Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice 9789004426979, 9004426973

Table of contents :
‎Contents
‎List of Illustrations and Tables
‎Notes on Contributors
‎Transliteration, Style, and Dates
‎Chapter 1. Introduction (Saif and Leoni)
‎Part 1. Occult Theories: Inception and Reception
‎Chapter 2. The Three Divisions of Arabic Magic (Burnett)
‎Chapter 3. New Light on Early Arabic Awfāq Literature (Hallum)
‎Chapter 4. A Study of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ’s Epistle on Magic, the Longer Version (52b) (Saif)
‎Chapter 5. Sabian Astral Magic as Soteriology in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s al-Sirr al-maktūm (Noble)
‎Chapter 6. Lettrism and History in ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī’s Naẓm al-sulūk fī musāmarat al-mulūk (Gardiner)
‎Chapter 7. Kāshifī’s Asrār-i qāsimī: A Late Timurid Manual of the Occult Sciences and Its Safavid Afterlife (Subtelny)
‎Part 2. Occult Technologies: From Instruction to Action
‎Chapter 8. The Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya and Medieval Islamic Occult Sciences (Coulon)
‎Chapter 9. Toward a Neopythagorean Historiography: Kemālpaşazāde’s (d. 1534) Lettrist Call for the Conquest of Cairo and the Development of Ottoman Occult-Scientific Imperialism (Melvin-Koushki)
‎Chapter 10. Power and Piety: Islamic Talismans on the Battlefield (Ekhtiar and Parikh)
‎Chapter 11. Calligrams of the Lion of ʿAlī in Southeast Asia (Yahya)
‎Chapter 12. A Stamped Talisman (Leoni)
‎Chapter 13. Bereket Bargains: Islamic Amulets in Today’s “New Turkey” (Gruber)
‎Chapter 14. Postscript: Cutting Ariadne’s Thread, or How to Think Otherwise in the Maze (Zadeh)
‎Index

Citation preview

Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice

Handbook of Oriental Studies Handbuch der Orientalistik Section One

The Near and Middle East

Edited by Maribel Fierro (Madrid) M. Şukru Hanioğlu (Princeton) Renata Holod (University of Pennsylvania) Florian Schwarz (Vienna)

volume 140

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ho1

Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice Edited by

Liana Saif Francesca Leoni Matthew Melvin-Koushki Farouk Yahya

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Kirsten Alvanson, Abjad 03, 2007, ink on paper, 45.8×45.8cm. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Islamic Occultism in Theory and Practice (Conference) (2017 : Oxford, England), author. | Saif, Liana, editor. | Leoni, Francesca, 1974- editor. | MelvinKoushki, Matthew S., editor. | Yahya, Farouk, editor. | Ashmolean Museum, host institution. Title: Islamicate occult sciences in theory and practice / edited by Liana Saif, Francesca Leoni, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Farouk Yahya. Other titles: Handbook of Oriental studies. Section 1, Ancient Near East ; v. 140. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2020] | Series: Handbook of Oriental studies. Section one, Ancient Near East = Handbuch der Orientalistik, 0169-9423 ; volume 140 | "The present volume, which gathers some of the papers presented at a three-day international conference, 'Islamic Occultism in Theory and Practice,' held at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford on January 6-8, 2017"–Introduction. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020031599 (print) | LCCN 2020031600 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004426962 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004426979 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Islamic occultism–Congresses. | Occultism–Religious aspects–Islam–Congresses. | LCGFT: Conference papers and proceedings. Classification: LCC BF1404 .I85 2017 (print) | LCC BF1404 (ebook) | DDC 130.88/297–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031599 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031600

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface. ISSN 0169-9423 ISBN 978-90-04-42696-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-42697-9 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents List of Illustrations and Tables vii Notes on Contributors xii Transliteration, Style, and Dates xvii 1

Introduction 1 Liana Saif and Francesca Leoni

Part 1 Occult Theories: Inception and Reception 2

The Three Divisions of Arabic Magic Charles Burnett

43

3

New Light on Early Arabic Awfāq Literature Bink Hallum

4

A Study of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ’s Epistle on Magic, the Longer Version (52b) 162 Liana Saif

5

Sabian Astral Magic as Soteriology in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s al-Sirr al-maktūm 207 Michael Noble

6

Lettrism and History in ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī’s Naẓm al-sulūk fī musāmarat al-mulūk 230 Noah Gardiner

7

Kāshifī’s Asrār-i qāsimī: A Late Timurid Manual of the Occult Sciences and Its Safavid Afterlife 267 Maria Subtelny

57

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Part 2 Occult Technologies: From Instruction to Action 8

The Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya and Medieval Islamic Occult Sciences 317 Jean-Charles Coulon

9

Toward a Neopythagorean Historiography: Kemālpaşazāde’s (d. 1534) Lettrist Call for the Conquest of Cairo and the Development of Ottoman Occult-Scientific Imperialism 380 Matthew Melvin-Koushki

10

Power and Piety: Islamic Talismans on the Battlefield Maryam Ekhtiar and Rachel Parikh

11

Calligrams of the Lion of ʿAlī in Southeast Asia Farouk Yahya

12

A Stamped Talisman 527 Francesca Leoni

13

Bereket Bargains: Islamic Amulets in Today’s “New Turkey” Christiane Gruber

14

Postscript: Cutting Ariadne’s Thread, or How to Think Otherwise in the Maze 607 Travis Zadeh Index

651

420

454

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List of Illustrations and Tables Figures 3.1

3.2

3.3

10.1

10.2 10.3

10.4 10.5

10.6

10.7

10.8

Cast iron 6×6 magic square, Anxi (Xi’an), early Yuan Dynasty (late seventh/thirteenth century). Shaanxi History Museum, Xi’an. Photo courtesy of Marilyn Shea, PhD, University of Maine at Farmington 67 A composite 28×28 wafq composed of sixteen bordered awfāq. London, British Library, Delhi Arabic 110, fols. 108v–109r. Image in the Public Domain, available from the Qatar Digital Library 123 Family tree of the Harranian Sabians of Baghdad. After François C. de Blois, “Ṣābiʾ” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., and Muhammad Yonis Abdel All Riḍwan, “Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal b. Thābit al-Ṣābiʾ wa-mā tabqā min nathrihi: nathr wa-dirāsa,” Majallat Jāmiʿat al-Malik Saʿūd 2, al-Ādāb 1 (1990): 39 132 Saber with scabbard and grip. Grip: India, twelfth/eighteenth century; guard and scabbard: Turkey, thirteenth/nineteenth century; blade: Iran, dated 1099/1688; decoration on blade: Turkey, thirteenth/nineteenth century. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Giulia P. Morosini, in memory of her father, Giovanni P. Morosini 1923, 23.232.2a, b. Image in the Public Domain 424 Detail of the underside of the hinged emerald on the scabbard in Figure 10.1. Image in the Public Domain 426 Shirt of mail and plate, India, dated 1042/1632–1633. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2008.245, Purchase, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Gift, 2008. Image in the Public Domain 429 Detail of stamped rings of shirt of mail and plate in Figure 10.3. Image in the Public Domain 433 Saber (kilij), Turkey, mid-tenth/sixteenth century. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of George C. Stone 1935, 36.25.1297. Image in the Public Domain 436 Saber (kilij), Turkey, thirteenth/nineteenth century. Wallace Collection, London, OA 1779. Photography by Cassandra Parsons © The Wallace Collection 440 Sançak banner, Turkey, probably Istanbul, dated 1235/1819–1820. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1976, 1976.312. Image in the Public Domain 442 “Ottoman Army Entering a City.” Folio from a Dīvān of Maḥmūd ʿAbd al-Bāqī (detail), Turkey, last quarter of the tenth/sixteenth century. Metropolitan

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11.1

11.2 11.3

11.4

11.5

11.6

11.7

11.8a

11.8b

11.9

11.10

list of illustrations and tables Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of George D. Pratt, 1935, 45.174.5. Image in the Public Domain 443 Paper cut, Turkey, dated 1280/1863–1864. The David Collection, Copenhagen, inv. no. 21/1974. Photo: Pernille Klemp. Courtesy of The David Collection 467 Carved wooden panel with the Macan Ali, Cirebon, Java, c. 1147–1164/1735– 1751. Kraton Kasepuhan, Cirebon. Photograph by the author 481 Royal banner, Cirebon, dated to 1190/1776. Museum Tekstil, Jakarta, inv. no. 017. Photo: Saul Steed. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of South Australia 483 One of a pair of carved wooden panels with Gaṇeśa riding the Macan Ali, Cirebon, c. 1242–1252/1827–1837. Kraton Kasepuhan, Cirebon. Photo: Saul Steed. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of South Australia 489 Qurʾan, Sumedang, Java, dated 1272/1856. Prabu Geusan Ulun Museum, Sumedang, no. I2, fols. 147v–148r. Photo: Saul Steed. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of South Australia 491 Calligraphic drawings with two variants of the Macan Ali, Babad Talaga, Majalengka, probably Cirebon, Java, c. 1283/1866. Leiden University Library, Leiden, CB 141, pp. 90–91. © Leiden University Library 492 Carved wooden panel with the Macan Ali, probably late twentieth or early twenty-first century, in the Masjid Agung Sang Cipta Rasa, Cirebon. Photograph by the author 493 Talisman to strengthen a bull or buffalo, in a treatise on bull-fighting, buffalo-fighting, and ram-fighting, compiled for a crown prince (raja muda) of Kelantan, c. 1253–1305/1838–1887. Collection of the late Nik Mohamed Nik Mohd. Salleh, Kuala Lumpur, side A, 29th opening. Photograph by the author 498 Azimat Singa (“Talisman of the lion”), in a treatise on bull-fighting, buffalofighting, and ram-fighting, compiled for a crown prince (raja muda) of Kelantan, c. 1253–1305/1838–1887. Collection of the late Nik Mohamed Nik Mohd. Salleh, Kuala Lumpur, side A, 30th opening. Photograph by the author 498 Talisman to protect against misfortune, Patani or Kelantan, thirteenth/nineteenth century. Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, MSS 2778, side A, eighth opening. Courtesy of the Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia 501 Wooden panel, Kelantan, thirteenth/nineteenth to early fourteenth/twentieth century. Museum of Asian Arts, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, inv. no. UM.79.133. Courtesy of the Museum of Asian Arts 504

list of illustrations and tables 11.11

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Doorway hanging, probably Kelantan or Patani, thirteenth/nineteenth to early fourteenth/twentieth century. Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, inv. no. 1998.1.4107. © Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia 506 11.12 Replica of the Macangngé flag of Luwuq, made by the batik studio Brahma Tirta Sari in Yogyakarta, 2007. Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, inv. no. SEA 03476. Courtesy of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory 509 12.1 Talisman, probably Turkey, late thirteenth/nineteenth or early twentieth century. Nasser D. Khalili Collection, London, MS 1179. © Nour Foundation, Courtesy of the Khalili Family Trust 529 12.2–3 Talismanic scrolls, probably Turkey, late thirteenth/nineteenth or early fourteenth/twentieth century. Halûk Perk Müzesi, Istanbul © Akadur Tölegen 531 12.4 Hand-shaped stamp with Qurʾanic excerpts and invocations, Ottoman Empire, 1154/1741. Nasser D. Khalili Collection, London, tls2707. © Nour Foundation, Courtesy of the Khalili Family Trust 532 12.5 Amulet/seal, possibly Turkey, thirteenth/nineteenth century. British Museum, London, 1893,0215.1 © Trustees of the British Museum 533 12.6 The five categories of impressions appearing on the talisman and their distribution 535 12.7a Detail of the top half of the talisman with textual impressions 537 12.7b Detail of the bottom half of the talisman with textual impressions 537 12.8 Section of the talisman containing sequences of letters and numbers 547 12.9a Detail of the top half of the talisman with impressions combining text and image 549 12.9b Detail of the bottom half of the talisman with impressions combining text and image 552 12.10 Detail of the ship-shaped calligram 554 12.11 Example of impression featuring a sanctuary (Mecca) 556 12.12 Example of a second impression featuring a shrine (Aḥmad Rifāʿī’s tomb) 557 13.1 Religious-goods shops surrounding the Eyüp shrine complex, Istanbul, August 2015. Photograph by the author 573 13.2 A box of blessing cards (bereket kartelası) offered for sale at a religious-goods shop next to the Eyüp shrine complex, Istanbul, August 2016. Photograph by the author 576 13.3 A laminated “radiant document” (nurani belgesi) of the prophet Muḥammad in the size and format of a Turkish state-issued identity card. Item purchased near the Eyüp shrine in August 2015 and now in the author’s collection 577

x 13.4

13.5

13.6

13.7

13.8 13.9

13.10

14.1

list of illustrations and tables Cards and magnets displaying a variety of Islamic amulets, affixed to a wall in a restaurant located in Beyoğlu, Istanbul. Photograph taken by the author in January 2018 581 Laminated blessing card (bereket kartelası) of the prophet Muḥammad’s “noble seal” (right) and its virtues (left), offered for sale at a religious-goods shop next to the Eyüp shrine complex, Istanbul, August 2016. Item now in the author’s collection 586 Laminated blessing card (bereket kartelası) of the prophet Muḥammad’s relics, offered for sale at a religious-goods shop next to the Eyüp shrine complex, Istanbul, August 2016. Item now in the author’s collection 589 Boys wearing turban hats decorated with the prophet Muḥammad’s sandalprint, Eyüp shrine complex, Istanbul, August 2016. Photograph by the author 592 Booth selling a variety of eye beads, Nazarköy, June 2016. Photograph by the author 596 “Islamized” eye beads inscribed with the name of God (Allāh) and the “Throne Verse” (āyat al-kursī) in Arabic script, Nazarköy, June 2016. Photograph by the author 600 Tile magnets decorated with Arabic-script and “Islamic” amuletic content, offered for sale in a tourist-souvenir shop, close to Galata Tower, Istanbul, July 2016. Photograph by the author 601 An incantation (ʿazīma), requiring the sacrifice of two cocks, performed in a mandal designed to subjugate the queen demoness ʿAyna, accompanied by a parī mounted on a lion. Nujūm al-ʿulūm, Bijapur, India, dated 978/1570. Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, MS IN2, fol. 125b. © The Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin 637

Map 11.1

Map of Southeast Asia, showing locations of the Lion of ʿAlī

469

list of illustrations and tables

xi

Tables 3.1 3.2 4.1

Pre-seventh/thirteenth-century awfāq treatises mentioned by Sesiano 111 Authors of awfāq treaties mentioned in the Dīwān al-ʿadad al-wafq (asterisks indicate authors discussed by Sesiano) 124 Variation of the title across the manuscripts 165

Notes on Contributors Charles Burnett (PhD Cambridge, FBA LGSM) is Professor of the History of Arabic/Islamic Influences in Europe at the Warburg Institute, University of London. His work centers on the transmission of Arabic science and philosophy to Western Europe, which he has documented by editing and translating several texts that were translated from Arabic into Latin and by describing the historical and cultural context of the translations. Jean-Charles Coulon is a tenured research scholar in the department of Arabic of the Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (National Center for Scientific Research, Paris) and editor in chief of the journal Arabica. His scholarly interests are in the history of magic and occult sciences in the medieval Islamicate world. Among his recent publications is La magie en terre d’Islam au Moyen Âge (2017). Maryam Ekhtiar is a specialist of later Persian art and culture, with expertise in calligraphy and painting. She received her PhD from the Department of Middle Eastern Studies of New York University in 1994 and has worked and taught at various museums and universities (Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York University, and Swarthmore College) before taking on her current role as Curator in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has organized exhibitions and has published and lectured extensively in the fields of Islamic Art, Iranian art, and contemporary art of the Middle East. She co-edited the catalogues Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch 1785–1925 (1998), Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2011), and the book Art of the Islamic World: A Resource for Educators (2012). Her latest publication, How to Read Islamic Calligraphy, was published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018. Noah Gardiner is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of South Carolina. He is an intellectual and cultural historian of the Arabicspeaking Mediterranean, with particular interest in Sufism, occultism, and manuscript culture. He is currently working on two book projects, one on the Sufi arch-lettrist Aḥmad al-Būnī and the other on the occult renaissance that gripped the cities of the Mamluk sultanate in the eighth/fourteenth and

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ninth/fifteenth centuries. He is the author of several articles on al-Būnī, alBisṭāmī, and related topics, and co-editor of the special double issue of Arabica entitled “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives” (2017). His monograph Ibn Khaldūn versus the Occultists at Barqūq’s Court: The Critique of Lettrism in alMuqaddimah is forthcoming from EB-Verlag, Berlin. Christiane Gruber is Professor of Islamic Art in the History of Art Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her scholarly work explores figural representation, depictions of the prophet Muḥammad, and ascension texts and images, about which she has written three books and edited half a dozen volumes. She also pursues research in book arts, codicology, and paleography, as well as modern and contemporary visual and material culture. Her most recent publications include the book The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images (2019) and the edited volume The Image Debate: Figural Representation in Islam and Across the World (2019). Bink Hallum is Arabic Scientific Manuscripts Curator at the British Library. His research centers on Islamic codicology and the history of the book, the transmission of knowledge, Graeco-Arabic studies, and the history of sciences. He holds a Wellcome Trust-funded post-doctoral research fellowship at the University of Warwick, with a project to edit and translate Abū Bakr al-Rāzī’s Twelve Books, a late third/ninth-century encyclopedia of alchemy. Hallum’s publications include “Essay Review: The Tome of Images: An Arabic Compilation of Texts by Zosimos of Panopolis and a Source of the Turba Philosophorum” in a special issue of Ambix guest-edited with Charles Burnett (2009) and “The Arabic Reception of Galen’s Commentary on the Epidemics” in Epidemics in Context: Greek Commentaries on Hippocrates in the Arabic Tradition, ed. Peter E. Portmann (2012). Francesca Leoni is Assistant Keeper and Curator of Islamic Art at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford, and Research Associate at the Khalili Research Centre, Oxford. Her interests include the Islamic arts of the book; cross-cultural exchanges between the Islamic world, Europe, and Asia; and the history and circulation of technologies. Among her recent publications are the exhibition catalogue Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural (2016) and the articles “Islamic Occultism and the Museum,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture (2018), and “ ‘The Illusion of an Authentic

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Experience’: A Lustre Bowl in the Ashmolean Museum,” Muqarnas (2019), coauthored with Dana Norris, Kelly Domoney, Andrew Shortland, and Moujan Matin. Matthew Melvin-Koushki (PhD Yale) is Associate Professor and McCausland Fellow of History at the University of South Carolina. He specializes in early modern Islamicate intellectual and imperial history, with a focus on the theory and practice of the occult sciences in Timurid-Safavid Iran and the wider Persianate world to the nineteenth century. Melvin-Koushki’s forthcoming books include Occult Philosophers and Philosopher Kings in Early Modern Iran: The Life and Legacy of Ibn Turka, Timurid Lettrist and The Occult Science of Empire in Aqquyunlu-Safavid Iran: Two Shirazi Lettrists and Their Manuals of Magic, and he is co-editor (with Noah Gardiner) of the Arabica special double issue “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives” (2017), the first in the field to treat of post-Mongol Persianate developments. His thirty published or forthcoming articles and review essays range widely temporally, geographically, and disciplinarily, from Ilkhanid Iran, Mamluk Egypt, and Ottoman Anatolia to Mughal India and Manghit Transoxania, and from history of science and history of philosophy to imperial historiography and literary and visual theory, including history of the book. Michael Noble received his degree in Arabic and Hebrew from St John’s College, Oxford, then practiced as a criminal barrister before researching for his PhD at the Warburg Institute, London. His PhD thesis will be published by De Gruyter under the title Philosophising the Occult: Avicennan Psychology and the Hidden Secret of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (2020). He is currently based at the Ludwig-Maximilian University, where he is a post-doctoral researcher on the DFG-funded “Heirs to Avicenna project,” headed by Professor Peter Adamson. His research focuses on the reception of Avicennan psychology and cosmology. He has specific interests in post-Avicennan epistemology, theories of cognition and imagination, and the debates concerning the origin and nature of soul. His personal research aims at situating the Islamic occult sciences in the broader context of the creative dialog between philosophy and theology in the sixth/twelfth and seventh/thirteenth centuries. Rachel Parikh (PhD Cambridge) is a historian of South Asian and Islamic Art, specializing in manuscripts and arms and armor. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Harvard Art Museums as the Calderwood Curatorial Fellow in South Asian Art

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(2016–2019) and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial and Special Collections Fellow for Arms and Armor (2014–2016). She was a research associate at the Art Institute of Chicago and a curatorial consultant for the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts and the Wallace Collection in London. Her recent publications include “The Forged and The Divine: Weapons and Goddess Worship in Hinduism,” Orientations (2018) and “Yoga Under the Mughals: From Practice to Painting,” Journal of South Asian Studies (2015). Her book on the Khalili Fālnāma will be published by the Khalili Family Trust and the Nour Foundation in 2020. Liana Saif is a Research Associate at the Warburg Institute and Université Catholique de Louvain as part of the ERC project “The Origin and Early Development of Philosophy in Tenth-Century al-Andalus: The Impact of Ill-Defined Materials and Channels of Transmission.” She is preparing a critical edition, translation, and analysis of an understudied text on talismanry and its theoretical foundations, the Kitāb al-nukhab al-baḥth, attributed to Jābir b. Ḥayyān (c. 101–200/720– 815), and gauging its influence in al-Andalus. Saif’s research centers on medieval Islamicate occult sciences and Islamic esotericism in a global context. She is also interested in the exchange of occult and esoteric ideas and practices between the Islamicate world and the Latin West in the medieval and early modern periods. Saif is translating into English the fourth/tenth-century magic text Ghāyat al-ḥakīm (known in its Latin translation as the Picatrix) by the Andalusian esotericist and occultist Maslama al-Qurṭubī (293–353/906–964). Saif’s first monograph, The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015, and she has recently edited a special issue on Islamic esotericism for Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism (2019). Maria Subtelny is Professor of Persian and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto, where she has been teaching since 1984. Her publications include Le monde est un jardin: Aspects de l’ histoire culturelle de l’Iran médiéval (2002) and Timurids in Transition: TurkoPersian Politics and Acculturation in Medieval Iran (2007); and, most recently, “The Works of Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ Kāshifī as a Source for the Study of Sufism in Late 15th- and Early 16th-Century Central Asia,” in Sufism in Central Asia: New Perspectives on Sufi Traditions, 15th–21st Centuries, ed. Devin DeWeese and Jo-Ann Gross (2018) and “A Man of Letters: Husain Vaʿiz Kashifi and His Persian Project,” in The Idea of Iran, vol. 9, The Timurid Century, ed. Charles Melville (2020).

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Her ongoing project is an edition and translation of Akhlāq-i muḥsinī, a late ninth/fifteenth–early tenth/sixteenth-century Persian “mirror for princes” by Kāshifī. Farouk Yahya is Research Associate in the Department of History of Art and Archaeology, School of Arts, SOAS University of London. His research interests include the Southeast Asian arts of the book, as well as texts and images relating to magic and divination in Southeast Asia. He was previously Leverhulme Research Assistant–Islamic Art and Culture at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, where he assisted with the exhibition “Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural” (2016–2017) and curated the display “The Tale of Prince Vessantara” (2018). He is the author of Magic and Divination in Malay Illustrated Manuscripts (2016) and the editor of The Arts of Southeast Asia from the SOAS Collections (2017). Travis Zadeh is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University, where he teaches courses on Islamic intellectual and cultural history. His academic areas of interest include frontiers and conversion, sacred geography and cosmography, encyclopedias, Quranic studies, law, theology, and philosophy, material and visual cultures, comparative theories of language and translation, theory and method in the study of religion, the digital humanities, secularism, colonialism, reform, science, magic, and the occult. He has published widely on numerous topics and is the author of Mapping Frontiers Across Medieval Islam: Geography, Translation and the ʿAbbāsid Empire (2011) and The Vernacular Qurʾan: Translation and the Rise of Persian Exegesis (2012). In addition to a project on early geography, he is currently working on the roles of enchantment and the marvelous in the course of Islamic history.

Transliteration, Style, and Dates Arabic transliterations follow the convention of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, with slight modifications for Persian and Turkish. Malay transliterations follow the system and spelling used by the Library of Congress and the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Terms that have been naturalized in English, such as Qurʾan, Mamluk, shaykh, and Shiʿi, as well as geographical regions and other toponyms, are used without diacritics. All citations follow the Chicago Manual of Style, and all dates are provided in both Hijrī and Gregorian formats where relevant.

chapter 1

Introduction Liana Saif and Francesca Leoni

A confluence of interests and an alignment of purposes led to the present volume, which gathers some of the papers presented at a three-day international conference, “Islamic Occultism in Theory and Practice,” held at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford on January 6–8, 2017.* Following parallel yet separate trajectories until then were Liana Saif, a historian investigating magical practices in medieval Islam (secondeight/sixth-twelfth century), and Francesca Leoni, a curator working on the material forms taken by Islamicate divination.** When their paths crossed, they realized the advantage of accessing and combining their diverse expertise and associated fields of study. This was prompted by the recognition that the tendency to separate theory from practice is a short-sighted approach for the study of the occult sciences. The above-mentioned conference was conceived as an opportunity to engage the two perspectives in active dialog and identify new and fruitful methodological directions for a fast-growing field of studies. The team was quickly joined by two other scholars, Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Farouk Yahya, whose specialisms contributed to widen the thematic, chronological, and geographical parameters of the effort. The greatest success of the conference lied in bringing international scholars together to develop ideas, questions, and arguments about the entanglement of the occult sciences with theological, philosophical, and esoteric currents, in terms of both theory and practice. The conference “spirit” now animates the present volume, with the same multidisciplinary approach maintained at its core. The thirteen chapters gathered here deliver the latest research on a wide range of issues and perspectives relating to Islamicate occult sciences. The breadth of the material discussed is similarly wide in geographical and chro-

* We acknowledge the invaluable financial support of The Barakat Trust and Rosalie Basten toward the organizational costs of the conference. We would also like to thank all of the presenters for their valuable contributions, Azfar Moin, Venetia Porter, and Emilie SavageSmith for sharing their insights during the roundtable discussion, and museum staff, volunteers, and attendees. ** The authors are grateful to the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust for supporting their research through a postdoctoral fellowship and a research-project grant, respectively.

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nological scope, with subjects of inquiry spanning from Spain in the west to Southeast Asia in the east, and from the fourth/tenth century to the present day.

1

The Occult Sciences

The complexity and often ambiguous nature of the subject addressed by this book means that it is important from the outset to establish our main conceptual framework. We have chosen to replace the term “occultism,” used for the conference title, with “occult sciences,” both to consolidate the subjectmatter within a burgeoning field and to avoid historical ambiguity. Occultism refers, in fact, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments in the history of Western esotericism and to “the specifically French currents in the wake of Eliphas Levi, flourishing in the ‘neo-martinist’ context of Papus and related manifestation of fin-de-siècle esotericism.”1 The term “occult sciences,” on the other hand, reflects the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, terminology used in historical sources up to the modern era: namely al-ʿulūm al-khafiyya, literally meaning hidden or occult sciences, also known as al-ʿulūm al-gharība (the unusual, rare, or difficult sciences), al-ʿulūm al-ghāmiḍa (the recondite sciences), al-ʿulūm al-daqīqa (the intricate sciences), and al-ʿulūm al-laṭīfa (the subtle sciences).2 We do, however, acknowledge the resulting problematic use of “occultist” as a noun describing actors and an adjective instead of the awkward “occult-scientific” or “occult scientist.” We therefore opted for it anyway for the sake of style and clarity.3 1 Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Occultism,” in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Antoinre Faivre, R. van den Broek, and Jean-Pierre Brach (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 887–888. 2 While al-ʿulūm al-khafiyya seems to be the dominant term in Arabic during the “classical” period, al-ʿulūm al-gharība emerged as the preferred designation in Persian and Turkish classifications of the sciences, particularly from the sixth/twelfth century onward. On these terms and for a survey of the changing formal categorisation of the various occult sciences between the natural, mathematical, and religious sciences in Arabic and Persian encyclopedias from the fourth/tenth century to the eleventh/seventeenth, see Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Powers of One: The Mathematicalization of the Occult Sciences in the High Persianate Tradition,” Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 5, no. 1 (2017): 127–199. 3 The authors see the confusion that arises from the use of “occultism,” which refers to a specific historical movement, as being graver than the use of “occultist.” Translation at its most basic aims to convey meaning succinctly rather than obfuscate, but traduttori traditori (“translators [are] traitors”), as the nineteenth-century Tuscan proverb goes, and something will inevitably be lost.

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A brief look at some uses is appropriate at this point in order to clarify the meaning of “occult sciences” in the Islamicate context. Al-ʿulūm al-khafiyya makes an early appearance in the ps.-Aristotelian Hermetica (hereafter referred to as psAH), a group of texts—sometimes appearing together in manuscripts or separately—purporting to be epistles or lessons by Aristotle addressed to his pupil Alexander the Great and concerned with astrology, magic, occult properties, alchemy, and medicine. Aristotle claims to have received his knowledge from Hermes’s al-Kitāb al-maknūn fī asrār al-ʿulūm al-khafiyya, (“The well guarded book on the secrets of the occult sciences”).4 We know that the psAH were known as early as the fourth/tenth century, based on citations in texts composed in that century, such as the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (“Epistles of the Brethren of Purity”), discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. In their epistle on magic, the Brethren list astrology, magic (which subsumes occult properties), alchemy, medicine, and a fifth science they call al-tajrīd (emancipation of the soul) as occult sciences.5 Al-ʿulūm al-khafiyya recurs in another psAH epistle, in which we are told that the demiurge Hādūs has taught Adamnūs (that is, Adam) “the secrets of the four sciences” and “the secrets of medicine.” The al-ʿulūm al-khafiyya are far from being rogue sciences. Attesting to their integration into the philosophical and scientific enterprise of the Islamicate world is their place in official classifications of the sciences. In his Aqsām alʿulūm al-ʿaqliyya (“The classification of intellectual sciences”), Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, d. 428/1037) presents his scheme as an organization of the constituents of ḥikma, that is, wisdom or philosophy, dividing it into three branches: lower sciences, encompassing the natural sciences; middle sciences, encompassing the mathematical sciences; and higher sciences, or metaphysics (al-ilāhiyyāt).6 The natural sciences, or lower sciences, are divided into either primary or secondary. In the first group are knowledge of natural universals such as matter, forms, motions, nature, and human nature; knowledge of the nature of heavens and the elements and nature; the processes of generation and corruption; knowledge of celestial influences on the elements (meteorology, earthquakes, 4 London, British Library, Delhi Arabic MS, fol. 21v. 5 Godefroid de Callataÿ and Bruno Halflants, ed. and trans., The Brethren of Purity: On Magic I: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistle 52a (London: University of Oxford Press, in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2011), 16–17. This is not surprising, considering that they transfer much of the content of the aforementioned psAH’s treatise on attracting animals into another, longer, version of their epistle on magic, citing the same Hermetic text on the secrets of the occult sciences. Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4 vols. (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 2008), 4:450. 6 Ibn Sīnā, “al-Risāla fī aqsām al-ʿulūm al-ʿaqliyya,” in Tisʿ rasāʾil fī l-ḥikma wa-l-ṭabīʿiyyāt (Cairo: Dār al-ʿArab, n.d.), 104–116, esp. 104–105.

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natural phenomena); mineralogy; science of plants; knowledge of animals; and knowledge of the soul and the powers of perception. The secondary natural sciences include medicine, astrology, physiognomy, oneiromancy (dream interpretation), talismans, nīranjs (organic amulets), and alchemy.7 Unlike Ibn Sīnā’s neutral description, al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) adopts a more condemnatory tone in the classification of sciences in his Tahāfut al-falāsifa (“The incoherence of the philosophers”) while following his predecessor closely. He is, however, unconcerned with the lawfulness of these sciences; as a matter of fact, al-Ghazālī attacks the natural sciences’ exclusion of divine volition from their discussion of causality, which ultimately undermines the extraordinariness of miracles making them akin to magic.8 From Ibn Sīnā onward, then, most occult sciences were consistently classed among the natural sciences in all the major Arabic and Persian classifications of the sciences, and increasingly among the mathematical and religious sciences as well. The science of letters (ʿilm al-ḥurūf ), sometimes referred to as lettrism, is a particularly instructive example here, as this and its subsets (such as jafr, or letter divination) were variously classed as natural, mathematical, or religious sciences, and, increasingly, as all three at once. The letters, especially those of the Arabic alphabet, are the building blocks of reality, so ʿilm al-ḥurūf can be defined as knowledge of the esoteric significance and occult potency of letters, their numerical values, and names that reveal truths about nature, the cosmos, and the divine. For some of its practitioners, indeed, it came to serve as a universal or master occult science, comprising both magical and divinatory applications and running the epistemological gamut from physics to metaphysics.9 Most notably, the status of the science of letters by the early modern period as a primary vehicle of applied Neopythagoreanism, especially in the Persianate world, served as a means to sacralize the

7 Ibn Sīnā, “al-Risāla fī aqsām al-ʿulūm al-ʿaqliyya,” 108–111. This system became influential, as it has been adopted by other classifications such as those in Miftāḥ al-saʿāda wa-miṣbāḥ alsiyāda (“The key to happiness and the cresset of mastery”) by the Ottoman scholar Aḥmed b. Musṭafā Ṭashköprüzāde (1495–1561) and Kashf al-ẓunūn (“The elucidation of doubts”) by Kâtip Çelebi (d. 1067/1657). Ṭashköprüzāde, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda wa-miṣbāḥ al-siyāda, 3 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1985), 1:301–302, 340–346; Ḥājjī Khalīfa, Kashf al-ẓunūn, ed. Muḥammad Yaltaqāyā and Rifʿat al-Kalisā, 2 vols. (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, n.d.), 1:11–18. 8 Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Tahāfut al-falāsifa, ed. Sulaymān Dunyā (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1966), 235–238. 9 Melvin-Koushki, “Powers of One.” In the present volume, chapters 6, 7, and 9 are particularly concerned with this science.

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mathematical sciences, occult or otherwise, by linking them with the Shiʿi Imams, for Sunnis and Shiʿis alike.10 More broadly, the occult sciences are a subset of knowledge that moves between the personal and the transpersonal, the subjective and the transitive, reflecting the epistemological fluidity of the Neoplatonic, Neopythagorean, and Aristotelian foundations of their theoretical frameworks. Ultimately the lines between divine and natural, subjective and objective investments are blurry. The recognition of this irreducible ambiguity is valuable to the methods of intellectual historians, art historians, and curators alike, as it allows them to give nuance to their arguments beyond preconceived notions based on anachronistic binaries. The ambiguous character of the occult sciences also caused their modern social and institutional marginalization, especially when subjected to postEnlightenment ideals that bifurcate knowledge into rational and irrational, as discussed later on. More significantly, the influence of the Enlightenment dichotomy of reason versus superstition, which delegitimized the study of the occult sciences, spread beyond “the West” to the Islamic ecumene, with similar effects expressed through different yet entangled cultural and political projects, most notably Islamic reform movements between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The creedal purity of Islamist revivalists of the early twentieth century, including those who adopted Wahhabi and Salafi theology, was bolstered by expunging “heterodoxy” and “superstition” from a rationalist program of reform.11 This rationality overtly shuns the occult sciences and largely dismisses Islamic esoteric currents, deemed as embarrassing and backward superstitions. For Muḥammad b. ‘Abd al-Wahhāb (d. 1206/1792), the question warranted two chapters in his Kitāb al-Tawḥīd in which he censored the making of amulets and seeking blessings from things other than God and criticized magic and divination by citing hadith against these practices and beliefs.12 Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb revamped earlier criticisms aligning in particular with Ibn Taymiyya; however, in the context of the twentieth century his view takes on an explicit anti-colonial and anti-imperialist dimension. As the Lebanese reformer Rashīd Riḍā claimed, these illicit practices and beliefs prevented the world from witnessing the true progressive and rational nature of Islam.13

10 11 12 13

Melvin-Koushki, “Powers of One.” Henri Lauzière, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 47. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, Kitāb al-Tawḥīd, ed. Abū Mālik al-Qufaylī (Egypt: Maktabat al-ʿUlūm wa-l-Ḥikam, 2008), 31, 34, 80–86. Lauzière, The Making of Salafism, 48, 118.

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In Iran too, the reform movements issuing from the 1905–1911 Constitutional Revolution intensified the legal and institutional assault on the occult sciences: Three developments conspired to criminalise the occult professions. First, postrevolutionary modernists redoubled attentions to the issue of public order, civility, and hygiene as part of efforts to remake urban space along modern European lines. Second, these reforms were coupled with calls for enlightened education and assaults on superstition and irrationality under the ancien regime …. Third, legal reform became the locus of heightened activity, particularly as modernists understood the establishment of a particular kind of public order to depend on the codification of and enforcement of a set of laws.14 These reformist processes of rationalization centre on the aforementioned post-Enlightenment dichotomy but contrast with medieval Islamicate notions of “intelligibility” and “rationality,” historically contingent analytical categories formulated in an episteme that hailed a massive and deeply influential (on a global level) sense of the knowability of the universe and the forces within it. This discourse led directly to the emergence of systematic studies of occult forces and explorations on how they manifest in the practice of magic and astrology (action at a distance), divination (intuition), and alchemy (chemical reactions). Anti-occultist rhetoric was also cultivated by other forces, including secularist and liberal-style currents in the Islamicate world and Christian evangelism, which resulted in strong tendencies of disenchantment. In its modern configuration propelled by political activism, from Algeria through Iran and India,15 therefore, the suppression and marginalization of the occult sciences, whether in practice or as academic study, was more successful than at any previous time.16 One of the by-products of such marginalizing processes is the creation of private and public spaces where new expressions of the occult emerge. For example, in many places of the MENA region at least, the privilege of middle and upper classes secures a level of legal immunity and social status. Thus, capital access to Western forms of occult and esoteric currents led to the surge 14 15 16

Alireza Doostdar, The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 50. Francis Robinson, “Islamic Reform and Modernities in South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 42, nos. 2–3 (March–May 2008): 259–281. Roman Loimeier, “Patterns and Peculiarities of Islamic Reform in Africa,” Journal of Religion in Africa 33, no. 3 (2003): 237–262.

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of Spiritism, Occultism, even Wicca, New Age practices, and Quantum Mysticism.17 The latter, in particular, created a modern process of rationalization that viewed traditional occult sciences with derision and their practitioners as charlatans, while elevating spiritual, esoteric, and occult practices that can be expressed in what are perceived as scientific terms (e.g., energy, wavelengths, consciousness). To some extent, this “Westernizing” turn contributed even further to the suppression of the traditional occult sciences, correlating them with the “superstition,” “irrationality,” and the desperation of the lower classes. This is a rich subject for future research that pays attention to contemporary practices, entanglements with other global communities, and the political, economic, and social power-structures that are, and have always been, shaping Islamicate occult sciences and spiritualities according to ever-changing discursive constructs of “rationality.” Present-day university programs often deepen this split by excluding the occult sciences from the history of science and philosophy and by assigning them, if at all, to the realms of anthropology, sociology, and religion. This volume’s ultimate ambition is thus to cement the value of studying and researching the occult sciences as an integral part of the vibrant Islamicate intellectual and scientific enterprise over many centuries and over vast territories.

