Hadhramaut's Sufi Saints and the City of Tarim

In the heart of Yemen's Hadhramaut Valley lies Tarim, a city of 50,000 people once home to 365 mosques and a center of Islamic scholarship that rivaled Cairo and Damascus. For over a millennium, the Ba 'Alawi sada, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, shaped Hadhramaut's spiritual and political life, spreading a quiet, tolerant Sufism across the Indian Ocean — from the Swahili Coast to Southeast Asia. This episode follows the rise of al-Imam al-Muhajir Ahmad ibn Isa, who fled persecution in Basra in the 10th century and planted a lineage that would produce scholars, saints, and even a queen. We explore the Ba 'Alawi's role in the region's religious landscape, their rivalry with the Zaydi imams of the highlands, the intellectual flowering of Tarim's ribats — including the famed Dar al-Mustafa founded in 1993 — and the enduring legacy of figures like 'Alawi al-Haddad, whose writings still guide seekers today. We also witness the melancholy of a city that lost its Jewish community but kept its spiritual flame, and ask what this ancient tradition offers a modern world in crisis.

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