TarimPrayer Times in Tarim, Al Mahrah

Tarim, in the Hadramaut valley of eastern Yemen, is the spiritual center of the Ba'Alawi Sufi tradition associated with the Hadrami sayyid families who trace descent from the Prophet through Imam Husayn and his great-great-grandson Ali ibn Ja'far al-Sadiq. From the medieval period onward Tarim and the wider Hadramaut produced generations of Shafi'i scholars whose teachings spread to the Indian Ocean rim — East Africa, Hyderabad, the Hijaz, and especially the Indonesian and Malay archipelagos, where Hadrami sayyids played a foundational role in the spread of Shafi'i Islam. The al-Muhdar Mosque, with its distinctive sand-brick minaret reputed to be the tallest in Yemen, anchors the city's skyline, and the al-Ahgaff University and Dar al-Mustafa seminary, the latter founded by Habib Umar bin Hafiz in 1993, draw students from over forty countries. Tarim's living scholarly and devotional culture remains a defining feature of contemporary Sunni Sufi Islam.