2

Looking Backward, Looking Forward

The last decade or so has witnessed a notable rise in scholarship dealing with magic, alchemy, the science of letters, astrology, divination, and various esoteric trends in the Islamicate world. In particular, the recent work of a new generation of Islamicists on the theoretical contributions of pivotal exponents of the occult sciences is gradually making available hitherto unknown or unedited texts that expand considerably current knowledge of the subject and better equip future scholarly quests.18 Ongoing research, often brewed in increasingly 17

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For the case of Turkey, see Özgür Türesay, “Between Science and Religion: Spiritism in the Ottoman Empire (1850s–1910s),” Studia Islamica 113 (2018): 166–200. See also the ANRDFG Neoreligitur Research project, “New Religiosities in Turkey: Reenchantment in a Secularized Muslim Country?” https://anr.fr/Project‑ANR‑13‑FRAL‑0006. About Iran, see Doostdar, The Iranian Metaphysicals, passim. See, above all, de Callataÿ and Halflants, The Brethren of Purity: On Magic I; Jean-Charles Coulon, “La magie islamique et le corpus bunianum au Moyen Âge” (PhD diss., Université de Paris IV–Sorbonne, 2013); Cecile Bonmariage and Sébastien Moureau, ed. and trans., Le cercle des lettres de l’ alphabet Da’irat al-ahruf al-abjadiyya: Un traité pratique de magie des lettres attribué à Hermes (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Liana Saif, “The Cows and the

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diverse academic centers across Europe and North America,19 is shedding light on subjects such as the development of occult thought in the early medieval period;20 the assimilation of Greek, Persian, and Indian knowledge to Islamic thought;21 the European reception of Islamicate occult ideas;22 the relationship between the occult sciences and imperial ideologies;23 and the production, circulation and careers of occult manuscripts and learning.24 Also on

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Bees: Arabic Sources and Parallels for Pseudo-Plato’s Liber vaccae (Kitāb al-nawāmīs),” The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 79 (2016): 1–47; Matthew Melvin-Koushki, The Lettrist Treatises of Ibn Turka: Reading and Writing the Cosmos in the Timurid Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming); Liana Saif, The Goal of the Wise: An English Translation from the Arabic Original (Pennsylvania: Penn State University, forthcoming); Godefroid de Callataÿ, Sébastien Moureau, and Bruno Halflants, ed. and trans., The Brethren of Purity: On Magic II: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistle 52b (London: University of Oxford Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, forthcoming). The Warburg Institute (London) continues to lead the way. At the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), the “Speculum Arabicum Project” (ERC 2012) is engaged in research on alchemy and magic. Courses on the Islamicate occult sciences are regularly taught in the history and religion departments of the University of South Carolina, where an MA in magic is currently under development. In Paris, the workshop series “La magie dans l’ Orient juif, chrétien et musulman: recherches en cours et études de cas” continues at the Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales du CNRS. Other initiatives are being developed at the University of Exeter and the University of London, as well as at Yale University, where Travis Zadeh recently organized an international symposium, “Magic and the Occult in Islam and Beyond” (March 2017), which was attended by several of the participants in the present volume. See his Postscript in this volume. Jean-Charles Coulon, La magie en terre d’Islam au Moyen Age (Paris: CTHS-Histoire, 2017); Liana Saif, “From Ġāyat al-ḥakīm to Šams al-maʿārif: Ways of Knowing and Paths of Power in Medieval Islam,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Matthew MelvinKoushki and Noah Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 297–345. Bink Hallum, “Zosimus Arabus: The Reception of Zosimos of Panopolis in the Arabic/ Islamic World” (PhD diss., Warburg Institute, 2008); Kevin van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Liana Saif, The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Ahmet Tunç Sen, “Astrology in the Service of the Empire: Knowledge, Prognostication, and Politics at the Ottoman Court, 1450s–1550s” (PhD diss., The University of Chicago, 2016); Emin Lelić, “Ottoman Physiognomy (ʿilm-i firâset): A Window into the Soul of an Empire” (PhD diss., The University of Chicago, 2017); Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Early Modern Islamicate Empire: New Forms of Religiopolitical Legitimacy,” in The Wiley-Blackwell History of Islam, ed. Armando Salvatore, Roberto Tottoli, and Babak Rahimi (Hoboken: WileyBlackwell, 2018), 353–375; Matthew Melvin-Koushki, The Occult Science of Empire in Aqquyunlu-Safavid Iran: Two Shirazi Lettrists and Their Manuals of Magic (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). Farouk Yahya, Magic and Divination in Malay Illustrated Manuscripts (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Noah Gardiner, “Esotericism in a Manuscript Culture: Aḥmad al-Būnī and His Readers

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the rise are interdisciplinary studies that are dedicated entirely to individual practices, foremost among them alchemy, astrology, geomancy, bibliomancy, physiognomy, oneiromancy, and amulet making,25 which have had the effect of sustaining more systematic work on divinatory and magical objects as well.26 On the curatorial side, in the last decade major museums worldwide have organized exhibitions focusing on various aspects of the occult sciences, notably Falnama: The Book of Omens at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC (October 24, 2009–January 24, 2010), Un art secret: Les écritures talismaniques en Afrique de l’Ouest at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (February 14–July 28, 2013), Power and Piety: Islamic Talismans on the Battlefield at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (August 29, 2016–February 13, 2017), and Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural at the Ash-

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through the Mamlūk Period” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2014); Noah Gardiner, “Esotericist Reading Communities and the Early Circulation of the Sufi Occultist Ahmad al-Buni’s Works,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Melvin-Koushki and Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 405–441. Simon Swain, ed., Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Massumeh Farhad, with Serpil Bağcı, Falnama: Book of Omens (Washington, DC: Freer and Sackler Gallery, 2009); Venetia Porter, with Robert Hoyland and Alexander Morton, Arabic and Persian Seals and Amulets in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 2011); Özgen Felek and Alexander Knysh, eds., Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012); Tuna Artun, “Hearts of Gold and Silver: Production of Alchemical Knowledge in the Early Modern Ottoman World” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2013); Özgen Felek, Kitābü’l-Menāmāt: Sultan III. Murad’ın Rüya Mektupları (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2014); Elizabeth Sirriyeh, Dreams and Visions in the World of Islam: A History of Muslim Dreaming and Foreknowing (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015); Elizabeth Sartell and Shandra Lamaute, eds., “Characterizing Astrology in the Pre-Modern Islamic World,” special issue of Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 12, no. 1 (2017): 1–97; Alessandro Palazzo and Irene Zavattero, eds., Geomancy and other Forms of Divination (Florence: SISMEL, 2017); Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Persianate Geomancy from Ṭūsī to the Millennium: A Preliminary Survey,” in Occult Sciences in Pre-modern Islamic Cultures, ed. Nader El-Bizri and Eva Orthmann (Beirut: Orient-Institut Beirut, 2018), 151–199; Nicholas Harris, “Better Religion through Chemistry: Aydemir al-Jildakī and Alchemy under the Mamluks” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2020). Interdisciplinary approaches to the occult have proved fruitful in other fields. See, for instance, Marvin Meyer and Paul A. Mirecki, Ancient Magic and Ritual Power (Leiden: Brill, 1995); Charles Burnett, Magic and Divination in the Middle Ages: Texts and Techniques in the Islamic and Christian Worlds (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996); Paul Magdalino and Maria Mavroudi, eds., The Occult Sciences in Byzantium (Geneva: La Pomme d’or, 2007); Alan Lenzi and Jonathan Støkl, eds., Divination, Politics, and Ancient Near Eastern Empires (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014).

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molean Museum, University of Oxford (October 20, 2016–January 15, 2017). These large-scale projects and their accompanying catalogs have been essential to introducing the topic to a wider, non-specialist audience.27 They have also challenged the way in which this material has been traditionally framed and exhibited in a museum context, creating further opportunities to reclaim its place within the wider material and artistic output of the Islamic societies under consideration.28 Exhibitions with components relating to the occult sciences are being staged also in Muslim-majority countries. The exhibition Ya Hafeth Ya Ameen, featuring talismanic adornments from Jordan, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Oman, was held at the Widad Kawar Home for Arab Dress in Amman, Jordan (November 18, 2015–March 28, 2016). More recently, Al-Tibb: Healing Traditions in Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur (March 19–December 31, 2018) dedicated a section to the uses of magic and divination in medicine, with a corresponding chapter in its catalog.29 The outputs of this vibrant field are not only the modern response to the pioneering studies, translations, and group efforts of earlier generations of scholars focusing on the subject.30 Many of them are, in fact, also transformative in methodological terms, in so far as they challenge and debunk the post-Enlightenment mindset and positivist stance that dismissed the occult

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Farhad with Bağcı, Falnama; Alain Epelboin et al., Un art secret: Les écritures talismaniques de l’ Afrique de l’ Ouest (Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe, 2013); Francesca Leoni, ed., Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2016). On some of the challenges posed by public displays of this subject, see Francesca Leoni, “Islamic Occultism and the Museum,” in “Installing Islamic Art: Interior Space and Temporal Imagination,” ed. Yuka Kadoi, special issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture 7, no. 2 (2018): 327–351. Farouk Yahya, “Divination and ‘Magic’ in Islamic Medicine,” in Al-Tibb: Healing Traditions in Islamic Medical Manuscripts, ed. Siti Marina Maidin (Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, 2018), 190–193. See, above all, Maslama al-Qurṭubī, Picatrix: das Ziel des Weisen, ed. Hellmut Ritter (London: Warburg Institute, 1933); Hellmut Ritter and Martin Plessner, trans., “Picatrix”; das Ziel des Weisen von Pseudo-Majriti (London: Warburg Institute, 1962); Toufiq Fahd, La divination arabe: études religieuses, sociologiques et folkloriques sure le milieu natif de l’Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1966); Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimenwissenschafen im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1972); Marie-Thérèse D’ Alverny and Françoise Hudry, “Al-Kindi: De radiis,” Archives d’historie doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 41 (1974): 139–260; Richard Lemay, ed. and trans., Abū Maʿšar al-Balḫī (Albumasar), Kitāb al-Madkhal al-kabīr ilā ʿilm aḥkām al-nujūm. Liber introductorii maioris ad scientiam judicorum astrorum, 9 vols. (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1995–1996); and Emilie Savage-Smith, ed., Magic and Divination in Early Islam (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).

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sciences as irrational, leading to the marginalization of their academic study in the past both in Muslim-majority and Western countries.31 The occult sciences were long treated as anomalies clashing with the more rational disciplines of the “classical” period of Islam, the so-called “Golden Age,” and their more “authentic” scientific and philosophical achievements of Greek origin. This view was bolstered with the colonialist and orientalist attitude toward the occult sciences in the Islamicate world, perceiving them as exotic phenonema of a superstitious Other. This was directed at “the Orient” as a whole and at rural societies more specifically, whose cultural output was deemed unsophisticated and uncultured because of a lack of textual output that can be approached on the basis of philological positivism.32 Such frameworks are at play in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century accounts of Edward Lane, Edmond Doutté, Bess Allen Donaldson, and Tewfik Canaan, which are among early scholarly sources for the study of occult sciences and material culture in the Muslim world.33 Published decades later, several works retaining this positivist scaffolding established themselves as standard resources on the subject. Most notable of these is Manfred Ullmann’s Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam (1972), a book on Islamicate sciences encompassing zoology, alchemy, astrology, magic, and agriculture.34 With few general insights, Ullmann systematically lists and summarizes the writings and manuscripts available under each heading, becoming a useful place for scholars to begin surveying literature and manuscripts related to their subjects and to expand further. A similar resource is Fuat Sezgin’s Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums (1967–2000),

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For a recent overview and relevant bibliographic references, see David J. Collins, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West, ed. David J. Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1–14. Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 40–41. Edward W. Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (London: John Murray, 1860); Edmond Doutté, Magie et religion dans l’Afrique du nord (Algiers: A. Jourdan, 1909); Tewfik Canaan, Dämonenglaube im Lande der Bibel (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1929); Tewfik Canaan, “Arabic Magic Bowls,” Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 16 (1936): 79–127; Tewfik Canaan, “The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans,” Berythus 4 (1937): 69–110 and Berythus 5 (1938): 141–151 (reproduced in Savage-Smith, ed., Magic and Divination, 125– 177); Bess Allen Donaldson, The Wild Rue: A Study of Muhammadan Magic and Folklore in Iran (London: Luzac, 1938). To this list we may add, Rudolph Kriss and Hubert Kriss-Heinrich, Volksglaube im Bereich des Islam. Bd. II. Amulette, Zauberformeln und Beschwörungen (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1962).

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a thirteen-volume publication with sections on alchemy (vol. IV), astrology (vol. VII), and magical texts described under various headings.35 The critical editions and studies of the orientalist Paul Kraus on alchemy— The Selected Treatises by Jabir ibn Hayyan (1935), Essai sur l’ histoire des idées scientifique dans l’Islam (1935), and Jābir ibn Ḥayyān: Contribution à l’ histoire des idées scientifique dans l’Islam (1942–1943)—are also foundational works, as they helped rehabilitate alchemy by turning it from an anti-scientific pursuit into an important intellectual and scientific enterprise.36 Similarly, the works of David Pingree have been crucial to the study of Islamic medieval astrological magic. His publications on these subjects and their focus on Greek, Indian, and Persian sources remain essential reading for the historian of medieval Islamicate occult sciences.37 Charles Burnett’s extensive studies on the transmission of texts, techniques, and artifacts from the Islamicate world to Europe in the Middle Ages are equally crucial. While his focus has traditionally been on Arabic texts concerned with philosophy, arithmetic, geometry, divination, astrology, astronomy, medicine, and magic and their Latin translations, his extraordinary output exposes the deep influence of Islamicate philosophy and sciences, especially the occult sciences, on the scholarly communities in Europe and their world views.38

35 36

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Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, 17 vols. (Leiden: Brill; Fankfurt am Main: Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, 1967–2000). Paul Kraus, Mukhtār rasāʾil Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (Cairo: al-Khānjī, 1354/1935); Paul Kraus, Essai sur l’ histoire des idées scientifique dans l’ Islam, vol. 1: Textes choisis (Paris: G.P. Maisonneuve, 1935); Paul Kraus, Jābir ibn Ḥayyān: Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifique dans l’ Islam, 2 vols. (Cairo: Imprimerie de l’ Institut FRANÇAIS d’Archéologie Orientale, 1942–1943; reproduced Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1986). See also Lawrence M. Principe, “Alchemy Restored,” Isis 102, no. 2 (June 2011): 305–312, esp. 307. Though astrology and magic are no longer explicitly treated as pseudo-sciences, the focus on identifying sources and influences tends nevertheless to undermine the originality of the texts themselves. See, among others, “Hermann of Carinthia and the Kitāb al-Istamāṭīs: Further Evidence for the Transmission of Hermetic Magic,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981): 167–169; “Arabic, Greek and Latin Works on Astrological Magic Attributed to Aristotle,” in Pseudo-Aristotle in the Middle Ages: The Theology and Other Texts, ed. Jill Kraye, W.F. Ryan, and C.B. Schmitt (London: Warburg Institute, 1986), 84–96; “El kitab al-Istamatis: un manuscrit Barceloní d’obres astrològiques i astronòmiques,” Lengua i literatura 2 (1987): 431–451; “The Eadwine Psalter and the Western Tradition of the Onomancy in Pseudo-Aristotle’s Secret of Secrets,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 55 (1988): 143–167; “Divination from Sheep’s Shoulder Blades: A Reflection on Andalusian Society,” in Cultures in Contact in Medieval Spain: Historical and Literary Essays Presented to L.P. Harvey, ed. D. Hook and B. Taylor (London: King’s College, 1990), 29– 45; Abū Maʿshār, The Abbreviation of the Introduction to Astrology, ed. and trans. Charles

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A special issue of Bulletin d’études orientales, titled “Sciences Occultes et Islam,” published in 1993, begins a change in scholarship.39 Edited by Pierre Lory and Annick Regourd, this volume covers several facets of the occultist epistemologies of medieval Islam. Some contributions consider social and ethnological dimensions and others shed light on new texts and highlight more connections. In this volume we also see a crucial shift from positivist-philological approaches, which treat the occult sciences as textual and intellectual curiosities, to a more contextual one. We find Richard Lemay arguing for the integrality of the occult sciences in the medieval scientific and philosophical enterprise, Toufic Fahd highlighting the fluidity of occult sciences within philosophical and theological discourses, and Ridha Atlagh noting the multiplicity of magical practices and occult epistemologies in the medieval period.40 The editors consciously loosen the dominant perspective that examines the occult sciences for their seeming infringement on some “orthodoxy.” Instead, they note that

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Burnett, Keiji Yamamoto, and Michio Yano (Leiden: Brill, 1994); Abū Maʿšar on Historical Astrology, The Book of Religions and Dynasties (On the Great Conjunctions), ed. and trans. Keiji Yamamoto and Charles Burnett, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2000); “Revision in the ArabicLatin Translations from Toledo: The Case of Abu Maʿshar’s On the Great Conjunctions,” in Les traducteurs au travail: leurs manuscrits et leurs méthodes, ed. J. Hamesse (Louvain-laNeuve: FIDEM, 2001), 51–113, 529–540; “Talismans: Magic as Science? Necromancy among the Seven Liberal Arts,” in Burnett, Magic and Divination in the Middle Ages, 1–15; “Ṯābit ibn Qurra the Ḥarrānian on Talismans and the Spirits of the Planets,”La Corónica 36 (2007) 13– 40; “Nīranj: a Category of Magic (Almost) Forgotten in the Latin West,” in Natura, scienze e società medievali. Studi in onore di Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, ed. Claudio Leornardi and Francesco Santi (Florence: Sismel, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008), 37–66; “The Theory and Practice of Powerful Words in Medieval Magical Texts,” in The Word in Medieval Logic, Theology and Psychology, ed. Tetsuro Shimizu and Charles Burnett (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), 215–231; “Aristotle as an Authority on Judicial Astrology,” in Florilegium mediaevale, Études offertes à Jacqueline Hamesse à l’ occasion de son éméritat, ed. J. Meirinhos and O. Weijers (Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 2009), 41–62; The Great Introduction to Astrology by Abū Maʿšar, ed. Keiji Yamamoto and Charles Burnett, with an edition of the Greek version by David Pingree, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Pierre Lory and Annick Regourd, eds., “Sciences occultes et Islam,” special issue of Bulletin d’ études orientales 44 (1992 [1993]). Richard Lemay, “L’Islam historique et les sciences occultes,” in Sciences occultes et Islam, ed. Lory and Regourd, Bulletin d’études orientales 44 (1992 [1993]): 19–32; Toufic Fahd, “La connaissance de l’ inconnaissable et l’ obtention de l’impossible dans la pensée mantique et magique de l’ Islam,” in Sciences occultes et Islam, ed. Lory and Regourd, Bulletin d’études orientales 44 (1992 [1993]): 33–44; Ridha Atlagh, “Le point et la ligne, explication de la ‘basmala’ par la science des lettres chez ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Ǧīlī (m. 826 h.),” in Sciences occultes et Islam, ed. Lory and Regourd, Bulletin d’études orientales 44 (1992 [1993]): 161– 190.

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the reality of the occult sciences in law and dogma is ambiguous, despite censure by thinkers such as Ibn Khaldūn and al-Ghazālī. The early modern context remains outside of the volume’s remit, perhaps reflecting the authors’ adherence to the much-challenged declinist narratives that perceived little philosophical and scientific achievements produced at this later time with which the occult sciences may intersect.41 Although the volume does not pose a direct and explicit challenge to the orientalist legacies of earlier research, it marks the start of a self-reflecting field. Published a decade later, the edited volume Magic and Divination in Early Islam provided another systematic effort to establish a state of the field. Compiled by Emilie Savage-Smith, whose contributions to the history of Islamic science, inclusive of occultist practices, have been field-defining,42 this volume spans an impressive range of topics from spirits and hermetic practices to weather forecasting and divinatory methods up to the seventh/thirteenth century. Savage-Smith’s compelling introductory bibliographic essay highlights not simply the resources available, both textual and material,43 for the study of this subject, but also the terminological challenges facing Western scholars studying Islamic practices, the limitations posed by the use of categorizations and dichotomies based on the European occultist tradition, and the complex nature of the disciplines included in Islamic classifications of occult sciences. Hence, although collating seminal articles that highlight past methodologies

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On this declinist narrative and its rebuttal see, above all, George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). In addition to innumerable articles, other significant publications include Ranee Katzenstein and Emilie Savage-Smith, The Leiden Aratea: Ancient Constellations in a Medieval Manuscript (Malibu, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1988); John A.C. Greppin, Emilie SavageSmith, and John L. Gueriguian, eds., The Diffusion of Greco-Roman Medicine into the Middle East and the Caucasus (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1999); Emilie Savage-Smith, A Descriptive Catalogue of Oriental Manuscripts at St John’s College Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Peter E. Pormann and Emilie-Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith, Lost Maps of the Caliphs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); and the titles cited below. Of all senior scholars working on occult sciences, Savage-Smith has perhaps the strongest interest in their material dimensions. See, in particular, Emilie Savage-Smith and Marion S. Smith, Islamic Geomancy and a Thirteenth Century Device (Malibu, CA: Undena Publications, 1980); Emilie Savage-Smith, Islamicate Celestial Globes: Their History, Construction, and Use (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985); Emilie Savage-Smith and Francis Maddison, Science, Tools and Magic, 2 vols. (London: Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1997); and Emilie Savage-Smith and Yossef Rapoport, An Eleventh-Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe: The Book of Curiosities (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

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and achievements in the study of occult sciences, Magic and Divination marked a further shift in the field. The volume by Constant Hamès dedicated to talismanic practices, Coran et talismans: textes et pratiques magiques en milieu musulman (2007), was among the first collective projects to react to the challenges voiced by Savage-Smith.44 Its focus on living practices, in particular, and interest in the longevity and reception of protective and prophylactic methods based on the Qurʾan exposes not only some of the dynamics surrounding the life of talismans—from conception to consumption and disposal—but also these objects’ profoundly Islamic nature, thereby reacting to the views that judge them as belonging to Islam contaminated by traditional animistic practices. Social aspects associated with talismanic arts and knowledge, including issues of authority, mediation, and class, are particularly significant throughout the volume and reflect the sociological and anthropological perspective framing the research of the editors and contributors dealing with North and West Africa, Yemen, and Tunisia. The 2017 special double issue of Arabica, edited by Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner, titled “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” is a substantial critical contribution to this changing landscape.45 By showcasing the original work of junior scholars and by proposing a more balanced medievalearly modern chronology and broader geographical focus than previously done, this recent collection has tackled more directly than before the epistemological shifts that led to the employment of the occult sciences as sources of natural and divine knowledge, as valued tools of statecraft, war, and imperial ideology, and as mainstream elements of Islamicate culture. The final two articles of this issue are also explicitly dedicated to material culture.46 Most of all, the Arabica volume represents a crucial methodological intervention, challenging the intellectual marginalization of occult sciences in Islamic studies specifically and the history of science generally, which has been sustained until recently by persistent anxieties about their value for the study of Islam and the

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Constant Hamès, Coran et talismans: textes et pratiques magiques en milieu musulman (Paris: Editions Karthala, 2007). “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 287–693. The publication was based on Melvin-Koushki’s 2014 Princeton conference of the same title. Özgen Felek, “Fears, Hopes and Dreams: The Talismanic Shirts of Murad III,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Melvin-Koushki and Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 647–672; Rose E. Muravchick, “Objectifying the Occult: Studying an Islamic Talismanic Shirt as an Embodied Object,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Melvin-Koushki and Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3– 4 (2017): 673–693.

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(de)legitimization of the scientific achievements of its civilization.47 The editors and contributors counter the resulting declinist narrative by showing some of the ways in which the occult sciences were integral to scientific activity in both “classical” and “post-classical” Islamicate cultures, thereby also exposing the fertile opportunities that the intellectual rehabilitation of this field offers to contemporary Islamic studies.48 The same year saw the publication of Jean Charles-Coulon’s La magie en terre d’Islam au Moyen Âge, an extensive survey of magic from the first/seventh to the eleventh/seventeenth century. This work, based on Coulon’s doctoral thesis, is a who’s who of medieval magic, among them al-Kindī, Jābir b. Ḥayyān, Ibn Waḥshiyya, and Maslama al-Qurṭubī, before turning to Aḥmad al-Būnī, the corpus attributed to him, and his influence. Coulon’s book is conscious of the orientalist fantasy in the early scholarship on magic, stemming from the scenes set in The Thousand and One Nights with the exoticization of jinn, and “the colonial propaganda” that one sees, for example, in La sorcellerie au Maroc by Émile Mauchamp and which ignited the magical imaginary pertaining to the Arab world.49 He also acknowledges the central problem of orientalist studies on magic that “want science and religion to be in constant opposition.” The result is a vision where “the Muslim is torn between the brilliance of science embodied, in the history of the Middle Ages, by Hellenistic, Persian, and Indian heritage, and the darkness of religion embodied … by Muslim religion as such and magic.”50 This indeed distracts from the originality of Islamic works by focusing on their “inheritance” of non-Islamic models of science, namely Greek, and their passing into the Latin world.51 Coulon points out that the trend of studying Islamic magic through their Latin translations, as in the work of David Pingree and Richard Lemay, for example, contributed to this view. This is usually set within a distorted broader picture that depicts

47

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49 50 51

Cf. John W. Livingstone, “Science and the Occult in the thinking of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 112, no. 4 (1992): 598; Stephen P. Blake, Astronomy and Astrology in the Islamic World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), viii and 2. Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Introduction: De-orienting the Study of Islamicate Occultism,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Melvin-Koushki and Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2018): 287–295, esp. 288–290; on the same theme, see also Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “(De)colonizing Early Modern Occult Philosophy,” review essay on Liana Saif, The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), in Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 12, no. 1 (2017): 98–112. Coulon, La magie en terre d’ Islam, 11–13. Coulon, La magie en terre d’ Islam., 17. Coulon, La magie en terre d’ Islam, 19–20.

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medieval Islamic sciences in conflict with religion, as exemplified by the seeming determinism of astrology and the question of the legitimacy of addressative magic.52 La magie en terre d’Islam takes into account the adab genre in its investigation and includes new and interesting themes such as magic and the feminine.53 Two further recent publications, appearing in 2018 and 2019 respectively, deserve mention. Both are collections of articles and are reflective not only of a rapidly widening field but also of the pressing importance of a conceptual shift in the way occult sciences and practices should be approached. The first collection of articles, The Occult Sciences in Pre-Modern Islamic Cultures, edited by Nader El-Bizri and Eva Orthmann, provides additional case studies intended to reclaim the intellectual value of the occult sciences in Islamic culture.54 This volume’s articles on physiognomy and occult alphabets, topics that are often overlooked, in addition to geomancy and the science of letters, are particularly important. At the same time, in seeking to demonstrate their place wedged between “natural philosophy” and “metaphysics” understood as clearly demarcated domains, the volume continues to appraise the relevance of occult sciences in relation to a positivistic notion of exact science, modeled on modern delineations, and juxtaposed with metaphysics. It is more accurate to see the occult sciences, especially medieval and early modern, not as a distinct, if precarious, category of science but rather as one whose epistemological foundations, like all sciences, change along with shifts in paradigms, discourses, occupations, and specializations. This is also because one of the immediate consequences of the above-mentioned approach is the exclusion of the material ramifications of occult practices, cutting out what is instead an essential dimension of these activities, as will be discussed shortly. The second publication is Die Geheimnisse der oberen und der unteren Welt: Magie im Islam zwischen Glaube und Wissenschaft, edited by Sebastien Günther and Dorothee Pielow.55 It is a large volume dealing with magic, theology, prophetic medicine, spirit summoning, amulet making, and astrological magic across an impressive chronological and geographical span, including Kurdish and West African practices. Because it is the latest contribution on this topic

52 53 54 55

Richard Lemay, “Religion vs Science in Islam: The Medieval Debate around Astrology,” Oriente moderno, n.s., 80, no. 3 (2000): 557–575. Coulon, La Magie en terre d’ Islam, 55–60. The Occult Sciences in Pre-Modern Islamic Cultures, ed. Nader El-Bizri and Eva Orthmann (Beirut: Orient-Institut Beirut, 2018). Die Geheimnisse der oberen und der unteren Welt: Magie im Islam zwischen Glaube und Wissenschaft, ed. Sebastian Günther and Dorothee Pielow (Leiden and Boston; Brill, 2019).

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at the time of writing, a more elaborate review is warranted.56 This book is an ambitious undertaking bringing together German scholars, most of whom are not historians of magic, with the exception of Eva Orthmann, Dorothee Pielow, and Bernd-Christian Otto, a historian of “Western” magic.57 Yet the conceptual framework and method of this publication reiterates the approaches of the earlier generations with heavy emphasis on the place of magic in religious and legal discourse, that is, as a polemic.58 This, in turn, feeds the unsubstantiated argument that Islamic magic refers to the modification of pre-Islamic and non-Islamic magical models and genres. Islam’s own contributions are understood in strict relation to the Qurʾan (e.g., the story of Hārūt and Mārūt, Moses and the Pharaoh’s magicians, tying knots in Sūrat al-Falaq) and the agency of jinn, rather than in relation to a wider intellectual and scientific incentives of a culture invested in the occult sciences. However, the relationship between science and the religious canon cannot be so neatly separated, assigning the Islamic to one sphere and the non-Islamic to another. The authors of the introduction view the “intrusion” of non-Islamic elements in terms of a syncretism, a concept of questionable heuristic value, as it implies the independent existence of a pure system of belief that is sullied by extraneous elements.59 Despite acknowledging that these developments are incomplete, organic, and dynamic, this double view, which reduces “inherent” magical elements to the Qurʾan and hadith, portrays magical discourse mostly as a religious anxiety legitimized.60 56 57

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For a more detailed review see Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Magic in Islam between Religion and Science,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 14, no. 2 (2019): 255–287. Eva Orthmann, “Lettrism and Magic in an Early Mughal Text: Muḥammad Ghawth’s Kitāb al-Jawāhir al-Khams,” in The Occult Sciences in Pre-Modern Islamic Cultures, ed. El-Bizri and Orthmann, 223–247; Eva Orthmann, “The Sources and the Composition of the Dustūr al-munajjimīn,” in Science in the City of Fortune: The Dustūr al-munajjimīn and Its World, ed. E. Orthmann and P. Schmidl (Berlin: EBVerlag, 2017), 35–114; Dorothee Pielow, “Dämonenabwehr am Beispiel des Zärs und des islamischen Amulettwesens,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 147 (1997): 354–370. Johann Christoph Bürgel, “Zum Geleit,” in Die Geheimnisse der oberen und der unteren Welt, ed. Günther and Pielow, xv–xxix, esp. xvi–xviii and xix–xx; Hans Daiber, “Magie und Kausalität im Islam,” in Die Geheimnisse der oberen und der unteren Welt, ed. Günther and Pielow, 155–177, here 155. For a concise overview of the limits of syncretism as an analytical category, see Tony Stewart and Carl Ernst, “Syncretism,” in South Asian Folklore: An Encyclopedia, ed. Peter Claus and Margareth Mills (New York: Routledge, 2003), 586–588. Bürgel, “Zum Geleit,” in Die Geheimnisse der oberen und der unteren Welt, ed. Günther and Pielow, xx; Sebastian Günther and Dorothee Pielow, “Magie im Islam: Gegenstand, Geschichte und Diskurs,” in Die Geheimnisse der oberen und der unteren Welt, ed. Günther and Pielow, 3–95, esp. 4–8.

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Otto’s postscript, in particular, emphasizes the bifurcation of the cultural sphere within which magic is thought of and practiced: the polemical and the internal. Magic becomes deviance contested, set within an exclusionary discourse, with persistent references to Ibn Khaldūn, whose treatment of the occult has demonstrably been given too much weight. This implies that this polemicization of magic is even across all periods and all Islamic religious experiences.61 This “pro-and-anti” duality is then developed into a call for a methodological binary, recommended by Otto as a systematic differentiation of inner and outer perspectives which he claims helps overcome Eurocentricisms. The contradiction of this approach, however, lies in the fact that Otto is adopting a perspective taken from the study of “Western” magic and esotericism, and one that, above all, approaches occult sciences and esotericism as forms of heterodox and “rejected knowledge.”62 Notable in this volume is the lack of engagement with the works and findings of the new generation, most of whom are contributors to our volume, who have been shedding new light on all aspects of magic specifically, and the occult sciences generally.63

∵ In addition to representing an array of new voices, Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice offers a more explicit intervention in relation to visual and material culture. The paucity of visual and material evidence from traditional scholarship devoted to Islamic occult sciences is not, in itself, new. Save, in fact, for a few and mostly recent exceptions,64 text-based studies have propelled

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Bernd-Christian Otto, “Magie im Islam: Eine diskursgeschichtliche Perspektive,” in Die Geheimnisse der oberen und der unteren Welt, ed. Günther and Pielow, 317–318. Yet, as scholars of Western esotericism today recognize, the scholarship from this unbalanced framework has produced an overemphasis on the particular polemical discourses against the occult that have issued from the Protestant Reformation to the post-Enlightenment period, the like of which have no relevance for the Islamicate experience. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), passim. The names of some of these scholars are mentioned in the introduction, but it becomes clear they were not read carefully. For example, although the PhD dissertations of Noah Gardiner and Jean-Charles Coulon are mentioned, Aḥmad al-Būnī is still regarded as the true author of Shams al-Maʿārif al-kubrā, despite both scholars proving that it is an eleventh/seventeenth-century al-Būnian-type compilation. Instead, the authors rely on outdated sources, such as Ullmann, on the topic of occult sciences. Except for the already cited work by Tewfik Canaan on Arabic talismans and Emilie Savage-Smith and Marion B. Smith’s monographic study of the British Museum’s geomantic tablet (Islamic Geomancy and a Thirteenth Century Device), most object- or image-

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and dominated the study of disciplines with strong material dimensions, such as astrology, geomancy, bibliomancy, and the science of letters.65 Yet artifacts have always provided a primary space for the articulation and implementation of occult technologies and knowledge.66 A telling example is to be found in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford. Elias Ashmole’s own antiquarian passion and collecting activities, in fact, were but an extension of his intellectual pursuits, centered mainly in natural philosophy, astrology, and alchemy. While often described in subsequent literature as exotic curios, his many natural specimens and artifacts were primarily a source of corroborative evidence and a testing ground for his ongoing exploration of nature’s secrets, properties, and powers.67 Ashmole’s collection, above all, testifies to the legitimacy of the esoteric, the folkloric, and the magical, alongside and even as part of the natural and the religious within the harmonizing framework of the cabinet of curiosities. Far from being the result of haphazard and misinformed collecting habits, in fact, these holdings reflected the considerable overlap between religion, philosophy, the natural sciences, and the occult sciences observable at the time.68 As such, these mineral, vegetal, and animal specimens

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based contributions involving contextual analysis date from the last two decades. For a detailed list, including recent doctoral dissertations studying new bodies of material, see the bibliographies in Leoni, Power and Protection, 95–100, and Venetia Porter, Liana Saif, and Emilie Savage-Smith, “Amulets, Magic, and Talismans,” in A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, Vol. 1: From the Prophet to the Mongols, ed. Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2017), 521–557. As demonstrated by the studies of, among others, Maddison and Savage-Smith (Science, Tools and Magic), Stefano Carboni (Following the Stars: Images of the Zodiac in Islamic Art [New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997]), Anna Caiozzo (Images du ciel d’orient au moyen âge: histoire du zodiaque et de ses représentations dans les manuscripts du ProcheOrient musulman [Paris: Presses de l’ Université de Paris Sorbonne, 2003]) and Farhad with Bağcı (Falnama). A two-year research project led by Francesca Leoni under the auspices of the Leverhulme Trust and completed in early 2018 was the first large-scale object-focused effort to explore divination in pre-modern Islam. Conrad Hermann Josten, Elias Ashmole (1617–1692): His Authobiographical and Historical Notes, His Correspondence, and Other Contemporary Sources Relating to His Life and Work, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). Many of these objects originated from John Tradescant the Elder’s own extensive selection of natural and botanical specimens, known as the Ark, which constituted the largest collection of its kind in seventeenth-century Britain. Arthur MacGregor, Ark to Ashmolean: The Story of Tradescants, Ashmole and the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1983). “[The Ark] straddled a world where burgeoning scientific research had parity with magic and superstition, both forms of knowledge were interrelated and accepted … the bizarre and incomprehensible had serious function … critical to the understanding of the mac-

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and artifacts provided essential keys to the prevailing system of knowledge underpinned by a Neoplatonic view of the cosmos and its correspondences between the heavenly and earthly spheres.69 That the belief in occult forces and the drive to study them were shared by the Royal Society—one of the world’s most prestigious institutions for the promotion of scientific knowledge—and its members (including Ashmole) should therefore come as no surprise. It was not long, though, before the rising experimentalism that eventually led to the Enlightenment began to sideline occult disciplines.70 The far-reaching effects of this shift were felt across the Ashmolean throughout the nineteenth century, when new taxonomies and hierarchies led to a reorganization of its growing collection. The process culminated in the relocation of the natural specimens and ethnographic materials in two institutions of recent foundation, the Museum of Natural History (1850) and the Pitt Rivers Museum (1886), transforming the Ashmolean into the university’s museum of art and archaeology, which it remains today. Reflecting the emergence of anthropology as a discipline during the nineteenth century and of ideas on social evolution and the linear progress of the human civilization, the establishment of the Pitt Rivers Museum, in particular, bears witness to the way in which material culture associated with occult practices came to be seen and represented in the public arena. At this time, the study of the material evidence of remote societies was deemed instrumental for the understanding of the earlier stages of human civilization of which the European exemplified what was believed to be the highest point in development. This conversation intersected with processes of rationalization of religions to align them with the parameters of modernity.71 “Irrational” elements,

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rocosm and its implications for the microcosm or mankind.” Martin Welch, “The Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum,” in Tradescant’s Rarities. Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum, 1683, with a Catalogue of the Surviving Early Collections, ed. Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 40–58, 53. Ashmole’s interest in botany developed because of its link with medicine and astrology. At the time, planets were key to establish both the medical applications of plants and the timing and rules of their collection and utilisation. Josten, Elias Ashmole, 1:57. Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society of London published in 1667, just a few years after the society was established, lists only research on celestial phenomena of an astronomical nature. History of the Royal Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London: Printed by T.R. for J. Martyn and J. Allestry, 1667). This was also the time in which chemists embarked on a systematic epuration of alchemy in order to make it “honest, sober and intelligible” and clear it of “the Chrysopoietick, delusory designs and vain transmutations, the Rosie-crucian vapours, magical charms and superstitious suggestions of the old Philosophers of the Notional way.” Josten, Elias Ashmole, 1:135–136. As in anthropology, a strand of liberal theology also argued for an evolutionary framework

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including forms of popular devotion and superstition, were seen as unmodern, hence the need to strip them away in order to rediscover the (true) essence of religions.72 Rather than using material evidence to shed light on the past social and economic forms of associated cultures, non-European artifacts were used to substantiate and explain pre-historic European finds and patterns of evolution. Material related to spiritual and occult practices always constituted a significant part of the evidence collected,73 useful in providing the evidence of non-European primitivism, and was mainly obtained by professionals involved in European colonial enterprises on the basis of criteria and guidelines dictated by their home institutions.74 However, by responding to processes of seriation measured against Western standards of development in both the scientific and religious domains, these objects were turned into tools for the legitimation of specific ideological frameworks and, more crucially, of the resulting colonial and civilizational enterprises.75 It is in the exoticization and vilification of occult objects witnessed in the museum space that we also find the conditions that led to their separation from the practices they once accompanied. Why their study came to prioritize their theoretical, rather than material, manifestations is thus ultimately also explainable by the process of segregation, abasement, and manipulation enacted in

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in which religions could be positioned. Christianity came to be framed as the opposite of Islam. The former was dynamic and progressive, while the latter was “stagnant and declining … defiantly unaffected by, or even reversing, the evolutionary momentum towards modernity.” Dietrich Jung, Orientalists, Islamists and the Global Public Sphere: A Genealogy of the Modern Essentialist Image of Islam (London: Equinox, 2011), 95–156. Peter Pels, “Introduction: Magic and Modernity,” in Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment, ed. Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels (Redwood, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1–38; and Yusuf Muslim Eneborg, “The Quest for ‘Disenchantment’ and the Modernization of Magic,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 25, no. 4 (2014): 419–432. For the impact of this conversation on Muslim intellectuals and reformists, see in the earlier part of this chapter, as well as Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” in Orientalism: A Reader, ed. Alexander L. Macfie (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 217–238; Muhammad Khalid Masud, Armando Salvatore, and Martin van Bruinessen, eds., Islam and Modernity: Key Issues and Debates (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Building on Sir Hans Sloane’s bequest, which comprised an important group of amulets with Qurʾanic passages, the British Museum continued to enlarge its collection of Islamic amulets, thanks to the considerable holdings accumulated by Henry Christy and Arthur W. Franks. Porter et al., Arabic and Persian Seals, vii. This collecting strategy also made the gathering of contextual information unnecessary, orphaning many of these objects from significant background documentation. Jonathan C.H. King, “Franks and Ethnography,” in A.W. Franks: Ninenteenth-Century Collecting at the British Museum, ed. Marjorie Caygill and John Cherry (London: British Museum, 1997), 136–159, esp. 139.

