Hailing from the Sahelian town of Ja (Dia) in the core Mali area, Al-Hajj Salim Suwari had performed the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca several times and devoted his intellectual career to developing an understanding of the faith that would assist Muslim minorities in residing in "pagan" lands (dar al-kufr).
Since the threshold values of semi-aridity here (100–200 to 600 mm) are clearly lower than in the Köppen climate classification (390 to 780 mm for stations with mean annual temperature of 25°C and dry season centered in "winter", and even 440 to 880 mm at 30°C), the tropical semi-arid Sahelian climate, incidentally the hottest climate on Earth, is on the borderline of Köppen's hot semi-arid climates (BSh) and Köppen's hot arid climates (BWh).
Born in Akouda, just north of Sousse, he studied at the University of Ez-Zitouna in 1947, he chaired the Sahelian cooperation within the Tunisian General Labour Union.