Habib Ali al-Jifri

Ali al-Jifri (born 16 April 1971) is a Yemeni scholar of the Ba 'Alawi tradition who is based in Cairo, Egypt.¹ He founded the Tabah Foundation in Abu Dhabi and received the Eugen Biser Award in 2008 for his work on the interfaith initiative A Common Word.¹

He was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on 16 April 1971, corresponding to 20 Safar 1391 AH.¹² From the age of ten he read with Abdul Qadir bin Ahmad al-Saqqaf in Jeddah, and studied also with Ahmed Mashur al-Haddad and Muhammad Alawi al-Maliki, before settling in Tarim in Hadhramaut in the company of Umar bin Hafiz from 1993 to 2003.² The Arabic article's list of his teachers names Umar bin Hafiz, dean of Dar al-Mustafa, under whom he read extensively in hadith, spirituality and law, and reports that he received authorisations from more than three hundred teachers.²

He founded and chairs the Tabah Foundation in Abu Dhabi, a research institution, and is a member of Dar al-Mustafa in Tarim.²³ The Muslim 500 has repeatedly placed him in its top fifty, ranking him 22nd in 2023.¹

The Arabic article devotes a section to his Sufism, reporting that scholars of Sufism in Syria, Yemen, Egypt and the Maghreb count him among the figures of the moderate Sufism preached by the early imams, and its criticism passage records that he adopts the Ash'ari method and adheres to the teachings of Sufism.² The Urdu article's lead likewise calls him a Yemeni Sunni and Sufi scholar.³

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