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these spaces.76 Yet, being often action- and goal-driven, be it for material or spiritual gain, occult practices would lose their raison d’ être if separated from their tools, vehicles, and “end products,” as clearly demonstrated by the object-based essays presented in this collection. Furthermore, objects enable us to consider the operative dimensions of specific techniques, and to reconstruct the ways in which users contribute to their efficacy. Be they utilitarian or symbolic, they are also vital to determining the sensorial interactions necessary for their actual functioning. As such, they allow us to reflect on broader issues, such as agency and activation, while bringing to light other and less visible classes of individuals who, in addition to the authors of texts and manuals, contributed to their existence and continued reproduction over time. These points are clearly emphasized in Chapter 10 on talismanic weaponry, and Chapter 12 on a stamped talisman. In the former, Maryam Ekhtiar and Rachel Parikh argue that the presence of talismanic formulas is, in itself, not enough for protection, and that the ability to interact with them is crucial for these objects’ construction as much as for their efficacy. Such evidence challenges our assumptions about the way apotropaic devices and their vocabulary operate and suggests that individual interventions and interaction constituted an essential, and yet overlooked, ingredient of a talisman’s potency. The centrality of sensorial interaction for the successful transfer of the prophylactic or apotropaic properties of specific motifs is similarly highlighted in Francesca Leoni’s contribution, where the diagrammatic nature of some of the seal marks reproduced on the talisman under examination elicits extended visual contemplation and tactile interaction, the latter, in fact, being documentable through the smudging of some of their surfaces. When cultivating an interdisciplinary collaboration between material culture and intellectual history on the subject of the occult sciences, one is confronted by the lack of direct correspondence between specific texts and objects.77 Nevertheless, the magical vocabulary visible on magical and divinatory artifacts appears in the medieval and early modern literature on magic.78 Survival is certainly part of the issue, as Venetia Porter, Liana Saif, and Emilie Savage Smith have noted in their recent reassessment of magic and talismans:

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The fact that many of the objects associated with occult practices are of varying artistic merit caused them to be mostly overlooked also by art historians until recently. The 2016 exhibition Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural mentioned earlier on offered an important corrective by considering both humble and sophisticated artifacts. Savage-Smith and Maddison, eds., Science, Tools and Magic, 1:62–63; Emilie-Savage-Smith, “Islamic Magical Texts vs. Magical Artefacts,” Societas Magica Newsletter 11 (2003): 2–6. Porter, Saif, and Savage-Smith, “Amulets, Magic, and Talismans,” 522.

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In terms of the survival of such objects, there are few that can be attributed with certainty to before the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. More magical artefacts have survived from later periods and we can only speculate about the reasons for the apparent lack of material evidence of the theories and practices discussed in the early medieval literature. It could be due to the perishable nature of earlier objects such as niranjiyat or perhaps they were subject to corrosion, since many were made of metals. Also, many of the objects that have survived in museums and other public resources originally belonged to personal collections gathered by travellers and researchers, from as early as the fifteenth century, as curios of the cultures they visited and thus it is more likely that these objects were created nearer the time of the collectors’ sojourns in these regions.79 Objects should nevertheless be seen as a supplementary form of “document,” testifying to ideas and principles whose textual formulation may have been lost or never realized. They can also capture oral and practical know-how and show its relevance in everyday life, the intended and ultimate forum of occult technologies. Farouk Yahya shows this in his analysis of the “lion of ʿAlī” calligram across Southeast Asia in Chapter 11, which reveals how the motif’s synthesis of regional adaptations, in both form and content, and drawing on Islamic as much as non-Islamic ideas and beliefs, supported both local devotional and protective needs. Similar to the vocabulary in use on the talisman discussed in Chapter 12, or found on the laminate devotional goods surveyed in Chapter 13, the content of Yahya’s calligrams is another proof of the endurance into modern times of specific principles and resources—from the Qurʾan to prophetic and saintly intercession—in the production of apotropaic and prophylactic devices. These examples also reveal the degree of experimentation of their creators, who may have relied only to a limited extent on technical literature and written knowledge. Instances such as these suggest that material culture can be a gateway to a parallel and highly stratified world of occult wisdom, which is usually the synthesis of established principles and idiosyncratic, generally locally relevant, methods, whose systematic exploration and significance for the broader subject matter remains to be undertaken. Artifacts, like texts, provide unique evidence for assessing the original and ad hoc contributions made by makers or determined by contingent circumstances. This, in turn, can help historians evaluate the bearing of occult theoret-

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Porter, Saif, and Savage-Smith, “Amulets, Magic, and Talismans,” 533.

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ical and philosophical knowledge on the realm of practice and which aspects of it filtered beyond scholarly circles and, therefore, succeeded in terms of reception. Related to this are the social dimensions of occult sciences, including the roles of users as diverse patrons of specific tools and methods, and the space occupied by the scholars, redactors, readers, and artisans responsible for the dissemination of such knowledge throughout society. Finally, objects can help to challenge clear-cut categories traditionally used to navigate Islamicate cultural contributions and expose the ambiguity of certain taxonomies. This appears consistently in all object-based contributions presented in this volume, where concepts such as “orthodox” and “heterodox,” “magical” and “devotional,” ḥarām and ḥalāl show levels of interpenetration that ultimately test these categories’ assumed coherence, to say nothing of their usefulness in trying to situate phenomena like the Islamicate occult sciences within the related cultural production. An instance of this, demonstrated by both the object-based and text-based contributions in this volume, is the problematic assumption of a strict Shiʿi-Sunni divide. From the perspective of material culture, Chapter 10 demonstrates the presence of ʿAlid references in Sunni contexts, for example on weapons on which one finds talismanic motifs that exemplify a crossbred system of symbols and devotional practices. From the perspective of intellectual history, Chapter 7 demonstrates a case in which Imamophilia, Sufism, and esotericism transcended confessional boundaries. Related to the equally hampering elite-popular binary, historical and material evidence points to the use of information drawn from occult sciences and practices for the benefit of aristocratic individuals, such as the weaponization of the science of letters for imperial agendas or the dedication of precious manuscripts to sovereigns for education and entertainment. At the other end of the spectrum, we recognize the role of the commodification of magical texts and objects in popularizing their utility.

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Rationale and Structure

One of the overarching ideas of the 2017 conference was an evaluation of the occult sciences in their own historical contexts and on their practitioners’ own terms, where their standing and intellectual contributions can be best measured. Hence, we structured it as a conversation between papers dedicated to intellectual history and others to material culture. This seemed intuitive, because the content and objectives of intellectual historians overlap, or are continuous with, the disciplines of the history of science, social history, political history, and history of art and material culture. Despite the now long, and

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even clichéd, contestation to “Whiggish” perspectives when it comes to magic, astrology, divination, alchemy, the science of letters, and the rest of the occult sciences, these issues are still contributing to the “stashing” of documentary evidence, whether texts, manuscripts, objects, or art, in archives and libraries all over the world. Nevertheless, the cache of untapped resources means that the effort of historians of Islamicate occult sciences is expended mostly on producing an expanding canon by making available the content of the documentary body: producing critical editions, translations, textual, paratextual, and material analysis, and examining the epistemological frameworks of the occult sciences in Islam. Our volume is a snapshot of these philology-heavy responsibilities of the historians of the occult sciences at this stage. At the same time, the articles take the research in two new directions: a wider global approach, and an examination beyond intention and analysis of context. The aim is to expand the meaning of textuality and provide insights into the various discursive practices with which the documentary source—be it text or material object (including texts as material objects)—and occult knowledge production were in dialog, especially the intellectual, cultural, and political incentives behind the creation of classificatory systems of knowledge.80 This also highlights the over-privileged status of “the archives,”81 new and historical, that historians themselves use, and its influence on the way our own classifications of the occult sciences are continuously (re)structured. Through the two directions followed in this volume, we heed the call for decolonizing our disciplines, because, to shake off the normative framework of “the West,” we need to identify transregional communities of interactions. Moving beyond national and religious boundaries, more than ever we must be reflective of our own position and power within

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This was an important practice in the systematization of Islamicate sciences and arts especially in the medieval and early modern periods. This approach has been employed by some of the authors in this volume too; namely, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Noah Gardiner, and Bink Hallum. For an example of these methodological directions beyond this volume, see Liana Saif, “What Is Islamic Esotericism?,” in “Islamic Esotericism,” ed. Liana Saif, special issue of Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism 7, no. 1 (2019): 1–59. A collection of documents (manuscripts, records, objects, etc.) created or gathered by one person or institutions (universities, libraries, museums, etc.) for long-term preservation. Here it is understood that the selection of these documents is never neutral and is influenced by power structures that resulted from social, economic, and political conflict, colonialism, and orientalist heritage. See Holger Warnk, “Searching for Seeds to Rest in Libraries: European Collecting Habits towards Malay Books and Manuscripts in the Nineteenth Century,” Frankfurt Working Papers on East Asia 1 (2009): 3–22; and James Lowry, ed., Displaced Archives (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017).

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intellectual and institutional structures to reassert the importance of the study of the occult sciences to the post-colonial study of Islam and the Islamicate world, past and present. Reflecting this rationale, the essays in this volume have been grouped according to two complementary aspects of the occult sciences. The first section, “Occult Theories: Inception and Reception” showcases the latest research from the perspective of intellectual history. This part commences with Charles Burnett’s discussion of the medieval tripartite division of magic into talismans, nīranjs, and alchemy, and the epistemological rationale behind it (Chapter 2). Investigating medieval sources such as Ghāyat al-ḥakīm, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Thābit b. Qurra’s De imaginibus, and some works of Ibn Sīnā, the author shows that the division reflects ideas on the body and soul. Magic, thus, becomes part of wisdom, to which the understanding of the dynamics between corporeal and psychical realities is central, and whose pursuit is therefore the appanage of the sage and the philosopher. This chapter expands on the relevance of magic to medieval physics and metaphysics, in addition to highlighting the transfer of this conceptualization to Europe by medieval authors and translators such as Hermann of Carinthia (fl. 1138–1143), Roger Bacon (d. 1292), and Adelard of Bath (d. 1160). Moving from a broad discussion of magic to a specific genre, Chapter 3 by Bink Hallum is an in-depth study of awfāq or magic squares. The author situates awfāq literature in the intellectual atmosphere in which it was conceptualized and created, from the mid-third/ninth to the late sixth/twelfth century. This chapter complements the study of the mathematical quality of these squares and emphasizes their importance in long-standing magical traditions, from astral magic to letter magic. Progressing to a specific text is Liana Saif’s essay, which explores the content of Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’s epistle on magic, the fifty-second in their encyclopedia known as the Rasāʾil, “The Epistles” (Chapter 4). In this epistle, magic (siḥr) is uniquely construed as a magical power in the traditional sense, an allegory of self and state transformation, and a means to enlightenment through knowledge of nature, the cosmos, and the divine. The author’s examination continues the discussion on the philosophical and mystical discourses in which the occult sciences, in general, and magic, in particular, are conceptualized. This theme is taken up further in Michael Noble’s discussion of the Kitāb al-Milal wa-l-niḥal (“The book of religions and sects”) of Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Shahrastānī (d. 548/1153), and the al-Sirr al-maktūm (“The hidden secret”) of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210), in which astral magic is treated as a form of spiritualized natural philosophy that offers the human soul “the promise of a soteriological angelomorphosis” (Chapter 5).

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The following contribution by Noah Gardiner takes up the subject of the occult sciences, especially the science of letters, in the service of writing universal history, particularly the case of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī’s Naẓm al-sulūk fī musāmarat al-mulūk (“Regulation of conduct: On the edification of kings”), a largely overlooked work completed in Bursa in 833/1429–1430 (Chapter 6). Such an application is facilitated by the fact that the science of letters is, at its core, a cosmological and cosmogenic discourse that interprets historical events as part of universal dynamics organized by divine decree through a lettrist cosmological infrastructure. As a result, the Naẓm is no mere exercise in writing history; al-Bisṭāmī, rather, signals the obligation of communal reform, in tandem with the cyclical movement of history, facilitated by the knowledge and utility attained by the science of letters. Like chapters 4 and 5, this article demonstrates the mobilization of the occult sciences for personal, communal, and civilizational transformation. The final contribution of this first section by Maria Subtelny analyzes the occult thought of Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ-i Kāshifī (d. 910/1504–1505), primarily through his Asrār-i qāsimī (“Qāsimian secrets”) (Chapter 7). This is a Timurid manual primarily concerned with illusionism and prestidigitation, which was expanded in the Safavid period to encompass all five of the “classical” occult sciences: kīmiyāʾ, līmiyāʾ, hīmiyāʾ, sīmiyāʾ, and rīmiyāʾ, the initial letters of which represent the Arabic phrase kulluhu sirrun (“It is all a secret”). Most strikingly, Kāshifī, a Naqshbandī Sufi by training and hence Sunni by confession, transcends conventional notions of confessionalism (and thus a strict Sunni-Shiʿi divide) by putting forward the occult sciences as a primary discourse of ʿAlidism or Imamophilia, which explains its eager reception in the Twelver Shiʿi society of Safavid Iran. Subtelny’s textual choice provides us with a telling example of the defining elements of the occult sciences as discussed earlier in this introduction, that is, sciences incorporated in both natural and religious systems of knowledge, in addition to confirming the confessional ambiguity of such disciplines. The second part of the volume, “Occult Technologies: From Instruction to Action” brings together the methods and directives associated with sciences such as astral magic, science of letters, and amulet-making, on the one hand, and the direct applications and material incarnations of some of these procedures, on the other. In Chapter 8, Jean-Charles Coulon introduces a text virtually ignored in available scholarship but of considerable importance and authority in the medieval Islamicate magical tradition, as testified by its mentions in later occultist literature. The chapter surveys available versions in view of a forthcoming critical edition and translation, but also highlights the text’s strengths and significance for both the transmission of Indian occult knowledge and

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for the theorization of occult sciences like sīmiyāʾ, identified primarily as “the secret of the nature,” “the secret of wisdom,” and “the bewitchment of reason.” Furthermore, by highlighting the role of talismans as “the means of action” of sīmiyāʾ, the Kitāb Sharāsīm adds historical validity to the approach put forth by this volume and its desire to reclaim the material dimensions of occult sciences. The next contribution (Chapter 9), by Matthew Melvin-Koushki, explores the application of the science of letters for imperial-ideological and military purposes, in this case for the Ottoman sultan Selīm the Grim (r. 918–926/1512– 1520). This occurs in a tract probably composed by the jurist Kemālpaşazāde Aḥmed, in which, using an exclusively lettrist argument, he urges his royal patron to invade Mamluk Egypt. To this end, Kemālpaşazāde’s text analyses Q 21:105 to demonstrate that the Ottoman ruler’s conquest of Egypt, which was indeed achieved immediately afterwards in 921–922/1516–1517, was “mathematically encoded in the very structure of the cosmos” and hence inevitable. Melvin-Koushki uses this case study, and the context of its production and reception, to reiterate the centrality of the science of letters as “the primary expression of Islamic Neopythagoreanism,” comparable to the role played by the sister discipline, the Kabbalah, in the Latinate Renaissance. This essay complements Chapter 6 by showing al-Bisṭāmī’s pioneering of a new, explicitly lettrist historiography and theory of history was in no way a one-off but a pursuit common to the ninth/fifteenth- and tenth/sixteenth-century Persianate world more broadly, and an important ideological prop to Mamluk, Timurid, Aqquyunlu, Ottoman, and Mughal imperial ambitions alike.82 The link between the science of letters and warfare informs the following chapter as well, which concentrates on another material dimension of this and associated techniques (Chapter 10). A close analysis of select arms and armor from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, leads Maryam Ekhtiar and Rachel Parikh to recognize them as talismanic in nature. Both the choice of materials and the vocabulary used in their decoration support this interpretation, which testifies to the continued reliance on notions such as the occult properties (khawāṣṣ) of stones—theorized in alBīrūnī’s Kitāb al-jamāhir fī maʿrifat al-jawāhir (“The book of the multitude of 82

Advocating this approach are also İlker Evrim Binbaş, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī and the Islamicate Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Noah D. Gardiner, “Forbidden Knowledge? Notes on the Production, Transmission, and Reception of the Major Works of Aḥmad al-Būnī,” Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 12 (2012): 81–143; Noah D. Gardiner, “Esotericist Reading Communities”; Melvin-Koushki, “Early Modern Islamicate Empire”; Matthew Melvin-Koushki and James Pickett, “Mobilizing Magic: Occultism in Central Asia and the Continuity of High Persianate Culture under Russian Rule,” Studia Islamica 111, no. 2 (2016): 231–284.

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knowledge of precious stones”) and developed by al-Tīfāshī’s popular Azhār al-afkār fī jawāhir al-aḥjār (“The blooms of considerations concerning precious stones”)—throughout the early modern period. Being later objects, these arms and armor are also useful to follow continuities and transformations of talismanic languages and motifs through time. The most interesting and resonant may be the imagery related to the Ahl al-Bayt—both through symbolic motifs such as Dhū l-Fiqār (ʿAlī’s mythical bifurcated sword) and the khamsa (“hand of Fāṭima”), and through formulas or ejaculations evoking ʿAlī and his progeny—and its proliferation in areas traditionally considered Sunni. The arms and armor produced in the Ottoman sphere provide additional evidence for the veneration of the Prophet and his family in this milieu, and they further support the argument that the public display of such piety aimed to appease Shiʿi/Sufi factions within the empire and to prevent the Safavids from establishing a monopoly over them.83 The blurring of Shiʿi and Sunni also emerges in Farouk Yahya’s contribution, dedicated to Southeast Asian adaptations of the Lion of ʿAlī for both devotional and talismanic purposes (Chapter 11). The choice of the shahāda and Q 61:13 in place of the more common nād-i ʿAlī, along with the replacement of the lion with the tiger, an animal with stronger magical associations in the region, reveals the degree of manipulation undertaken at both textual and visual levels in order to align the motifs with local sensibilities. At the same time the author’s examples, culled from various localities across Southeast Asia, document the survival of the broader associations with protection and well-wishing observed in other parts of the Islamicate world. The last two essays in the volume expand on the devotional contours of talismanic formulas and motifs. Chapter 12, by Francesca Leoni, deconstructs a large stamped talisman in order to highlight the harmonization of “magical” and “devotional” resources for a range of apotropaic and prophylactic aims. The object’s protective capital against adversities such as demons, jinn, and the evil eye consists of invocations to saints, repetitions of God’s names, supererogatory prayers, images of holy sites, and burials of Sufi leaders. In the author’s view, however, this apparatus is not simply talismanic vocabulary in an Islamic garb but a likely indication of the direct involvement of individuals endowed with spiritual stature and charisma in these motifs’ and devices’ actual fabrication. By considering the use and arrangement of this mighty syntax on the talisman,

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Zeynep Yürekli-Gorkay, “Dhūʾl-faqār and the Ottomans,” in People of the Prophet’s House, ed. Fahmida Suleman (London: Azimuth, Institute of Ismaili Studies, British Museum, 2015), 163–172.

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the author follows its transformation from a devotional tool to an empowering prophylactic resource for the desirable immediate benefit of diverse users. Chapter 13, by Christiane Gruber, brings the occult traditions to the modern day by reflecting on the contemporary incarnations and adaptations of centuries-old motifs stemming from the veneration of the prophet Muḥammad and his intercessory powers. Following the spread of protective commodities such as “blessing cards” (bereket kartelası) and “evil-eye beads” (nazar boncuğu) across Turkey, the author considers the shifts observable in their makeup, using the Arabic language as their main tool in the legalization of otherwise dubious activities and in the overall Islamization of the public sphere promoted by the Justice and Development Party (AKP). This compelling, additional act of erasure and reconfiguration of practices drawing on occultist traditions and knowledge by acting on their material incarnations acts as a final reminder of why the recognition of a scholarly and cultural status for the occult sciences is necessary. A postscript by Travis Zadeh brings the volume to full circle, meditating on its governing question: what is the relationship between theory and practice? To this end, he catalogs some of the many ways in which the gharīb sciences defy and trouble traditional conceptual divisions, both those of our historical actors and our own. With respect to the latter, Zadeh calls for a more sweeping deconstruction of the intellectual frameworks and master categories through which the Western academic study of Islam has been pursued to date, presenting as antidote to persistent colonialist tropes the radically fluid ways in which Muslim thinkers and doers have classified and experienced the occult and the marvelous over the centuries. “Magic” as a historiographical category thus becomes impossible to pin down, functioning in this sense as a mandala. But this is its great virtue, as its very elusiveness reminds us of the constructed nature of all our analytical categories. To study the occult sciences of the Islamic past and present is therefore to track the myriad ways in which knowledge is generated, and power is exercised, in human societies.

∵ We hope that the studies contained in Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice will help construct a more nuanced and broader understanding of the complexities surrounding this obscure, fascinating, and yet grossly understudied topic. The authors would like to express their gratitude to Emilie SavageSmith, Hans Daiber, and Anna Akasoy for first recognizing the value of their collaboration, and for encouraging them to develop it into the present volume. They would also like to acknowledge the support of the publisher, Brill, and its

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editors and copyeditors. Special thanks go to Kristen Alvanson, who graciously let us use her evocative and wonderfully fitting artwork Abjad 03 as the cover image for the volume.

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Farhad, Massumeh, with Serpil Bağcı. Falnama: Book of Omens. Washington, DC: Freer and Sackler Gallery, 2009. Farouk Yahya. Magic and Divination in Malay Illustrated Manuscripts. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Farouk Yahya. “Divination and ‘Magic’ in Islamic Medicine.” In Al-Tibb: Healing Traditions in Islamic Medical Manuscripts, edited by Siti Marina Maidin, 190–193. Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, 2018. Felek, Özgen. Kitābü’l-Menāmāt: Sultan III. Murad’ın Rüya Mektupları. Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2014. Felek, Özgen. “Fears, Hopes and Dreams: The Talismanic Shirts of Murad III.” In “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” edited by Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner. Special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 647–672. Felek, Özgen, and Alexander Knysh, eds. Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012. Gardiner, Noah. “Forbidden Knoweldge? Notes on the Production, Transmission, and Reception of the Major Works of Ahmad al-Buni.” Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 12 (2012): 81–143. Gardiner, Noah. “Esotericism in a Manuscript Culture: Aḥmad al-Būnī and His Readers through the Mamlūk Period.” PhD diss., Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, 2014. Gardiner, Noah. “Esotericist Reading Communities and the Early Circulation of the Sufi Occultist Ahmad al-Buni’s Works.” In “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” edited by Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner. Special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 405–441. al-Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid. Tahāfut al-falāsifa, edited by Sulaymān Dunyā. Cairo: Dār alMaʿārif, 1966. Greppin, John A.C., Emilie Savage-Smith, and John L. Gueriguian, eds. The Diffusion of Greco-Roman Medicine into the Middle East and the Caucasus. Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1999. Günther, Sebastian, and Dorothee Pielow, eds. Die Geheimnisse der oberen und der unteren Welt Magie im Islam zwischen Glaube und Wissenschaft. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Günther, Sebastian, and Dorothee Pielow. “Magie im Islam: Gegenstand, Geschichte und Diskurs.” In Die Geheimnisse der oberen und der unteren Welt Magie im Islam zwischen Glaube und Wissenschaft, edited by Sebastian Günther and Dorothee Pielow, 3–95. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Ḥājjī Khalīfa. Kashf al-ẓunūn, edited by Muḥammad Yaltaqāyā and Rifʿat al-Kalisā, 2 vols. Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, n.d. Hallum, Bink. “Zosimus Arabus: The Reception of Zosimos of Panopolis in the Arabic/ Islamic World.” PhD diss., London, Warburg Institute, 2008.

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Islam,” edited by Pierre Lory and Annick Regourd. Special issue of Bulletin d’études orientales 44 (1992 [1993]): 19–32. Lemay, Richard, ed. and trans. Abū Maʿshar’s Kitāb al-mudhkal al-kabīr ila ʿilm ahkām al-nujūm, 9 vols. Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1995–1996. Lemay, Richard. “Religion vs Science in Islam: The Medieval Debate around Astrology.” Oriente Moderno, n.s., 80, no. 3 (2000): 557–575. Lenzi, Alan, and Jonathan Støkl, eds. Divination, Politics, and Ancient Near Eastern Empires. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014. Leoni, Francesca, ed. Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2016. Leoni, Francesca. “Islamic Occultism and the Museum.” In “Installing Islamic Art: Interior Space and Temporal Imagination,” edited by Yuka Kadoi. Special issue of International Journal of Islamic Architecture 7, no. 2 (2018): 327–351. Livingstone, John W. “Science and the Occult in the thinking of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 112, no. 4 (1992): 598–610. Loimeier, Roman. “Patterns and Peculiarities of Islamic Reform in Africa.” Journal of Religion in Africa 33, no. 3 (2003): 237–262. Lory, Pierre, and Annick Regourd, eds. “Sciences Occultes et Islam.” Special issue of Bulletin d’études orientales 44 (1992 [1993]). Lowry, James, ed. Displaced Archives. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017. MacGregor, Arthur. Ark to Ashmolean: The Story of the Tradescants, Ashmole and the Ashmolean Museum. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1983. Maddison, Francis, and Emilie Savage Smith. Science, Tools and Magic. 2 vols. London: Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1997. Magdalino, Paul, and Maria Mavroudi, eds. The Occult Sciences in Byzantium. Geneva: La Pomme d’Or, 2007. Masud, Muhammad Khalid, Armando Salvatore and Martin van Bruinessen, eds. Islam and Modernity: Key Issues and Debates. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Melvin-Koushki, Matthew. “(De)colonizing Early Modern Occult Philosophy.” Review essay on Liana Saif, The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 12, no. 1 (2017): 98–112. Melvin-Koushki, Matthew. “Introduction: De-orienting the Study of Islamicate Occultism.” In “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” edited by Matthew MelvinKoushki and Noah Gardiner. Special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 287– 295. Melvin-Koushki, Matthew. “Powers of One: The Mathematicalization of the Occult Sciences in the High Persianate Tradition.”Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 5, no. 1 (2017): 127–199.

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Melvin-Koushki, Matthew. “Early Modern Islamicate Empire: New Forms of Religiopolitical Legitimacy.” In The Wiley-Blackwell History of Islam, edited by Armando Salvatore, Roberto Tottoli, and Babak Rahimi, 353–375. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018. Melvin-Koushki, Matthew. “Persianate Geomancy from Ṭūsī to the Millennium: A Preliminary Survey.” In Occult Sciences in Pre-modern Islamic Cultures, edited by Nader El-Bizri and Eva Orthmann, 151–199. Beirut: Orient-Institut Beirut, 2018. Melvin-Koushki, Matthew. “Magic in Islam between Religion and Science.” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 14, no. 2 (2019): 255–287. Melvin-Koushki, Matthew. The Lettrist Treatises of Ibn Turka: Reading and Writing the Cosmos in the Timurid Renaissance. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming. Melvin-Koushki, Matthew. The Occult Science of Empire in Aqquyunlu-Safavid Iran: Two Shirazi Lettrists and Their Manuals of Magic. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming. Melvin-Koushki, Matthew, and Noah Gardiner, eds. “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives.” Special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017). Melvin-Koushki, Matthew, and James Pickett. “Mobilizing Magic: Occultism in Central Asia and the Continuity of High Persianate Culture under Russian Rule.” Studia Islamica 111, no. 2 (2016): 231–284. Meyer, Marvin, and Paul A. Mirecki. Ancient Magic and Ritual Power. Leiden: Brill, 1995. Muravchick, Rose E. “Objectifying the Occult: Studying an Islamic Talismanic Shirt as an Embodied Object.” In “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” edited by Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner. Special double issue 0f Arabica 64, nos. 3– 4 (2017): 673–693. Orthmann, Eva. “The Sources and the Composition of the Dustūr al-munajjimīn.” In Science in the City of Fortune: The Dustūr al-munajjimīn and Its World, edited by Eva Orthmann and Petra Schmidl, 35–114. Berlin: EBVerlag, 2017. Orthmann, Eva. “Lettrism and Magic in an Early Mughal Text: Muḥammad Ghawth’s Kitāb al-Jawāhir al-Khams.” In Occult Sciences in Pre-modern Islamic Cultures, edited by Nader El-Bizri and Eva Orthmann, 223–247. Beirut: Orient-Institut Beirut, 2018. Otto, Bernd-Christian. “Magie im Islam: Eine diskursgeschichtliche Perspektive.” In Die Geheimnisse der oberen und der unteren Welt Magie im Islam zwischen Glaube und Wissenschaft, edited by Sebastian Günther and Dorothee Pielow, 515–546. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Palazzo, Alessandro, and Irene Zavattero, eds. Geomancy and Other Forms of Divination. Florence: SISMEL, 2017. Pels, Peter. “Introduction: Magic and Modernity.” In Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment, edited by Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels, 1–38. Redwood, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

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part 1 Occult Theories: Inception and Reception

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chapter 2

The Three Divisions of Arabic Magic Charles Burnett

In the well-known early fourth/tenth-century Arabic text on magic called the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm, translated into Castilian in 1256, and soon after into Latin under the title Picatrix, magic (Ar., siḥr, Lat., nigromantia) is described as consisting of three divisions: nīranjāt, talismans, and alchemy. These three terms may suggest three different traditions that are brought together in the Arabic world. Nīranj is the Arabic transcription of the Middle Persian word ‘nerank’ used for an incantation or ritual formula, “talisman” is clearly the Greek word telesma, originally meaning “completer,” and alchemy, according to one theory, derives its name from the Egyptian word for the black earth of the fertile Nile delta. But it is not on ethnic lines that the author of the Ghāya (now most plausibly identified as Maslama al-Qurṭubī1) differentiates between the three divisions. Rather, he uses the categories of spirit (Ar., rūḥ) and body (Ar., jasad): nīranjāt involve the operation of spirit on spirit, talismans, of spirit on body, and alchemy, of body on body. What does he mean by this distinction? Is it invoked only for its beautiful symmetry? Or does it accurately describe the actual processes that characterize these three divisions of magic? Before investigating this we may wonder what grounds there are for thinking that there can be three kinds of magic, no more, no less. Reading Isidore of Seville’s account of magic in the Etymologiae one would think that there were innumerable kinds of magic, and this is also the impression given by Ḥājjī Khalīfa in his Kashf al-ẓunūn (“Removal of doubts”) written in Arabic nine centuries later.2 But this trilogy of divisions is confirmed by the account of the great Persian-Arabic writer on philosophy and medicine, Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 428/1037), who, in his book Divisions of the Intellectual Sciences, as the last three of the “practical branches” of natural science, gives precisely these three “sciences.” His description of them is more detailed than Maslama’s, but there are resemblances. Avicenna writes:

1 Maribel Fierro, “Bāṭinism in al-Andalus. Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī (d. 353/964), Author of the Rutbat al-Ḥakīm and the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm (Picatrix),” Studia Islamica 84 (1996): 87–112. 2 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, ed. W.M. Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 2:ix, 1–35; Toufic Fahd, La Divination arabe (Leiden: Brill, 1966), 40.

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– The aim of the science of talismans is to mix the heavenly powers with those of certain terrestrial bodies in order that from this a power may be produced which accomplishes a strange (Ar., gharīb) action in the earthly world (i.e., “spirit on body”). – The aim of the science of nīranjāt3 is to mix the powers that are found in the substances of the earthly world in order that from these a power may be produced from which a strange action emanates (i.e., “body on body”). – The aim of the science of alchemy is to take out of mineral substances their own properties and enrich them with the properties of other substances … in order to produce gold and silver (again, “body on body”).4 There is another treatise by Avicenna, called “On Action and Passion” (Risāla fī al-fiʿl wa al-infiʿāl) in which Avicenna divides all actions into four categories according to the relation of nafs (soul or psyche) and jism (body): nafsānī (psychical) on jusmānī (corporeal); nafsānī on nafsānī; jusmānī on nafsānī; and jusmānī on jusmānī. We may ask whether nafs is exactly the same as rūḥ (spirit) and whether jism (body) is the same as jasad (body), but his explanation of each of these categories gives an idea of what he is referring to: (1) Psychical action on psychical is like the action of the separate intellects, one on another, as is discussed in the Metaphysics, and like the influence of these intellects on the souls of men either in sleep or in a wakeful state. (2) Psychical action on corporeal is like the action of psychical powers on the four elements when they mix them so that there arise the compounds of minerals, plants, and animals; and the subsequent actions of these psychical powers on nourishing these compounds, making them grow and develop until they reach their completion (one may imagine forms acting on matter). (3) Corporeal action on psychical is like the effect of beautiful forms on human souls (one may imagine the effect of a beautiful woman or landscape). (4) Finally, corporeal action on corporeal is like the action of the elements on one another, and the change from one into another, like the change of water into air, and air into water, and the change of air into fire and fire

3 The manuscripts vary between this spelling and nīranjiyyāt. 4 See Jean Michot, “Les sciences physiques et métaphysiques selon la Risālah fī Aqsām al-ʿulūm d’ Avicenne: Essai de traduction critique,” Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 22 (1980): 62–73, esp. 67.

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into air, and so on with the rest of the elements. This action is also discernible at the level of compounds, when drugs and poisons act on the bodies of men and animals.5 It is at the end of this last category, with its implication of medicine, that nīranjāt, talismans, and alchemy all appear, classified as examples of “action of the corporeal on the corporeal.” But Avicenna qualifies this by saying that corporeal things can never be considered separately from the psychic powers in them. He refers to the necessity of operating with them at the right time and in the right place and with the right elements and natural combinations of elements. But this discussion of the action of body on body leads Avicenna to discuss that of a particular kind of body on a particular kind of body, that is, of metals on metals, and how it is possible to change one of them into another, and how some of them are called bodies (Ar., ajsād) and some are called spirits (Ar., arwāḥ). This science, he says, is called alchemy. The ultimate position of these sciences in all these discussions is probably not accidental. The very name of Maslama’s Ghāyat al-ḥakīm (“The aim [or goal] of the wise man”) indicates that its subject, magic, is the culmination of the program of education of the wise man. It deals with two of the three divisions of magic: nīranjāt and talismans. But the Ghāya is described as the second natīja (outcome or fruit) of learning, of which the Rutbat al-ḥakīm (“The rank of the wise man”), by the same author, is the first. This book is on alchemy.6 Maslama begins the Rutba by describing geometry, astronomy, logic and the Peripatetic natural sciences as the foundation for alchemy, and the scholar must have mastered these subjects before he reaches the requisite rank (Ar., rutba) for studying alchemy. Using the root r-t-b as a metaphor, Maslama describes the psychical and intellectual progress of the wise man in terms of a ladder, whose final steps (Ar. martabāt) are alchemy and magic. The same language, incidentally, reappears in Latin in the Opus maius of Roger Bacon (d. 1292), the template for a new curriculum of learning that he sent to Pope Clement IV in 1267 (a mere ten years after the translation of the Ghāyat alḥakīm into Castilian), in which alchemy again appears as the culmination of

5 Ibn Sīnā, Risālat al-fiʿl wa-l-infiʿāl, in Majmūʿ rasāʾil al-shaykh al-raʾīs, ed. ʿAbdallāh b. Aḥmad al-ʿAlawī (Hyderabad: Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif, 1935), 221–230. Jean Michot has translated two pages of this text into French and commented on it in “Cultes, magie et intellection. L’homme et sa corporéité selon Avicenne,” in L’ homme et son univers en Moyen Age: actes du septième Congrès international de philosophie médiévale, ed. Christian Wenin, 2 vols. (Louvain-la-Neuve: Editions de l’ Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1986), 1:220–233. 6 Godefroid de Callataÿ, “Magia en al-Andalus: Rasāʾil Ijwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rutbat al-Ḥakīm y Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm (Picatrix),” Al-Qanṭara 34, no. 2 (2013): 297–344.

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intellectual study. For Roger, alchemy supersedes the other arts and sciences because it adds practice (action) to theory.7 Another companion to the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm was the Epistles of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, the Brethren of Purity, which appeared in al-Andalus at the same time as the Ghāya and was promoted by Maslama to such an extent that it was considered by Arabic authorities to be a third work of Maslama. It included nīranjāt and talismans. Its last letter is on magic,8 which it defines as “all words and actions that ‘magic’ (using the verbal form of the root s-ḥ-r, which also gives siḥr) souls and bind intellects.”9 The “sciences of magic” are defined as the knowledge of the action of a soul on another soul or on a body (less specific than in the Ghāya) and are divided in a slightly different way from what we find in the Ghāya. An aetiological myth is told of women and men each being given a set of secrets and then these two sets being interwoven, so that words from one set alternate with those of the other (male, female, male, female, etc.). Then four sciences with their canons and proofs are formed from this interwoven text: medicine, alchemy, astrology, and talismans.10 What we are dealing with, then, is a body of knowledge that occupies the highest position in human development. It is no mere sleight-of-hand. It is a means for a human being to discover the hidden realities in the universe and to act as a co-creator with God. The common features of this knowledge are alchemy, talismans, and nīranjāt, and the leitmotif is action.

∵ Let us start from the bottom: alchemy. Alchemy is the corporeal science, whose materials are the whole of God’s creatures, divided into animal, vegetable, and mineral. Alchemical recipes use only material ingredients. In ps.-Rāzī, De aluminibus et salibus we read:

7 8

9

10

Roger Bacon, Opus maius, ed. John Henry Bridges, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), 2:214. The shorter version of this letter has been edited by Godefroid de Callataÿ and Bruno Halflants: The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, On Magic. 1. An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistle 52A (Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2011). On the longer version, see Liana Saif’s article in this volume. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil, 4 vols. (Bombay edition), 4:310, 17–19 (longer version). This definition is taken up in Picatrix. “Das Ziel des Weisen” von Pseudo-Maǧrīṭī, I. Arabischer Text, ed. H. Ritter (Leipzig: Teubner, 1933), 7, line 1. De Callataÿ and Halflants, On Magic, 63. We shall return to the addition of medicine below.

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Lead is cold and dry, and it belongs to the division of Kaywān.11 The Moon (silver) and the Sun (gold) are in it potentially, not visibly. It is a heavy body, slow in movement, taking on color [plus “with difficulty” L] but, when it takes it on, it is not able to be separated from it. When you exalt it, it brings forth silver which is its daughter, and from it you make litharge, white lead, and red lead. From it is made an elixir of profound redness and whiteness, and from it are produced liquids which bind the “slave” (quicksilver). The liquids are compatible with Mars (iron), and when they are mixed with it they do not separate from it. It is mixed with tin and does not separate from it. It is alloyed with prepared Venus (copper) and joins with silver but is separated from it by purification. It is not purified immediately with the Sun (gold), but its vapor breaks up the Sun (gold).12 There are no numinous influences brought to bear—whether they be the rays of the planets, or the effects of spirits. The material objects themselves are the focus, and they are glorified. I quote from the same work a passage concerning salt: Because of its whiteness men have named it “the silver of the common people,” both because all men need it and because it restores the bodies of men to health and directs the path of their life. And God on high did not praise anything among His Creation in the Torah as much as He praised salt.13 The planets feature not as spiritual influences but only as the names ennobling the metals. Within this world of materials one has a microcosm of the greater world, with planets and, even more, with spirits and bodies. The same words are used (Ar., rūḥ, jism; Lat., spiritus, corpus), but this time it is the material substances themselves that are divided between the two: those substances that can vaporize (or are volatile) are spirits, those that cannot are bodies. Also, each material can be described in terms of its external/manifest qualities, which are its body, and its internal/hidden qualities, which are its spirit. Thus, mercury is cold and moist outside (“through its body”) and hot and dry inside (“through

11 12

13

The Persian name of Saturn. Ps.-Rāzī, Das Buch der Alaune und Salze, ed. Julius Ruska (Berlin: Verlag Chemie GMBH, 1935), 49 (“L” indicates a variant in the Latin text, ed. and trans. in Catherine Arbuthnott, ps.-Rāzī, De aluminibus et salibus, forthcoming). My translation. Ps.-Rāzī, Alaune und Salze, 52.

