Abdullah ibn Alawi al-Haddad

A ratib is a fixed arrangement, a set of Quranic verses and short formulae recited in a settled order and a settled number of repetitions. The one al-Haddad composed in the 1650s is short enough to finish in a quarter of an hour and has been recited after the evening prayer in Hadrami communities ever since. Its portability is the point. It needs no shaykh present, no instrument and no building, and it can be led by whoever is in the room, which makes it a devotion that travels in a household rather than in an institution.

That is precisely what happened. Hadrami men left the valley in large numbers for the ports of East Africa, the Malabar coast, the Malay peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago, as traders, teachers and religious specialists, and they took short texts with them. By the nineteenth century the Ratib al-Haddad was being recited in Zanzibar, in Kerala, in Palembang and in Singapore, and printed editions moved along the same routes. His Wird al-Latif, a morning and evening litany, spread the same way, and both are still in print in several scripts.

Nothing organised the diffusion. Families moved, carried books and taught their children the same order of words, which is a useful corrective to accounts of Sufi expansion that assume a missionary structure behind every spread.

The Ba Alawi are the sayyid families of the Hadramawt, tracing descent from the Prophet through a line that settled in the valley in the tenth century. Their tariqa is unusual among Sufi orders in being carried by descent as much as by initiation, and in being tied to a particular landscape: the towns of Tarim, Seiyun and Shibam, the tombs along the valley floor, and an annual round of visiting.

Its character is deliberately sober. There is no music and no dance in the gathering, the emphasis falls on the study of law alongside the interior work, and the model held up is the ordinary conduct of the Prophet rather than any extraordinary state. Al-Haddad is the writer who set that out most clearly, in the Book of Assistance and in a large body of letters and short treatises addressed to correspondents who were often not scholars at all.

He was born near Tarim in 1634 and lost his sight as a small child, which the tradition connects to smallpox. He taught, wrote and received visitors at al-Hawi outside Tarim until his death in 1720. His descendants and students continued the teaching, and Tarim became a centre to which students travelled from across the Indian Ocean, a role it kept into the modern period and, after a long interruption, holds again.