Wilson Chacko Jacob, For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World (Stanford University Press, 2019)

Wilson Chacko Jacob's academic study of the life of Sayyid Fadl ibn Alawi (1824–1900): born in Malabar to a Hadrami immigrant Sufi father, exiled to Arabia, he became a renowned Sufi scholar, an Ottoman governor in Dhofar and an adviser to the Sultan in Istanbul, where he died in 1900. The book also traces the Ba Alawi sayyids and their Sufi pathway across the Indian Ocean world.