Ali al-Harawi

Also known as Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Abi Bakr al-Harawi

Persian-born Sufi traveller and pilgrimage geographer whose Kitab al-Isharat — a guide to the holy graves and shrines of Islam — was compiled from a working life on the road across the central Islamic world, including the Crusader Levant.

Ali al-Harawi was a Persian-born Sufi from Herat who spent his life in motion across the central Islamic world — Egypt, the Maghrib, Syria, the Jazira, Iraq, Anatolia, and the holy cities — visiting the burial places of prophets, companions of the Prophet, and Sufi masters wherever he went. He moved through Frankish-held Syria more than once during the years of Saladin and the Third Crusade, and was a familiar figure at the courts of the Ayyubid princes of Aleppo and Damascus.

His Kitab al-Isharat ila Marifat al-Ziyarat ('Book of Indications for Knowledge of Pilgrimage Sites') is the systematic record of those decades of travel. It catalogues, region by region, the shrines and tombs that the medieval Muslim pilgrim was expected to visit — including those of biblical figures who were also venerated by Christians and Jews, which makes the book a unique cross-religious gazetteer of holy sites in twelfth-century Syria-Palestine.

Saladin's son al-Zahir Ghazi, ruler of Aleppo, became his patron in old age and built him a madrasa-mausoleum complex in the city, where al-Harawi died in 1215 and where his grave became itself a pilgrimage site. His career exemplifies the practical tolerance and learned mobility of the middle-period Islamic world that the Latin sources almost never quite see.

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