The village was situated on a low sandstone hill on the central coastal plain, overlooking the Mediterranean seashore. Built around the shrine of al-Hasan ibn 'Ali (d. A.D. 1081), a descendant of the second Muslim caliph 'Umar ibn al-Khattab, the village also was known as Sayyiduna 'Ali ('our lord 'Ali'). The Syrian Sufi traveller al-Bakri al-Siddiqi, who journeyed in the area in the mid-eighteenth century, reported that he was given overnight lodgings in the mosque of al-Haram. 
Traditionally, people from all over Palestine came to the shrine during the summer to pray, perform rituals, and collect souvenirs. Al-Haram's population was predominantly Muslim. The village houses were made of stone or adobe brick and were built close together. An elementary school, founded in 1921, had an enrollment of sixty-eight students by the mid-1940s. Agriculture was the mainstay of the economy; in 1944/45, 136 dunums of village land were devoted to citrus and bananas and 2,096 dunums were allocated to cereals; 256 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards. In addition to agriculture, the residents engaged in fishing. Eight hundred m north of the village lay Khirbat Arsuf (132178). Excavation at this site in 1977 and 1982 revealed the remains of a suq (market) dating to the early Islamic period. However, the history of the site spans from the fifth century B.C. to the sixteenth century A.D. During the Hellenistic period it was known as Apollonia. The Crusaders built a fortress there that they called Arsur. Arshuf was also mentioned in the sixteenth-century Ottoman tax records. It seems that it was only after the site of Arshuf had been abandoned, some time in the seventeenth century, that al-Haram was built.
