Habib Ahmad Mashhur al-Haddad أحمد مشهور بن طه الحداد

Habib Ahmad Mashhur ibn Taha al-Haddad (rahimahullah) was born in 1907 at Qaydun in the Hadramawt valley of Yemen, a descendant of the Prophet ﷺ and a luminary of the Ba'Alawi tradition. He was both a leading exponent of the Shafi'i school of jurisprudence and a master of the Sufi science of spiritual realization (tahqiq), following and teaching the way of Imam Abd Allah ibn Alawi al-Haddad and other illustrious predecessors. His early studies took him to Qaydun, Tarim, and for a period to Indonesia, where he sat with numerous shaykhs. For several decades thereafter, he devoted himself to spreading Islam across remote regions of East Africa, based mainly in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa. He also spent a number of years in Uganda, where tens of thousands of people came to or returned to Islam at his hands. In later life he divided his time between Jeddah and Mombasa until age made travel impossible. He passed away in Jeddah on December 6, 1995, and was buried in a cemetery near Makka. Among his most celebrated works is 'Miftah al-Janna' (Key to the Garden), a widely read classic of the Hadrami-Ba'Alawi spiritual tradition.