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its spirit”).14 This last reference comes from a work in which these theories are fully described, the Latin translation of a lost Arabic alchemical treatise made in Spain in the 1220s, and it is significant that anima appears in its title: De anima in arte alchemica (“about the soul in the alchemical art”).15 Spirits or souls feature in alchemy. Even so, the emphasis is on the visual and sensible: on the shape, the brightness, and, above all, the color of the materials.

∵ The next stage is that of talismans. In this case the body is the material out of which the talisman is made; noble materials are used for good effects, base materials for bad. The spirit is brought into the body to enliven it. Thābit b. Qurra, the late third/ninth-century authority on talismans, quotes a significant sentence at the beginning of his work: “No body has life that lacks spirit” (lā ḥayāta li-l-jism lā rūḥ fīhi).16 This spirit is brought into the matter by prayer (Ar., khiṭāb, Lat., oratio) and the burning of incense (Ar., dakhn, Lat., suffumigatio). The talisman must be made in the appropriate shape, as for a serpent for binding snakes and a woman for making a woman take off her veil. In one recently discovered Arabic version of Thābit’s text the spirit is apparently lacking. We read the following about the instructions for a talisman for making rulers favorable: A talisman used for making contact between the ruler and one of his men … so that he inclines towards him with friendship, and his status with [the ruler] is raised. If you wish to make it, you begin first by assigning to him the ascendant, confirming this with correct thought. Then you observe whether there is between the lord of the ascendant and the lord of the tenth place conjunction or reception. And if you find the lord of the ascendant is joined to the lord of the tenth in trine or sextile [aspect] and

14

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16

Sébastien Moureau, Le De anima alchimique du Pseudo-Avicenne, 2 vols. (Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2016), 2:131: “Aurum vivum est humidum et frigidum et calidum et siccum: frigidum et humidum per corpus suum, calidum et siccum per spiritum suum” (“Mercury is humid-and-cold and hot-and-dry: cold-and-humid through its body, hot-anddry through its spirit”). Moureau, Le De anima alchimique du Pseudo-Avicenne. The title De anima in arte alchemiae appears in the printed edition of Mino Celsi (1572), while the manuscripts of this alchemical text usually call it simply De anima. In the context, Thābit is applying this dictum to the fact that no wisdom (“body”) is complete without the knowledge of the science of the stars (“spirit”); the sentence is quoted in Picatrix, ed. Ritter, 37.

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there is full reception between them, and they are both in a good condition and unharmed by the malefics, the matter will be fulfilled: it is a sound talisman which will be very effective …. And when you have completed the sculpture of the mold according to these conditions, complete the form of the man from lead, tin or copper—whichever agrees with the ascendant of his nativity (horoscope), if you know it, or with the ascendant of his question. Name the talisman with the name and cognomen by which the man is known … and benefit the ascendant with a powerful benefic, which should not be retrograde, cadent, or burnt. And the [lord of the] ascendant should be powerful, in a good position, in direct course, and in one of its dignities …. You should cast the talisman according to these conditions. When you have done all this, his ruler will incline towards him with friendship, and will not prefer [anyone] over him, and will bestow favors on him, and he will achieve high esteem and will be the man closest to him and the most honored in his court, as long as the talisman lasts, until death separates them.17 While the sixth/twelfth-century Latin translation of John of Seville follows this text closely, a different Arabic version is clearly the origin of an earlier translation by Adelard of Bath. This differs in that incense and prayers are added and spirits are invoked to make the talismans effective. Here is an excerpt from the description of how the talisman for love is created: When friendship is the aim, first the ascendant should be noted and the appropriateness or otherwise of the topic should be considered … [several other astrological considerations are mentioned] …. Having done this, keeping the aim in mind, one should cast a talisman of association in a mold shaped like a human figure. Then the [client’s] usual name should be put on the cast. Then for him from whom friendship is desired, a second talisman should be made, with the ascendant and the eleventh place from the topic. This done, on each of the talismans the names and cognomens of each of them should be written. Afterwards, the talismans should be placed together like this: the second behind the first, and the name of the first, written in any way you like, applied to the breast of the second, opened on the side of the heart. Then, the rings of the Lords of 17

This translation is taken from Charles Burnett and Gideon Bohak, “A Judaeo-Arabic Version of Ṯābit ibn Qurra’s De imaginibus and Pseudo-Ptolemy’s Opus imaginum,” in Islamic Philosophy, Science, Culture, and Religion, ed. Felicitas Opwis and David Reisman (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 179–200, esp. 188–194.

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the ascendant and the eleventh place should be painted on a clean cloth or on virgin parchment, and the two talismans, scented with musk and camphor, should be wrapped in this; after being fumigated with saffron, aloes-wood and frankincense. Do this three nights in a row, after bathing and wearing clean clothes, and whilst you are doing this pray as follows: “O shining spirits of the planets, you who descend from al-ʿālam [i.e. the macrocosm], effectors of good and evil! Bind the spirit of Socrates son of Sophronicus to the heart of Plato. Let their will and desire be one; let loathing and rejection be absent; but let the imagining and remembering [of the other] be always present. Be present too, spirits of these planets, not only by day, but also in the night and in their sleep. Bring the picture of [Socrates’] image before [Plato’s] eyes to such an extent that, all other feelings excluded, he gives himself totally to him, by the power of God.” This done, the talismans should be bound in a girdle of the same nature as these lords of the houses. Then they should be buried in the house of one of them in such a way that they are ventilated by the wind blowing through the entrance of the house, but are not struck by the rays of the Sun at all; a benefic being in the ascendant at the time of the burying.18 It may be no coincidence that the “image” of the beloved person is the same word as that used for the talisman (Lat., imago), for both images have power over the spirit of Socrates. Intense concentration must be brought to bear when making the talisman. Above all the right astrological conditions have to be observed. Hence the talismanic art is considered part of the astrological art of elections: the choosing of the best time astrologically for undertaking any activity—the time when the influences from the stars are most supportive.19

∵ Finally, we come to the nīranj, the spirit working on the spirit. The nīranj is a magical practice that includes a combination of mixing and processing ingredi18

19

Adelard of Bath (trans.), Liber prestigiorum Thebidis secundum Ptolomeum et Hermetem, ed. and trans. Charles Burnett, 43–57; see also, Thābit ibn Qurra, On Talismans and PseudoPtolemy On Images 1–9: a Reconstruction Based on the Judaeo-Arabic and Latin Texts, Together with the Liber Prestigiorum Thebidis, editions, translations and studies by Gideon Bohak and Charles Burnett (forthcoming). This is its position in the Speculum Astronomiae; Paola Zambelli, The Speculum Astronomiae and its Enigma: Astrology, Theology and Science in Albertus Magnus and his Contemporaries (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1992), 240–241.

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ents, invoking spiritual beings, burning incense (suffumigation), and making figurines in order to manipulate spiritual forces.20 In the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm several procedures are described as being nīranjāt. Here is the one that has the same function as the talisman quoted above: A nīranj called Bāgīs used for attracting the hearts of kings to their people, their love toward them, and their inclination to kindness and gentleness. What you do is take wax that is totally unused and make from it a hollow figurine in the name of the relevant king. Then take a dāniq portion from the brain of a gazelle, two dāniq from the brain of a hare, and a mithqālportion of human blood, and mix them all together in a crucible. Then throw onto the mixture half a mithqāl of ground camphor, two dāniq of ambergris, and half a dāniq of musk. Melt this and mix it until it congeals. When it has congealed through melting, pierce the head of the figurine and pour [the mixture] into it. Leave it until it has cooled. When it is cold, stick a piece of wax over that hole. Then take four mithqāl of human blood, two mithqāl of the blood of a white cockerel, two mithqāl of the brain of a horse, the measure of a dāniq of musk and camphor, and a mithqāl of the melted rump of a ewe. Combine them all in a crucible and melt [the mixture] until it congeals. When it has congealed, pierce the throat [of the image] and pour [the mixture] into it. Then leave it until it has cooled. When it is cold, stick a piece of wax [over the hole]. Then take a thin, unused, silver needle, and thrust it into the breast, without it coming out of the other side. While thrusting say: “Aqryūs, Ghīdāyūs, Yāhīlās, Yhīdūs.” Then place the figurine in a new [earthen L] crucible, smeared with clay. When you have completed this [operation], take half a mithqāl of ground frankincense and galbanum and a mithqāl of the eye of a white cockerel. Combine all of this. Then take the figurine, some incense, and an incense-burner, and go to the top of a mountain that looks down over the country and dig on it a hole that is big enough for it [the figurine], and bury it in the hole up to its head [head down L], then place over the head of the container a stone or baked brick and put the earth back around it until it is covered. Then throw the incense onto the fire, and say, while you are doing this: “Akrārūs, Mndūrās, Fīlāhūs and Ramālīs, incline the heart of so-and-so (naming him) with love, affection, and kindness toward so-and-so by the power of these spiritual spirits (Ar., arwāḥ 20

See Charles Burnett, “Nīranj: A Category of Magic (Almost) Forgotten in the Latin West,” in Natura, scienze e società medievali. Studi in onore di Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008), 37–66.

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rūḥāniyya) Bndūrās, Inmūs, Kfīnās, Mādlūs.” And when you have done this, you may depart and be sure from this of his inclination, kindness, and closeness to him and reception of him.21 One can see how Avicenna might describe the nīranj as the mixing of corporeal with corporeal, since most of the ingredients are of a bodily nature, but what is effected is the drawing of a spirit by a spirit. Even the ingredients, macabre as they are, may imply this, for the brains of animals, the seat of the sensible spirits and the emotions, are prominent among them. Nīranjāt are particularly appropriate to control emotional or psychological situations: love or hatred between two people, obedience and subjection, causing impotence, and releasing from impotence. The spirit is the means of sensation, and the nīranjāt that precede the one quoted here operate respectively through being seen, smelled, and tasted by the object of the activity. Spiritual forces (Ar., arwāḥ rūḥāniyya, Lat., spiritus spiritualium) are invoked to empower the action. The magician’s spirit has the power to draw and bind, something expressed in the sixteenth century by Henry Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia: “For there is in spirits of men a power of changing, attracting, impeding, and binding things and men to what it desires; and all things obey it [the spirit], when it is carried into a great excess of some passion or power to such an extent that it overcomes those whom it binds.”22 The word nīranj is also used for “party tricks.”23 This is, however, not incongruent, for, if we turn back to Avicenna’s Fiʿl wa-infiʿāl, we find the following, as the continuation of the description of the effect of the psychical on the psychical: “the influence of powerful human souls on the imaginative and estimative powers of weaker souls, like those of stupid people and children.” This would include illusionism and sleight-of-hand. And in the Ghāya’s account of the action of spirit in spirit, the word nīranjāt is followed by takhayyul, which can also mean “deception.”24

21

22

23 24

Picatrix, ed. Ritter, 256, line 1 and 257, line 5. My translation. Variants are indicated (as L) from the Latin Picatrix, ed. David Pingree (London: Warburg Institute, 1986), 154–155. For the translation of another nīranj (for the love of a girl), see Burnett, “Nīranj,” 41–42. Henry Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres, ed. Vittoria Perrone Compagni (Leiden: Brill, 1992), I, chap. lxviii (“Quomodo animus noster potest permutare et ligare res inferiores ad id quod desiderat”): “Inest etiam hominum animis virtus quaedam immutandi, attrahendi, impediendi et ligandi res et homines ad id quod desiderat: et omnes res obedient illi, quando fertur in magnum excessum alicuius passionis vel virtutis in tantum ut superet eos quos ligat.” As in Fahd, Divination arabe, 40. This is also implied in the Latin translation: “et hoc est in faciendo res similes que non

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Conclusion: Embodying the Spirit of Magic Man is not only the operator of these divisions of magic: in a way, he can also become their embodiment. Three observations apply here: 1) The most obvious operation within man is that of body on body: the mixing of the four elemental qualities to form the humors. Plato’s reference in the Timaeus to the use of the most noble of these elements to make man, the highest of God’s creatures, was echoed by Hermann of Carinthia in the mid-twelfth century (he is also one of the first to quote the Arabic magical texts discussed here), when he describes how the Creator chose the most apt elements for the soul.25 And medicine, which can restore the equal temperament of the humors is, as we have seen, ranked by the Ikhwān aṣ-Ṣafāʾ alongside astrology, magic, and alchemy as one of the four supreme sciences.26 2) The spirit’s operation on body can also be applied to the human experience. At the beginning of his text on talismans, as mentioned above, Thābit b. Qurra justifies the talismanic art by stating that “No body has life which lacks spirit.” The supreme example of a spirit dwelling in a body is that of man. The original meaning of “necromancy” (which, in the Latin Picatrix, is the name for magic in general) was divination through the dead, and the thirteenth-century Liber Theysolius gives detailed instructions on how to summon a spirit to enter a dead human body, so that it can advise and counsel the magician.27 The vivification of talismans is a continuation of the ancient practice of vivifying statues. The Arabic word for “statue,” ṣanam, is applied to the talisman. But the Ghāya also uses this word to describe man himself: “He is a ṣanam, and inside him is a light, and his body is the ṣanam for that light, and his soul is the dweller in it.”28

25 26 27 28

sunt essencia” (“and this involves making look-alikes that do not exist in reality”): Picatrix, ed. Pingree, 5, ll. 9–10. Hermann of Carinthia, De essentiis, ed. Charles Burnett (Leiden: Brill, 1982), 230–231, recalling Plato, Timaeus, 44D. See above, at note 10. Sophie Page, “Magic and the Pursuit of Wisdom: The ‘Familiar’ Spirit in the Liber Theysolius,” La Corónica 36, no. 1 (2007): 41–70. Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, 43, Latin Picatrix, 26, lines 26–27; see Charles Burnett, “Magic in the Court of Alfonso el Sabio: the Latin Translation of the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm,” in De Frédéric II à Rodolphe II. Astrologie, divination et magie dans les cours (XIIIe–XVIIe siècle), ed. JeanPatrice Boudet, Martine Ostorero, and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2017) 37–52, esp. 50–51.

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3)

In interrogational astrology and geomancy, man’s spirit is in contact with higher spirits. In interrogational astrology the client’s concentration on a question that he wishes to pose to the astrologer is guided by the spirits of the stars (the stars being animate beings) to such an extent that the astrologer can find an answer to that question simply by casting a horoscopic chart for the moment when the concentration is at its strongest.29 Similarly, heavenly forces influence the mind of the geomancer when he draws the random lines of dots from which the geomantic figures are composed. In both cases we have spirit effecting spirit, as in the nīranjāt. Ibn Khaldūn, one of our finest witnesses to medieval Arabic magic, in his Muqaddima, written in North Africa in the 770s/1370s (with subsequent revisions), criticizes astrological interrogations because they are based on the belief that the mind of man is influenced by the stars (whereas nativities cast for the birth of a child and the conjunctions of the higher planets observed for world history are based on their effects on corporeal natures).30 He attacked geomancy for the same reason.31 Here we have the spirit operating on the spirit. “Spirits,” in sum, can mean many things. They can be effluences (from the stars or from earthly bodies); they can be rays (as described in detail by al-Kindī’s On the Rays or The Book of Magical Theory32); they can sometimes be identified with souls, or parts of the soul, or with angels or daemones. But what is consistent is that, in magical works, the term “spirit” is the one most commonly used (rūḥ or rūḥāniyya in Arabic; spiritus in Latin). The way in which this spirit combines with body thus lies at the heart of Arabic magic. To categorize all the

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Interrogations, according to Speculum astronomiae (a summary of the contents of ArabicLatin astrology), chap. 9, “teach how to make a judgement about something about which an interrogation has been made cum intentione radicali (with radical intent)” (ed. Zambelli, 234). In chap. 14 of the same work, this refers to the involvement of the “root” horoscope (i.e., that of the nativity), and rather the sollicitudo (“concern”) of the client at the time of the interrogation is emphasized, which depends on the contemporary state of the ambient (“Sollicitudo enim hominis in hora interrogationis erit secundum habitudinem circuli”; ed. Zambelli, 234). Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, translated from the Arabic by Franz Rosenthal, 3 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), 1:228. On this attack and the contemporary response to it, see Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “In Defense of Geomancy: Šaraf al-Dīn Yazdī Rebuts Ibn Ḫaldūn’s Critique of the Occult Sciences,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 346–403. Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddimah, 1:231. Marie-Thérèse d’ Alverny and Francoise Hudry, “Al-Kindi, De radiis,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age, année 1974 (1975): 139–260.

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types of magic according to these combinations, as in the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm and by Avicennan scholars thereafter, therefore makes eminent sense.

Bibliography Primary Sources Adelard of Bath, trans. Liber prestigiorum Thebidis secundum Ptolomeum et Hermetem, edited and translated by Charles Burnett. Forthcoming. Agrippa, Henry Cornelius. De occulta philosophia libri tres, edited by Vittoria Perrone Compagni. Leiden: Brill, 1992. Bacon, Roger. Opus maius, edited by John Henry Bridges, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897. Hermann of Carinthia. De essentiis, edited by Charles Burnett. Leiden: Brill, 1982. Ibn Khaldūn, Abū Zayd ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Muḥammad. Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, translated from the Arabic by Franz Rosenthal, 3 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958. Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna). Risālat al-fiʿl wa-l-infiʿāl, in Majmūʿ rasāʾil al-shaykh al-raʾīs, edited by ʿAbdallāh b. Aḥmad al-ʿAlawī. Hyderabad: Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif, 1935. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ. Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ. 4 vols. Bombay: Maṭbaʿat Nukhbat al-Akhbar, 1305–1306/1887–1889. Isidore of Seville. Etymologiae, edited by Wallace M. Lindsay, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911. ps.-Rāzī. Das Buch der Alaune und Salze, edited by Julius Ruska. Berlin: Verlag Chemie, 1935. ps.-Rāzī. De aluminibus et salibus, edited and translated by Catherine Arbuthnott. Forthcoming. al-Qurṭubī, Maslama. Picatrix. “Das Ziel des Weisen” von Pseudo-Maǧrīṭī, I. Arabischer Text, edited by Hellmut Ritter. Leipzig: Teubner, 1933.

Secondary Sources Burnett, Charles. “Nīranj: A Category of Magic (Almost) Forgotten in the Latin West.” In Natura, scienze e società medievali. Studi in onore di Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, edited by Claudio Leonardi and Francesco Santi, 37–66. Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008. Burnett, Charles. “Magic in the Court of Alfonso el Sabio: The Latin Translation of the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm.” In De Frédéric II à Rodolphe II. Astrologie, divination et magie dans les cours (XIIIe–XVIIe siècle), edited by Jean-Patrice Boudet, Martine Ostorero, and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, 37–52. Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2017. Burnett, Charles, and Gideon Bohak. “A Judaeo-Arabic Version of Ṯābit ibn Qurra’s De

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imaginibus and Pseudo-Ptolemy’s Opus imaginum.” In Islamic Philosophy, Science, Culture, and Religion, edited by Felicitas Opwis and David Reisman, 179–200. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Callataÿ, Godefroid de. “Magia en al-Andalus: Rasāʾil Ijwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rutbat al-ḥakīm y Ġāyat al-ḥakīm (Picatrix).” Al-Qanṭara 34, no. 2 (2013): 297–344. Callataÿ, Godefroid de, and Bruno Halflants, eds. and trans. The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, On Magic. 1. An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistle 52a. Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2011. D’ Alverny, Marie-Thérèse, and Françoise Hudry. “Al-Kindi: De radiis.” Archives d’historie doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 41 (1974): 139–260. Fahd, Toufic. La divination arabe. Leiden: Brill, 1966. Fierro, Maribel. “Bāṭinism in al-Andalus. Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī (d. 353/964), Author of the Rutbat al-Ḥakīm and the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm (Picatrix).” Studia Islamica 84 (1996): 87–112. Melvin-Koushki, Matthew. “In Defense of Geomancy: Šaraf al-Dīn Yazdī Rebuts Ibn Ḫaldūn’s Critique of the Occult Sciences.” In “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” edited by Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner. Special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 346–403. Michot, Jean. “Les sciences physiques et métaphysiques selon la Risālah fī Aqsām alʿulūm d’Avicenne: Essai de traduction critique,” Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 22 (1980): 62–73. Michot, Jean. “Cultes, magie et intellection. L’homme et sa corporéité selon Avicenne.” In L’homme et son univers en Moyen Age: actes du septième Congrès International de Philosophie Médiévale, edited by Christian Wenin, 2 vols., 1:220–233. Louvain-laNeuve: Editions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1986. Moureau, Sébastien. Le De anima alchimique du Pseudo-Avicenne, 2 vols. Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2016. Page, Sophie. “Magic and the Pursuit of Wisdom: The ‘Familiar’ Spirit in the Liber Theysolius.” La Corónica 36, no. 1 (2007): 41–70. Pingree, David, ed. Picatrix. London: Warburg Institute, 1986. Zambelli, Paola. The Speculum astronomiae and Its Enigma: Astrology, Theology and Science in Albertus Magnus and His Contemporaries. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1992.

chapter 3

New Light on Early Arabic Awfāq Literature Bink Hallum

ٍ ‫فإن علم الأعداد للوفق من لطائف العلوم العقلية التي تبسط النفس فيها بما يطلع منها بسهولة‬ .‫على عجائب خواصها مع ما ذكر أصحاب الطلسمات من خواص فوائدها واتفقوا عليها‬ The science of numbers in harmony is among the subtlest of the rational sciences, in which the soul delights: for one may easily observe their remarkable occult properties, as well as what talismanists have generally determined to be their special uses. Muḥammad b. al-Muẓaffar al-Ṭūsī1

∵ 1

Introduction

A simple formal definition of a magic square is that it is an arrangement of a set of numbers (usually consecutive, beginning from one) in a square grid in such a way that the sums of the numbers contained in each row, column, and the two corner-to-corner diagonals are equal. But, beyond this, what are magic squares? What did their makers think they were for, and what accounts for their wide diffusion and historical tenacity? Are they games of recreational mathematics, illustrations of number theory, magic tricks, talismans, a combination of some or all of these things, or something else entirely? Of course, these questions can be answered in many ways, since magic squares were undoubtedly understood

1 Muḥammad b. al-Muẓaffar al-Ṭūsī, Risāla fī ʿilm al-wafq (Treatise on the Science of Harmony), Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Orientabteilung, MS Sprenger 869, fol. 85r. Muḥammad b. al-Muẓaffar al-Ṭūsī may be the son of or even, through errors in the manuscript transmission, himself identifiable with the mathematician and astronomer Sharaf al-Dīn al-Muẓaffar b. Muḥammad al-Ṭūsī (d. 1213). See Glen van Brummelen, “Sharaf al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī,” in BEA, 1051, and Sharaf al-Dīn Muẓaffar b. Muḥammad al-Ṭūsī, Œuvres mathématiques: algèbre et géométrie au XIIe siècle, ed. and trans. Roshdi Rashed, 2 vols. (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1986).

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and appreciated differently by various people at various times according to their context, training, orientation, and expectations. This paper explores some of these historic perspectives on magic squares, focusing on the authors who wrote on this subject, in order to take account of their contexts and legacies. From the mathematician’s perspective, magic squares are a type of figurate numbers, arrangements of sequences of numbers in geometrical patterns. The search for and calculation of all the possible arrangements of numbers within a magic square of a certain order that fulfill a given set of conditions is within the domain of the mathematical subdiscipline of combinatorics.2 Attempts to set out as succinctly as possible the series of mathematical operations needed to arrange the numbers in a magic square in such a way as to fulfill those conditions are part of the study of algorithms.3 Indeed, according to the historian of mathematics Jacques Sesiano, the leading expert on Islamicate magic squares (awfāq),4 “One of the most impressive achievements in Islamic mathematics,

2 Norman L. Biggs, “The Roots of Combinatorics,” Historia Mathematica 6 (1979): 118–124; Ahmed Djebbar, “Islamic Combinatorics,” in Combinatorics: Ancient and Modern, ed. Robin Wilson and John J. Watkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 84. The “order” of a magic square is the square root of the total number of cells it contains or the number of cells it has along each side. Thus, the simplest magic square, that of nine cells, is said to be a square of order three, since it contains 3 × 3 cells. There is only one way to construct a 3×3 magic square. All apparent differences in squares of this order are simply rotations or mirror images, such that the central cell will always contain the number 5 and the relative positions of the other numbers in the peripheral cells can never vary. As the order of the magic square is raised, the total number of possible arrangements of the numbers within the square increases dramatically: the square of order 4 has 880 possible arrangements and that of order 5 has 275,305,224 (Clifford A. Pickover, The Zen of Magic Squares, Circles, and Stars [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002], 3–6). 3 Jean-Luc Chabert et al., eds., A History of Algorithms. From the Pebble to the Microchip, trans. Chris Weeks (Berlin: Springer, 1999), 49–81. 4 When speaking of Islamicate contexts in this article, I will use the term wafq (pl. awfāq) to refer to what are usually called magic squares in European languages. I have not extended the same courtesy to Indian, Chinese, or any other cultural contexts, not because I do not think it is important to do so, but because I have neither the historical nor linguistic expertise to do so properly. In Arabic contexts, a typical wafq consists of a table (lawḥ) or grid ( jadwal) of cells (bayt, pl. buyūt) arranged in vertical (ṭūlī) and horizontal (ʿardī) rows/columns (ḍilʿ, pl. aḍlāʿ) and diagonals (quṭr, dual quṭrayn). The grid most often takes the form of a square (murabbaʿ), but awfāq in the form of triangles and other polygons, stars, circles, cubes, spheres, and cones are also attested in the manuscripts. The grid and the numbers and/or letters within it are together usually referred to simply as the figure (shakl). The history of the mathematics of awfāq has been explored in depth by Jacques Sesiano, most recently in Magic Squares in the Tenth Century. Two Arabic Treatises by Anṭākī and Būzjānī (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017).

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in any case the most original one, is the development of general methods for constructing magic squares.”5 On the other hand, as a feature of occult technology, magic squares functioned as talismans in their own right or as constituent elements of more complex talismans. Their powers or occult properties (khawāṣṣ) were often understood to be derived from the numbers they contained, the letters of divine names alphanumerically encoded in the squares, the elemental natures of these letters themselves, or the planets and astral spirits with which the squares were associated. The powers harnessed by the magic squares allowed their makers to perform wonders (ʿajāʾib). The history of the awfāq has most often been discussed solely from the perspective of the history of mathematics, frequently with a focus on locating scientific firsts. But history, be it intellectual, cultural, or social, is not best understood as a series of eureka moments, as if only the first instance of every historical phenomenon is important, or that every repetition of an action or idea, with all its contextual variations and permutations, is derivative and therefore of limited interest. Focusing on firsts leads to a general ignorance of the historic and cultural significance of awfāq in Islamicate societies. Would-be students of the cultural history of awfāq are also often hindered by over-reliance on a few works from the corpus attributed to the Sufi master of letter magic (ʿilm al-ḥurūf ) Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad al-Būnī (fl. 622/1225), which tend unjustifiably to be granted the archetypal status of summa of all previous literature on awfāq.6 This is unfair, not least because Islamicate writings on awfāq were produced in several genres and modes, most not represented by the Būnīan corpus. To put it another way, the treatment of awfāq in the Būnīan corpus lacks context without an appreciation of the centuries-old Islamicate traditions of awfāq that precede it. To make matters worse, the most prolific scholar 5 Jacques Sesiano, “Wafḳ,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. Sesiano makes nearly the same statement again in “Magic Squares in Islamic Mathematics,” in Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, ed. Helaine Selin, 3rd ed. (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2016), 4:2610. 6 See, for example, Wilhelm Ahrens, “Die ‘magischen Quadrate’ al-Būnī’s,” Der Islam 12, no. 3–4 (1922): 157–177, and Schuyler Cammann, “Islamic and Indian Magic Squares. Part I,” History of Religions 8, no. 3 (1969): 184. On al-Būnī himself and the corpus attributed to him, see Noah Gardiner, “Forbidden Knowledge? Notes on the Production, Transmission, and Reception of the Major Works of Aḥmad al-Būnī,” Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 12 (2012): 81– 143, Noah Gardiner, “Stars and Saints. The Esotericist Astrology of the Sufi Occultist Aḥmad al-Būnī,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 12, no. 1 (2017): 39–65, and Noah Gardiner, “Esotericist Reading Communities and the Early Circulation of the Sufi Occultist Aḥmad al-Būnī’s Works,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64 (2017): 405–441.

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and editor of Arabic awfāq literature, Jacques Sesiano, is a historian of mathematics adept at analyzing the numerical properties and construction methods of awfāq and an authority on the history and chronology of their mathematical development, but he shows little interest in social questions concerning the status and contexts of the authors of awfāq treatises or of the cultural and practical roles played by awfāq in the lives of the mathematicians and nonmathematicians who dealt with them. This purely mathematical interest in awfāq on the part of expert mathematicians sheds light on their mathematical significance but does not, in itself, produce a well rounded history of awfāq. This article is a contribution to the foundations of a cultural history of awfāq. It seeks to explore their prevalence in Islamicate literature and to outline the nature, scope and form of their literary appearances. It will examine the development of the cultural position of awfāq in the Islamicate world by contextualizing these literary appearances within their intellectual landscapes and situating their authors, where possible, not just chronologically but also within recognized locales of scientific endeavor (notably sites of astronomical activity), which were themselves nodes in networks of patronage, collaborative relationships, and scholarly debate. It will also attempt to trace these networks of patronage, collaboration, and correspondence between the various authors of awfāq texts in order to identify hubs of awfāq research. We begin with a survey of discussions of awfāq in Islamicate literature from their earliest known appearance in the mid-third/ninth century down to the huge rise in cultural prevalence of the awfāq in the early seventh/thirteenth century with the occultist-Sufi synthesis typified by the writings of Muḥyī lDīn Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) and al-Būnī. The second half of this article will focus on a newly identified manuscript of a previously unknown awfāq treatise from the sixth/twelfth century: the Collection of the Harmonious Number (Dīwān al-ʿadad al-wafq).7 I will use this manuscript to connect three major periods and locations often identified as golden ages of Islamicate cultural and scientific patronage: (1) Baghdad under ʿAḍud al-Dawla (r. 367–372/978– 83) and subsequent Buyid amirs, (2) Isfahan and Marw under the Great Seljuk sultans Malikshāh (r. 465–485/1073–1092) and Sanjar (r. 511–552/1118–1157), and (3) Delhi under the Mughal padishah Shāh Jahān (r. 1037–1076/1628–66).

7 BL, Delhi Arabic 110, fols. 28r–119v, https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100040730535 .0x000002. A full catalog record for this manuscript is available in the British Library’s online catalog: http://hviewer.bl.uk/IamsHViewer/Default.aspx?mdark=ark:/81055/vdc_100028835 675.0x000001.

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The historical trajectory traced by the unique manuscript of the Collection of the Harmonious Number is indicative of the extensive chronological range and geographical breadth of the Islamicate interest in awfāq, as well as the fact that many of the greatest names in the history of the sciences in the Islamicate world (both scientists and patrons) were caught up in this fascination. Before we can speak of the origin of awfāq literature in the Islamicate world, however, we should outline the current state of knowledge concerning magic squares in the pre-Islamic world and their subsequent development in the cultures bordering on or subsumed within the growing Islamicate world.

2

Pre-Islamic Magic Squares and the Later Developments of These Traditions

Much ink has been spilled trying to determine when and where magic squares originated and their routes of transmission into (or perhaps parallel development in) the Islamicate world and thence Latin Europe. The well known outlines of this history are as follows. China was the first known source of knowledge on magic squares, but this was restricted in the earliest instances to the square of the lowest order (i.e., 3 ×3), which may be alluded to in Chinese texts from the first two centuries BCE, but is not patently discussed until the late first century CE. Squares of higher orders have not been found in Chinese literature from before the latter half of the thirteenth century, long after their appearance in Arabic and Persian texts in about the mid-fourth/tenth century. The earliest mention of the 4 × 4 square is found in Sanskrit literature in the mid-sixth century, but early appearances of magic squares in India are restricted to those of orders 3 and 4. By the third/ninth century, the magic squares had entered Islamicate literature and, within about a century, Arabic treatises devoted to awfāq began to appear. During the fifth/eleventh century, the Toledan astronomer Ibn al-Zarqālluh wrote a treatise on the talismanic use of awfāq, and, by the seventh/thirteenth century, the magic squares had entered Europe through Latin and Old Castilian translations of Ibn al-Zarqālluh’s treatise. Because European scholars were introduced to the squares via a talismanic handbook and not a mathematical treatise, the term “magic square” has endured in European languages. Although the precise chronology of this history is difficult to establish, the abundance of evidence is remarkable. The widespread existence, cultural significance, and persistence of magic squares across Afro-Eurasia indicate that, far from being hidden on the edges of society—the marginal property of any one culture, time, place, or group—they were a significant and enduring phe-

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nomenon throughout the world then known to Islamicate civilisation. Three major cultural blocs have influenced the early development of awfāq. 2.1 Greece The feeling that magic squares would be at home in Neopythagorean number theory has led several scholars to suspect that their origin lies in the Hellenistic world. Attempts to confirm this supposition have, however, been largely unsuccessful.8 George Sarton’s claim, for example, that the Neopythagorean mathematician and astronomer Theon of Smyrna (fl. c. 100 CE) discussed the 3 ×3 magic square was shown to be false by N.L. Biggs, who flatly denied the existence of magic squares in classical or late-antique Greek literature, arguing that If the Greeks or their followers had known about magic squares, then it is unthinkable that just one passing reference to them should have survived: to be sure, some Greek wisdom has been lost, but magic squares are simply too memorable to have disappeared completely.9 Likewise, H.E. Stapleton’s statement that the “Magic Square [of 3 × 3] was known in Europe to Theodorus, a pupil of … Porphyry [d. c. 305]” remains unsubstantiated.10 More recently, however, Nicolas Vinel has made a case for the existence of esoteric allusions to magic squares in late antique Greek mathematical literature, notably in the Neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichus’s (d. 325 CE) commentary on the Arithmetical Introduction, a treatise on Neopythagorean number theory by the philosopher and mathematician Nicomachus of Gerasa (d. c. 120CE), to which we shall return near the end of this article.11 8

9

10 11

See, e.g., Paul Tannery, “Le traité de Manuel Moschopoulos sur les carrés magiques. Texte grec et traduction,” Annuaire de l’ Association pour l’ encouragement des études grecques en France 20 (1886): 90, and Schuyler Cammann, “The Magic Square of Three in Old Chinese Philosophy and Religion,” History of Religions 1, no. 1 (1961): 45–46. The false claim is made in George Sarton’s Introduction to the History of Science (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1927–1948), 1:272, and followed by Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954–), 3:61. The rebuttal is in Norman L. Biggs, “The Roots of Combinatorics,” Historia Mathematica 6 (1979): 120–121. Needham (“Theoretical Influences of China on Arabic Alchemy,” Revista da Universidade de Coimbra 28 [1980]: 11) subsequently retracted his erroneous statement and identified Sarton as the source of his error. Henry E. Stapleton, “The Antiquity of Alchemy,” Ambix 5, nos. 1–2 (1953): 37. Nicolas Vinel, “Un carré magique pythagoricien? Jamblique précurseur des témoins Arabo-Byzantins,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 59, no. 6 (2005): 545–562, and Iam-

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Although there remains no generally accepted proof of the knowledge of magic squares in Graeco-Roman antiquity, archaeological evidence has recently come to light that may add weight to Vinel’s theory. A Greek letter square (or rather an oblong) depicted on a fifth- or sixth-century CE writing tablet from Antinoupolis in Middle Egypt may be a sort of proto-magic square. While admittedly not conforming to the usual mathematical constraints of a magic square, when the letters in this oblong grid are assigned their positional values within the alphabetic sequence rather than their usual alphanumerical values, many equal sums are discoverable in its columns and rows.12 With this archaeological discovery and Vinel’s work, the tide of scholarly opinion shows signs of turning against Biggs’s uncompromising stance. Sesiano, the greatest living historian of Islamicate magic squares, has recently admitted that “the surprising results already obtained in the science of magic squares [in the Islamicate world] by the tenth century thereby suggest … a much earlier, possibly Greek time for the first discoveries” and concludes that “… although … [the] … Greek allusions [adduced by Vinel] are in themselves not convincing [that the magic square of 3×3 was known in the Graeco-Roman world], they can no longer be dismissed a priori.”13 For the time being, however, the earliest known explicit discussion of magic squares in Greek literature is found in the eighth/fourteenth-century writings of the grammarian Manuel Moschopoulos of Constantinople, and this has been shown to derive from Islamicate sources.14 2.2 China In fact, the earliest known magic squares were constructed in China, where they were and continue to be an important part of the science of divination and geomancy ( fengshui).15 The simplest magic square (3 × 3) appears perhaps

12

13

14

15

blichus, In Nicomachi Arithmeticam, ed. and trans. Nicholas Vinel (Pisa: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2014), 23–35. Julia Lougovaya, “A Perfect Pangram: A Reconsideration of the Evidence,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 57 (2017): 165, 179–180 and 189–190. I thank Juan Acevedo for bringing this article to my attention. Sesiano, Magic Squares in the Tenth Century, 9 and 16. For an introduction to the late antique Neoplatonic interpretation of Pythagoreanism that served as a substrate for early Islamicate number theory, and perhaps for magic squares themselves, see Dominic J. O’Meara, Pythagoras Revived. Mathematics and Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Tannery, “Le traité de Manuel Moschopoulos,” 90, and Jacques Sesiano, “Les carrés magiques de Manuel Moschopoulos,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 53, no. 5 (1998): 377–397. Although the Chinese fengshui and the Arabo-Persian ʿilm al-raml are both referred to in

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as early as 190BCE in Xu Yue’s Memoir on Some Traditions of the Mathematical Art (Shushu jiyi), where it is called the “nine-palace diagram” ( jiugong tu) and apparently served divinatory and cosmological/cosmographical functions.16 In about 80 CE, the 3×3 square appears again in the more reliably dated Record of Rites by Dai the Elder (Da Dai Liji) by Dai De, where it is found in a chapter called “Bright Hall” (Mingtang), a reference to a palace of nine halls in which ceremonial rites were carried out by the emperors of the Zhou dynasty (1046– 771BCE).17 The Luo River Chart (Luoshu), an important diagram in the development of Chinese geomantic thought, may be considerably older than the writings of Xu Yue and Dai De just mentioned, but its origin is legendary, and, because it was written schematically and without numerals, it was not identified with the nine-palace diagram and Bright Hall (and thus with the 3 × 3 square) until as late as the time of Cai Yuanding (d. 594/1198), the great geomancer and commentator on the Classic of Changes (Yijing).18 Historically, the semantic range of the Chinese term shuxue, usually translated into English as “mathematics,” also touched upon philosophy, astrology, and divination, and the 3×3 magic square played important roles in all these categories.19 This magic square was a potent cosmological symbol embodying “the two forces of Yin and Yang at work, the cycles of the Four Seasons and the Five Elements, and the deployment of the Nine Directions of space, emphasis always remaining on cosmic centrality like a kind of powerhouse.”20 Fundamental to the compass school of geomancy,21 it is also the basis for several astrological divinatory practices whereby each number in the square is

16

17 18 19 20 21

English as “geomancy,” it is important to distinguish the two traditions, which differ greatly in origin, scope, and application. Ho Peng-Yoke, “Chinese Number Mysticism,” in Mathematics and the Divine: A Historical Study, ed. Teun Koetsier and Luc Bergmans (London: Elsevier, 2005), 47, and Lay Yong Lam, ed. and trans., A Critical Study of the Yang Hui Suan Fa: A Thirteenth-Century Chinese Mathematical Treatise (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1977), 294. For an extended study of the principles and applications of the square of 3×3 in Chinese culture, see Lars Berglund, The Secret of Luo Shu. Numerology in Chinese Art and Architecture (Lund: Institutionen för Konstvetenskap Lunds Universitet, 1990). Peng-Yoke, “Chinese Number Mysticism,” 47; Jean-Claude Martzloff, A History of Chinese Mathematics (Berlin: Springer, 1997), 363. Peng-Yoke, “Chinese Number Mysticism,” 48. Peng Yoke, “Magic Squares in China,” 2599 and Needham, “Theoretical Influences,” 12–17. Needham, “Theoretical Influences,” 17. Albert Ting Pat So, Eric Lee, Kin Lun Li and Dickson Koon Sing Leung, “Luo Shu: Ancient Chinese Magic Square on [sic] Linear Algebra,” SAGE Open 5, no. 2 (April 2015): https://doi .org/10.1177/2158244015585828.

