Welcome to Peace News , the newspaper for the UK grassroots peace and justice movement. We seek to oppose all forms of violence, and to create positive change based on cooperation and responsibility. See more. This analogy is extremely inaccurate, of course, but maybe it helps understand some of the basic divisions. The Houthi movement arose as a response to Wahhabi incursions, and it gradually came into conflict with the secular Yemeni government, which was financially supported by Saudi Arabia and appears to have supported the proselytising.
Several battles between the two sides were fought in the north in the past decade. Last September, the Houthis took over the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, having become a movement of political Islam. They subordinated the government to themselves. Recently, several government officials, including president Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, have fled south to Aden and established a rump government there. Note that some of them are secular Zaidis, Arab nationalists, and not religious. So this is political.
When religion is deployed for political purposes and there is no separation of religion and state, religion acts like a political movement and throws up political opposition. Where politics is violent, so is religious politics. Countries were there is a separation of religion and state have much less religious violence, because there is no point in deploying religion for political purposes where religion is barred from attaining them.
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