The Key to Arriving at the Door of the Messenger ﷺ: Volume 1

About the author

Muhammad Sadiq al-Alawi: Muhammad Sadiq al-Alawi is a contemporary scholar and devotional author working within the BaʿAlawi tradition, the spiritual path carried by the sayyids of Hadramawt in Yemen and their students across the Muslim world. He traveled the path under the guidance of the Hadrami master Habib Ahmad Mashhur bin Taha al-Haddad (1907-1995), a teacher whose gentle, traditional Islam shaped a generation of seekers. His writing gathers around a single devotional center, the love of the Prophet Muhammad and the practice of sending salutations (salawat) upon him. His best-known work, the two-volume "Key to Arriving at the Door of the Messenger," was first composed in Urdu and weaves the author's own prose and poetry together with the discourses and verse of earlier saints, alongside well-established invocations and salutations. In "Salutations of the Prophetic Portrait for the Vision of the Beloved," a 388-page contribution to the shamaʾil genre, he is noted for carrying the reader from the Prophet's outward description toward his inward spiritual reality. Other works include "Daily Salutations upon the Best of Creation," a bilingual Arabic-English collection of salawat composed for the daily recitation of his students, and shorter devotional treatises on sainthood and the love of the righteous. Together his books reflect a working teacher's concern for the everyday spiritual life of his students.