Muhammad Mahmud al-Zubayri

Muhammad Mahmud al-Zubayri was born into a scholarly family in Sana'a and studied at Dar al-Ulum in Cairo, where he founded the Grand Yemen Movement. Returning to Yemen, his passionate opposition to the despotic, isolationist rule of Imam Yahya led to imprisonment in the fortress of Al-Ahnoum and decades of exile in Egypt, Pakistan, and Sudan.

Zubayri was the spiritual conscience of the 26 September 1962 Revolution that established the Yemen Arab Republic, serving as its first Minister of Education. Seeking to halt the civil war between royalist and republican tribes, he traveled unarmed through the northern mountains to preach national peace, where he was assassinated in April 1965, immortalized as Yemen's martyr-poet.