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assigned a color and circulated throughout the 3 × 3 square to form a total of nine different arrangements.22 Despite the antiquity of magic squares in China, squares of orders higher than three do not appear in Chinese literature until 673/1275, when they were included in the Continuation of Ancient Mathematical Methods for Elucidating the Strange (Xugu zhaiqi suanfa) by Yang Hui.23 This mathematical text discusses magic squares of 3×3 to 10×10, as well as magic circles and other mathematically “magic” figures, but only explains the construction methods for the lowest two orders (3×3 and 4×4). Furthermore, Yang Hui treats magic squares solely from the point of view of mathematics and is apparently the first to refer to a magic square without the usual Chinese legendary epithets, but simply as “a vertical and horizontal plan” (zonghengtu), a name still used for them in Chinese today. Both the 3×3 and 9×9 magic squares played important roles in Daoist rituals during which a priest takes steps (Yubu or gangbu) following the pattern of the magic square in order to harness astral powers, and numbers derived from magic squares of higher orders were also used to justify the importance of numbers in the number theory of the Classic of Changes (Yijing).24 It is tempting to contextualize the appearance of higher order squares in Chinese literature within the Mongol incursions into Central Asian and Near Eastern Islamicate realms that began in the 620s/1220s and culminated with the fall of Baghdad in 655/1257 and the establishment of the Īlkhānid, Kipchak 22

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Peng-Yoke, “Chinese Number Mysticism,” 52. For the Tibetan development of Chinese astrological divination on the basis of the 3 × 3 magic square, see Dieter Schuh, “Über die Möglichkeit der Identifizierung tibetischer Jahresangaben anhand der sMe-ba-dgu,” Zentralasiatische Studien des Seminars für Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft Zentralasiens der Universität Bonn 6 (1972): 485–504; Siegbert Hummel, “The sMe-ba-dgu, the Magic Square of the Tibetans,” East and West 19, no. 1/2 (1969); and Gyurme Dorje, Tibetan Elemental Divination Paintings. Illuminated Manuscripts from The White Beryl of Sangs-rgyas rGyamtsho with the Moonbeams Treatise of Lo-chen Dharmaśrī (London: John Eshkenazi in association with Sam Fogg, 2001). I thank Burkhard Quessel for introducing me to the literature on this Tibetan tradition. Lam, ed. and trans., A Critical Study, 145–151 (translation) and 293–322 (commentary). See also Schuyler Cammann, “Old Chinese Magic Squares,” Sinologica 7 (1962): 14–53; Cammann, “Islamic and Indian Magic Squares. Part I,” 186–88, n. 9; Schuyler Cammann, “Islamic and Indian Magic Squares. Part II,” History of Religions 8, no. 4 (1969): 280–281; Martzloff, A History of Chinese Mathematics, 18 and 363; Needham, “Theoretical Influences,” 13, and Ho Peng Yoke, “Magic Squares in China,” in Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, 3rd ed., ed. Helaine Selin (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), 4:2598–599, who discusses Chinese literature on this subject down to the seventeenth century. Peng-Yoke, “Chinese Number Mysticism,” 52–54.

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(Golden Horde), and Chagatai khanates in and to the north and east of the Islamicate world. Although diplomatic, commercial, scientific, and other cultural transactions are well documented between China and Muslims from the Islamicate world in the first century after the death of the prophet Muḥammad (d. 11/632), clear evidence for points of transmission of the knowledge of magic squares between the two cultural blocs has yet to be adduced and investigated. An interesting starting point for such research could be the cast iron 6 × 6 square with eastern Arabic numerals, which was excavated in 1957 from the foundations of the palaces of the Prince of Anxi, 3 kilometers northeast of Xi’an, Shaanxi Province in northwestern China.25 The palaces were the residence of the Yuan Dynasty princes of Anxi, and were constructed during the reign of the first such prince, Mangqala (enthroned 670–671/1272), the third son of Qubilai Qaghan (r. 658–693/1260–1294). It is probable, however, that the magic square was buried in the foundations of the palace of the Prince of Anxi during the reign Mangqala’s son and successor Ananda (enthroned 680–681/1282), who is known to have converted to Islam early in his life, enthusiastically followed Islamicate customs, and propagated Islam in his realm.26 The fact that the magic square was placed in a carved stone coffer and then deposited in the foundations of a royal edifice clearly indicates that this was an official ritual act and points to the influence of Islamicate

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The square is held in the Shaanxi History Museum, and a catalog record can be found in Dongshan Ji and Jianwu Han, Charm and Brilliance: An Appraisal of the National Treasures in the Shaanxi History Museum. The Jade and Other Objects. Shen yun de hui hang: Shanxi li shi bo wu guan guo bao jian shang—yu za qi juan (Xi’an: Sanqin Publishing House, 2006), 216. I am grateful to Han-Lin Hsieh for finding and translating this catalog record for me and to her and Emma Harrison for general help with Chinese. See also Dezhi Ma, “Xi’an Yuan dai Anxi wang fu kan cha ji [Investigations of the Yuan Dynasty Palace of the Prince of Anxi in Xi’an],” Kaogu 5 (1960): 20–23; Nai Xia, “Yuan Anxi wang fu zhi he Alabo shu ma huan fang [The Remains of the Yuan Dynasty Palace of the Prince of Anxi and the Arabic Numeral Magic Square],” Kaogu 5 (1960): 24–26; Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, “Imperial Architecture along the Mongolian Road to Dadu,” Ars Orientalis 18 (1988): 68–69; Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, “Towards the Definition of a Yuan Dynasty Hall,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 47, no. 1 (1988): 61; and Martzloff, A History of Chinese Mathematics, 365–366 (Fig. 20.2). On Prince Ananda, see the biographical sketch in Rashīd al-Dīn Ṭabīb’s (d. 718/1318) Compendium of Histories ( Jāmiʿ al-tawārīkh) (Rashīd al-Dīn Ṭabīb, The Successors of Genghis Khan, trans. John Andrew Boyle [New York: Columbia University Press, 1971], 323–328); Morris Rossabi, “The Muslims in the Early Yüan Dynasty,” ed. John D. Langlois, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), especially 292; and Herbert Franke, “Tibetans in Yüan China,” ed. John D. Langlois, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 300– 301.

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figure 3.1 Cast iron 6 × 6 magic square, Anxi (Xi’an), early Yuan Dynasty (late seventh/thirteenth century). 12 × 12 × 1.5cm. Shaanxi History Museum, Xi’an Photo courtesy of Marilyn Shea, PhD, University of Maine at Farmington

magic squares in the east of the Mongol realm within twenty years of the fall of Baghdad and shortly after the publication of Yang Hui’s work on higher-order magic squares.27

27

It has been proposed that the magic square was not imported from Islamicate Central Asia but rather was produced locally in Chang’an (mod. Xi’an; see Xia, “Yuan Anxi wang fu,” 23, cited by Steinhardt, “Imperial Architecture,” 77, n. 76). Mathematically, however, it is clear that the Anxi iron 6 × 6 magic square was constructed independently of Yang Hui’s Continuation of Ancient Mathematical Methods, since the numerals in the only 6×6 square to appear in that work are arranged differently from those in the Anxi magic square. From a talismanic and ritual perspective, it is not surprising that the Anxi magic square is 6×6, since, in the two major Islamicate systems of associations between magic squares and the planets, the square of 6 × 6 is associated with the Sun and is used for ensuring long and prosperous reigns. It is unusual, however, that the square is constructed of iron— traditionally associated with Mars—and not of gold, the metal associated with the Sun and usually prescribed for such a talisman.

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2.3 India The earliest known appearance of a magic square in Indian literature is the 4 × 4 square mentioned in the Great Compilation (Bṛhatsaṁhitā).28 This Sanskrit text mainly treating divination was written in about 550 CE by the mathematician and astronomer Varāhamihira (d. 587CE) of Ujjain, an important centre of both political power and mathematical and astronomical research in Central India.29 The 4 ×4 magic square is used in that text not for divination but for determining the correct proportions of the sixteen ingredients used to make a perfume called the “all-auspicious” (sarvatobhadra).30 There follows a large gap in the historical record until about 900 CE, when the physician Vṛnda included a 3×3 magic square in his Sanskrit Ayurvedic medical compendium the Siddhayoga.31 He recommends that pregnant women suffering a difficult labor should gaze (dṛṣṭvā) at this magic square in order to ease childbirth. This eutocic usage of the 3 × 3 square is one of the 28

29

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31

On the Great Compilation, see Takao Hayashi, “Varāhamihira’s Pandiagonal Magic Square of the Order Four,” Historia Mathematica 14 (1987): 159–166, and David Pingree, Jyotiḥśāstra: Astral and Mathematical Literature (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1981), 71–75. For a brief and well referenced survey of the history of magic squares in India, see Takao Hayashi, “Magic Squares in Indian Mathematics,” in Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, 3rd ed., ed. Helaine Selin (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), 2600–2607. I thank Azadeh Shokouhi for her kind help with Sanskrit texts. Ujjain’s astronomical importance is indicated by its adoption as the base location (alQubba) from which all longitudes are measured in the Zīj al-Sindhind (translated shortly after 153/770 at Baghdad from a Sanskrit astronomical work [siddhānta]; see Edward S. Kennedy, “A Survey of Islamic Astronomical Tables,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 46, no. 2 [1956]: 129–130). Varāhamihira, Bṛhat Saṁhitā, ed. and trans. M. Ramakrishna Bhat (Delhi, Varanasi, and Patna: Motilal Banarsidass, 1981–1982), 2:714–715. A Persian translation of the Bṛhatsaṁhitā called Tarjuma-yi kitāb-i Barāhī was produced by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Shams-i Tahānsarī under the patronage of the Delhi sultan Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq (r. 752–790/1351–1388). See Eva Orthmann, “Tarjuma-yi kitāb-i Bārāhī,” in Perso-Indica. An Analytical Survey of Persian Works on Indian Learned Traditions, ed. Fabrizio Speziale and Carl W. Ernst (2017), http://www.perso‑indica.net/work/tarjuma‑yi_kitabi_barahi. The magic square in Shamsi Tahānsarī’s Persian translation (containing only the perfume ingredients without the corresponding numerals) can be seen in BL, IO Islamic 1262, fol. 228v. Vṛnda, The First Treatise of Āyurveda on Treatment: Vṛndamādhava or Siddha Yoga, ed. and trans. Premvati Tewari and Asha Kumari (Varanasi: Chaukhambha Visvabharati, 2006), 2:837–888. See Arion Roşu, “Études āyurvédiques III. Les carrés magiques dans la médecine indienne,” in Studies on Indian Medical History. Papers Presented at the International Workshop on the Study of Indian Medicine Held at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine 2–4 September 1985, ed. Gerrit Jan Muelenbeld and Dominik Wujastyk (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1987), 104–108 and Arion Roşu, “Les carrés magiques indiens et l’ histoire des idées en Asie.” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 139, no. 1 (1989): 120–124.

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most stable and enduring features in the lore of the magic squares in Islamicate lands, and, as we shall see below, it is found in Arabic literature about half a century before it appears in Sanskrit. From the eleventh century CE, magic squares appear on monuments related to Śaiva tantric traditions in northern India, in which they were employed as numerical ritual diagrams (aṅkayantra). These magic squares were a subset of the more general tantric ritual diagram ( yantra) to be gazed at or visualized internally by the yogi in meditation in order to achieve magical or spiritual aims, much as Vṛnda had prescribed gazing at the 3 × 3 square to obtain a eutocic benefit some five centuries earlier.32 The first discussion of magic squares in an Indian mathematical treatise is found in a short section within the fourth and final chapter of the Prakrit Gaṇitasārakaumudī written in about 1300CE by Ṭhakkura Pherū (d. after 1323CE), a Jaina scholar employed at the Delhi mint under the Khaljī sultans and perhaps also under the early Tughluqids.33 Much longer is the discussion of magic squares and other figures in the fourteenth and final chapter (on “Auspicious Mathematics” [Bhadragaṇita]) of Nārāyaṇa Paṇḍita’s Sanskrit mathematical treatise, Gaṇitakaumudī, written in 1356CE.34 By the fourteenth century CE magic squares appear in Jaina hymns, and, at an as yet unconfirmed date, they appear carved on Jaina temples.35

32 33

34

35

Roşu, “Les carrés magiques indiens,” 124–125. Vṛnda did not himself, however, use the term yantra or aṅkayantra to refer to the square. Roşu, “Les carrés magiques indiens,” 153 and 158; Sreeramula Rajeswara Sarma, Ṭhakkura Pherū’s Rayaṇaparikkhā. A Medieval Text on Gemmology (Aligarh, Viveka Publications, 1984), 1–10. Nārāyaṇa Paṇḍita, The Gaṇita Kaumudī, ed. Padmākara Dvivedī Jyautishāchārya (Benares: Government Sanskrit College, 1936–1942), 2:353–410; Paramanand Singh, “The Gaṇitakaumudī of Nārāyaṇa Paṇḍita: Chapter XIV, English Translation with Notes,” Gaṇita Bhāratī 24 (2002): 34–98. For modern studies, see Schuyler Cammann, “Islamic and Indian Magic Squares. Part II,” History of Religions 8, no. 4 (1969): 271–299; Bibhutibhusan Datta and Awadhesh Narayan Singh (revised by Kripa Shankar Shukla), “Magic Squares in India,” Indian Journal of History of Science 27, no. 1 (1992): 51–120; and Raja Sridharan and M.D. Srinivas, “Folding Method of Nārāyaṇa Paṇḍita for the Construction of Samagarbha and Viṣama Magic Squares,” Indian Journal for the History of Science 47, no. 4 (2012): 589– 605. See also, with caution, Pramila Deodhar, “Recreations in Mathematics: With Special Reference to Ganita Kaumudi of Nārāyaṉa (1356A.D.),” Bulletin of the Deccan College Research Institute 50 (1990): 193–196. See Hayashi, “Magic Squares in Indian Mathematics,” 2601.

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Awfāq: Islamicate Magic Squares

Awfāq are ubiquitous in the material culture of Islamicate societies. They are frequently encountered scribbled on the flyleaves of manuscripts, inscribed and painted on ceramics and metalware, on ceremonial flags and military standards, protective talismanic shirts, and on engraved, inscribed and blockprinted (ṭarsh) talismans.36 Outside of texts on mathematics, magic, medicine, and natural philosophy, the cultural status of awfāq is attested to by their appearance in literary works on such diverse subjects as chess,37 music,38 and genealogy.39 Just as in the Chinese and Indian traditions, awfāq first appear in

36

37 38

39

Emilie Savage-Smith, “Magic and Islam,” “Magic-Medicinal Bowls” and “Amulets and Related Talismanic Objects,” in Science, Tools and Magic: Part One: Body and Spirit, Mapping the Universe, by Francis Maddison and Emilie Savage-Smith (London: Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1997), 59–147; on ṭarsh talismans in particular, see Mark Muehlhaeusler, “Math and Magic: A Block-Printed Wafq Amulet from the Beinecke Library at Yale,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 130, no. 4 (2010): 207–218 and Karl R. Schaefer, Enigmatic Charms. Medieval Arabic Block Printed Amulets in American and European Libraries and Museums (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 76–79 and pl. 8. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sakhāwī (d. 902/1497), ʿUmdat al-muḥtajj fī ḥukm alshaṭranj, ed. Usāma al-Ḥarīrī and Nazīr Kaʿka (Kuwait: Dar al-Nawādir, 2012), 152. Treatise of the Treasure of Gifts Concerning Music (Risāla-yi kanz al-tuḥaf dar mūsīqā), BL, Or. 2361, fol. 267r (copy completed at Delhi, 16 Rajab 1075/2 February 1665): a 5×5 wafq appears between an Arabic prayer to Venus (begins fol. 266v, ult.) and a Persian verse prayer to Venus (ends fol. 267v) attributed to Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274). The authorship of this treatise in Or. 2361 is unknown, but Henry G. Farmer, “Iranian Musical Instruments in the Ninth/Fifteenth Century,” Islamic Culture 38, no. 3 (1964): 175–176 suggests (on the authority of C. Huart, without further reference) that the author is the mawlāwī dervish Amīr b. Khiḍr Mālī and that he composed the treatise in 838/1434. This is contradicted by a collation note (presumably copied from the exemplar) after the colophon of this text (fol. 269v) stating that the copy was collated against a manuscript dated Tuesday 1 Dhū l-Qaʿda 784/6 January 1383. Furthermore, Charles Rieu, Supplement to the Catalogue of the Arabic Manuscripts in the British Museum (London: The British Museum, 1894), 561 (item 823) interprets a chronogram at the end of the treatise as indicating a composition date of 746/1345–1346. As for the possibility that Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī had an interest in awfāq, a treatise called al-Awfāq attributed to al-Ṭūsī’s teacher Kamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Yūnus (d. 639/1242) is edited in Jacques Sesiano, “An Arabic Treatise on the Construction of Bordered Magic Squares,” Historia Scientiarum 42 (1991): 14–31. ʿAzīz al-Dīn Ismāʿīl b. Ḥusayn al-Marwazī, known as al-ʿAlawī al-Nassāba (d. 632/1234– 1235), The Harmony of Numbers [i.e. Magic Square] Concerning Genealogy (Wafq al-aʿdād fī al-nasab), completed at Marw in 614/1217–1218 but now lost. See Yāqūt b. ʿAbdallāh alḤamawī (d. 626/1229), Irshād al-arīb ilā maʿrifat al-adīb, ed. David Samuel Margoliouth et al. (Leiden: Brill; London: Luzac, 1907–1927), 2:262–266 and Bakr b. Abū Zayd, Ṭabaqāt al-Nassābīn (Riyadh: Dār al-Rushd, 1987), 126–127 (item 298).

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Islamicate literature in medicinal and magical contexts. Only later are entire treatises, both talismanic and mathematical, dedicated to them. They are taken up as the subjects of mathematical treatises within about a century of their first explicit appearance in Arabic literature. In comparison to the Chinese and Indian traditions in which they are not found in mathematical literature until some seven and a half and eleven centuries after their initial appearances, respectively, the awfāq make a much swifter transition in Islamicate cultures from their occasional appearance in medical and talismanic texts to being the subject of prolonged mathematical studies. This early and intense engagement between mathematical research and talismanic practice with respect to awfāq had a profound effect on the history of the occult sciences in the Islamicate world. In the following pages, I attempt to trace the contours of an early cultural history of awfāq in order to place their historical study on a firmer foundation. By bringing together a selection of passages discussing the simplest and most well-known wafq (that of 3×3) from Arabic literary works written before the end of sixth/twelfth century, I explore the Islamicate thinking on awfāq that informed the explosion in popularity of lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf ) and the associated great increase in the profile, diffusion, and variety of awfāq, in the seventh/thirteenth century, propelled by the likes of al-Būnī and Ibn ʿArabī.40 3.1 Ibn Rabban al-Ṭabarī ( fl. c. 235/850) The earliest dateable reference to a wafq (although this designation is not used) in Islamicate literature is found in a discussion of methods for facilitating child40

The theoretical underpinnings of the paradigm shift that coincided with the rise of lettrism, which saw Sufi cosmology and revelation displace natural philosophy and astral causality as the interpretative framework in which magic was conceived, have been studied by Noah Gardiner, “Esotericism in a Manuscript Culture: Aḥmad al-Būnī and His Readers Through the Mamlūk Period” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2014), 166–185; Liana Saif, “From Ġāyat al-ḥakīm to Šams al-maʿārif : Ways of Knowing and Paths of Power in Medieval Islam,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” edited by Matthew MelvinKoushki and Noah Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 297–345; and Matthew Melvin-Koushki has shown that natural philosophy and astral causality returned to favour amongst lettrists of later centuries, with the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm continuing its popularity; see “World as (Arabic) Text: Mīr Dāmād and the Neopythagoreanization of Philosophy in Safavid Iran,” Studia Islamica 114, no. 3 (2019): 378–431. The following survey of Arabic texts on the 3 × 3 wafq written before 596/1200 is not exhaustive but is intended to be broadly illustrative of the place of awfāq in Islamicate literature before this paradigm shift. I have reproduced here the original Arabic of every passage cited in order to facilitate future analysis. The Arabic text has been kept to the footnotes when a reliable critical edition is available. I have put the Arabic text in the main body of the article only when presenting an unedited text or an edited text that is being re-edited here from the manuscripts.

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birth written by Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Rabban Sahl al-Ṭabarī. Born into a family of state secretaries at Marw in Tabaristan, Ibn Rabban lived most of his life as a Christian (probably a Nestorian), before converting to Islam in his later years.41 His father Sahl was given the title rabban (Syriac, “our master”) owing not only to his scriptural erudition but especially to his medical knowledge, and, if later testimony is to be believed, also to his scholarly achievements in mathematics, astronomy, and the translation of scientific texts. ʿAlī b. Rabban followed in his father’s footsteps, with political service as a secretary first to the governor of Tabaristan, Māzyār b. Qārīn (d. 226/841), and then at the Abbasid court at Samarra under the caliphs al-Muʿtaṣim (r. 218–227/833–842), al-Wāthiq (r. 227–232/842–847), and al-Mutawakkil (r. 232–247/847–861). He was a boon companion (nadīm) to al-Mutawakkil, and it was probably during the reign of that caliph that Ibn Rabban converted to Islam, at about the age of seventy. It was also during the reign of al-Mutawakkil in 235/850, perhaps before his conversion, that Ibn Rabban wrote his most famous book, an encyclopedic work on medicine and natural philosophy called the Paradise of Wisdom (Firdaws al-ḥikma).42 This work contains a summary of Indian medicine (āyurveda) that demonstrates Ibn Rabban’s familiarity with Sanskrit medical sources and traditions.43 It is thus possible that he derived his knowledge of the eutocic 3×3 wafq from these Indian sources. Be that as it may, Ibn Rabban claims that the immediate source of his knowledge about the eutocic powers of the 3×3 wafq was his father. The passage in the Paradise of Wisdom in which Ibn Rabban mentions the 3× 3 wafq is found only in the earliest (seventh/thirteenth-century) manuscript of the work, BL, Arundel Or. 41, fol. 135r–v (hereafter L).44 Because the standard edition of the Paradise of

41

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44

The most recent and complete biographical account of ʿAlī b. Rabban, including references to both primary sources and previous secondary studies, is Rifaat Ebied and David Thomas, “ʿAlī ibn Rabban al-Ṭabarī, Fragments of a Life,” in The Polemical Works of ʿAlī alṬabarī, ed. Rifaat Ebied and David Thomas (Leiden: Brill, 2016), esp. 11–15. For an extended enquiry into the genre and salvific aims of the Paradise of Wisdom, see Joshua Thomas Olsson, “Design, Determinism and Salvation in the Firdaws al-Ḥikma of ʿAlī Ibn Rabban al-Ṭabarī” (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 2015). For an early but still useful overview of the contents of the work, see Max Meyerhof, “ʿAlî aṭ-Ṭabarî’s “Paradise of Wisdom,” One of the Oldest Arabic Compendiums of Medicine,” Isis 16, no. 1 (1931): 6–54. ʿAlī b. Sahl Rabban al-Ṭabarī, Firdausu’l-Ḥikmat or Paradise of Wisdom of ʿAlí b. Rabban-alṬabarí, ed. Muhammad Zubair Siddiqi (Berlin-Charlottenburg: Buch- und Kunstdruckerei “Sonne,” 1928), 557–620 (7.4.36). See Meyerhof, “Paradise of Wisdom,” 12, 42–47. A digital copy of L is at https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100023664595.0x000 051. Bilingual (Hebrew/Arabic) ownership inscriptions on fol. 2r of this manuscript show that it was owned by Rabbi Yosef al-Tiflīsī (fl. early eighth/fourteenth century), son of

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Wisdom contains numerous textual errors, I have re-edited this passage from L and present it here with a fresh translation. 3.1.1

Text45 ‫ وهو أن تأخذ خزفتين من كوز أو جرة‬47 ً‫ لعسر الولاد شيئ ًا عجيب ًا مجر با‬46‫وقد كان أبي يكتب‬ ‫ وتصور عليها شكلا ًمثل هذا وتكتب فيها حساباً كيف ما حسبت طول ًا‬48‫جديدة لم يصبها الماء‬ ‫ضا أو من زاو ية إلى زاو يةكان خمسة عشر وتكتب حولها آيتين من الز بور وتؤتى بهما المرأة‬ ً ‫وعر‬ ‫ش‬ ّ ُ ‫حتى تنظر إلى ما فيهما من الكتابة نعم ًا ثم تضعها تحت قدميها وكان يأمر أن يؤخذ من ع‬ ‫الخطاطيف شيء قليل من ذلك الطين و يسحق بدهن رازقي وتمرخ به عانتها وحقو يها وأن‬ ‫ أصل كز برة قلع ًا رفيق ًا و يؤخذ عرقها و يشد على فخذ المرأة وهذه صورة الشكل وهو‬49‫يقلع‬ ‫ وأر بعة ثم سبعة وخمسة وثلثة ثم ستة وواحد وثمانية فأما الآيتان من ز بور داوود‬50‫أثنان وتسعة‬

45

46 47 48 49 50

the Exilarch, head of the Jewish community of Gagra on the Black Sea coast of western Georgia, and then by his son Emmanuel the Dayān, brother of Rabbi Isaiah of Tabriz (fl. first half of eighth/fourteenth century), author of a cabbalistic Book of Divine Glory (Sefer ha-kavod). I am grateful to Colin Baker for his help in reading and interpreting these inscriptions. On this Jewish scholarly family, see Michael Beizer, Michael Zand, and Mordkhai Neishtat, “Georgia,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., ed. Fred Skolnik and Michael Berenbaum (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2007), 7:497; Walter J. Fischel, “Azarbaijan in Jewish History,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 22 (1953): 9, esp. n. 21; Alexander Marx, “Hebrew MSS. in Vienna,” Jewish Quarterly Review 16, no. 3 (1926): 340–341, and Gershom Scholem, Kitve-yad be-Ḳabalah ha-nimtsaʾim be-Vet ha-sefarim haleʾumi ṿeha-universiṭaʾi bi-Yerushala[y]im (Jerusalem: Ḥevrah le-Hotsaʾat Sefarim ʿal-yad ha-Universiṭah ha-ʿIvrit, 1930), 41–42. I thank Zsofi Buda for her help with this Hebrew reference. Al-Ṭabarī, Firdausu’l-Ḥikmat, ed. Siddiqi, 280–281 (4.9.19). A German translation based on Siddiqi’s text appears in Alfred Siggel, “Gynäkologie, Embryologie und Frauenhygiene aus dem “Paradies der Weisheit über die Medizin” des Abū Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Sahl Rabban aṭ-Ṭabarī, nach der Ausgabe von Dr. M. Zubair aṣ-Ṣiddīqī, Berlin-Charlottenburg: 1928 Buch- und Kunstverlag “Die Sonne.” Übersetzt und erläutert,” Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Medizin 8 (1942): 253–254. See Meyerhof, “Paradise of Wisdom,” 29 (chap. 160). ‫ ]أبي يكتب‬L: ‫ يكتب أبي‬Siddiqi. ً‫ ]مجر با‬L: om. Siddiqi. ‫ ]لم يصبها الماء‬L: om. Siddiqi. ‫ ]يقلع‬L: ‫ يقطع‬Siddiqi. ‫ ]تسعة‬scripsi: ‫ سبعة‬L, Siddiqi: ‘9’ Siggel.

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‫ وليؤمّلني‬51‫فمكتو بان حولها وهو بالسر يانية وتفسيرها »أخرج نفسي من المحبس لأشكر لاسمك‬ [fol. 135v] .‫ إذا أنت كافيتني« ولها أشياء كثيرة غير هذه‬52‫أبرارك‬

3.1.2

Translation For difficulties in childbirth, my father used to prescribe something wondrous and tested, namely, that you take two pieces of pottery from a new earthenware jug (kūz) or jar ( jarra) never touched by water and on each one you draw a figure like this [one below] in which you write a sum such that, however you add it up vertically, horizontally, or from corner to corner, you get fifteen. Around each one you write two verses from the Psalms, and they are brought to the woman so that she gazes intently at the writing on them. Then you place them under her feet. He [sc. my father] used to order that a little clay be taken from a swallow’s nest and ground with lily oil, that her pubes and groin be anointed with it, and that a stem of coriander be gently plucked and its root taken and bound to the woman’s thigh. This[, below,] is an illustration of the figure, which is two, nine, four, then seven, five, three, then six, one, eight. As for the two verses from the Psalms of David, they are written around it in Syriac and are translated [as follows]: Bring my soul out of prison that I may give thanks unto Your name. Truly Your righteous ones will expect me when You have rewarded me.53 It also had many other things beside this. [fol. 135v]

51 52 53

‫ ]لأشكر لاسمك‬sine punctis L: ‫ لا سكر ولا سمك‬Siddiqi. ‫ ]أبرارك‬L: ‫ إ يرادك‬Siddiqi. This is Ps. 141:8 in the Vulgate (142:7 KJV), but Ps. 142:8 in the Masoretic text and in the Syriac Peshiṭta text referred to by Ibn Rabban al-Ṭabarī: 焏‫ܫܝ‬熏‫ ܚܒ‬狏‫ ܒܝ‬爯‫ ܡ‬營‫ ܢܦܫ‬犟‫ܐܦ‬

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3.1.3 Commentary The specification that the two 3×3 wafqs used in this treatment should be “brought to the woman so that she gazes pleasantly (?) at the writing on them” (wa-tuʾatā bihā al-marʾata ḥattā tanẓura ilā mā fīhimā min al-kitābati niʿman) is reminiscent of Vṛnda’s Sanskrit prescription in which the square is to be gazed at by the woman in labor. It is thus tempting to see Ibn Rabban’s use of the eutocic 3×3 wafq as a continuation or even (if the direction of transmission went the other way) the origin of the Indian tradition of the aṅkayantra (see above, § 2.3). At any rate, we are dealing with similar cultural phenomena. In Islamicate works on medicine, magic, and the natural sciences, the eutocic power of the 3×3 wafq is mentioned frequently from the third/ninth century onward. Many of the details of its method of use as prescribed by Ibn Rabban’s father Sahl in late-second/eighth- or early-third/ninth-century Marw survived through the ages, such as the inscription of the wafq on pieces of pottery untouched by water, gazing upon them and their placement under the feet of the woman in labor.54 Other features of Ibn Rabban’s prescription such as the inscription of verses from the Psalms around the wafq and the anointment of the woman in labor with lily oil and mud from a swallows nest, however, are not found again after the Paradise of Wisdom. On the other hand, divine, angelic, or saintly names or other words and phrases from Holy Scripture are 營‫ܥܢ‬犯‫ ܬܦ‬煟‫ ܟ‬燿‫ܢ ܙܕܝ̈ܩܝ‬熏‫ ܢܣܟ‬營‫܂ ܠ‬燿‫ܝ ܕܐܘܕܐ ܠܫܡ‬狏‫ܫܝ‬熏‫( ܚܒ‬text from The Old Testament

54

in Syriac according to the Peshiṭta Version, Pt. ii, fasc. 3. The Book of Psalms, edited on behalf of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament by the Peshiṭta Institute Leiden [Leiden: Brill, 1980]). The text of the Leiden Peshiṭta, along with lexical tools, can be consulted at http://cal1.cn.huc.edu/. The idea of gazing at the 3 × 3 wafq reappears in the Revelation of the Truths of Hidden Secrets Concerning the Subtleties of Harmonious Numbers and Letters (Kashf ḥaqāʾiq al-asrār al-makhfiyya fī daqāʾiq al-aʿdād wa-al-ḥurūf al-wafqiyya) by Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. Abī al-Karam al-Tustarī (fl. c. early 8th/14th century?). This important but overlooked text prescribes the use of three 3 × 3 awfāq “two of which [one should] place beneath the feet of the woman having difficulty in giving birth and one before her eyes while she gazes at it”

76

hallum

commonly found surrounding or incorporated into awfāq in talismans of later periods.55 3.2 Ibn Akhī Ḥizām ( fl. 280/893) Within about fifty years of the composition of the Paradise of Wisdom, 3 × 3 number squares appeared in another Abbasid medical text, this time one of the earliest Arabic hippiatric treatises, which was written by Abū Yūsuf Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb b. Akhī Ḥizām al-Khuttulī, stable master to the caliph alMuʿtaḍid (r. 279–289/892–902).56 These 3×3 number squares are not, strictly speaking, awfāq, because neither is filled with the first nine consecutive numbers, nor are the sums of the numbers in their rows, columns, and corner-tocorner diagonals equal. Nonetheless, their similarity to the 3 × 3 wafq is undeniable. Ibn Akhī Ḥizām’s text recommends that a horse suffering from “stoppage” (inqiṭāʿ, presumably incomplete emptying of the bladder) be made to walk over two 3×3 number squares.57 3.2.1

Text58 ‫ضا مما وضعه القدماء أن يصو ّر هذين الصورتين بما فيها من الحساب و يمشي الدابة‬ ً ‫وللانقطاع أي‬ .‫عليه تبرا بإذن الله تعالى وهذا من خواص الأعداد‬

55 56

57

58

(‫ووضع أثنين منها تحت قدمي امرأة تعسر ولادتها وواحدًا قبالة عينيها تنتظر إليها سهلت عليها الولادة‬, Dublin, CBL, Ar. 5087, fol. 115v, lines 3–4). See Tewfik Canaan, “The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans,” Berytus 4 (1937): 71–89. Ibn Akhī Ḥizām’s treatise is variously called The Book of Horsemanship and Horses’ Marks (Kitāb al-furūsiyya wa-shiyāt al-khayl), The Book of Horsemanship and Veterinary Science (Kitāb al-furūsiyya wa-l-bayṭara), and The Book of the Horse and Veterinary Science (Kitāb al-khayl wa-l-bayṭara). See Manfred Ullmann, Die Medizin im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 219–220 and Housni Alkhateeb Shehada, Mamluks and Animals: Veterinary Medicine in Medieval Islam (Brill: Leiden, 2013), 118–120 and 169–170. This definition of inqiṭāʿ is suggested by the appearance of a similar prescription in the Book of Veterinary Science (Kitāb fī ʿilm al-bayṭara), a ninth/fifteenth-century Mamluk hippiatric manual in which inqiṭāʿ is discussed alongside “urinary retention” (ḥuṣr al-bawl), BL, Add. MS 14056, fol. 73r–v, https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100045800789.0x0 000a5. Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb Ibn Akhī Ḥizām, Kitāb al-furūsiyya wa-shiyāt al-khayl, BL, Add. MS 23416, fol. 161r, lines 11–14, https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100023488850 .0x000087.

77

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

3.2.2

‫ع‬

‫ح‬

‫س‬

‫و‬

‫مه‬

‫ل‬

‫لا‬

‫ع‬

‫س‬

‫ٮٮ‬

‫اٮٮ‬

‫لا‬

‫ٮٮ‬

‫ٮر‬

‫ٮر‬

‫ٮٮ‬

‫ٮر‬

‫د‬

Translation59 For incomplete emptying of the bladder (inqiṭāʾ): also among what was written by the ancients is that these two images be drawn with the num-

59

The letters in the squares are unpointed in the manuscript, so no attempt has been made to interpret them numerically or phonetically in the translation. Perhaps they are to be interpreted as follows:

60

8

70

30

45

6

60

70

31

31

‫اٮٮ‬

12

17

17

12

4

17

12

In the lower square, ‫ اٮٮ‬may stand for 13 (‫ا‬+‫ي‬+‫ ب‬or 1+10+2), but the usual abjad notation for 13 is ‫( ٮج‬or 10+3).

78

hallum

bers they contain and the beast is made to walk on them. It will be cured by the will of God the Exalted. This is one of the occult properties of numbers. 3.2.3 Commentary Note that the theme of release is present in these earliest medical prescriptions using the 3×3 number square (whether true wafq or not): the words of the Psalm “release my soul from prison,” the release of the stuck fetus, and, here, the release of the stopped urine. 3.3 The Jābirian Corpus (c. 260/874–c. 365/975) The 3×3 wafq is next found in the writings attributed to the semi-legendary alchemist Jābir b. Ḥayyān. This author is reputed to have lived in the second/ eighth century, so he was perhaps a contemporary of Sahl Rabban al-Ṭabarī, but the vast corpus of texts that pass under his name are generally thought to be the work of several Shiʿi authors writing between about 260/874 and about 365/975. The authors of the Jābirian corpus deal with the 3 × 3 wafq using their trademark method of esoteric exposition: “dispersal of knowledge” (tabdīd al-ʿilm), or dividing up the discussion of a given topic and spreading it across several texts in order to prevent the casual reader from grasping the whole meaning without considerable effort.60 Accordingly, we find four separate discussions of 3×3 wafq scattered across the Jābirian corpus. Into a section of the Jābirian Small Book of Balances (Kitāb al-mawāzīn alṣaghīr) in which the occult properties (khawāṣṣ) of animals, plants, and minerals are discussed, the author inserts the following passage on the 3 × 3 wafq. 3.3.1

Translation This image, whose number is three vertically, horizontally, and diagonally, is fifteen in every direction. Apollonius claimed that it is one of the puzzles of magic (min ʿuqad al-siḥr). It has nine cells, and this is its image:

60

On this esoteric writing practice as found in the writings of Jābir and other ancient and medieval authors, see Paul Kraus, Jâbir Ibn Ḥayyân: contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’ Islam (Cairo, Imprimerie de l’ Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1942–1943), 2:xxxi–xxxiii, and Gardiner, “Esotericism in a Manuscript Culture,” 106–108.

79

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

4

9

2

3

5

7

8

1

6

When you write this image on two pieces of pottery untouched by water and place them beneath the leg of a woman for whom childbirth has become difficult, she will give birth.61 3.3.2 Commentary Here the wafq is transmitted with the approval of the Neopythagorean philosopher Apollonius of Tyana (d. c. 100). It is hardly surprising to find Apollonius mentioned in this context. Often referred to in Arabic sources simply as “the talisman maker” (ṣāhib al-ṭalāsim/al-ṭilasmāt), this wandering holy man and wonder-worker is the alleged author of many Islamicate pseudepigraphic texts on the occult sciences, and his name was already associated with talismans in Greek sources as early as the time of Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339 CE).62 The talismans of which he is said in these Greek texts to be the author, however,

61

Marcellin Berthelot, ed., Histoire des sciences: La chimie au moyen âge (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1893), 3:118 of the Arabic text. ‫[ خمسة عشر من كل جهة‬Berthelot prints ‫وهذا الصورة التي عددها ثلثة طولا ًوعرضا ًوقطرا ً]قطرها‬

‫و بلينوس زعم أنها من عقد السحر وهي تسعة بيوت وهذه صورتها‬ ٢

٩

٤

٧

٥

٣

٦

١

٨

‫فإذا كتبت هذه الصورة على خزفتين لم يصبهما الماء ووضعتها تحت رجل المرأة التي قد عسر عليها ولادتها‬ .‫ولدت‬ 62

For a discussion of the sources for the Greek tradition of Apollonius’s talismans, see Manuel Á. Martí-Aguilar, “Talismans against Tsunamis: Apollonius of Tyana and the stelai of the Herakleion in Gades (VA 5.5),” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 57 (2017): 971– 981; for the Arabic tradition, see Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 378–381.

