Egyptian education delegation. Complaints from conservatives, however, led to the appointment of a traditional instructor to teach Zaidi doctrines. And when the Imam's secret police discovered the Hay'at al Nidal and arrested al-Muta, Numan was placed under house arrest in Ta'izz. Activities in Cairo On release from arrest, Numan travelled to Cairo. He later said that while under arrest he developed his ambition to be a political leader. He left Dhjubhan in 1937 and travelled to Cairo by way of Lahej and Aden. Numan's original goal was to attend King Fuad I University but was refused admission because he lacked qualifications in modern subjects. Instead Numan reluctantly attended al-Azhar University, which he feared would simply duplicate the Islamic education he received at Zabid. Instead, he encountered modern Arab political thought. The university was a center of Muslim Brotherhood activity, who were particularly interested in Yemen, owing to its isolation, as a suitable test for governance according to shari'a. At al-Azhar Numan made the acquaintance of Ali al-Tahir, a Palestinian newspaper publisher in Cairo. It was through al-Tahir that Numan met Shakib Arslan. Arslan soon took Numan under his wing. Arslan's interest in the Yemen went back to his attempted mediation of the Saudi-Yemen war of 1934. At the time he was shocked by the backwardness of Yemen, and persuaded the Imam to employ advisers (from the same Lebanese Druze community that he came from. For similar reasons he hired Numan as his secretary in 1939. While working for Arslan and writing for al-'Alam, Numan also wrote pamphlets. His first contribution was an introduction to The Journey of H.H. Prince Sayf al-Islam the Great Crown Prince of Yemen by Sayyid Husayn al-Yamani in 1937. He also wrote two pamphlets mainly about his treatment by Sayyid Ali al-Wazir, the governor of Ta'izz: The First Moan (1948) and A Few Words on the Outrages of Ali al-Wazir (1939), both of which also criticized the government of Yemen in general. In March 1940 the poet Muhammad al-Zubayri arrived in Cairo. Although al-Zubayri's patron was Ali al-Wazir, the former governor of Ta'izz against whom Numan's pamphlets were directed, al-Zubayri sought out Numan (whom he had once before met when he accompanied Ahmad al Muta to inspect Numan's school). Although the poet had no background in reform politics or anti-imamic agitation and spent his first few months in Cairo writing poetry and reading at Dar al-Ulum