Al-Musaymīr

Al-Musaymir lies in the hill country north of the coastal lowlands of Lahj. It was the seat of the Haushabi sultanate, a local power that emerged in the eighteenth century in southern Yemen. The surrounding valleys lead toward the Tuban plain and the coast near Aden, while hills divide the inland settlements from one another. The sultan's seat belonged to a landscape of communities and tribal territories between the cultivated lowlands and the higher Yemeni interior.