Ali al-Hujwiri
Sufi mystic
Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Uthman al-Jullabi al-Hujwiri (Persian: ابو الحسن علی بن عثمان الجلابی الھجویری, romanized: Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn ʿUthmān al-Jullābī al-Hujwīrī; c. 1009–1072/77) is his full name as reconstructed by modern scholarship. The name he himself used, by his own nisba, was al-Jullabi, a form he employs consistently in Kashf al-Mahjub rather than the “al-Hujwiri” that later became standard. He is known reverentially, chiefly in South Asia, by several further names that developed after his death: Data Ganj Bakhsh (Persian: داتا گنج بخش, romanized: Dātā Ganj Bakhsh, “treasury bestower”), Data Sahib (Persian: داتا صاحب, romanized: Dātā Ṣaḥib), and, less commonly, Shaykh Syed Ali al-Hujwiri. He was an Islamic scholar and mystic who authored Kashf al-Mahjub, the earliest treatise on Sufism in the Persian language. Born in the Ghaznavid Empire, al-Hujwiri is believed to have contributed significantly to the spread of Islam in South Asia through his preaching.
Al-Hujwiri is venerated as the primary saint of Lahore, Pakistan, by the Sufis of the area; his tomb-shrine, known as the Data Darbar, is one of the most frequented shrines in South Asia. It is currently Pakistan’s largest shrine by annual visitors and complex size and, having been nationalised in 1960, is managed by the Department of Awqaf and Religious Affairs of the Punjab. The mystic remains a “household name” in the daily Islam of South Asia. In 2016 the Government of Pakistan declared 21 November a public holiday marking the commencement of his three-day death anniversary.
Chronology and sources
The dates c. 1009 for his birth and 1072 for his death are those reproduced across most tertiary sources, but they rest on thinner ground than the infobox precision suggests.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2733487. VIAF identifies the subject as 166217879. The Library of Congress control number is n50039206. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1009, 1072, 1960 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ali al-Hujwiri” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.