After his sermon, he told a reporter for Al Jazeera: “Obama’s advisers recommended that if Yemen becomes a failed state, they have to occupy the oil resources and Yemen’s seacoast. What is this military buildup on our coasts for? Is it really justified by piracy? No one really believes that.”

Sheik Zindani is no fan of American involvement in the Muslim world and has defended jihad  beginning with the thousands of Muslims, many of them from Yemen, who heeded the call, as he did, to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Their alliance with the Taliban then was considered a fine thing, and Mr. bin Laden himself fought the Soviets.

But the reaction to Afghanistan, including the creation of Al Qaeda, has hit Yemen, too. Sheik Zindani, who has considerable political and moral weight, has come out against terrorism, if not jihad, and President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen has failed to get Washington to remove the sheik from the terrorist list. Even a senior Western diplomat said that the sheik “has kept his head down for the last few years,” since he took legal action against Yemeni newspapers and journalists in 2006 for reprinting even censored parts of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad.

Mr. Saleh, who has run Yemen for 31 years, told The New York Times in June 2008 that ruling here is like “dancing with snakes.” Sheik Zindani and his conservative brand of Islam  Yemeni Salafism  has strong support from Saudi Arabia and one of Mr. Saleh’s oldest allies, Ali Mohsen. They are all pillars of the current government, even if Mr. Mohsen opposes the dynastic succession of Mr. Saleh’s son, Ahmed, to the presidency.

While Yemeni Salafism is not as militant as the Saudi variety  Wahhabism  Sheik Zindani studied in Saudi Arabia, and the mental landscape of the Salafis and Al Qaeda is very similar  conservative, anti-Western, devoted to purifying Islam and returning to the practices they believe existed at the time of Prophet Muhammad.

Mr. Mohsen, a general who is currently prosecuting the war against a Houthi rebellion in the north, also recruited thousands of Yemenis to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. His brigades returned victorious, and Mr. Saleh has used them since to help defeat the south in the 1994 civil war and against the Houthis. Some fighters, of course, have migrated to Al Qaeda, and there are imams here more radical than Mr. Zindani.

When north and south Yemen were united in 1990, Sheik Zindani accepted Mr. Saleh’s rule and was granted this huge area of government land on the western edge of Sana for the university  adjoining a large military base, which is Mr. Mohsen’s headquarters. There are rumors that students sometimes get military training there, which Mr. Abu Ras also denies.