Imam al-Haddad would perform recitation a quarter juz (portion) of the Quran practice alone in his youth, prior to the age of 17 in the desert canyons around Tarim. He also chose the ascetic path, "In the beginning, I spent a long period subsisting on coarse food and wearing rough clothes.”
![hadad alwi ibu hadad alwi ibu](https://fasrforms387.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/5/3/125356882/649737650.jpg)
“In my childhood,” he testifies, “I was never treated like one who didn’t see, neither in walking nor in playing.” From a young age, he was trained as a religious scholar as he was given to very intense worship and spiritual struggle as a child. This does not seem to have affected his personality or scholarship, in memorizing the whole Qur'an or even his look, as no scars remained on his face. Smallpox blinded him for life before the age of five. The Sayyid, who lived in the ninth century of the Hijra, took to sitting at the ironsmith’s shop in Tarim much of the time, hence he was called Ahmad al-Haddad (Ahmad the Ironsmith). The first person of Ba 'Alawi sada to acquire the surname al-Haddad ( The Ironsmith) was Imam al-Haddad's ancestor, Sayyid Ahmad bin of Abu Bakr. His lineage is recorded as follows: He is Abdullah bin Alawi, bin Muhammad, bin Ahmad, bin Abdullah, bin Muhammad, bin Alawi, bin Ahmad al-Haddad, bin Abu Bakr, bin Ahmad, bin Muhammad, bin Abdullah, bin Ahmad, bin Abd al-Rahman, bin Alawi Amm al-Faqih, bin Muhammad Sahib al-Mirbat, bin Ali Khali Qasam, bin Alawi al-Tsani, bin Muhammad Sahib al-Sawma'ah, bin Alawi al-Awwal, bin Ubaydullah, bin Ahmad al-Muhajir, bin Isa al-Rumi, bin Muhammad al-Naqib, bin Ali al-Uraidhi, bin Ja'far al-Sadiq, bin Muhammad al-Baqir, bin Ali Zayn al-Abidin, bin Husayn, bin Ali bin Abi Talib and Fatimah al-Zahra, the daughter of Muhammad. His maternal great-grandfather, Ahmad al-Habshi, met his father, before he was to meet his future wife, Abdallah's mother and he said to Imam al-Haddad's father, "Your children are my children, and there is a blessing in them".
![hadad alwi ibu hadad alwi ibu](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/yQqPzDkkpWU/hqdefault.jpg)
His mother was Salma bint Aidrus bin Ahmad al-Habshi.
![hadad alwi ibu hadad alwi ibu](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/l50dEZ0qS-U/mqdefault.jpg)
Imam al-Haddad's paternal grandmother, Salma, was also known to be a woman of gnosis and sainthood. His father was Alawi bin Muhammad al-Haddad, a pious man of taqwa, from the people of Allah. Abd Allah (or Abdullah) was born on Sunday night, 5th Safar, 1044 AH (1634 CE) in al-Subayr, a village on the outskirts of Tarim in Hadramawt.