Ahmad bin Yahya
For the next 44 years North Yemen was ruled by two powerful imams. al-Mutawakkil Yahya Muhammad Hamid ad-Din and his son Ahmad bin Yahya created a kingdom there much as the kings of England and France had done centuries earlier. The two imams strengthened the state and secured its borders. They used the imamate to insulate Yemen and revitalize its Islamic culture and society at a time when traditional societies around the world were declining under imperial rule. While Yemen under the two imams seemed almost frozen in time, a small but increasing number of Yemenis became aware of the contrast between an autocratic society they saw as stagnant and the political and economic modernization occurring in other parts of the world. This produced an important chain of events: the birth of the nationalist Free Yemeni Movement in the mid-1940s, an aborted 1948 revolution in which Imam Yahya was killed, a failed 1955 coup against Imam Ahmad, and finally, the 1962 takeover in which imam Muhammad al-Badr was deposed by a group of Egyptian supported and financed Sunni officers and the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) was proclaimed under the leadership of Abdullah al-Sallal.