Gate of Lamentation: Islamist Persecution, Christian Survival, and an Encounter with the Houthis in Yemen

Author’s byline: David Pinault is the author of “Earth Dragon Run: A Spiritual Entertainment” (Ignatius Press). His other publications include “The Crucifix on Mecca’s Front Porch: A Christian’s Companion for the Study of Islam” and “Providence Blue: A Fantasy Quest” (also published by Ignatius). He is an emeritus professor of religious studies at Santa Clara University.

I was idling in my room at the Arabia Felix, drinking Orange Fanta and eyeing geckos on the wall, when a message came from the lobby. I’d been granted the meeting I was hoping for with Yahya Sayfallah.

This was a nom de guerre. ‘Sayfallah’ means ‘Allah’s sword,’ and it sounds as grandiose in today’s Arabic as it does in English. But appropriate, I thought, for someone who did public relations for the militant group known as the Houthis.

This was in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, in an interval of quiet some years ago during the country’s civil conflicts in the spring of 2009. But amid Houthi missile attacks and drone strikes on Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea in 2026, what I learned in my interviews back then may be worth knowing today for dealing with Yemeni Islamists—and with their patrons in Iran.

Our meeting was in a traditional mudbrick tower-house in Sanaa’s walled Old City. Yahya—young, intense, a fine speaker of Fusha (the elegant neoclassical Arabic rooted in the language of the Qur’an)—sat on a long couch surrounded by hangers-on and bodyguards. He was courteous but by no means conciliatory. As soon as he learned I was from the States, he began reciting the Houthis’ slogan: “Allah is great. Death to America and Israel. May the Jews be cursed. Victory belongs to Islam.”

I couldn’t resist observing that this war-cry al-Mawt li-Amrika sounded a bit derivative, a copy of the Farsi Marg bar Amrika (“Death to America”) featured at regime rallies in Iran’s Islamic Republic. Did this mean the Houthis were underlings of the mullahs in Tehran?

His couch-mates glowered at my comment, but Yahya retained his calm. He said I needed to understand not only the Houthis but also their relations with Iran.

What he told me showed his familiarity with Islamic theology and history. The Houthis and the Iranian theocracy are both Shia but belong to different branches of the faith. Houthi militancy is rooted in Zaydi Shiism, which takes its name from an eighth-century descendant of the prophet Muhammad named Zayd ibn ‘Ali. Zayd was killed in the street fighting in the Iraqi city of Kufa during a revolt against the tyrannical Umayyad caliphate. Ever since that time, Yahya said, Zayd’s heroic combat death highlights a key feature of the Zaydi tradition—muqawamah, active “resistance” to unjust overlords. Anyone who claims to be an imam or leader must be willing to fight openly against the reigning powers of this world, most notably the caliphal forces of the dominant Sunni Muslim majority. As scriptural justification Zaydi leaders quote the Qur’an (chapter 4, verse 95), citing Allah’s preference for those who wage jihad over those who remain politically inactive. In the tenth century Zaydi rebels established an imamate that ruled much of Yemen until the mid-twentieth century. (Today Zaydi Muslims constitute some 30% to 35% of the nation’s population and are concentrated especially in the northern regions of Yemen; the rest of Yemen largely adheres to the Sunni form of Islam.)

Iran’s rulers belong to a branch of Shiism—called the Ithna-‘Ashari or “Twelver”—that followed a different historical trajectory. From the seventh to the tenth century, a succession of twelve imams served as spiritual leaders of the Shias but generally refrained (with rare and politically unsuccessful exceptions) from open conflict with the caliphs. Twelver doctrine asserts that Allah has kept the twelfth imam alive and in concealment for centuries; he will return at a divinely chosen moment to restore justice to the world. Until then Shias, with a long history as a persecuted minority, are to avoid confrontation and await the twelfth imam’s return as the Mahdi.

Things changed with the toppling of Iran’s shah in 1979. Ayatollah Rohallah Khomeini abandoned traditional Twelver quietism and instead favored a policy of “exporting the Iranian revolution.” He aspired to leadership of the entire ummah (the global community of Islam). But how to achieve this? Arab-Persian rivalries were longstanding, as was Sunni antipathy for the Shia minority. This explains why Iran’s official designation post-revolution is “the Islamic Republic” and not, say, “the Shia Theocracy.” In pronouncements directed to Muslim audiences worldwide, the government downplays its sectarian identity.

But since 1979 Iran’s chief rival has been Saudi Arabia, home to the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina, and host to a Wahhabi Islamist ideology that has been rigorously anti-Shia for generations. In recent years the Saudi government under Prince Muhammad bin Salman has downplayed Wahhabism’s longstanding sectarian bigotry, for the sake of projecting an image of religious tolerance. But the bias lingers, especially in the Saudi government’s readiness to suppress harshly any Shia political protests or collective activism.

