other Yemenis faded until it survived mostly in family trees. Their legacy is as much scholarly as political. Wahb ibn Munabbih, the Yemeni storyteller and collector of biblical and South Arabian lore, came from Abna' stock. So did his brother Hammam, whose written collection of hadith is among the oldest to survive. The name is easy to confuse with the abna' al-dawla of Abbasid Baghdad, the descendants of the army from Khurasan, but that was a separate group that arose nearly two centuries later.