80

hallum

are not magic squares nor even the portable, often written, talismans known from Islamicate sources but rather monumental stone statues and stelae with apotropaic powers.63 In the Jābirian presentation of the 3×3 wafq, Ibn Rabban’s appeal to the divine and healing power of the Judaeo-Christian Syriac Psalms is absent. Instead, the power of the square is understood in terms of khawāṣṣ (sing. khāṣṣa), “occult properties” or mysterious forces inherent in objects that allow them produce an empirically verifiable effect with no apparent cause.64 In fact, Ibn Rabban probably also viewed the power of the eutocic wafq in relation to khawāṣṣ, since one of the earliest descriptions of these occult properties is found in his Paradise of Wisdom. In the chapter “On the properties of things” (Fī khawāṣṣ al-ashyāʾ, 5.1.1), Ibn Rabban explains khawāṣṣ as follows: Everything has a power (quwwa) evidenced by experience of it, and a property (khāṣṣa) whose cause is unknown and source undiscerned except by experimentation. For properties (khawāṣṣ) are concealed and hidden in things like the property of the magnet by which it attracts iron, and [that of] amber [by which it attracts] wheat chaff.65 In another Jābirian passage concerning occult properties (khawāṣṣ), this time in the Book of the Passage of Potentiality into Actuality (Kitāb ikhrāj mā fī lquwwa ilā l-fiʿl), we find the following fleeting reference to the eutocic 3 × 3 wafq, with no associated image or diagram:

63 64

65

I have been unable to find awfāq in any of the Arabic writings attributed to Apollonius that could plausibly be authentic translations from the Greek. For the Galenic background to the concept of khawāṣṣ, see Emma Gannagé, “Between Medicine and Natural Philosophy. Avicenna on Properties (khawāṣṣ) and Qualities (kayfiyyāt),” in The Occult Sciences in Pre-modern Islamic Cultures. Beiruter Texte und Studien 138, ed. by Nader El-Bizri and Eva Orthmann (Beirut: Ergon Verlag Würzburg, 2018), 41–45; for the concept of khawāṣṣ in the Jābirian corpus, see Kraus, Jâbir Ibn Ḥayyân, 2:61–95; and for a more general study of khawāṣṣ, see Lucia Raggetti, “The ‘Science of Properties’ and its Transmission,” in In the Wake of the Compendia: Infrastructural Contexts and the Licensing of Empiricism in Ancient and Medieval Mesopotamia, ed. Justin Cale Johnson (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 159–176. Especially important in interpreting the next few passages we shall adduce is Saif, “From Ġāyat al-ḥakīm to Šams al-maʿārif,” 299–309.

‫إن لكل شيء قوة يستدل عليها بمذاقتها وله خاصة لا يعرف علتها ولا يدرك غورها إلا بالتجارب لأنها‬ ‫خواص غامضة خفية في الأشياء مثل خاصة حجر المغناطيس الذي يجذب به الحديد والـكهر باء لقشور‬ ‫الحنطة‬. al-Ṭabarī, Firdausu’l-Ḥikmat, ed. Siddiqi, 356, lines 7–9.

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

3.3.3

81

Translation If we arrange in the nine cells anything other than what indicates fifteen, childbirth will not be eased.66

3.3.4 Commentary The passage is so brief and contains so few details that its subject would hardly be recognizable without comparison to other such references in the Jābirian corpus and elsewhere. The most extensive discussion of the 3×3 wafq known from the Jābirian corpus appears in the Great Book of Occult Properties (Kitab al-khawāṣṣ al-kabīr, chap. 18).67 Here the action of the wafq is assessed and reasons for its possible failure are explained. The passage is of particular interest because it while it lacks appeals to religious or philosophical authorities, instead it frames the discussion in terms of causation based on Aristotelian natural philosophy and on astrological principles: 3.3.5

Text68 ‫وقد كنا مثلنا لك في موضع آخر من هذه الـكتب ما العلة التي لها صار المثلث الذي يجمع خمسة‬ ‫عشر من العدد يعمل في أمر الولادة ما يمر ّ عنه مشهور إلا أن ذلك وإن كان يعمل على الحقيقة‬ ً ‫مخ ْل ِفا‬ ُ ‫وهو من الخواص فإني امتحنه فوجدته قد يبطئ في بعض الأعمال حتى يكاد أن يكون‬ ‫البتة َوذلك لز يادة العلة على مقدار قوة العمل ولعلة أخرى أحسن من هذه وهي لأجل علة غير‬ ‫علة الولادة قد عارضته والكتاب والحساب إنما ينفع الولادة وليس له في العلة الأخرى مدخل‬ ‫فامتنع لذلك السبب فلسبب آخر وهو غير ذلك وهو الوقت الحاضر الذي تمت فيه الكتابة أن‬ ‫يكون كتب ونحس طالع فأوجب ما حدث من الامتناع من الولادة في ذلك الوقت وهو‬ ‫وإن تأخر وأبطأ فإنه لا بد كائن فاعمل ما وصفناه وما كنا قد صو ّرنا هذه الحروف فغير ضائر أن‬

66

67

68

‫فإن ّا لو نصبنا في البيوت التسعة غير ما يدل على خمسة عشر لم تسهل الولادة‬. Jābir b. Ḥayyān, Mukhtār rasāʾil Jābir b. Hayyān. Essai sur l’ histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam, vol. 1, Textes choisis, ed. Paul Kraus (Cairo: Maktabat al-Khānjī, 1935), 1:76, lines 8–9. On this text, see Kraus, Jâbir ibn Ḥayyân, 1:148–152 and 2:64–91, esp. 73, and Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften, 207. For a partial edition of the text, excluding the passage on the wafq, see Jābir b. Ḥayyān, Mukhtār rasāʾil, ed. Kraus, 1:224–332. Jābir b. Ḥayyān, Kitāb al-khawāṣṣ al-kabīr, BL, Or. 4041 (eighth/fourteenth century), fol. 36r, line 13 to 36v, line 8, https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100044824246.0x000051.

82

hallum

‫نورد ذكر هذه الأبيات التسعة فإن ما ذكرتها مصورة إلا هاهنا وفي موضع آخر من كتبي ولـكني‬ ‫قد ذكرتها لك هاهنا إذ هو أخص المواض به فامتحنه واعمل به فإنه من كبار الفوائد وقد نحب‬ ‫[ إليه من‬fol. 36v] ‫أن يكون في الوسط منه خمسة وفي تحصيل هذه الخمسة خروج ما يحتاج‬ ‫باقي ما فيه وذلك أنهما ثلثة بيوت ففي الأعلى منها ثمانية وفي الذي يليه ثلاثة وفي الأسفل أر بعة‬ ‫فذلك خمسة عشر وفي النصف الأوسط واحد في الأعلى وفي الذي دونه خمسة وفي الأسفل‬ ‫تسعة فذلك خمسة عشر وفي الجانب الثالث في الأعلى ستة والذي دونه سبعة وفي الأسفل‬ :‫أثنان فذلك خمسة عشر وهذه صورته‬

‫ثمانية‬

‫واحد‬

‫ستة‬

‫ثلثة‬

‫خمسة‬

‫سبعة‬

‫أر بعة‬

‫تسعة‬

‫إثنان‬

‫ولا يعود في الواحد منها حساب مثل ما في الآخر بوجه ولا سبب وإلّا فسد الحساب ومتى‬ ‫جمعت الزوايا كانت أيضا ً خمسة عشر وإذا جمعت عرضا ً كانت مثل ما جمعت طولا ً سوى‬ .‫وذلك أيضا ًمثل حل الأعداد بخاصية عجيبة فاعمل في ذلك ترى فيه ما تحب إن شاء الله‬ 3.3.6

Translation Elsewhere in these books, we have given you an example of the reason why, among numbers, the threefold [i.e. 3 × 3] which adds up to fifteen performs the action it is renowned for with regard to the matter of childbirth. But even if, in fact, it does perform [this action], this is due to its occult properties (min al-khawāṣṣ). Indeed, I have tested it and found that in some cases it can be so slow as to be almost completely disappointing. But this is due to an additional cause, which surpasses the limit of [the square’s] potential to act, and to another cause superior to this [power of the square]. This is on account of a counteracting cause other than that of the birth [itself], so although the writing and numbering [of the square] aids the birth, it has no effect on the other cause, and for this reason it is obstructed. Another reason [the square can fail] apart from this is that the present moment in which the writing of the square is completed may be such that it is written while the ascendant is malefic (wa-naḥis ṭāliʿ),

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

83

so this necessitates that the birth be obstructed at that time. But, even if it is late and slow, it will inevitably work. So, do what we have described and [make] these nine letters we have depicted. It will cause no harm if we mention these nine cells. Indeed, I have not mentioned them with an illustration except here and in another place in my books, but I have mentioned them to you here, because this is the most apposite place for it. Test it and work with it, for it is one of the greatest aids. Say we wish for 5 to be at the centre of it, and this 5 so placed, the rest of what is needed in it comes out, [fol. 36v] namely three cells: 8 in the upper [cell], 3 in the next one, and 4 in the lower [cell], and that [makes] 15. In the middle half, 1 is above, 5 in the one beneath it, and 9 in the lowermost [cell], and that [makes] 15. On the third side, 6 is in the upper [cell], 7 in the one beneath it, and 2 in the lower [cell], and that [makes] 15. This is the image:

Six

One

Eight

Seven

Five

Three

Two

Nine

Four

The numbers in each [cell] must nowise repeat, or there is an error in the numbering. And when the corner [diagonals] are added up, they too [make] fifteen, and when [the numbers] are added up horizontally they equal [the sum of the numbers added] vertically, and that also is the like solution to the numbers by means of a wondrous occult property. So, perform this operation and you will surely achieve the result you desire, God willing. 3.3.7 Commentary This passage is particularly significant in that it contains the earliest known discussion of the importance of the astrologically determined moment propitious to the efficacy of the wafq. The link between awfāq and astral influences continued to develop in later centuries as awfāq became a fundamental component of the Islamicate science of talismans. In the Jābirian corpus, however, there is no suggestion that the actions of the 3×3 wafq might be modified by the practitioner through the choice of various astrologically significant moments at which to construct the talisman in order that it might be used for something

84

hallum

other than its traditional eutocic purpose. This text simply warns that using the wafq at an astrologically inopportune moment (for example, when the ascendant is malefic) can impede its eutocic power. Furthermore, there is no indication in the Jābirian corpus that the properties of awfāq of higher orders could be harnessed talismanically. The Book of Selections (Kitāb al-nukhab) is a comprehensive treatise on talisman making in twelve chapters.69 It is considered to be one of the youngest writings in the Jābirian corpus and is not mentioned in any other Jābirian text. It is, however, cited in Maslama al-Qurṭubī’s (d. 353/964) Goal of the Sage (see §3.5, below), so it must have been written before the mid-4th/10th century.70 In Chapter Five of the Book of Selections, there is a discussion of substances with khawāṣṣ that act through the senses. Here, the author mentions the eutocic effects of the 3×3 wafq as an example of the inscrutability of khawāṣṣ in general and numerical khawāṣṣ in specific. 3.3.8

Text71 ‫ الولادة يا معشر الناس‬74‫ الحساب في تسهيل‬73‫ هذه الأشكال الجامعة لمبادئ‬72‫وإلى ماذا ن ُسب‬ ‫[ فقد قلنا فيما سبق مثل ذلك وهل ذلك منسوب ومتطلب من الروائح أو من الطعوم‬C 114r] ‫[ ما قال قوم من أهل الشرع ونسبه‬P 56r] ‫أو من اللموس أو من سائر الباقية أم الحال فيها على‬

69

70 71

72 73 74

I am grateful to Liana Saif for bringing this passage to my attention and for providing me with the manuscripts and her draft transcription and translation, which I have adapted here. On this text, which is also incorrectly known as the Book of Research (Kitāb al-baḥth), see Kraus, Jâbir ibn Ḥayyân, 1:142–146; Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften, 207 and 383–384; Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums (Leiden: Brill, 1967–), 4:263. These will soon be superseded by Liana Saif, Kitāb al-Nukhab attributed to Jābir bin Hayyān: A Critical Edition, Translation and Commentary (forthcoming) and Liana Saif, “From Jābir to Maslama: The Early Development of Esoteric-Occult Discourse” (forthcoming). Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī, Picatrix: das Ziel des Weisen, von Pseudo-Maǧrīṭī, ed. Helmut Ritter (Leipzig: Teubner, 1933), 146, lines 12–13. Jābir b. Ḥayyān, Kitāb al-nukhab, C = Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Carullah 1721, fols. 113v, line 26–114r, line 1; P = BnF, Arabe 5321, fols. 55v, line 18–56r, line 3, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ ark:/12148/btv1b90653135/f59.item. ‫ ]نسب‬C: ‫ ينسب‬P. ‫ ]لمبادى‬P: ‫ للمبادى‬C. ‫ ]الحساب في تسهيل‬P: om. C.

85

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

‫إلى سيدة نساء العالمين مر يم صلوات الله عليها وأنها رحمة منها للنساء وقد ن ُسب ذلك إلى سيدتنا‬ 75‫فاطمة عليها السلام أم كيف الجواب في ذلك وهذه صورة الشكل‬

‫ستة‬

3.3.9

‫واحد‬

‫ثمانية‬

‫سبعة‬

‫ثلاثة‬

‫اثنين‬

‫أر بعة‬

Translation But to what is the eutocic effect of these figures that contain the principles of arithmetic to be attributed, o crowd of people? [C 114r] We have previously spoken of similar things, and so is this [also] attributed to and demanded of odors, flavors, textures (al-lumūs) or the other remaining [sensations]? Or is their [i.e. these figures’] case what some religious scholars say, who attribute it to the Mistress of the Women of the Worlds, Maryam—the prayers of God be upon her—, that they are an act of mercy from her to women? It has also been attributed to Our Lady, Fāṭima— peace be upon her. Otherwise, what is the answer concerning this? This is an image of the figure:

Eight

75

One

Six

Three

Seven

Four

Two

‫مثل ذلك وهل ذلك منسوب … وهذه صورة الشكل‬, and following figure] P: om. C.

86

hallum

3.3.10 Commentary As is later the case in Maslama al-Qurṭubī’s Goal of the Sage, the wafq in the Book of Selections appears in a list of things with known khawāṣṣ. In contrast with the previously mentioned things, the khawāṣṣ of a mathematical entity such as a wafq cannot conceivably be modulated by its interaction with the senses since it has no inherent color, odor, flavour, sound or texture. Nor are astral influences mentioned in the Book of Selections as an interfering factor as they were in the Jābirian Great Book of Occult Properties. Rather, it is suggested that the wafq’s khawāṣṣ stem from its association with, or perhaps invention by religious authorities, either Maryam (mother of Jesus) or Fāṭima (daughter of the prophet Muḥammad, especially venerated by the Shiʿi authors of the Jābirian corpus as the wife of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib and mother of Ḥasan and Ḥusayn). The association of this wafq with female religious figures is appropriate because of its eutocic property. The unusual appearance of the wafq in the Book of Selections with its numbers missing from the lower two cells of the central column may not have been the author’s intention but simply a defect in P, the only manuscript to contain this diagram. Alternatively, the numbers could have been left out deliberately either by the author or by the scribe of P in order not to activate the khawāṣṣ of the wafq unintentionally. 3.4 Epistles of the Brethren of Purity (Mid-Fourth/Tenth Century) The next appearance of the eutocic 3×3 wafq is in the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity (Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ), written by a secretive group of anonymous authors probably at Baghdad during the mid-fourth/tenth century.76 Here, we find a shift in the frame of reference in which the awfāq are considered. The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity discuss not only the 3 × 3 wafq but the first seven awfāq (3×3 to 9×9). While it is unlikely the Brethren of Purity were the first to write about awfāq of orders higher than three, owing both to uncertainties concerning the composition date of their Epistles and to the patchiness of our evidence for the early study of the awfāq, we are unable to render a final judgment. There is, however, no indication that they associated these first seven awfāq with the seven planets, as becomes routine in Islamicate literature about a century later.

76

For this dating of the composition of the Epistles, see Liana Saif, “Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ’s Religious Reform and Magic: Beyond the Ismaʿili Hypothesis,” Journal of Islamic Studies 30, no. 1 (2019): 55–56, n. 87.

87

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

With the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, we leave the medical context in which the 3×3 wafq appears in the Paradise of Wisdom and in which it remains, to a certain extent, in Ibn Akhī Ḥizām’s hippiatric treatise and in the Jābirian corpus. The discussion of awfāq in the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity still focuses on occult properties (khawāṣṣ), just as in the Jābirian corpus, but it is framed within the mathematical discourse of the “Epistle on Geometry” (2.26).77 Here, the awfāq are clearly conceived of in terms of figurate numbers78 and, as such, are imagined to combine the occult properties inherent in both the numbers they contain and the geometrical figures into which these numbers are arranged. When the two sets of occult properties are combined, they yield new and unexpected properties. Epistle 2.26 begins with the Brethren of Purity’s conception of the combination of number and form. 3.4.1

Translation79 Since we have shown something of the properties of these figures …, and, previously, something of the properties of numbers …, we want to

77

78 79

Epistles of the Brethren of Purity: On Arithmetic and Geometry. An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistles 1 & 2, ed. and trans. Nader El-Bizri (Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2012), 138–144 (text), 154–159 (translation). For an introduction to the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ’s broader arithmological framework, see Nader El-Bizri, “The Occult in Numbers: The Arithmology and Arithmetic of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ,” in The Occult Sciences in Pre-modern Islamic Cultures. Beiruter Texte und Studien 138, ed. Nader El-Bizri and Eva Orthmann (Beirut: Ergon Verlag Würzburg, 2018), 17–40. That is, the arrangement of sequences of numbers into geometrical patterns, the most famous ancient example of which is the Pythagorean tetractys. Epistles of the Brethren of Purity 2.26, ed. El-Bizri, 138 (text), 154–155 (translation, adapted here).

ً ‫ فنر يد أن نذكر طرفا‬،… ‫ وقبلها طرفا ً من خواص العدد‬،… ‫وإذ قد بينّ ا طرفا ً من خواص الأشكال‬ ‫ وذلك أن ّه إذا جُم ِـَع بين بعض الأعداد و بين بعض الأشكال الهندسية ظهر منها‬،‫من خواص مجموعهما‬ ‫ب التسعة الآحاد في الشكل المتسع‬ َ ِ ‫كت‬ ُ ‫ مثال ذلك إذا‬.‫خواص ُأخ َر ُ لا يتبي ّن في كل واحد منهما بمجر ّده‬ :‫ مثل هذا‬،‫صيته في الشكل المتسع أن ّهكيفما ع َُّد كانت الجملة خمسة عشر‬ ّ ‫ن خا‬ ّ ‫على هذه الصورة فإ‬

٦

٧

٢

١

٥

٩

٨

٣

٤

88

hallum

mention something of the properties of their combination. That is to say that, when some numbers are combined with some geometrical figures, other properties are manifested out of them that had been indiscernible in either of them in isolation. An example of this is when the nine units are inscribed in a ninefold figure in this form [shown below], its property within this ninefold figure is that, however it be added up, the sum is fifteen, like this:

6

7

2

1

5

9

8

3

4

3.4.2 Commentary The results of the combinations of number and form are observed in changes in properties (khawāṣṣ) and specifically in the appearance of new, previously unknown properties. The 3×3 wafq is chosen as an example of such unique properties manifested by a geometrical arrangement of numbers. The Brethren of Purity explain that the new, previously indiscernible property made manifest when the first nine numbers (i.e., 1–9) are combined in a 3 × 3 square is the sum ( jumla) of the numbers in each row, column, and the two corner-tocorner diagonals, namely fifteen.80 Although the term khāṣṣiyya (pl. khawāṣṣ) can simply mean “property” or “characteristic,” the discussion at the end of Epistle 2.26 leaves no doubt that what is meant are “occult properties,” that is, an object’s active properties the cause of which is not readily apparent but which allows the possessor of such properties the power to act from a distance.81 In the case of the wafq, the occult property is equated with the

80

81

This sum is often referred to in modern literature as the “magic constant” of a magic square. In Arabic awfāq literature, the magic constant is often simply called the “harmony” (wafq) or “harmonious number” (al-ʿadad al-wafq). The standard example of such khawāṣṣ is, as we saw in the quotation from the Paradise of Wisdom (see § 3.3.2, above), the power of the magnet to attract iron from a distance without apparent cause. The intermediary position between the sciences of geometry, arithmetic, khawāṣṣ, and talisman making occupied by awfāq in the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity remains discernible, even after their wholesale assimilation into lettrism

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

89

“magic constant” itself, which only manifests when the nine numbers are properly arranged within the square. After displaying the arrangements, stating the magic constants of each of the first seven awfāq, and suggesting that the same example could be followed for other numbers and figures, the text uses the eutocic 3 × 3 wafq to exemplify the awfāq’s practical utility. Some fascinating details are given concerning the way in which the Brethren of Purity imagined the talismanic power of the awfāq to function.

(ʿilm al-ḥurūf ), in the division of sciences laid out by the Ottoman encyclopaedist Taşköprüzāde (d. 968/1561) in his Key of Felicity and Lamp of Sovereignty (Miftāḥ al-saʿāda wamisbāḥ al-siyāda, completed 948/1541): “This science [sc. “the science of the numbers of harmony,” i.e., of awfāq] is one of the branches of the science of number with respect to their numerical calculation and one of the branches of the science of khawāṣṣ with respect to their effects and benefits” (‫ ومن‬،‫وهذا العلم من فروع علم العدد من حيث حساب الأعداد‬

‫فروع علم الخواص من حيث آثاره ومنافعه‬, Aḥmad b. Muṣṭafā Taşköprüzāde, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda wa-misbāḥ al-siyāda [Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1985], 1:373, s.v. ‫“ ;)علم أعداد الوفق‬It is possible to place this science [sc. “the science of spiritual properties from number and letter awfāq and number and letter permutations (taksīrāt)”] among the branches of the science of arithmetic with respect to the arrangement of numbers, and among the branches of the science of geometry with regard to the equilibration of those numbers or letters in the harmonious tables [i.e., the physical arrangement within the grids of the awfāq]. But, because one can place it among the [science of] the properties of letters in consideration of the laying out of the harmony with letters [i.e., letter squares], I have mentioned it [here] in [the article on] the properties of letters, which are among the properties of the Qurʾān” (‫ ومن‬،‫وهذا العلم يمكن جعله من فروع علم الحساب من حيث ترتيب الأعداد‬

‫ لـكن لما أمكن جعله‬.‫فروع علم الهندسة من جهة تعديل تلك الأعداد أو الحروف في الجداول الوفقية‬ ‫ً ذكرناه في علم الحروف التي هي من خواص القرآن‬،‫من خواص الحروف باعتبار جعل الوفق حرفيا‬, Taşköprüzāde, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda, 2:548, s.v. ‫علم الخواص الروحانية من الأوفاق العددية والحرفية‬

‫)والتكسيرات العددية والحرفية‬. For a discussion of Taşköprüzāde’s treatment of the occult sciences that focuses on these two passages, see Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Powers of One: The Mathematicalization of the Occult Sciences in the High Persianate Tradition,”Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 5, no. 1 (2017): 173–176, esp. n. 171; I adapt his translation here.

‫‪90‬‬

‫‪hallum‬‬

‫‪Translation82‬‬

‫‪3.4.3‬‬

‫‪As for their benefits and uses, we have mentioned this in the “Epistle on‬‬ ‫‪Talismans and Incantations” and presented something of them [there].‬‬ ‫‪But we will give one example of them in this chapter as an indication of‬‬ ‫‪the truth of what we have said.‬‬ ‫‪We say: The property and benefit of this ninefold figure is that it eases‬‬ ‫‪childbirth when inscribed on two pieces of pottery untouched by water‬‬ ‫‪and you suspend them from a woman suffering in labor. If the Moon hap‬‬‫‪pens to be in the ninth house and is joined to the lord of the ninth [house],‬‬ ‫‪it [i.e., the figure] eases childbirth, or if it is [joined] to the lord of its house‬‬ ‫‪in the ninth [degree], or some similar ninefold [astral arrangement].‬‬

‫‪Epistles of the Brethren of Purity 2.26, ed. El-Bizri, 142–144 (text), 159 (translation, adapted‬‬ ‫‪here).‬‬

‫وأما منافعها والفائدة منها فقد ذكرنا ذلك في رسالة الطلسمات والعزائم وأوردنا طرفا ًمنها ولـكن نذكر‬ ‫صْدق ما قلنا‪.‬‬ ‫منها في هذا الفصل مثالا ًواحدا لً يكون دلالة ًعلى ِ‬

‫ب على خزفتين لم يصبهما‬ ‫كت ِ َ‬ ‫فنقول‪ :‬إن من خاصية هذه الشكل المتسع ومنفعته تسهيل الولادة إذا ُ‬ ‫ب التاسِع سهل‬ ‫الماء وعلقتهما على المرأة التي ضر بها الطلق وإن ات ّفق أن يكون القمر في التاسع متصلا بً ر ِّ‬ ‫ب بيته من التاسع وما شاكل ذلك من المتسعات‪:‬‬ ‫الولادة َ أو بر ّ‬

‫د‬

‫ج‬

‫ح‬

‫ط‬

‫ه‬

‫ا‬

‫ب‬

‫ز‬

‫و‬

‫وعلى هذا الطر يق سلك أصحاب الطلسمات في نصبها وذلك أنه ما من شيء من الموجودات الر ياضية‬ ‫والطبيعية والإلهية إلّا وله خاصية ليست لشيء آخر من الموجودات ولمجموعاتها خواص ليست لمفرداتها‬ ‫من الأعداد والأشكال والصور والمكان والزمان والعقاقير والطعوم والألوان والروائح والأصوات‬ ‫ت بينها على النسب التأليفية ظهرت خواصها وأفعالها‬ ‫والكلمات والحروف والأفعال والحركات فإذا جمع َ‬ ‫والدليل على صحة ما قلنا أفعال التر ياقات والمراهم والشر بات وألحان الموسيقى وتأثيراتها في الأجساد‬ ‫ب حكيم فيلسوف كما بينّ ا طرفا ًمن ذلك في رسالة الموسيقى‪.‬‬ ‫والنفوس جميع ًا مماّ لا خفاء به عن كل ذي ل ّ‬

‫‪82‬‬

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

D

J

Ḥ

Ṭ

H

A

B

Z

W

91

Talisman makers arrange them following this method. That is, there is nothing in existence, be it mathematical, physical, or divine, without some property that it shares with nothing else in existence, [nor are there] combinations [of properties] without properties they share with no individual [i.e., uncombined] number, figure, form, place, time, element, flavor, color, odor, sound, word, letter, action, or movement. So, when you combine them according to harmonious relationships, their properties and actions are manifested. The actions of theriacs, ointments, and potions are evidence that what I have said is correct, [as are] the influences of musical melodies on bodies and souls alike, which do not escape the notice of every intelligent and sage philosopher, of which we have explained something in the “Epistle on Music.” 3.4.4 Commentary The instructions given here for using the eutocic 3 × 3 wafq are similar to those already seen in the writings of Ibn Rabban al-Ṭabarī and Vṛnda and in the Jābirian corpus. But, in contrast to those texts, the Brethren of Purity offer both a more theoretical conceptualization of the powers of the wafq and further astrological instructions for its use. A wafq’s powers, they tell us, are the result of “the harmonious relationships” (al-nasab al-taʾlīfiyya) that exist between the various numbers it contains and between those numbers and the figure in which they are arranged. In arranging the numbers harmoniously within a wafq, the talisman maker is like the physician who effects great cures through the harmonious relationships he sets up when he skillfully mixes his many and varied materia medica or like the musician who blends tone and rhythm in his melodies and is thus able to affect at a distance both the bodies and souls of his listeners. Although the Brethren of Purity never use the term wafq (lit. “harmony”) to refer to a magic square, their insistence that a “harmonious relationship” (al-nisba al-taʾlīfiyya) is the source of its power is a good indication of what the name wafq implies from a talismanic point of view. This passage is also the first to give clear instructions on electing an astrologically propitious moment to construct the 3 × 3 wafq. Several potentially

92

hallum

good options are presented, but they all have in common the observance of the Moon in relation with the number nine (e.g., the ninth house, the lord of the ninth house, the ninth degree). It is common in later Islamicate texts on the awfāq to associate the 3×3 wafq with the Moon, and the Brethren of Purity are the first to hint at this association. If they did mean to associate the 3×3 wafq with the Moon, which is not certain, as we shall see from the next passage, it might be assumed that their reason for introducing the first seven awfāq directly before this passage was to suggest that the next six awfāq (4× 4 to 9×9) are associated with the rest of the seven planets, but they do not make this explicit. It is unclear, for example, how the associated astrological numbers would work as the order of the squares increases. The 9 of the 3 ×3 wafq works because there are more than nine houses and degrees within a house. Users of this system might struggle to find astrally significant 81s for the 9 × 9 wafq, since there are only twelve houses and only thirty degrees in each house. But the Brethren of Purity have more to say on this matter. The beginning of this passage suggests that the present discussion of awfāq is just a small sample of a more extended exploration of this subject to be found in another epistle called the “Epistle on Talismans and Incantations” (Risāla fī l-ṭalismāt wa-l-ʿazāʾim). The epistle referred to is the epistle on magic, the title of which begins “On what magic, incantations, the evil eye, taming, imagination, and spells are; and on how talismans are used ….”83 Surprisingly, however, no further discussion of the awfāq appears in either of the two recensions of the “Epistle on Magic” (epistles 52a and 52b). The end of the passage, however, points us in the direction of the “Epistle on Music,” and there we find a similar description of the use of the eutocic 3×3 wafq. Following a discussion of the numerous tetrads found in creation (e.g., the four ages of man, seasons, elements, and cardinal directions) and the correspondences and oppositions between them, the potency of combinations embodying a “harmonious relationship” (nisba taʾlīfiyya) is illustrated by medicine. Again, the examples of theriacs, ointments, and potions are given. Finally, talisman making is adduced as an example of an art that employs an underlying structure of harmonious relationships timed with corresponding terrestrial and 83

‫في ماهية السحر والعزائم والعين والزجر والوهم والرقي وفي كيفية أعمال الطلسمات‬. Epistles of the Brethren of Purity: On Magic I. An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistle 52a, ed. and trans. Godefroid de Callataÿ and Bruno Halflants (Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2011), 5 (text), 87 (translation, adapted here).

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

93

astral phenomena to bring about a desired result. The prime example of talismanic method is the eutocic 3×3 wafq. 3.4.5

Translation84 Know, my brother—God aid you and us by means of a spirit from Him!— that when these corresponding things are joined in a harmonious relationship (ʿalā al-nisbati al-taʾlīfati), they are combined, doubling their potentials. Their actions are manifested, they overcome their opposites, conquering what is contrary to them. By knowing them, the sages discovered medicines that cure diseases and heal illnesses like the theriacs, ointments, and potions known among physicians and prescribed in their books. Talisman makers work similarly in their preparations, following their knowledge of the natures, properties, and correspondences of things, how they are composed and their harmonious relationships. An example of this is the ninefold figure in its facilitation of childbirth when the nine numbers are inscribed in it during the ninth month of pregnancy, at the ninth hour of labor, when the lord of the ascendant is in the ninth house or the lord of the ninth is in the ascendant, and the Moon is in the ninth house or joined to a planet in the ninth house, or some similar ninefold [astral arrangement].

84

Epistles of the Brethren of Purity: On Music. An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistle 5, ed. and trans. Owen Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2010), 161–162 (text), 159 (translation, adapted here); annotated French translation in Amnon Shiloah, “L’épître sur la musique des Ikhwān alṢafa,” Revue d’ études islamiques 34 (1967): 182–183.

‫ت‬ ْ َ ‫واعلم يا أخي أي ّدك الله وإيانا بروح منه بأن هذه الأشياء المشاكلة إذا جمع بينها على النسبة التأليفية ائتلف‬ ‫ و بمعرفتها استخرجت الحكماء‬،‫وتضاعفت قواها وظهرت أفعال ُها وغلبت أضدادها وقهرت ما يخالفها‬ ‫الأدو ية المبرئة من الأمراض الشافية للأسقام مثل التر ياقات والمراهم والشر بات المعروفة بين الأطباء‬ ‫ وعلى مثل ذلك عمل أصحاب الطلسمات في نصبها بعد معرفتهم بطبائع الأشياء‬،‫الموصوفة في كتبهم‬ ‫ المثال في ذلك الشكل المتسع في تسهيل الولادة إذا‬،‫وخواصها ومشاكلتها وكيفية تركيبها ونسب تأليفها‬ ‫ و يكون رب الطالع في‬،‫ب فيه الأعداد التسعة في الشهر التاسع من الحمل في الساعة التاسعة من الطلق‬ َ ِ ‫كت‬ ُ ‫ وما شاكل‬،‫ و يكون القمر في التاسع أو مت ّصلا بً كوكب منه في التاسع‬،‫التاسع أو رب التاسع في الطالع‬ .‫ذلك من المتسعات‬

94

hallum

3.4.6 Commentary This passage is nearly identical in content to the passage from the “Epistle on Geometry,” discussed above (§3.4.3). Here, in the “Epistle on Music,” the action of the wafq is not explicitly likened to music, as this analogy is implied by the context. Once again, however, the property of the wafq is compared to that of knowledgeably and skillfully mixed compound remedies, and especially the elaborate and wonderous antidotes known as theriacs. We are additionally told that the harmonious relationships within the wafq (as also within compound remedies and music) double the potential of their constituent elements, empowering them to overcome their opposites. Finally, further ninefold arrangements are given as options for the timing of the wafq’s construction: three astral (the lord of the ascendant in the ninth house, the lord of the ninth house in the ascendant or the Moon joined to a planet in the ninth house) and one terrestrial (the ninth month of pregnancy at the ninth hour of labor). The fact that not all the suggested ninefold astral arrangements involve the Moon may be taken as evidence that the Brethren of Purity did not, in fact, associate the 3×3 wafq solely with the Moon. At any rate, it is clear that a larger role in the timing of this wafq’s construction is played by the number 9—perhaps the Brethren of Purity would prefer that we say the “ennead” or “novenary”—than by any particular astral body. 3.5 Maslama al-Qurṭubī (d. 353/964) It should be noted that, in the passages so far adduced, the term wafq has not been used. In fact, no standard term is used in these early texts to refer to the magic square itself or to the “harmonious” arrangement of numbers in it. Rather, the awfāq are generically referred to as “figures” (ashkāl, sing. shakl) by Ibn Rabban and the Brethren of Purity and “image” (ṣūra, pl. ṣuwar) by Ibn Akhī Ḥizām and the Jābirian corpus. The first use of the term wafq to refer to a magic square in an extant text in the tradition of the eutocic 3×3 square is found in Abū al-Qāsim Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī’s influential grimoire, the Goal of the Sage (Ghāyat al-ḥakīm, Lat. Picatrix). The Goal of the Sage (6.8) contains only a single, brief mention of the eutocic 3×3 wafq.

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

3.5.1

95

Translation85 The 15 from the numbers in the three cells of the wafq is [helpful] for a difficult childbirth.

3.5.2 Commentary Despite the brevity of the reference to the wafq, the fame and wide diffusion of the Goal of the Sage was perhaps influential in ensuring the general acceptance and continued use of wafq as the standard technical term for a magic square, although the term may already have been standard in mathematical literature (see below). It is noteworthy also that, just as in the Jābirian Book of Selections (see text §3.3.8–9 above), the eutocic power of the 3 × 3 wafq is mentioned in the Goal of the Sage amongst substances and objects with occult properties (khawāṣṣ) and not in a section of the text devoted to talisman making. The intermediary position held by the wafq in the Goal of the Sage between something like a stone, a letter, or a number that might have naturally inherent khawāṣṣ and a fully elaborated talisman that must be constructed out of the correct substances in the correct form at the correct astrologically elected moment may owe something to the fact that Maslama al-Qurṭubī knew the Book of Selections.86 It is interesting that Maslama al-Qurṭubī places in his list of things with khawāṣṣ the number 15 itself (the “magic constant” of the 3 × 3 wafq obtained by adding specified sets of three numbers within its cells), rather than all nine numbers arranged within the wafq from which the 15 is derived as was the case in the Book of Selections. This is similar to The Brethren of Purity’s explanation in the “Epistle on Geometry” (see §3.4.1 above) that the new, previously indiscernible property (khāṣṣiyya) made manifest when the numbers of the 3 × 3 wafq are combined harmoniously is 15. This similarity should come as no surprise, however, because the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity are a major source for the writings of Maslama al-Qurṭubī, who even claimed to be one of their authors.87 85 86 87

Al-Qurṭubī, Picatrix, ed. Helmut Ritter, 400, line 13. .‫والخمسة عشر من العدد في ثلاثة بيوت الوفق لعسر الولادة‬ See above, note 70. See Godefroid de Callataÿ, “Magia en al-Andalus: Rasāʾil Ijwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rutbat al-Ḥakīm y Gāyat al-Ḥakīm (Picatrix),” Al-Qanṭara 34, no. 2 (2013): 297–344; Godefroid de Callataÿ and Sébastien Moureau, “Again on Maslama Ibn Qāsim al-Qurṭubī, the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ and Ibn Khaldūn: New Evidence from Two Manuscripts of Rutbat al-ḥakīm,” Al-Qanṭara 37, no. 2 (2016): 332–336; Godefroid de Callataÿ and Sébastien Moureau, “A Milestone in the His-

96

hallum

3.6 Ibn al-Zarqālluh (d. 493/1100) Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm b. Yaḥyā al-Naqqāsh al-Tujībī al-Ṭulayṭulī b. al-Zarqālluh’s Treatise on the Movements of the Wandering Stars (Maqāla fī ḥarakāt al-kawākib al-sayyāra)88 marks a major turning point in the cultural history of the awfāq. This Andalusian work outlines practices for using the first seven awfāq (i.e., 3 ×3 to 9×9) as talismans of the seven planets and is probably the earliest known text in which correspondences between all these awfāq and the planets are stated explicitly. It is also probably the first text to explain the talismanic use of awfāq of orders higher than three and the first to assert that a single wafq can have more than one talismanic function (both beneficial and harmful), depending upon the materials used to create it, the astrologically elected moment at which it is created, the incense used to suffumigate it, and the method by which it is employed. In Ibn al-Zarqālluh’s treatise, the choices and actions of the talisman maker are at least as important for activating and directing the power of the wafq as the correct arrangement of the numbers in the wafq. With that, the awfāq become more or less identical with other types of talismans. For purposes of comparison, I will extract here only Ibn alZarqālluh’s treatment of the eutocic power of the 3 × 3 wafq (which, following his atypical system, is associated not with the Moon but with Saturn) and leave out his discussion of its other powers.89

88

89

tory of Andalusī Bāṭinism: Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī’s Riḥla in the East,” Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 5 (2017): 88–90 and 112; and Saif, “From Ġāyat al-ḥakīm to Šams al-maʿārif,” 303–304. Cambridge, MS Gg. 3.19, fols. 140r–148v (c. 860/1456, hereafter A). This treatise is also called the Epistle on the Movements and Governance of the Wandering Stars (Risāla fī ḥarakāt alkawākib al-sayyāra wa-tadbīrihā, Cairo, Dār al-Kutub, MS Ṭalʿat majāmīʿ 424, fols. 51v–60v [c. 1200/1785], hereafter C1), and The Operation of the Authority and Figures of the Planets (Tadbīr amr al-kawākib wa-ashkālihā, Vienna, Nationalbibliothek Wien, MS A.F. 162d, fols. 1v–11v [c. 963/1556], hereafter V). This treatise is also found, without title, in BL, Add. MS 9599, fols. 128r–131r and 133r–136v (c. 1223/1808, hereafter B). I follow Julio Samsó, “Ibn alZarqālluh,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed. in calling this author Ibn al-Zarqālluh, whose name appears in various forms in the sources (e.g. Walad al-Zarqiyāl and al-Zarqālī). I am grateful to Liana Saif for acquainting me with the earliest copy of this text (A), which is not mentioned by modern scholars in relation to Ibn al-Zarqālluh’s treatise on awfāq. The dating of the Cambridge copy is based on the colophon to another text in the same manuscript (fol. 98v); an erroneous reading of the date in this colophon as 767/1366 is given in Edward G. Browne, A Hand-List of the Muhammadan Manuscripts, Including All Those Written in the Arabic Character, Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: The University Press, 1900), 201. I am currently preparing a study of the tradition of Ibn al-Zarqālluh’s treatise, which will include annotated editions and translations of the Arabic text as well Latin and Old Castilian versions edited, translated, and analyzed by Rosa Comes and Emilia Calvo. Ibn al-Zarqālluh goes on to explain that, under different conditions, this wafq can also be used to destroy and depopulate an area, depose a governor, or win the favor of a king.

