Jawad Ali (1907–1987) was an Iraqi historian and academic who specialized in the history of both Islam and the Arabs.

Jawad Ali was born in a town located in the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad, Iraq.

After completing most of his studies in his homeland, he migrated to Germany where he would receive a doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1939.

[1][2] After his return from Germany, he married an Iraqi woman and had three sons from this marriage, all of whom would become influential academics in future.

[5] In his later years, he also wrote a Seerah (prophetic biography) known as Tarikh al-Arab fi al-Islam, which, unlike his previous work on pre-Islamic Arabia, concerned the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and the Arabs after the rise of Islam, as well as being written in only one volume.