Mai Yamani
Yemeni anthropologist
Mai Yamani (Arabic: مي يماني; born 6 September 1956) is an independent Saudi scholar, author and anthropologist.
Early life
Yamani was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1956 to an Iraqi mother from Mosul and a Saudi Arabian father from Mecca, the former Saudi Minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani. Her paternal grandfathers came from Yemen, hence the surname Yamani ("from Yemen"). Her early education included schooling in Baghdad, Iraq and Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
She attended secondary school at the renowned Château Mont-Choisi in Lausanne, Switzerland, from 1967 to 1975. She received her bachelor's degree summa cum laude (with highest honors) from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania; and subsequently attended Somerville College, University of Oxford, where she was the first Saudi woman to obtain a M.St. and a D.Phil. from Oxford, in social anthropology.
Career
She started her career as a university lecturer at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, between 1981 and 1984. She was a research fellow at University of Oxford between 1990 and 1991, an academic advisor for Georgetown University between 1990 and 2000, and a research fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
“Mai Yamani” enters the record as yemeni anthropologist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Yamani, Yemeni and anthropologist can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4118045. VIAF identifies the subject as 172824. The Library of Congress control number is n96040934. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1967, 1975 and 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mai Yamani” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.