‫‪97‬‬

‫‪new light on early arabic awfāq literature‬‬

‫‪Text90‬‬

‫‪3.6.1‬‬

‫فإذا أردت العمل به في أي وجهكان‪ 91‬فاصنع على‪ 92‬ما أصف لك وهذا صورته‪93‬‬

‫‪۲‬‬

‫‪۹‬‬

‫‪٤‬‬

‫‪۷‬‬

‫‪٥‬‬

‫‪۳‬‬

‫‪٦‬‬

‫‪۱‬‬

‫‪۸‬‬

‫فإذا أردته‪ 94‬لمن تعسرت في الولادة فاكتبه‪ 95‬يوم السبت في ساعة زحل‪ 96‬وهو في يسره أو‬ ‫ز يادته أو ملائه‪ 97‬وتعرف ذلك في الم َكر ُمة المرسومة‪ 98‬له‪ 99‬تأخذ‪ 100‬خرقة جديدة من ثوب‪101‬‬ ‫قطن وتنزل فيها الشكل‪ [C1 54r] 102‬على صفته‪ 103‬وتر بطه على الخصر الأيمن‪ 104‬وتبخره‪ 105‬بو بر‬ ‫الشهم وهو القط‪ 106‬فإن الحابل تضع في الحـين‪107.‬‬

‫‪Ibn al-Zarqālluh, Maqāla fī ḥarakāt al-kawākib al-sayyāra, A fol. 142r, C1 fols. 53v–54r, V‬‬ ‫‪fol. 4r and B fol. 133v.‬‬ ‫‪ C1 B: om. V.‬في أي عمل شئب ‪] A:‬في أي وجهكان‬ ‫‪) B.‬فاصنع ‪ (om.‬على ‪) A:‬على ‪ (om.‬فاصنع ‪] V C1:‬فاصنع على‬ ‫‪ V: om. A B.‬وهو هذا ‪] C1:‬وهذا صورته‬ ‫‪ B.‬فإذا أردت ‪ C1:‬فإن أردته ‪ V:‬فإن أردت ‪] A:‬فاذا اردته‬ ‫‪ B.‬لعسر النفاس فاكتبه ‪ V C1:‬لعسر الولادة تكتبه ‪] A:‬تعسرت في الولادة فاكتبه‬ ‫‪ V.‬ساعته ‪] A C1 B:‬ساعة زحل‬ ‫‪ B.‬ولاكن يكون زحل في يسره وفي ز يادته أو يكون في امتلائه ‪] A V C1:‬وهو في يسره … أو ملائه‬ ‫‪ C1.‬في الـكرامة مرسومة ‪ A:‬من الـكرمة المرسومة ‪] V:‬في المكرمة المرسومة‬ ‫‪] om. B.‬وتعرف ذلك … المرسومة له‬ ‫‪ B.‬وتكون الكتابة في ‪] A V C1:‬تأخذ‬ ‫‪] A V C1: om. B.‬ثوب‬ ‫‪ B.‬وتنزل شكل المثلث فيها ‪] A V C1:‬وتنزل فيها الشكل‬ ‫‪ B.‬الصفة التي تأتي إن شاء الله ‪] A V C1:‬صفته‬ ‫‪ B.‬ثم تر بطها المرأة على خاصرتها اليسرى ‪ V:‬وتر بط خصر الأيمن ‪] A C1:‬وتر بطه على الخصر الأيمن‬ ‫‪ B.‬بعدما تبخر الشكل ‪] A V C1:‬وتبخره‬ ‫‪ B.‬بشوك القنفود )‪ C1: (sic‬بو بر تعسهم وشيهم ملو القسط ‪ V:‬بو بر وشهم ‪] A:‬بو بر الشهم وهو القط‬ ‫فإنها تولد الصغير و يسهل الله في ‪ C1:‬تضعه في الحـين ‪ V:‬تضع في الحـين ‪] A:‬فإن الحابل تضع في الحـين‬ ‫‪ B.‬ولادتها بحوله وقوته‬

‫‪90‬‬ ‫‪91‬‬ ‫‪92‬‬ ‫‪93‬‬ ‫‪94‬‬ ‫‪95‬‬ ‫‪96‬‬ ‫‪97‬‬ ‫‪98‬‬ ‫‪99‬‬ ‫‪100‬‬ ‫‪101‬‬ ‫‪102‬‬ ‫‪103‬‬ ‫‪104‬‬ ‫‪105‬‬ ‫‪106‬‬ ‫‪107‬‬

98

hallum

3.6.2

Translation If you wish to work with it in any way, make it as I describe it to you. This is an image of it:

4

9

2

3

5

7

8

1

6

If you want it for someone who is having difficulty in childbirth, inscribe it on Saturday, at the hour of Saturn, when it [sc. Saturn] is in its “ease,” “increase,” or “fullness,” which you will know from the generous gift drawn up for it.108 Take a new rag from a cotton robe, mark the figure on it [C1 54r] as it has been described, and tie it to the [woman’s] right hip. Suffumigate it with the fur of “the sagacious one” (i.e., a cat), and the pregnant woman will give birth immediately. 3.6.3 Commentary While this description of how to use the eutocic 3 × 3 wafq is similar, in some respects, to earlier prescriptions, there are major changes to both the materials used and their employment. For example, only one wafq is to be used, and it is not to be written on a piece of new pottery and placed under the feet but on a rag of new white cotton and tied to the hip.109 More substantial innovations are the addition to the prescription of a suffumigation and the election of an astrologically propitious moment for constructing the wafq, both of which are fundamental talismanic practices.

108

109

“Generous gift” (makruma) is the term Ibn al-Zarqālluh uses for the tables placed at the end of his treatise, which indicate when each planet is in various states such as the “ease,” “increase,” and “fullness” mentioned here. The shift from a piece of pottery (‫ )خزف‬to a rag (‫ )خرقة‬can be explained by the graphical similarity between these words in Arabic, but the other changes lack obvious textual explanations.

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

99

3.7 Abū al-Walīd al-Mālaqī (d. c. 530/1135) Abū al-Walīd Ismaʿīl (b. ʿAlī?) b. al-Ḥasan (or al-Ḥusayn) b. Abī Naṣr al-Fatḥ alMālaqī was a mathematician and astronomer from Málaga.110 The only surviving work of this relatively unknown, younger Andalusian contemporary of Ibn al-Zarqālluh is a short treatise on the talismanic use of the awfāq that survives in a single manuscript: The Treatise on the Existence of the Cause of Amicable Numbers and Square Figures with Numerical Planes, and their Properties with regard to the Arrangement of the Properties of the Celestial Bodies (Maqāla fī wujūd ʿillat al-aʿdād al-mutahābba wa-al-ashkāl al-murabbaʿa dhawāt al-sutūḥ al-ʿadadiyya wa-khawāṣṣihā min jihat awḍāʿ khawāṣṣ al-ajrām al-falakiyya).111 This treatise is similar to Ibn al-Zaqālluh’s Treatise on the Movements of the Wandering Stars in that it contains instructions for the talismanic use of the first seven awfāq associated with the seven planets, but al-Mālaqī adds the 10 × 10 wafq, which he associates with the sphere of the fixed stars. This is one of the many differences between al-Mālaqī’s and Ibn al-Zarqālluh’s treatises that show that neither of these authors drew directly from the other in composing his own treatise. In fact, it is not even certain whether Ibn al-Zarqālluh’s or al-Mālaqī’s treatise was composed first.112 Because al-Mālaqī mentions the eutocic effect at both the beginning and the end of his treatment of the 3×3 wafq, I present the passage here in full. 110

111

112

See Ibn al-Abbār (d. 658/1260), al-Takmila li-kitāb al-Ṣila, ed. ʿAbd al-Sallām al-Harrās, 4 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1995), 1:155, item 487 and Jorge Lirola Delgado and José Miguel Puerta Vílchez, eds., Biblioteca de al-Andalus, 9 vols. (Almería: Fundación Ibn Tufayl de Estudios Árabes, 2004–2017), 3:159, item 470. I am grateful to Julio Samsó for identifying al-Mālaqī and providing me with these references. Al-Mālaqī, Abū Walīd Ismāʿīl, Maqāla fī wujūd ʿillat al-aʿdād al-mutaḥāba wa-l-ashkāl almurabaʿa dhuwāt al-suṭūḥ al-ʿadadiyya wa-khawāṣṣihā min jihat awḍāʿ khawāṣṣ al-ajrām al-falakiyya. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Orientabteilung, MS Or. Quart. 98, fols. 2r–7r, http://resolver.staatsbibliothek‑berlin.de/SBB000041CE00000 005. See Wilhel Ahlwardt, Verzeichnis der arabischen Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin, 10 vols. (Berlin: Asher, 1887–1899), 3:505–506, item 4115. There is one further pre-7th/13th-century Andalusian appearance of the eutocic 3×3 wafq, of the more traditional variety, in a Hebrew medical treatise attributed to Abraham b. Ezra (d. c. 560/1165), which clearly derives from Arabic sources on the science of occult properties (ʿilm al-khawāṣṣ). The prescription is a simple formulation similar to that found in the Jābirian Small Book of Balances (see § 3.3.1, above), but it is, unusually, attributed to the Graeco-Roman physician Galen of Pergamon (d. c. 215). See Abraham b. Ezra, Sefer hanisyonot. The Book of Medical Experiences. Medical Theory, Rational and Magical Therapy. A Study in Medievalism, ed. and trans. Joshua Otto Leibowitz and Shlomo Marcus (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1984), 70–71 (commentary) and 238–241 (text and translation). In general, magic squares in Jewish literature (both Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic), although undoubtedly deserving of study in their own right, stem from and form a part of the larger Islamicate tradition.

‫‪100‬‬

‫‪hallum‬‬

‫‪Text113‬‬

‫‪3.7.1‬‬

‫وأما الأشكال المر بعة على كمية قسمة السطوح وعللها وخواصها من جهة الأفلاك‪ 114‬فاعلم‬ ‫أن الشكل المثلث هو أول الأشكال متناسبة‪ 115‬أعداده من الواحد إلى ما يجتمع في أضلاعه‬ ‫على التوالي وهو منسوب لفلك القمر وخواصه وأعداد وفقه إذا جمعت في الطول والعرض‬ ‫والقطر كان المجتمع فيه أبد ًا ي̅ ه عدد ًا ومن خواصه إخراج المحبوس والجنين وتسهيل كل عسير‬ ‫وأنواع ما ينسب إلى القمر وهو أول الأشكال وفلك القمر أول الأفلاك من جهة الـكون‬ ‫والفساد فينبغي أن ينقش أعداده بالحروف الطبيعية في فضة خالصة والطالع برج الثور والقمر‬ ‫في السرطان في الثالث من الطالع في بيته بر يئ ًا من النحوس يستعان به في الأسفار والحركات‬ ‫والشرف وقضاء الحوائج وسرعها والآخر أن يكون الطالع السرطان والقمر فيه ينجح سعيه فإن‬ ‫كان القمر في الثور تقضي حوائجه و يتحبب للناس وإن كان القمر في التاسع في برج الحوت‬ ‫يستعين به على سفر البحر ]‪ [fol. 3v‬وصيده وللطلق وخروج المحبوس فاعلم ذلك موفق ًا‪.‬‬

‫ب‬

‫ط‬

‫د‬

‫ز‬

‫ه‬

‫ج‬

‫و‬

‫ا‬

‫ح‬

‫‪Translation‬‬

‫‪3.7.2‬‬

‫‪As for the square figures with [arranged] according to the quantity of the‬‬ ‫‪divisions of their planes, and their causes and properties with regard to‬‬ ‫‪the celestial spheres, know that the threefold figure is the first of the fig‬‬‫]‪ures whose numbers are proportionate from one to the sum of [the cells‬‬ ‫‪in its rows consecutively. It is associated with the Sphere of the Moon and‬‬ ‫‪its properties. The numbers of its harmony (aʿdād wafqihi), when added‬‬ ‫‪vertically, horizontally or diagonally, in each [case] always result in the‬‬ ‫‪Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Orientabteilung, Ms. or. quart. 98,‬‬ ‫‪fol. 3r, line 5–3v, line 1.‬‬ ‫‪ cod.‬الفلك ‪] scripsi:‬الأفلاك‬ ‫‪ cod.‬المتناسبة ‪] scripsi:‬متناسبة‬

‫‪113‬‬ ‫‪114‬‬ ‫‪115‬‬

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

101

number 15. Its properties include the releasing of a prisoner or a fetus, the easing of every difficulty, and things that are associated with the Moon. It is the first of the figures and the Sphere of the Moon is the first of the spheres from the perspective of generation and corruption [i.e., the sublunary world]. Its numbers must be engraved in natural letters on pure silver when the sign of Taurus is ascendant and the Moon is in Cancer— the third [house] from the ascendant—in its house, and free from misfortune. Then it will be helpful for journeys, movements, nobility, and the speedy fulfilment of needs. Otherwise, [engrave it when] the ascendant is Cancer and the Moon is in it, its movement being favorable. If the Moon is in Taurus, his needs will be fulfilled, and he will become popular with people. If the Moon is in the ninth [degree] of Pisces, it will be helpful for seafaring, [fol. 3v] fishing for labor pains, and releasing captives, so know that with success.

B

Ṭ

D

Z

H

J

W

A

Ḥ

3.7.3 Commentary Al-Mālaqī unequivocally associates the 3×3 wafq with the Moon, and calls for this talisman to be constructed at times that are astrologically propitious for that planet: when it is in Taurus (the Moon’s house) or Cancer (the house of the Moon’s exaltation) or when one of these two signs of the Zodiac are ascendant. He also appears to follow the talismanic method of the Brethren of Purity in prescribing a ninefold astral arrangement when he calls for the talisman to be made when “the Moon is in the ninth [degree] of Pisces,” but this could be coincidental. Echoes of Ibn Rabban al-Ṭabarī’s association of the eutocic 3 × 3 wafq with both the easing of childbirth and the words of the Psalm “Bring my soul out of prison” (see §3.1, above) may be detectable in al-Mālaqī’s treatise when he says that “its properties include the releasing of a prisoner or a fetus” and that “it will be helpful … for labor pains and releasing captives.” Al-Mālaqī does not, however, follow the traditional method of inscribing the 3 × 3 wafq on pottery to achieve its eutocic effect, nor does he follow Ibn al-Zarqālluh’s innovation of inscribing it on cloth. Instead he stipulates that it should be inscribed on pure silver (the

102

hallum

metal associated with the Moon) and that the numbers in the wafq must be represented by means of letters. In explicitly associating the 3×3 wafq with the Moon and insisting upon the use of silver for its talisman, al-Mālaqī appears to be the father of a tradition of associating the awfāq with the planets more popular than that of Ibn alZarqālluh. Al-Mālaqī’s system of planetary associations (the exact opposite of Ibn al-Zarqālluh’s system) and talismanic techniques continued in use at least until the early 11th/17th century, when it appeared in The Greater Sun of the Gnostics (Shams al-maʿārif al-kubrā) falsely attributed to al-Būnī.116 3.8 Al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) Any survey of literary appearances of the 3×3 wafq before the seventh/thirteenth century must mention Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-Ṭūsī al-Ghazālī. Indeed, his association with the 3× 3 wafq is so strong that it is sometimes named after him as the “threefold” (muthallath) or “seal (khitām) of al-Ghazālī”. In fact, however, he did no more than adduce it as a well known example of something with occult properties (khawāṣṣ) that are mysterious and inscrutable, which is nonetheless undeniably effective. In his autobiographical Deliverer from Error and Transmitter to the Possessor of Power and Glory (al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl wa-l-muwaṣṣil ilā dhī l-ʿizza wal-jalāl), al-Ghazālī argues against “those whose faith has been corrupted by way of philosophy” (man fasada īmānuhu bi-ṭarīq al-falsafa) so that they have lapsed into denial of prophecy and prophetic injunctions. During the course of his arguments, he uses examples chosen to be acceptable to students of philosophy such as “the occult properties of medicine and the stars, … physics, magic, and talismans” (khawāṣṣ al-ṭibb wa-l-nujūm … wa-l-ṭabīʿa wa-l-siḥr wa-l-ṭilasmāt).117 “Why,” asks al-Ghazālī, “is it not permissible that, within the prescriptions of the sharīʿa, there should be occult properties for healing and

116

117

For the planetary awfāq talismans in Pseudo-al-Būnī’s Shams al-maʿārif al-kubrā, see the eleventh/seventeenth-century BnF, MS Arabe 2650, fols. 84v–85r, https://gallica.bnf .fr/ark:/12148/btv1b11002467q/f87.item.r=Arabe%202650. On the compilation date of the Shams al-maʿārif al-kubrā and its false attribution to al-Būnī, see Gardiner, “Forbidden Knowledge?,” 123–129 and Gardiner, “Esotericism in a Manuscript Culture,” 33–37. A comprehensive history of literature on the planetary awfāq talismans is the subject of a forthcoming study by the present author. Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī, al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl wa-l-muwaṣṣil ilā dhī l-ʿizza wa-l-jalāl, ed. Kāmil ʿAyyād and Jamīl Ṣalībā (Beirut: Dār al-Andalus, 1967), 124; translation in William Montgomery Watt, The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazālī (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953), 77 (adapted here).

103

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

purifying hearts that are incomprehensible by intellectual wisdom but visible only to the eye of prophecy?”118 Al-Ghazālī goes on to forestall his opponents’ objections, using the example of the inscrutable yet undeniable khawāṣṣ of the 3 × 3 wafq. If one believes that the numbers in the wafq hold inexplicable powers, why should he deny that the numbers prescribed by the Prophet (e.g., the specific numbers of inclinations and prostrations [rakaʿāt] prescribed in each of the five daily prayers) might also hold inscrutable powers? 3.8.1

Translation119 Indeed, they [i.e. philosophers] have recognized occult properties (khawāṣṣ) more wondrous than this in what they have presented in their writ-

118

‫ ما لا يدرك‬،‫ في مداواة القلوب وتصفيتها‬،‫فلم َ لا يجوز أن يكون في الأوضاع الشرعية من الخواص‬

119

‫ بل لا يبصر ذلك إلى بعين النبوة؟‬،‫ بالحكمة العقلية‬al-Ghazālī, Munqidh, ed. ʿAyyād and Ṣalībā, 126; translation in Watt, Faith and Practice, 79 (adapted here). Al-Ghazālī, Munqidh, ed. ʿAyyād and Ṣalībā, 126–127 (some punctuation modified and orthography standardized here); translation in Watt, Faith and Practice, 79–80 (adapted here). ‫ وهي من الخواص العجيبة المجر بة في‬،‫بل قد اعترفوا بخواص هي أعجب من هذا فيما أوردوه في كتبهم‬ :‫ بهذا الشكل يكتب على خرقتين لم يصبهما ماء‬،‫معالجة الحامل التي عسر عليها الطلق‬

‫ب‬

‫ط‬

‫د‬

‫ز‬

‫هـ‬

‫ج‬

‫و‬

‫ا‬

‫ح‬

٢

٩

٤

٧

٥

٣

٦

١

٨

‫ وقد أقر ّوا بإمكان‬.‫ فيسرع الولد في الحال إلى الخروج‬،‫ وتضعها تحت قدميها‬،‫وتنظر إليهما الحامل بعينها‬ ‫ يكون مجموع ما‬،‫ يرقم فيها رقوم مخصوصة‬،‫ذلك وأوردوه في عجائب الخواص وهو شكل فيه تسعة بيوت‬ .‫في جدول واحد خمسة عشر ؛ قر َأته في طول الشكل أو في عرضه أو على التأر يب‬

104

hallum

ings of the wondrous properties proven in the treatment of a pregnant woman for whom delivery is difficult, by means of this figure inscribed on two rags untouched by water.

D

Ṭ

B

J

H

Z

Ḥ

A

W

4

9

2

3

5

7

8

1

6

The pregnant woman gazes at them with her eyes, and they are placed beneath her feet, then at once the child comes out quickly. They acknowledge the possibility of this and list it among the wonders of occult properties (khawāṣṣ). It is a figure in which there are nine cells, each with a specific number written in it, [so that] the sum of what is written in a single line ( jadwal) is 15 [whether] you read it in the figure vertically, horizontally, or diagonally (? ʿalā al-taʾrīb). 3.8.2 Commentary Al-Ghazālī’s philosophical opponents took the efficacy of the eutocic 3 × 3 wafq for granted. Al-Ghazālī, for his part, says nothing to suggest that he does not also believe in the power of the wafq, and, in fact, uses its khawāṣṣ as an example to make the same point in a Persian tract against antinomian Sufis.120 By the time al-Ghazālī wrote the Deliverer from Error in Seljuk Khurasan, it seems that the perceived truth of the power of the eutocic 3×3 wafq was unassailable.

120

Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī, Die Streitschrift des Ġazālī gegen die Ibāḥīja im persischen Text herausgegeben und übersetzt, ed. and trans. Otto Pretzl (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1933), 19–20 (text), 41–42 (translation).

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

105

The early texts on the eutocic powers of the 3 × 3 wafq reviewed above do not explain the mathematical rules governing the construction of awfāq, nor do they give instructions for algorithms by which their constructions could be carried out even if not fully understood. The texts are accompanied by images of the awfāq that must be slavishly copied by would-be practitioners. Even the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, in which a discussion of awfāq from 3×3 to 9×9 appears in a mathematical context, and the treatises of Ibn al-Zarqālluh and al-Mālaqī, with their extensive treatment of the talismanic uses, are silent about their methods for constructing these same awfāq. There are some apparently early awfāq treatises that deal with both the khawāṣṣ of the awfāq and their talismanic uses on the one hand and the mathematics behind their methods of construction on the other, but these texts have yet to be securely dated.121 Most treatises devoted entirely to awfāq, which I term awfāq literature proper, and written before the seventh/thirteenth century deal almost exclusively with mathematics. This is not to say that the authors of such awfāq liter-

121

An important example of these dual-genre awfāq treatises is al-Tustarī’s Revelation of the Truths (see above, note 54), the first two thirds of which deal exclusively with the mathematics of awfāq and the last third with their talismanic uses. Another such text is the anonymous Persian treatise found in manuscript BL, Add. MS 7713 (hereafter Anon. Pers. BL; see Charles Rieu, Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum [London: British Museum, 1879–1883], 2:487). This manuscript, which appears to date from the seventh/thirteenth century, has a colophon added by a hand perhaps later than that of the main scribe (fol. 237v) dated Rajab 608/December 1211–January 1212, although this date may have been transcribed from its archetype. The manuscript is defective at beginning and end, so the preface, part of the introduction and some folios near the end, and the end of the conclusion are missing. The first folio is a replacement on European paper, containing a new beginning (fol. 1v) by a much later (Ottoman?) hand, which attributes the treatise to the Persian astrologer Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī (d. 272/886). This attribution is, however, surely as spurious as the attribution to Abū Maʿshar of another treatise involving awfāq (see Oliver Kahl and Zeina Matar, “A Treatise on the Amicable Numbers 220 and 284 Attributed to Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī,” Journal of Semitic Studies 35, no. 2 [1990]: 233–243). A forthcoming article by Sâqib Bâburî and the present author will argue that the text preserved in Anon. BL Pers. is the product of mid-sixth/twelfth-century Ghaznavid patronage. Anon. Pers. BL is of particular interest here because, as is the case with al-Tustarī’s Revelation of the Truths, the bulk of this text is devoted solely to mathematical constructions giving no cause to suspect that the interest in these constructions is not purely mathematical but also magical. Then, a brief and fragmentary conclusion (fol. 237v) discussing the occult properties (khawāṣṣ) and astral associations of certain awfāq demonstrates that there is no reason to assume a mathematician fully engaged in arithmetical analyses should necessarily dismiss the magical properties of the awfāq. Cammann frequently refers to awfāq from Anon. Pers. BL in his “Islamic and Indian Magic Squares. Part I” and “Islamic and Indian Magic Squares. Part II.”

106

hallum

ature were not interested in employing the khawāṣṣ of the awfāq they studied but merely that this was not the aim of this genre of text. Regardless of the ultimate intentions of these authors with the awfāq, however, their mathematical advancements in this field allowed the construction of larger and more complex awfāq, not just in the form of squares, but also as triangles, circles, stars, cubes, cones, and spheres. Research presented by these mathematicians (e.g., methods for the inclusion of names and words into awfāq) prepared the way for the confluence of lettrism and awfāq popularized in the writings of al-Būnī and others and taken up enthusiastically by later authors such as ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī (d. 858/1454).122

4

The Rise of awfāq Literature

The question of who wrote the earliest treatise devoted to the awfāq remains open. The earliest known text with a title containing the word wafq/awfāq is by Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr b. Baḥr al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/868–869), who tells us that he wrote a work (now lost) called the Book of Awfāq and Mathematics (Kitāb al-awfāq wa-l-riyāḍāt).123 Given the fact that al-Jāḥiẓ is a well known author of adab works and is not known to have written any mathematical or, strictly speaking, scientific treatises, it is unlikely that this text is a candidate for the earliest mathematical treatise on awfāq. It is all but certain that al-Jāḥiẓ’s Book of Awfāq and Mathematics is an adab work, no more a treatise on the mathematics of awfāq than his Book of Circling and Squaring (Kitāb al-tarbīʿ wa-l-tadwīr) is a treatise on geometry.124 But, just as the Book of Circling and Squaring touches on questions of geometry, his Book of Awfāq and Mathematics may well have dealt tangentially with the mathematics of awfāq. Be that as it may, the title alone is evidence that the awfāq themselves were sufficiently well known by this name

122 123

124

See Noah Gardiner, “The Occultist Encyclopedism of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī,”Mamlūk Studies Review 20 (2017): esp. 13. ʿAmr b. Baḥr al-Jāḥiẓ, Kitāb al-ḥayawān, ed. ʿAbd al-Salām Muḥammad Hārūn (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1996), 1:7. See Charles Pellat, “Ǧāḥiẓiana III. Essai d’inventaire de l’œuvre Ǧāḥiẓianne,” Arabica 3, no. 2 (1956): 153 (item 29). In fact, the context in al-Jāḥiẓ’s Book of Animals (Kitāb al-ḥayawān) suggests that the general subject of the Book of Awfāq and Mathematics was trade (see James E. Montgomery, Al-Jāḥiẓ: In Praise of Books [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013], 114 and 135). For a brief description of the Book of Circling and Squaring, see Charles Pellat, The Life and Works of Jāḥiẓ. Translations of Selected Texts (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 21.

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

107

and their link with mathematics sufficiently established in the mid-third/ninth century that al-Jāḥiẓ’s use of the term would have had cultural currency.125 If al-Jāḥiẓ’s Book of Awfāq and Mathematics was not the first Islamicate treatise dedicated to the awfāq, what was? To date, there has not been a satisfactory answer to this question. It is often claimed that the earliest Arabic work devoted to the awfāq was written by the Sabian mathematician, translator, and physician Abū l-Ḥasan Thābit b. Qurra al-Ḥarrānī (d. 288/901). This claim rests on good authority, since Ibn al-Qifṭī (d. 646/1248) lists an Epistle on the Harmonious Number (Risāla fī l-ʿadad al-wafq) among the works attributed to Thābit b. Qurra, and he tells us that he is merely reproducing a list he found in a genealogical document relating to Thābit b. Qurra, which was written by Thābit’s greatgreat-grandson Abū ʿAlī al-Muḥassin b. Ibrāhīm b. Hilāl al-Ṣābiʾ (d. 410/1010).126 Despite the excellent pedigree of this information, there remain reasons to doubt whether Thābit b. Qurra did, in fact, write a treatise on awfāq. Not only does this text not appear in the earliest list of Thābit b. Qurra’s works, that of al-Nadīm’s (d. c. 385/995) Fihrist,127 but it is not mentioned in any source that is not dependent on Ibn al-Qifṭī. Rosenfeld and İhsanoğlu claim that there is a reference to Thābit’s Epistle on the Harmonious Number in al-Bīrūnī’s (d. c. 442/1050) Treatise on the Derivation of the Chords in a Circle (Maqāla fī istikhrāj

125

126

127

The Book of Awfāq and Mathematics must have been composed before the Kitāb alḥayawān in which it is mentioned. On the date of the Kitāb al-ḥayawān, see Pellat, “Ǧāḥiẓiana III,” 153 (item 29), who thinks it was written before 232/847, and Montgomery, Al-Jāḥiẓ: In Praise of Books, 237, who argues it was written after 244/858. Either way, alJāḥiẓ wrote his Book of Awfāq and Mathematics at roughly the time, and perhaps some years before, Ibn Rabban al-Ṭabarī wrote the Paradise of Wisdom, and about a century before the term wafq appeared in Maslama al-Qurṭubī’s Ghāyat al-ḥakīm. Thābit’s treatise on awfāq is named in Jamāl al-Dīn Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī Ibn al-Qifṭī’s Tāʾrīkh al-ḥukamāʾ, ed. August Müller and Julius Lippert (Leipzig: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1903), 119, line 2; this information is repeated in IAU, 1:220, line 14. Al-Muḥassin b. Ibrāhīm is identified as the source of this information at Ibn al-Qifṭī, Tāʾrīkh al-ḥukamāʾ, ed. Müller and Lippert, 116, lines 3–7. See Roshdi Rashed, “Thābit ibn Qurra: From Ḥarrān to Baghdad,” in Thābit ibn Qurra. Science and Philosophy in Ninth-Century Baghdad, edited by Roshdi Rashed (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 23; reprinted in Roshdi Rashed, Figures and Commentators in Arabic Mathematics. A History of Arabic Sciences and Mathematics, ed. Nader El-Bizri, trans. Roger Wareham et. al. (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 121– 122. For a family tree of the Harranian Sabians of Baghdad, see Figure 3.3. The list of Thābit b. Qurra’s works is found in Muḥammad b. Isḥāq al-Nadīm’s Kitāb alFihrist, ed. Gustav Flügel, Johannes Roediger, and August Müller (Leipzig: F.C.W. Vogel, 1871–1872), 1:272; translation in Muḥammad b. Isḥāq al-Nadīm, The Fihrist of al-Nadim: A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture, ed. and trans. Bayard Dodge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 2:648.

108

hallum

al-awtār fī l-dāʾira),128 but a search through the two printed editions of this text, Suter’s German translation, and the manuscripts presented by Hogendijk has failed to locate any such reference.129 Elsewhere, Rosenfeld goes further and claims that Thābit introduced the correspondence between the seven planets and the first seven awfāq in his Epistle on the Harmonious Number, but this claim must be baseless if that text is not extant (if it ever existed).130 It may also be suspected that a discussion of awfāq might be found in the treatise on talismans attributed to Thābit b. Qurra, but no such thing appears in the surviving Judaeo-Arabic fragments of that text or in the Latin version, De Imaginibus. The talismans ascribed to Thābit in that text are similar to those of the ps.-Aristotelian Hermetica in many regards, including the fact that neither set contains any mathematical talismans.131 128

129

130

131

Boris A. Rosenfeld and Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, Mathematicians, Astronomers, and Other Scholars of Islamic Civilization and Their Works (7th–19th c.) (Istanbul: IRCICA, 2003), 52 (text M26). For bibliographical details, references, and digitized resources for the study of al-Bīrūnī’s treatise, see Jan Hogendijk’s comprehensive al-Bīrūnī website, http://www .albiruni.nl/, text B2.8. Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Bīrūnī, Rasāʾil al-Bīrūnī (Hyderabad: Maṭbaʿat Jamīʿat Daʾirat alMaʿārif al-ʿUthmāniyya, 1948), 2–226; Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Bīrūnī, Istikhrāj al-awtār fī l-dāʾira bi-khawaṣṣ al-khaṭṭ al-munḥanī fīhā, ed. Aḥmad Saʿīd al-Dimirdāsh (Cairo: alMuʿassasah al-Miṣriyyah, 1965) and Heinrich Suter, “Das Buch der Auffindung der Sehnen im Kreise von Abū’l-Raiḥān Muḥ. el-Bīrūnī,” Bibliotheca Mathematica, ser. 3, 11 (1910–1911): 11–78. I have not been able to inspect the Russian translation in Pavel Georgievich Bulgakov and Boris A. Rozenfel’d, Abu Raĭkhan Beruni, 973–1048, Izbrannye Proizvedeni͡ıa, vol. 7, Matematicheskie i astronomicheskie traktaty (Tashkent: Fan, 1987), 27–77. Boris A. Rozenfelʹd and Nurii͡a G. Khaĭretdinova, Sabit ibn Korra: 836–901 (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), 102. Although admitting that the Epistle on the Harmonious Number (Risāla fī l-ʿadad al-wafq) is not extant, Rosenfeld and Khaĭretdinova silently alter the title to read Book of the Number of the Wafq (which presupposes Kitāb ʿadad al-wafq) and assume arbitrarily that the “number” in question is the sum of all the numbers in a wafq (rather than, e.g., the root [or order number] of the square, its magic constant, middle term, highest number, or any of the other significant numbers derivable from it), saying “the title of his treatise … seemingly implies the sum of its numbers that was placed in correspondence with the Sun, Moon and the planets.” From this assumption, they reach the groundless conclusion that the correspondence between Saturn and the 3×3 square based on the fact that the numerical value of the Arabic for Saturn (Zuḥal, [Z = 7] + [Ḥ = 8] + [L = 30] = 45) is equal to the sum of all the numbers in the 3 × 3 square (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 = 45) “was already mentioned in the treatise by Thābit Ibn Qurra.” Rosenfeld and Khaĭretdinova also repeat as fact, again without evidence, that “the use and application of magic squares was well known in the Hellenic world.” I thank Katya Nosyreva for translating this reference from the Russian. See Charles Burnett, “Ṯābit ibn Qurra the Ḥarrānian on Talismans and the Spirits of the Planets,” La Corónica, 36, no. 1 (2007): 13–40 and Charles Burnett and Gideon Bohak, “A Judaeo-Arabic Version of Ṯābit ibn Qurra’s De imaginibus and Pseudo-Ptolemy’s Opus ima-

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

109

Not only does no trace of any text by Thābit b. Qurra on awfāq survive, but no later treatises on awfāq even mention Thābit b. Qurra among the authors of works on this subject. Moreover, Thābit is mentioned in the introduction to an anonymous sixth/twelfth-century awfāq treatise edited and translated by Sesiano but not as an author of an awfāq treatise himself.132 Rather, he is said there to have followed Plato in writing on amicable numbers—a reference to Thābit’s Book of Amicable Numbers (Kitāb al-aʿdād al-mutaḥābba).133 This same anonymous sixth/twelfth-century awfāq treatise also credits the pre-Socratic father of natural philosophy Thales of Miletus (d. c. 545 BCE) with the discovery of magic squares (lit., “the harmonious number” [al-ʿadad alwafq]), and, with this, we are in the realm of origin legends of the awfāq.134 The ancient Greek philosophers are commonly made to be the originators of the awfāq in these legends. As we have seen (§3.3.1, above), the Jābirian Small

132 133

134

ginum,” in Islamic Philosophy, Science, Culture, and Religion. Studies in Honour of Dimitri Gutas, ed. Felicitas Opwis and David Reisman (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 179–200. Jacques Sesiano, “Une compilation arabe du XIIe siècle sur quelques propriétés des nombres naturels,” SCIAMVS 4 (2003): 153 (translation) and 173 (text). For a recent discussion of Thābit’s work on amicable numbers along with a new edition and French translation of the treatise, see Roshdi Rashed and Christian Houzel, “Théorie des nombres amiables,” in Thābit ibn Qurra. Science and Philosophy in Ninth-Century Baghdad, ed. Roshdi Rashed (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 77–151. The earliest author to mention amicable numbers is not, in fact, Plato but Iamblichus, who attributes the discovery of the only pair of amicable numbers (phíloi arithmoí) known in antiquity (220 and 284) to Pythagoras (d. c. 495 BCE). Iamblichus, In Nicomachi Arithmeticam, ed. and trans. Nicholas Vinel (Pisa: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2014), book II, 126. Whether or not Pythagoras himself knew the amicable numbers, the fact that they are two matching halves of an arithmetical whole that fit together only with each other makes them a suitably mathematical Pythagorean symbolon, on which, see Peter T. Struck, Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of their Texts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), chap. 2. Sesiano, “Une compilation arabe,” 154–155 (translation) and 173–174 (text). Thales is there said to have placed a 100 × 100 square in a temple where it was used for swearing oaths and curing diseases. The odd phrase al-ʿadad al-wafq (lit., “harmonious number,” strange in that it uses wafq adjectivally) appears, as we shall see, in the titles of a some of the earliest Arabic awfāq literature as a designation of their subject. From its use here and in other early awfāq literature, it is clear that the phrase “harmonious number” (al-ʿadad al-wafq) referred to the awfāq themselves (i.e., the harmonious arrangements of the numbers within their grids [ jadāwil], and most importantly their “magic constants”), but also to the science behind these arrangements. For the adjectival use of the word wafq, see Francis Joseph Steingass, The Student’s Arabic-English Dictionary. Companion Volume to the Author’s English-Arabic Dictionary (London: Crosby Lockwood and Son, 1884), 1224. I am grateful to Julia Bray for pointing me to this dictionary. See also Jacques Sesiano, “Le Traité d’ Abū’l-Wafāʾ sur les carrés magiques,” Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wissenschaften 12 (1998): 141.