Which brings us back to the Arabian peninsula and the Saudis’ rivals across the border in Yemen. The Houthi movement takes its name from a Zaydi scholar named Badr al-Din al-Houthi and his son Husain, who in the early 1990s founded a group called “the Association of Believing Youth” to defend Zaydi identity against Saudi attempts to convert Zaydis to Wahhabism. Nowadays the movement’s official name is “Ansar Allah” (“those who help bring about Allah’s victory”). But as Yahya pointed out to me, the group’s enemies prefer the designation “Houthis” or “Houthi rebels” to discredit the movement and make them sound like mere members of a personality cult.

I told him what Wahhabi evangelists in Sanaa had told me: the Houthis follow Iran’s lead so thoroughly that they’ve secretly converted to Twelver Shiism (thereby renouncing the Zaydi faith so closely linked to Yemen).

Yahya didn’t like hearing this kind of rumor. He admitted the Houthis admire Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iran’s “Islamic revolution.” But, he said, “that doesn’t mean we’ve become Twelvers. The Iranians and the Twelvers are the ones who have been influenced by us, by the Zaydis.” By this, he meant that Zaydism’s centuries-long commitment to rebellion against tyranny was the source of Iran’s Khomeinist awakening and the root of the 1979 Islamic revolution. I interpreted this as a way of retrieving Zaydi dignity in the shadow of Iran’s present dominance of global Shiism.

Which brings us to the present. Worth noting are what I call three pillars of Houthi governance in the regions of Yemen they control in the country’s ongoing civil war. The first is an ongoing campaign of persecuting non-Muslim religious minorities as a matter of government policy. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom notes that Houthi spokesmen repeatedly “incite hatred against vulnerable faith communities.” One of the sectarian movement’s leaders, ‘Abd al-Malik al-Houthi, claims that religious minorities “want to take away the sovereignty of Islam”. A 2026 Human Rights Watch report has documented a “campaign of arbitrary detention against Christians in Yemen,” in which those suspected of practicing Christianity are arrested in their homes or snatched from the street and subjected to harassment and prolonged imprisonment.

This is far worse than what I recall from my own experience in Yemen. True, even at that time no churches or other public places of non-Muslim worship were permitted in Sanaa (the nation’s capital); nor did the city tolerate the overt display of a cross to mark a meeting point for followers of Jesus. Nonetheless I frequently attended clandestine “house church” gatherings.

Local Christians explained to me the unspoken rules that prevailed at that time: If you stay low-profile, worship indoors in unmarked private homes (safely away from the public eye), and—above all!—refrain from any attempt to proselytize, then your existence will be tolerated. Unsurprisingly, given the suspicion directed at non-Muslims, only a handful of people showed up for the worship services I joined—sometimes as few as three or four, never more than 25 attendees.

Yet in the face of such ambient hostility what I remember best are the intensity of prayer and the sense of companionship in Christ that prevailed at every gathering I attended. “Here, in a Muslim country,” one participant told me, “we don’t take our Christianity for granted. Here, with these small communities meeting ‘underground,’ the original spirit of Christianity can be revived.”

But those days seem largely gone. Now, amid the new resurgence of Houthi persecution, the bulk of the Christian community has fled either overseas or south to parts of the Arabian peninsula beyond Houthi control.

The second pillar of Houthi governance involves support for pan-Islamist causes. The most notable manifestation of this in recent years has been a series of long-range missile assaults on Israel in solidarity with Palestinian militant groups. Such support extends also to propaganda. Go to the online homepage of the “Yemen News Agency” (the Arabic-language mouthpiece of the Houthi government), and you’ll find a link labeled “You Are Not Alone: The National Campaign in Support of al-Aqsa.” (Al-Aqsa is one of the mosques on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, which—together with Mecca and Medina—is among the foremost places of worship for Muslims worldwide, because of a belief that the prophet Muhammad underwent a mi‘raj—ascension to heaven—that began at that site in Jerusalem.) Click on the Aqsa link, and you’re led to an online celebration of the October 7 massacre of Israelis by Hamas terrorists in 2023. Public government-sponsored demonstrations in Sanaa feature placards and banners with rhyming slogans such as Amrika hiya al-shaytan, Isra’il hiya al-sartan. (“America is the devil; Israel is the cancer.”)

The third pillar is closely affiliated with the second: loyalty to the geopolitical agenda determined by Iran. For years the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has supplied weaponry to the Houthis; in exchange they launch long-range strikes against northern Israel and (most recently) any Saudi shipping that tries to reach the Gulf of Aden via the Bab al-Mandab. (The name means “Gate of Lamentation” in Arabic, so-called because this strait between Yemen and Africa is so treacherous to navigate. The Gate’s unpredictable crosscurrents, subsurface rocks and rapidly shifting winds have caused many shipwrecks through the centuries.)

