Treaty of Daan

The Treaty of Daan (or Da'an) (Arabic: صلح دعان) was an agreement signed in October 1911 at Daan in the Yemen Vilayet by a representative of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and Imam Yahya Muhammad Hamid ed-Din, the Zaydi Imam of Yemen expanding autonomy in the areas of the Ottoman province inhabited by the Zaydis, and ending the Yemeni–Ottoman conflicts.

Angered by the misrule of the Ottoman officials, the imams, who were treated merely as local religious leaders by the Turks who denied them the right to temporal rule, looked back to their historical claim over greater Yemen for inspiration.

This was further stimulated by the Zaydi political concept, by which they were encouraged to rise up as imams against an unjust ruler as part of their religious duty, hence the periodic uprisings against the Ottomans.

In the years when he had been chief of the Ottoman general staff, Izzet Pasha had proposed as a solution to the costly military stalemate in Yemen that the mountainous regions inhabited by the Zaydis be left to their effective control while Turkey would retain the coastal regions, the Tihamah, leaving only a token garrison in Sanaa.

[5] For his part, Iman Yahya — whose uprising of 1911 had almost collapsed by the end of April due to lack of support from tribesmen from a number of agricultural districts — agreed to renounce his claim to the caliphate and drop the title of 'Commander of the Faithful' assumed by his predecessors and himself, and to style himself simply as 'Imam of the Zaydis'.