The Bā ʿAlawī Sufis of the Hadhramawt Valley: A Premodern Intellectual and Social HistoryBy Omar Edaibat

This book expands upon my doctoral dissertation at McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies. It is the first comprehensive premodern intellectual and social history of the Bā ʿAlawi Sada and their Sufi tradition in the English language. While the Bā ʿAlawī tarīqa and its premodern origins remains poorly understood, this history addresses that lacuna by closely re-examining the available primary sources, charting the evolution of the sāda’s Sufi tradition from its 10th century origins up to the late 16th century. In doing so, the study challenges our current academic knowledge of the Hadhrami Sufism, where far from reflecting a provincialist phenomenon in which the sāda’s activities were primarily dominated by the temporal and practical concerns of public preaching, economic power, and social status, their scholarly tradition remained well-integrated within the intellectual and spiritual currents of western Yemen and the Hejaz, exhibiting a sophisticated intellectual engagement with the wider legacy of philosophical Sufism, while retaining its own distinctive features. Such local features were predominantly shaped by the sāda’s immediate social context and the unique and recurring challenges of their social and political milieu.