Underlying such attacks on the Israelis and Saudis is a shared attempt at ideological deflection. The theocrats in both Tehran and Sanaa show support for Hamas and likeminded jihadists because the Palestinian issue retains traction in the Arab world today. But such support is meant to distract attention from the reality that no matter what they do to promote themselves as pan-Islamic, both the Houthis and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards remain hardcore Shias—and hence unpalatable to the Sunnis who make up the majority of Muslims worldwide.

What then might be done? In recent years both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have conducted repeated airstrikes against Houthi missile and drone launch sites, to little effect. A ground campaign involving infantry holds little appeal. Egyptian leader Gamel Abdel Nasser tried this in 1962, when he intervened in one of Yemen’s civil wars (there have been many!), hoping to expand Egyptian regional influence in the name of “pan-Arab unity.” He sent a massive expeditionary force to fight the Zaydis on their home ground in northern Yemen (the same territory controlled today by the Houthis).

The result: disaster. He didn’t understand the geography, didn’t understand the setting in which his troops would have to fight. (I’ve hiked the mountain highlands north of Sanaa, and I can testify: the terrain is rugged.) Over 15,000 Egyptians died in five years of fighting that yielded nothing, until the expeditionary force retreated ingloriously from Yemen in 1967, a campaign that at the time earned the title “Nasser’s Vietnam.”

But if there are few good military options in Yemen, other factors might be borne in mind.

First, the Houthis depend on Tehran for support, but—as noted above—they insist that when it comes to ideological predominance, they’re the true leaders, with the longest pedigree of resistance to the world’s tyrants and “satans.” The Houthis are proud and prickly, with a strong sense of independence. The Iranian-Houthi axis is one of convenience—and with the right leverage just might be pried apart.

Second, Yemen’s Sunnis (who make up most of the country’s population) by and large loathe and mistrust the Houthis. This mistrust derives in part from the closeness of Houthi ties with Iran. This reality came out in a conversation I had with a Sunni mosque-leader in Sanaa. We discussed attempts by Iranian Muslim missionaries to convert Yemen’s Zaydis (including Zaydis politically aligned with the Houthis) to the Twelver-Shia denomination that predominates in Iran. I told this Sunni imam something I’d learned in my research: Iranian missionaries refer to the Yemenis who convert to Twelver Shiism as mustabsirun (“those who have become endowed with insight”). I asked him what he thought of this mustabsirun phenomenon.

He wasn’t happy with it. He told me he found this label of “newly insightful” both condescending and insulting to his fellow Yemeni Muslims.

Then he added that the Yemeni Zaydis and Houthis who adopt what he called “the Iranian form” of Shiism couldn’t possibly be sincere in their conversion. He insisted that such individuals were no more than pawns in a Tehran-based plot to take control of Yemen secretly. “The Iranians,” he concluded, “will use these converts as part of their conspiracy to rule our country from afar.”

What this imam told me reflects a sentiment I heard elsewhere: many Yemenis resent Iranian influence—another point worth keeping in mind in any dealings with the people of Yemen and the Houthi government.

The third point to consider: even many of the Zaydi Shias resent their Houthi overlords. Arab critics deride the government in Sanaa as dawlat al-khawf, “the regime of fear.” Zaydis under Houthi rule are heartily sick of the harm caused by the government’s insistence on pan-Islamist “resistance”: disease (notably cholera and malaria), widespread hunger, cities largely in ruins. What keeps the government in power is its readiness to use extreme brutality to suppress dissent among its own people (a trait the Houthis share with the theocracy in Tehran).

Which leads me to a suggestion. Perhaps it’s time for the Trump administration to restore funding and active support for Voice of America and other U.S. programs that once beamed Arabic-language broadcasts throughout the Middle East. Such programs might help foster changes that would come from within Yemen rather than be imposed exclusively by force from the outside.

“Gate of Lamentation,” these past few years, has struck me as a sadly apt name for Yemen in general, given its long history of woe. But—with the right kind of assistance—someday the Houthi “regime of fear” may collapse under the weight of its own incompetence and crimes. Someday it might even be possible to gather again with old friends in Sanaa and celebrate our love for Christ.

After all, as Jesus himself assures us in John’s Gospel (16:22), “So you have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”

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Author’s byline: David Pinault is the author of “Earth Dragon Run: A Spiritual Entertainment” (Ignatius Press). His other publications include “The Crucifix on Mecca’s Front Porch: A Christian’s Companion for the Study of Islam” and “Providence Blue: A Fantasy Quest” (also published by Ignatius). He is an emeritus professor of religious studies at Santa Clara University.