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Tarim, Yemen. This remote desert valley, with its towering bluffs and ancient mud-brick houses, is probably best known to outsiders as the birthplace of Osama bin Laden’s father. Most accounts about Yemen in the Western news media refer to it as “the ancestral homeland’’ of the leader of Al Qaeda, as though his murderous ideology had been shaped here.

But Tarim and its environs are a historic center of Sufism, a mystical strand within Islam. The local religious school, Dar al-Mustafa, is a multicultural place full of students from Indonesia and California who stroll around its tiny campus wearing white skullcaps and colorful shawls.

“The reality is that Osama bin Laden has never been to Yemen,’’ said Habib Omar, the schools’s revered director. “His thinking has nothing to do with this place.’’ Omar set out 16 years ago to restore the religious heritage of Tarim. It is an extraordinary legacy for an arid town in the southeast corner of the Arabian Peninsula.

About 800 years ago, traders from Tarim and other parts of Hadramawt, as the area is known, began traveling down the coast to the Arabian Sea and onward in rickety boats to Indonesia, Malaysia and India. They thrived, and they brought their religion with them. Nine especially devout men, all with roots in Tarim, are now remembered as “the nine saints’’ because of their success in spreading Islam across Asia.

“This town, with its thousand-year tradition, was the main catalyst for as many as 40 percent of the world’s Muslims becoming Muslim,’’ said John Rhodus, an Arizonan student at the school.Tarim’s Sufist tradition also appears to have helped shape the relatively moderate Islam practiced in much of South Asia.

Hadrami merchants remained successful until well into the 20th century. Some made their fortune in Saudi Arabia, including Bin Laden’s father Muhammad bin Laden, while others returned home and built flamboyant palaces.

Most of the merchants fled after a communist junta seized power in 1967. Now their palaces are abandoned and decayed, too grand for the state to maintain in this desperately poor country.

The communist years, which lasted until 1990, were even worse for those who refused to accept the enforced secularism. “Some religious scholars were tortured, others murdered,’’ Omar said. His father, who had been a renowned religious teacher in Tarim, was kidnapped and killed.

In 1993, Omar began teaching Sufi-inspired religious classes in his home. Three years later, he moved into a two-story white school building, with a mosque attached. There are now about 700 students, at least half of them South Asians, with a rising number of Americans and Britons.

But as the school grew, a more militant Islam was gaining followers across the region. Saudi Arabia was financing ultraconservative religious schools and scholars in an effort to shore up its influence here. In 1991 the Saudi king, angered by Yemen’s public support for Saddam Hussein of Iraq, abruptly sent home a million Yemeni, many of whom had lived in Saudi Arabia for decades and had been shaped by it.



The New York Times