The Reeducation of Abu Jandal

Hamoud al-Hitar still insists that his own program is the best way to deal with the detainees. When I visited al-Hitar at his home in Sana one evening, I mentioned what his former pupil al-Bahri had had to say about the ineffectiveness of his program. The judge, who was propped on a pillow on the floor of his salon, sat silent for a long moment and looked a little hurt. He rolled a ball of khat leaves—a mild stimulant that is ubiquitous in Yemen—around in his cheek. Then he raised his eyebrows, which are generally fixed at the angle of a disapproving schoolmaster's, and peered out over a pair of frameless glasses that were perched halfway down his nose. He looked confused. "Nasser was good in the program," the judge said quietly.

If al-Hitar is sensitive about the program's worth, it may be because so much of his own identity is tied up with its success. Yemen's population can be roughly divided into three major tribes; al-Hitar's—the Mathhaj tribe—is the least influential of the three. He was born in a small Yemeni province called Ibb, where his parents cultivated corn, sorghum and khat. When he was growing up, in the late 1950s, Ibb was still very much a rural backwater. There were no real schools, only a group of students who gathered in a local mosque. By the time he was a teenager, al-Hitar wanted a broader education. The law especially appealed to him. "I had the sense that the judiciary was somehow distinguished," he told me. "Nobody could impose their opinion on you." A judge "could do whatever he liked with his will." Al-Hitar made the three-day journey, partly by donkey, to Sana to start his classes.

Today al-Hitar is rarely out of character. He almost always wears his traditional judge's robes and the special gold-tipped dagger that denotes his position. Yet it's easy to forget that the dignified persona is largely self-invented. Al-Hitar, as one Yemeni friend told me, essentially "made himself up."

That independent streak extends to his personal politics. The al-Hitar family, like most rural Yemenis, was Muslim and devout. Still, as a young man, al-Hitar found himself enchanted by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the dashing Egyptian Arab nationalist leader. "I had that Islamic tendency," the judge recalls. "But Nasser was so charming. I liked him, I admired him. He was capable of mobilizing the masses." Al-Hitar was only 12 years old when the Israeli army crushed Nasser and his allies in 1967's Six Day War, shattering the nationalist's mystique. Al-Hitar, like other young Arabs and Muslims of the time, began looking for new heroes. Five years later, in 1972, he joined the local Muslim Brotherhood.

The group provided a sense of belonging and offered an outlet for al-Hitar's civic impulses. "At the time we felt that it was the only movement that was anti-communist," he recalled. "We felt like communism was against human nature." Still, he ultimately found the Brotherhood intolerant. Shortly after beginning work as a judge, in the early 1980s, al-Hitar quit the organization and joined the ruling party, led by President Saleh.

As a judge, al-Hitar challenged Yemeni social mores. He tried his most notable case in 1984, when two local Muslims were charged with killing two Yemeni Jews. According to an unwritten but longstanding tradition, Muslims who were convicted of killing Jews were not subject to the death penalty. To al-Hitar, that seemed unjust. "I had a conflict between my culture and my conscience," he told me. "My conscience was telling me all humans are equal. My culture was telling me they weren't. I searched in the Qur'an, the Sunna [Muslim social customs and legal traditions], the history of the caliphs. None of them differentiate between Muslims and non-Muslims. A soul is a soul." At the final hearing, al-Hitar sentenced the two Muslims to death. Whispers in the courtroom rose to a crescendo of murmurs. The judge ultimately received death threats for his verdict.