110

hallum

Book of Balances claims that Apollonius of Tyana at least discussed if not invented the 3×3 wafq. Zakariyyāʾ b. Muḥammad al-Qazwīnī (d. 682/1283) attributes the invention of magic squares to Archimedes (d. 212 BCE).135 The legends of the awfāq also frequently link them with the prophets and figures from early Islamic history. Al-Tustarī’s Revelation of the Truths attributes the discovery of the 100×100 wafq to the legendary Persian king Fereydūn and says that it was handed down through the line of Persian kings, kept in their treasuries to ensure their military invincibility, and then found by the caliph ʿUmar b. al-Khāṭṭāb (d. 23/644) after his defeat of the last Sassanid shah, Yazdegird III (d. 30/651).136 A briefer but similarly worded version of the story of Fereydūn, Yazdegird, and the 100×100 wafq was presented by Luṭfullāh alṬūqātī (d. 900/1494), palace librarian to the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (r. 848–850/1444–1446 and 855–886/1451–1481) at Istanbul, later recommended to Sultan Bāyezīd II (r. 886–918/1481–1512) for the same position by the celebrated astronomer ʿAlī Qūshjī (d. 879/1474), erstwhile head of the observatory of Ulugh Beg at Samarqand.137 In his Treatise on the Doubling of the Altar [of Delos] (Risālat Taḍʿīf al-madhbaḥ), Luṭfī al-Ṭūqātī extended the lineage of the wafq in question through Greek astrologers and philosophers and the Abrahamic prophets all the way back to Adam.138 135

136 137

138

Āthār al-bilād, Fifth Clime, s.v. Yūnān (= Zakariyyāʾ b. Muḥammad al-Qazwīnī, Zakarija ben Muhammed ben Mahmud el-Cazwini’s Kosmographie, ed. Ferdinand Wüstenfeld [Göttingen: Dieterich’sche Buchhandlung, 1848–1849] 2:358); see Eilhard Wiedemann, “Beiträge zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften V,” Sitzungberichte der physikalisch-medizinischen Sozietät zu Erlangen 37 (1905) 392–445. Al-Tustarī, Kashf ḥaqāʾiq al-asrār, Dublin, CBL, Ar. 5087, fol. 125r–v. Al-Ṭūqātī went on to be executed for his unorthodox beliefs and is thus known also as Luṭfī al-Maqṭūl (“the killed”); see Luṭfullāh al-Ṭūqātī, La Duplication de l’autel (Platon et le problème de Délos), ed. Şerefettin Yaltkaya, trans. Abdulhak Adnan and Henry Corbin (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1940), 4–5. For links between Qūshjī and the court of Bāyezīd II, see Ahmet Tunç Şen, “Reading the Stars at the Ottoman Court: Bāyezīd II (r. 886/1481–918/1512) and His Celestial Interests,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Matthew MelvinKoushki and Noah Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64 (2017): esp. 589. Al-Ṭūqātī’s inclusion of a closely worded paraphrase of the legend of the discovery of the 100×100 wafq as told in al-Tustarī’s Revelation of the Truths suggests that he knew the story either from the Revelation of the Truths itself, from a text derived from the Revelation of Truths or from a common source text. The discussion of the 100 × 100 wafq is found in al-Ṭūqātī, La Duplication de l’autel, 16–21 (text) and 52–61 (trans.); see also Sesiano, Les Carrés magiques dans les pays islamiques, 266–268. A version of the legend of ʿUmar’s discovery of Yazdegird’s 100×100 wafq even briefer still—the wording of which is less similar to that in al-Tustarī’s Revelation of the Truths—is recounted by Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406) in Muqaddima vi, 27 (= Muqaddimat Ibn Khaldūn. Prolégomènes d’Ebn-Khaldoun, ed. Éttiene Quatremère [Paris: Benjamin Duprat, 1858], 3:135; translated by Franz Rosenthal in The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to

111

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

Legends and unverified attributions aside, scholarship—thanks largely to the editorial and analytical efforts of Jacques Sesiano—has uncovered enough texts to present a detailed history of early Arabic awfāq literature. Sesiano has identified nine texts written before the seventh/thirteenth century that are entirely devoted to the awfāq or contain substantial sections devoted to them (see Table 3.1) to which we can add the treatise by al-Mālaqī (see above, text 7). table 3.1

1

2

Pre-seventh/thirteenth-century awfāq treatises mentioned by Sesiano

Title

Author/date

Location(s) of author

Commentary on the Arithmetical [Introduction] (Kitāb tafsīr al-Arithmāṭīqī)139 Book on the Arrangement of the Harmonious Number in Squares (Kitāb fī tartīb al-ʿadad al-wafq fī l-murabbaʿāt)140

Abū l-Qāsim ʿAlī al-Anṭākī (d. 376/987)

Antioch?; Baghdad ʿAḍud al-Dawla, Buyid amīr (r. 367–372/978– 83)

Abū l-Wafāʾ al-Būzjānī (d. 388/998)

Bāb al-Tibn Observatory, Baghdad (c. 348/960)

139

140

Patron(s) of author

ʿAḍud al-Dawla, Ṣamṣām al-Dawla, and Sharaf al-Dawla, Buyid amīrs (combined reigns 367–379/978– 89)

History [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958], 3:168–169). According to a variant of the legend preserved in a gloss in a twelfth/eighteenth-century manuscript, knowledge of the awfāq originated with the prophet Hūd, who placed a 100×100 wafq in the foundations of Mecca, and the caliph ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 40/661) was the first to employ this wafq on the banner of Islam. On the manuscript containing this gloss, see Jacques Sesiano, Un traite médiéval sur les carrés magiques: De l’ arrangement harmonieux des nombres. Édition, traduction et commentaire d’un texte arabe anonyme décrivant divers modes de construction (Lausanne: Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes, 1996), 13–14, n. 16; and text 5 in Table 3.1, below. Sesiano, Les carrés magiques dans les pays islamiques, 267, n. 164, also mentions Saʿd Allāh b. Ṣadr al-Dīn’s Risala fī l-wafq (Süleymaniye, MS Reşid Efendi 1068, fols. 49v–56r [not 53r]) as a further source of such legends. In fact, that text is anonymous, and Saʿd Allāh b. Ṣadr al-Dīn is the manuscript’s scribe, not the text’s author. The text mentions al-Būnī (so was written after the mid-seventh/thirteenth century) and claims that Archimedes studied awfāq and that Thales was inspired to invent the 100×100 wafq, and he also discusses the problem of the doubling of the altar of Delos (fols. 49v–50r). Only Chapter 3 of this work is extant, and only section 2 of that chapter is dedicated to awfāq. The text is edited and translated in Sesiano, Magic Squares in the Tenth Century, 120–205 (translation), 260–334 (text). Excerpts edited and translated in Sesiano, Magic Squares in the Tenth Century, 207–252

112

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Table 3.1

Pre-seventh/thirteenth-century awfāq treatises mentioned by Sesiano (cont.)

Title

Author/date

3

On the Numbers of Harmony (Fī ʿadād al-wafq)141

4

Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan Basra (354– Ibn al-Haytham c. 390/965– (d. c. 430/1040) c. 1000); Cairo (from c. 390– 430/c. 1000–1039, with a gap) Unknown (fl. Unknown early fifth/eleventh century?)

Abridgment on Guidance to the Harmony of Numbers (Mukhtaṣar fī l-irshād ilā wafq alaʿdād)142 Book of Numeration on the Unknown (fl. 1st Unknown half of fifth/elevHarmony of Numbers (Kitāb al-iʿdād fī wafq al- enth century?) aʿdād)143

5

141

142

143

Location(s) of author

Patron(s) of author

al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh, Fatimid caliph (r. 386–411/996–1021)

Unknown

Unknown

(translation), 335–381 (text). See also Jacques Sesiano, “Le Traité d’Abū’l-Wafāʾ sur les carrés magiques,” Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wissenschaften 12 (1998): 121–244. Lost text mentioned by Ibn al-Qifṭī, Tāʾrīkh al-ḥukamāʾ, ed. Müller and Lippert, 168, line 1 and IAU, vol. 2, 98, line 14, and appearing in two anonymous premodern bibliographies of Ibn al-Haytham’s works. See Rosenfeld and İhsanoğlu, Mathematicians, Astronomers, and Other Scholars, 135 (text M43); Sesiano, Les Carrés magiques dans les pays islamiques, 12, and Roshdi Rashed, Ibn Haytham and Analytical Mathematics. A History of Arabic Sciences and Mathematics, ed. Nader El-Bizri, trans. Susan Glynn and Roger Wareham (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 2:392–393. Within awfāq literature, Ibn al-Haytham’s treatise is mentioned in the anonymous sixth/twelfth-century treatise edited in Sesiano, “Une compilation arabe,” 181–185. Edited and translated in Jacques Sesiano, “L’abrégé enseignant la disposition harmonieuse des nombres, un manuscrit arabe anonyme sur la construction des carrés magiques,” in From Baghdad to Barcelona. Studies in the Islamic Exact Sciences in Honour of Prof. Juan Vernet, ed. Josep Casulleras (Barcelona: Instituto “Millás Vallicrosa” de Historia de la Ciencia Arabe, 1996). See also Sesiano, Les Carrés magiques dans les pays islamiques, 13–14. Edition, translation, and study in Sesiano, Un traite médiéval. See also Sesiano, Les Carrés magiques dans les pays islamiques, 13.

113

new light on early arabic awfāq literature Table 3.1

Pre-seventh/thirteenth-century awfāq treatises mentioned by Sesiano (cont.)

Title

Author/date

Location(s) of author

Patron(s) of author

6

Treatise on the Movements of the Wandering Stars (Maqāla fī ḥarakāt alkawākib al-sayyāra)144

Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm Ibn al-Zarqālluh (d. 493/1100)

Toledo; Córdoba (from c. 482/1080)

Ṣaʿīd al-Andalusī, astronomer and chief qāḍī of Toledo (d. 472/1070)

7

Unknown145

Isfahan (from 476/1074–1075); Balkh (c. 506/1112)

Jalāl al-Dīn Malikshāh, Seljuk sultan (r. 465– 485/1073–1092)

8

Epitome on the Harmonious Number (Talkhīṣ fī l-ʿadad alwafq)146 Unknown147

Abū Ḥātim al-Muẓaffar al-Isfizārī (d. c. 510/1116) Jamāl al-Zamān al-Kharaqī (d. 533/1138–1139)

Marw

Sanjar b. Malikshāh?, Seljuk sultan (r. 511– 552/1118–1157)

Unknown

Unknown

9

144

145

146

147

Unknown (fl. 515–587/1121– 1191)

For variations in the title of this work, see above, note 88. Edition, translation, and study of this text and its Latin and Old Castilian versions in preparation by the present author, Rosa Comes, and Emilia Calvo. See Mercè Comes and Rosa Comes, “Los cuadrados mágicos matemáticos en al-Andalus. El tratado de Azarquiel.” Al-Qanṭara 30, no. 1 (2009): 137– 169, and Rosa Comes, “The Transmission of Azarquiel’s Magic Squares in Latin Europe,” in Medieval Textual Cultures. Agents of Transmission, Translation and Transformation, ed. Faith Wallis and Robert Wisnovsky (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 159–198. For the Latin version of the treatise, see Jacques Sesiano, “Magic Squares for Daily Life,” In Studies in the History of Exact Sciences in Honour of David Pingree, ed. Charles Burnett et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 715–734. Traces of this lost treatise may be found in the anonymous sixth/twelfth-century treatise edited in Sesanio, “Une compilation arabe,” 185. See also Sesiano, Les carrés magiques dans les pays islamiques, 14–15, and below. Edited and translated in Jacques Sesiano, “Herstellungsverfahren magischer Quadtrate aus islamischer Zeit (III),” Sudhoffs Archiv 79 (1995), 211–226. See also Wiedemann, “Einleitung zu Werken von al Charaqî,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften 70, in Sitzungberichte der physikalisch-medizinischen Sozietät zu Erlangen 58–59 (1926–1927) 203–218. Edited in Sesiano, “Une compilation arabe.” See also Jacques Sesiano, “Herstellungsverfahren magischer Quadtrate aus islamischer Zeit (I),” Sudhoffs Archiv 64 (1980): 187–196 and Sesiano, Les Carrés magiques dans les pays islamiques, 15.

114 5

hallum

New Manuscript Evidence for Early awfāq Literature

Despite Sesiano’s pioneering work, the majority of works of Islamicate awfāq literature remains unstudied in manuscripts, and the treatises edited by Sesiano tend to be short. The largest pre-seventh/thirteenth-century text dealt with by Sesiano is the Book of Numeration on the Harmony of Numbers (Kitāb al-iʿdād fī wafq al-aʿdād, text 5 in Table 3.1), which, despite running to only forty-four folios in the manuscript (74 pp. in Sesiano’s edition), is, according to Sesiano, one of the longest and oldest awfāq treatises known.148 Its anonymous early fifth/eleventh-century author tells us in the introduction that he has spent the smaller portion of the book recounting information about the awfāq from earlier sources, but he does not cite any of his sources by name. The larger portion is devoted to his own discoveries with the awfāq, which go no higher than 10× 10 and are all squares (no triangles, circles, or other wafq figures). The treatise does, however, contain an early discussion of methods for inserting names and other text into a wafq using the abjad values of the letters, a technique that would become widespread in later lettrist talisman making.149 Several much longer early awfāq treatises, which are also more diverse in content and even more historiographically detailed, do, in fact, survive in the manuscripts. The previously mentioned Anon. Pers. BL, for example, runs to 237 folios, making it, to my knowledge, the single largest Islamicate treatise on the mathematical construction of awfāq, covering square, triangular, and circular figures.150 Later, al-Tustarī’s Revelation of the Truths (late 8th/14th century?) deals with constructions for triangular, circular, cubic, and spherical awfāq.151 As with the Persian treatise just discussed, the Revelation of the Truths begins with a long section devoted entirely to the mathematical constructions of awfāq without mention of their khawāṣṣ but then concludes with detailed instructions for their talismanic uses.

148 149

150 151

Sesiano, Les Carrés magiques dans les pays islamiques, 13. For a brief description of the contents of the treatise see Sesiano, Un traité médiéval, 11–12. Sesiano, Un traité médiéval, 72–74 (text) and 129–132 (translation). Sesiano removes the names (Sirāj, Shihāb, ʿAlī, and Aḥmad) from his translation, leaving only their numerical values, so that readers of the French translation without access to the Arabic text would have no idea that the text is discussing meaningful names and not randomly chosen numbers. See above, note 121. For a brief description of the oldest surviving manuscript, a ninth/fifteenth-century copy of 125 folios, see Arthur J. Arberry, The Chester Beatty Library, A Handlist of the Arabic Manuscripts (Dublin: Emery Walker and Hodges, Figgis, 1955–1966), 7:29, who was unaware of the identity of the manuscript’s text.

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

115

A newly discovered sixth/twelfth-century Arabic treatise of ninety-two folios, the Collection of Harmonious Number (Dīwān al-ʿadad al-wafq), provides invaluable resources for the early history of awfāq literature. Although the identity of the author of this treatise is unknown, by carefully citing the sources of the information he transmits, he substantially increases our knowledge of mathematicians engaged in the study of awfāq and their writings and discoveries. We now consider the history of the unique manuscript that contains this text. 5.1 British Library, Delhi Arabic 110 The British Library’s Delhi Collection is a rich and largely untapped resource for the literary and intellectual history of Islamicate India and Central Asia.152 The collection comprises more than 3,700 manuscripts (mostly Arabic and Persian but also Urdu, Panjabi, and Pashto) from the Mughal Imperial Library and other collections in Delhi that were dispersed during British reprisals following the Indian Uprising of 1857–1858 and then sold to the (British imperial) Government of India at a sale arranged in 1859 by the Delhi Prize Agents.153 An inventory in the form of a handwritten Catalogue of the Delhi Collection was drawn up in Calcutta at some time after 1869, under the supervision of Heinrich (Henry) Ferdinand Blochmann (1838–1878), philological secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and assistant professor at the Calcutta Madrasa.154 The 152

153

154

On the Delhi Collection, see S.C. Sutton, A Guide to the India Office Library with a Note on the India Office Records (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1967), 32, 34–35, 45– 46 and 87; Arthur J. Arberry, The Library of the India Office. A Historical Sketch (London: India Office, 1938), 84–85; Ursula Sims-Williams, “The Arabic and Persian Collections in the India Office Library,” Collections in British Libraries on Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, ed. Paul Auchterlonie (Durham: University of Durham, Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, 1981), 49–50; and Hugh Goodacre, Ursula Sims-Williams, and Penelope Tuson, Arabic Language Collections in the British Library (London: British Library, 1984), 16–17. For further resources relating to the Delhi Collection, see “The Delhi Collection,” Collection Guides, British Library, https://www.bl.uk/collection‑guides/the ‑delhi‑collection. On the Mughal Imperial Library, see Shaykh Abdul Aziz, The Imperial Library of the Mughuls (Lahore: Panjab University Press, 1967) and Dharma Bhanu, “The Mughul Libraries,” Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society 2, no. 4 (1954): 287–301. BL, IO Islamic 4601–4606. Blochmann’s catalog contains basic information on each text in the collection’s manuscripts, listing, when known, the author, title, incipit, explicit, production date, number of folios, and lines per page, along with basic judgments on the condition of the paper and quality of script. A brief description of this “extremely slight, and not particularly accurate” handlist is found in Arthur J. Arberry, “Hand-List of Islamic Manuscripts Acquired by the India Office Library, 1936–8,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 3 (1939): 381.

116

hallum

collection was subsequently shipped to London and deposited in the Library of the India Office in 1876. Some of the Arabic manuscripts from the Delhi Collection appear in published and unpublished catalogs compiled in the first half of the twentieth century, but many have not been described since the time of Blochmann.155 In 1982 the India Office Library was incorporated into the British Library, where the Delhi Collection is now housed. The Delhi Collection’s strong holdings of Indian Islamic religious and mystical texts have long been noted, but its few scientific texts have been almost entirely ignored.156 One of these overlooked texts is Delhi Arabic 110, a composite volume comprising two unrelated manuscripts: a thirteenth/nineteenthcentury manuscript of Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī’s (d. 852/1449) Selection of Thoughts Concerning the Traditionists’ Terminology (Nukhbat al-fikr fī muṣṭalaḥ ahl al-athar, fols. 2v–27r), and the Collection of the Harmonious Number (Dīwān al-ʿadad al-wafq, fols. 28r–119v, hereafter Dīwān). Blochmann’s catalog presents the following information about the Dīwān:157 ١١٠ (‫)ب‬ ‫ديوان العدد الوفق‬ Díwánul’ad walwafq158 Author: ‫مفضل بن ثابت‬

155

156

157 158

Some Arabic manuscripts of the Delhi Collection appear in Charles Ambrose Storey, ed., Catalogue of the Arabic Manuscripts in the Library of the India Office, vol. 2 (London: India Office Library, 1930–1940). Unpublished draft catalog entries for the Delhi Persian material can be accessed through Nur Sobers-Khan and Ursula Sims-Williams, “A Newly Digitised Unpublished Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts,” British Library: Asian and African Studies Blog, July 7 2014, http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian‑and‑african/2014/07/a‑newly ‑digitised‑unpublished‑catalogue‑of‑persian‑manuscripts.html; and for the Delhi Arabic material, see Reuben Levy and Charles Ambrose Storey, “Unpublished draft for Vol.III of Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts in the India Office Library,” Charles Ambrose Storey Papers, BL, Mss Eur D563, http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Mss_Eur _D563,_ff_1‑751 and http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Mss_Eur_D563,_ ff_752‑1208. An exception to this rule is Delhi Arabic 1949, https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc _100028004317.0x000001. This sixth/twelfth- or seventh/thirteenth-century manuscript of Sharaf al-Zamān Ṭāhir al-Marwazī’s (fl. mid-fifth/eleventh–early-sixth/twelfth century) zoological treatise The Natures of Animals (Ṭabāʾīʿ al-ḥayawān) was hailed by Arberry as a “tantalizing witness to the pristine splendour of the Royal Library at Delhi” (Arberry, The Library of the India Office, 85). Catalogue of the Delhi Collection, Arabic MSS, vol. 1, 165, BL, IO Islamic 4604. Whoever added this transliteration (not the same hand that added the transcriptions) was apparently confused by this title, since he read the second dāl in ʿadad as a wāw, changing the title to the Collection of Enumeration and Harmony.

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

117

Beginning: 159‫نذكر فيها انشاء الله ما يحتاج إليه طالبه في شايط العدد الوفق‬ End: Wanting Date of Copy: Wanting Persian character: middling good Paper: Nice, somewhat worm eaten and water stained Number of leaves: 96 Number of lines p[er] page: 25. 5.2 Description, Provenance, and Date of the Manuscript of the Dīwān The manuscript is defective at beginning and end, and the remaining first and last folios have been mutilated and repaired, with the loss of some text. Since the catalog entry above states that the manuscript comprised ninety-six folios, while, in its current state, it comprises ninety-two folios, it seems that four folios have been lost from the Dīwān in the time since about 1869. Historic foliation in eastern Arabic numerals begins at 3 on fol. 29r—the corner bearing this foliation on fol. 28r, the present first folio of the Dīwān manuscript, has been mutilated—which suggests that only a single leaf has been lost from the beginning.160 The historic foliation is continuous and does not indicate any folios missing from the middle of the text, so we can say that three or more folios are missing from the end. A comparison of the extant text with the table of contents (fols. 28r–29r) shows that the missing final leaves contained part of bāb 3 and the whole of bābs 4 and 5 of maqāla 8. From the perspective of the arts of the Islamic book, as opposed to Arabic literature or the history of scientific thought, the copy of the Dīwān in Delhi Arabic 110 is most notable as a masterpiece of layout and design rather than decoration and artistry. The hand used is not ornate or excessively polished but neat, legible, and uniform. It is really in the precision and clarity of line in the accompanying figures (of which there are more than 325 squares and triangles), the skillful use of color and shape to present technical material and the well conceived and executed tables and diagrams that this manuscript achieves distinction. In the absence of any scribal colophon or patron statement (due to the loss of the initial and final folios) we have no firm evidence of the manuscript’s

159 160

This text comes not from the beginning of the manuscript but from the beginning of maqāla 1 (fol. 29v). It is thus probable that only a single page of text, or less, has been lost from the beginning; the text in a carefully prepared Islamic manuscript customarily begins on the verso side, and some space on that side may have been taken up by a decorative ʿunwān (‘title’ or other heading).

118

hallum

date. On palaeographical grounds, it appears to date from late ninth/fifteenthor early tenth/sixteenth-century Timurid Iran or Central Asia. A manuscript copied in a similar hand, on similar paper, in a similar format and, indeed, on a similar subject (square and other figurate lettrist talismans) can be seen in MS Princeton University Library, Third Series, no. 591.161 According to its colophon (fol. 26v), this Princeton manuscript was transcribed on 17 Rajab 888/21 August 1483 by Ḥājjī b. Jamāl al-Kātib al-Kāshī. Furthermore, the abjad (alphanumeric) numeral forms employed in Delhi Arabic 110 in particular are typical of late ninth/fifteenth- or early tenth/sixteenth-century Iranian manuscripts.162 Provenance information in the form of owners’ inscriptions, marginalia, and seal impressions does not extend back far enough to support this production date but does prove that the manuscript was part of the Mughal Imperial Library collection. To begin with, the seal of ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq b. Qāsim Shīrāzī (d. 1054 or 55/1644–1645), dated 1037/1627–1628 is found on fol. 28r, the present first folio of the treatise.163 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Shīrāzī, known from 1141/1632 as Amānat Khān, was a palace librarian under Shāh Jahān (r. 1037–1076/1628–1666) whose seal appears in many of the manuscripts then in the Mughal imperial library, but he is best known as the master calligrapher whose work is signed on the Taj Mahal and other eleventh/seventeenth-century Mughal monuments.164 The appearance of his seal on this folio suggests that the original first folio of the manuscript was already lost and the historic foliation was already present at the beginning of Shāh Jahān’s reign. Later, during the reign of Awrangzīb (ʿĀlamgīr, r. 1068–1118/1658–1707), another librarian, Fakhr al-Dīn Muḥammad, left his seal impression dated 1110/1698–1699 along with the following valuation note (fol. 27ar):165 161

162 163 164

165

A digital surrogate of this “Treatise on charms and talismans,” along with a catalog record can be found on the Princeton University Library website, http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/ 88435/8336h195t. See Rida A.K. Irani, “Arabic Numeral Forms,” Centaurus 4, no. 1 (1955): 3–10. See the CBL Islamic Seals Database, seal no. 186. A further two illegible seal impressions are found on BL, Delhi Arabic 110, fols. 28r and 119v. See Wayne E. Begley, “Amānat Khān and the Calligraphy on the Tāj Maḥal,” Kunst des Orients 12, nos. 1–2 (1978–1979): 5–60; Wayne E. Begley and Ziyaud-Din A. Desai, Taj Mahal: The Illumined Tomb. An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Mughal and European Documentary Sources (Cambridge, MA: Harvard; MIT; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989), 245–257; and John Seyller, “The Inspection and Valuation of Manuscripts in the Imperial Mughal Library,” Artibus Asiae 57, nos. 3–4 (1997): 255. The seal and note are found on a detached strip of repair paper inserted between fols. 27 and 28, now bound into the volume as fol. 27a. For a nearly identical seal impression, bearing the same name but dated 1126/1714–1715, see CBL Islamic Seals Database, seal no. 632. I thank Sâqib Bâburî for his invaluable assistance in deciphering this note.

new light on early arabic awfāq literature

119 (A) ‫نسخة ديوان العدد الوفق‬ … ‫من المفضل بن ثابت‬ ‫فقط‬ (B)

‫ايـ]ـن[ نسـ]ـخٔە[ نفيسٔە نادره در وفق اعداد … دار الخلافه شاهجهان ]آباد[ … نموده ]افـ[ـقر‬ … ‫ قيمت حال … حال‬.‫احقر ]فـ[ـخر الدين محمد‬ (A) Copy of the Collection of Harmonious Number from al-Mufaḍḍal b. Thābit … end (B) This precious and rare copy concerning the harmony of numbers … the Abode of the Caliphate Shāh Jahān[ābād, i.e., Delhi] … the most needy and wretched Fakhr al-Dīn Muḥammad. The present value [semilegible raqm numbers followed by the seal impression] … present [semilegible raqm numbers]. Although the value ascribed to the manuscript by Fakhr al-Dīn Muḥammad is not clearly legible, we can see that already in the early twelfth/late seventeenth century it was considered “precious and rare.” Also probably dating from the manuscript’s time in the Mughal library is a fragmentary note in the repaired upper margin of fol. 28r that indicates the relationship between awfāq literature (even of a strictly mathematical nature) and the occult sciences in Mughal India: ⟨‫هذ⟩ا⟨ الكتاب ديوان العدد در علم حساب ور يا]ضة …[ كالـكيمياء والإكسير للعالم هذ⟩ا‬ ‫العلم‬ This book is the Collection of Number concerning the science of arithmetic and mathe[matics …] like alchemy and the elixir for the connoisseur of this science.

120

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5.3 The Text of the Dīwān The Dīwān is a comprehensive treatise on the construction of awfāq, which focuses solely on mathematical analyses and neglects entirely the subject of their occult properties (khawāṣṣ) or talismanic uses.166 Because the first folio of the unique manuscript of the Dīwān is missing, the text begins abruptly in a preface, which lists the types of awfāq that will be dealt with. The author then explains briefly his method of composition and the meaning of the treatise’s title, states the text’s composition date (517/1123–1124), and gives an outline of the structure of the Dīwān before it is presented visually in a table of contents that directly follows the preface. The complete text of what remains of the author’s preface is presented here (fol. 28r, lines 1–10): ّ ‫… الساذج ثم ّ بعده المحل ّق ثم ّ الوفق الغر يب ثم ّ المو‬ ‫كب بعضها‬ ّ ‫شح والممتزج و بعد جميعها المر‬ ‫مع بعض ونختمه بالوفق المجس ّم العجيب ووفق الشكل المثل ّث ونشير إلى النوادر واختلاف‬ ‫الوقوع في مواضعها على أوجز ما يمكن من غير إخلال بأصل من أصول منها بل نسهّل‬ ‫سماه إذ‬ ّ َ ‫فيه الغامض ونبي ّن الخفي وسميناه كتاب ديوان العدد الوفق وهذا اسم يوافق م‬ ‫ل فيه إلى يومنا وهو سن ّة سبع عشرة وخمسمائة هجر ية وإيراد أقسامه‬ َ ِ ‫غرضي فيه نجمع ما ق ُب‬ ‫ل ما تعو ّد وصلناه ثماني مقالات الأولى منها في المقدمات‬ ّ ‫ن لك‬ ّ ‫المرت ّبة بألفاظ سهلة لأ‬ ‫ضا وقطر ًا الثالثة في الوفق المحل ّق طول ًا‬ ً ‫التي تحتاج إليها الثانية في الوفق الساذج طول ًا وعر‬ ّ ‫ضا وقطر ًا وإحاطة الرابعة في الوفق الغر يب الخامسة في الوفق المو‬ ‫شح أعني الشكل في‬ ً ‫وعر‬ ‫الشكل والسادسة في المختلط الملم ّع عماّ ذكرنا السابعة في الوفق المجس ّم والثامنة في وفق الشكل‬ ‫ب وفصول كما في هذا‬ ٍ ‫ل قسٍم فيها على أبوا‬ ّ ‫ل مقالة فيها يشتمل على أقساٍم وك‬ ّ ‫المثل ّث وك‬ … ‫الفهرست‬ … the simple (sādhaj) [wafq], then, after that, the ringed (muḥallaq), then the rare (gharīb) wafq, then the adorned (muwashshaḥ) and mixed (mumtazij), and after all of them the composite (murakkab) one with another [i.e., composed by joining multiple awfāq]. We conclude it [sc. the Dīwān] with the wondrous solid (mujassam ʿajīb) wafq and the triangular (shakl muthallath) wafq. We point out rarities and discrepancies

166

This is true for the extant portions of the text. Khawāṣṣ and talismans may, of course, have been discussed in the missing portion at the beginning of the authors preface or in the missing bābs at the end of maqāla 8. See above, note 121.

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121

that appear in the passages [from previous works on awfāq] in which they occur as succinctly as possible, without being unfaithful to any one of their sources. Rather, we simplify what is obscure in it [i.e., in each source text] and clarify what is mysterious. We named it The Book of the Collection of Harmonious Number, and this name suits the thing named, because my aim in it is to collect all that has been contributed on this [subject] up to our own day, that is, the year 517AH [1123–1124 CE]. The exposition of its ordered parts (aqsām) is in simple terms, since all that is wont to be communicated is in eight books (maqālāt): the first deals with the required prolegomena (muqaddimāt), the second with the simple wafq that is vertically, horizontally, and diagonally [harmonious], the third with the ringed [wafq] that is vertically, horizontally, diagonally, and concentrically (iḥāṭatan) [harmonious], the fourth with the rare wafq, the fifth with the adorned (muwashshaḥ) wafq, the sixth with the mixed glittering (mukhtalaṭ mulammaʿ) [wafq] from what I have mentioned, the seventh with the solid wafq, and the eighth with the triangular wafq. Each of these books consists of parts, and each of these parts of chapters and sections as [shown] in this table of contents. The treatise is divided into eight books (maqālāt), each successively subdivided into parts (aqsām), chapters (abwāb), and sections ( fuṣūl). Occasionally a further subdivision into “methods” (wujūh) is used that is not mentioned in the preface or table of contents. These demonstrate individual techniques of construction, each given a rubricated heading with description. The general logical structure of the Dīwān is as follows. 1 Book (maqāla) 1.1 Part (qism) 1.1.1 Chapter (bāb) 1.1.1.1 Section ( faṣl) 1.1.1.1.1 Method (wajh) The Dīwān’s distinctive table of contents (fols. 28r–29r) is a work of great clarity and efficiency, expertly designed to help the reader visualize and navigate the intricate hierarchy of its divisions in a legible tabular fashion. While unusual, this type of table of contents is not unique and, as we shall see below, may help identify or at least contextualize the Dīwān’s author. Following the preface printed above and the table of contents (fols. 28r–29r), the Dīwān’s eight books are as follows:

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Book I: Introductions (fols. 29v–35v) Book II: The Simple (sādhaj) Wafq (fols. 35v–58v) Book III: The Bordered (muḥallaq) Wafq (fols. 58v–80v) Book IV: The Unique Strange Bordered (al-fard al-gharīb al-muḥallaq) Wafq (fols. 80v–93v) Book V: The Adorned (muwashshaḥ) Wafq (fols. 93v–99r) Book VI: The Mixed (mumtazij) Wafq (fols. 99r–109v) Book VII: The Solid (mujassam) Wafq (fols. 109v–116v) Book VIII: The Triangular Harmonious Number (al-ʿadad al-wafq bi-lshakl al-muthallath, fols. 116v–119v, defective at end). The most elaborate and largest wafq in the Dīwān covers a full opening (fols. 108v–109r). It is a composite (murakkab) wafq of 28 × 28 cells, which contains all the numbers from 1 to 784 and has a magic constant of 10,990. This wafq consists of sixteen 7×7 awfāq, each containing forty-nine consecutive numbers. Each of these sixteen 7×7 awfāq is a bordered (muḥallaq) wafq. This means that if the outer border of cells is removed from any of them, a 5 × 5 wafq remains, and if the outer border of that 5×5 wafq is removed, a 3 × 3 wafq remains.167 The middle term (i.e., the number in the central cell) of each of the 7 × 7 (and, thus, 5 × 5 and 3×3) awfāq has been circled, and these circled middle terms form a 4 ×4 wafq with a magic constant of 1570. Unfortunately, the accompanying text does not attribute this wafq to a particular author, so although it may have been extracted by the author of the Dīwān from an earlier work, it is only possible to assign it a terminus ante quem of 517/1123–1124, the composition date of Dīwān. Even so, the Dīwān is the earliest known text to describe a wafq of such size and complexity. As the author the Dīwān says in the preface, he bases his treatise on previous works of awfāq literature and names explicitly seven authors of such works, though without mentioning the titles of their treatises. The composition date (517/1123–1124) given in the author’s preface is lent credence by the fact that, of these seven authors, none lived later than the sixth/twelfth century. These authors are presented in Table 3.2 in roughly chronological order.

167

This property of bordered squares to maintain their harmonious (i.e., mathematically “magic”) qualities with the removal of each successive concentric border (i.e., the cells of each of the outer rows and columns) is what the author of the Dīwān means when he says in the preface that the bordered square is harmonious “concentrically” (iḥāṭatan, lit., “surroundingly”).

figure 3.2 A composite 28× 28 wafq comprising sixteen bordered awfāq. Colored inks on paper. Page 27×18 cm. London, British Library, Delhi Arabic 110, fols. 108v–109r Image in the Public Domain, available from the Qatar Digital Library.

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table 3.2

1

2*

Authors of awfāq treaties mentioned in the Dīwān al-ʿadad al-wafq (asterisks indicate authors discussed by Sesiano)

Author/date

Location(s) of author

Patron(s) of author

Appearance in Dīwān168

Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal b. Thābit al-Ḥarrānī (d. before 368/978– 979) Abū l-Wafāʾ al-Būzjānī (d. 388/ 998)

Baghdad

al-Muhallabī (d. 352/963), wazīr to Muʿizz al-Dawla, Buyid amīr (r. 334– 356/945–967) ʿAḍud al-Dawla, Ṣamṣām al-Dawla, and Sharaf al-Dawla, Buyid amīrs (combined reigns 367– 379/978–989) al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh, Fatimid caliph (r. 386–411/996–1021)

3.2 (60v–64r), 4.1 (80v–87r), 5.1 (94r– 95v), 5.2 (95v–99r), 6 (102r–109v) Total: 50 pages 3.3 (64r–77v), 4.2 (87r–91v), 4.3.1 (91v– 92r), 5.1 (94r–95v), 5.2 (95v–99r) Total: 52 pages

?

2.4 (51r–53v), 6.intro (on fol. 101v in square) Total: 7 pages

Bāb al-Tibn observatory, Baghdad (c. 348/960)

3*

Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham (d. c. 430/1039)

4

Majd al-Dīn al-Amīr b. Abī Naṣr Manṣūr b. Muḥammad b. ʿAlī (d. early-sixth/ twelfth century?) Abū Ḥātim alIsfahan (from Muẓaffar b. Ismāʿīl 476/1074–1075); al-Isfizārī (d. c. Balkh (c. 506/1112) 510/1116)

5*

168

Basra (354– c. 390/965–c. 1000); Cairo (from c. 390– 430/c. 1000–1039, with a gap) ?

2.1 (35v–40v) Total: 11 pages

Jalāl al-Dīn Malik2.2 (41r–44v) shāh, Seljuk sultan (r. Total: 8 pages 465–485/1073–1092); Abū l-Muẓaffar Barkiyāruq, Seljuk sultan (r. 487–498/1094– 1105); Abū Saʿd Jarrāḥ, Khwārazmshāh prince at Balkh

Included in this column are lists of all folios in BL, Delhi Arabic 110 (a) on which the given author is referred to explicitly or (b) which comprise sections of the Dīwān indicated in their titles or elsewhere as being drawn from the writings of the given author.

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new light on early arabic awfāq literature Table 3.2

Authors of awfāq treaties mentioned in the Dīwān al-ʿadad al-wafq (cont.)

Author/date

Location(s) of author

Patron(s) of author

Appearance in Dīwān

6

ʿUmar b. Ibrāhīm al-Khayyāmī al-Nīsābūrī (d. c. 517/1123)

Malikshāh observatory, Isfahan (from 476/1074–1075); Balkh (c. 506/1112); Marw (after 485/1092)

Jalāl al-Dīn Malik6.1.2 (107v–109v) shāh, Seljuk sultan Total: 5 pages (r. 465–485/1073– 1092); Abū Saʿd Jarrāḥ, Khwārazmshāh prince at Balkh

7

Abū l-Fatḥ ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Khāzinī (d. after 525/1130–1131?)

Marw

Sanjar b. Malikshāh, Seljuk sultan (r. 511– 552/1118–1157)

2.5 (53v–58v), 3.4 (77v–80v), 4.3.2–3 (92r–93v), caption to squares (fol. 100v– 101r), 7 (109v–116v), comment on alMufaḍḍal b. Thābit (fol. 60v) Total: 40 pages

Comparing the list of awfāq treatise authors in Table 3.2 with that of the authors discussed by Jacques Sesiano in Table 3.1, we can get a general view of awfāq authorities, observe pockets of interest in the mathematical study of awfāq, and suggest chains of transmission of knowledge in this field. First, it can be seen that authors of awfāq treatises written before the seventh/thirteenth century tended to be astronomer-mathematicians, many of whom were employed at observatories under royal patronage and engaged in the production of zījes (books of astronomical tables). Furthermore, concerning the geographic distribution of these authorities, a concentration is observed in Iraq in the fourth/tenth century, with important developments to the west in the fifth/eleventh century (e.g., the Basran Ibn al-Haytham who spent much of his career in Egypt and Ibn al-Zarqālluh and al-Mālaqī in al-Andalus),169 followed by a subsequent eastward movement across Iran into Khurasan in the 169

Ibn al-Zarqālluh and al-Mālaqī’s work on awfāq should, however, not be considered isolated Iberian phenomena but contextualised in the international cultural-scientific scene that had developed in Islamicate Spain during the so-called orientalisation of Andalus-

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first half of the sixth/twelfth century. This geographic pattern of development may indicate little more than the fact that awfāq treatises were produced in the major Islamicate centers of political power and scientific patronage as these shifted to the east, a phenomenon that mirrors the geographic development of mathematics and astronomy more generally.170 But this eastward shift of awfāq activities in the period directly preceding the composition of the Dīwān does allow us to speculate on the location, professional and scholarly affiliation, and even the identity of the author of the Dīwān.

6

Defining Hubs of awfāq Activity

In the remainder of this article, we look more closely at the two major hubs of activity in the study of awfāq that have been identified by the manuscript evidence in Iraq and Iran/Khurasan. Both of these hubs have been partially highlighted by the work of Sesiano, so we will pay particular attention to awfāq authorities newly made known by the Dīwān and explore their social and scientific contexts. We will work in reverse chronological order, beginning nearest in time to the author of the Dīwān and moving backward. 6.1 Seljuk Isfahan and Marw The three latest authorities drawn upon by the Dīwān, al-Isfizārī, al-Khayyāmī (better known in Europe as ʿUmar Khayyām, although it is doubtful whether the poet and mathematician were the same person), and al-Khāzinī, were well known astronomer-mathematicians of Seljuk-era Iran and Khurasan and were among the most brilliant scientists of their day. The few biographical details we have of these three scholars indicate close connections between them.171

170

171

ian science in the third–fifth/ninth–eleventh centuries. See Miquel Forcada, “Astronomy, Astrology and the Sciences of the Ancients in Early al-Andalus (2nd/8th–3rd/9th Centuries),” Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wissenschaften 16 (2004/05): 1–74; Julio Samsó, Las ciencias de los antiguos en el Al-Andalus (Almería: Fundación Ibn Tufayl de Estudios Árabes, 2011), 45–49, and Julio Samsó, “Ibn al-Zarqālluh,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed. See Edward S. Kennedy, “The Exact Sciences in Iran Under the Saljuqs and Mongols,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, ed. John Andrew Boyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 5:678. Mohammed Abattouy and Salim al-Hassani, The Corpus of al-Isfizārī in the Sciences of Weights and Mechanical Devices. New Arabic Texts in Theoretical and Practical Mechanics from the Early XIIth Century. English Translation, Partial Analysis and Historical Context (London: al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2015), 31–49, and Kennedy, “The Exact Sciences in Iran,” 674.

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Al-Isfizārī and al-Khayyāmī were colleagues under the patronage of Sultan Malikshāh in the Great Seljuk capital Isfahan, where they collaborated on astronomical observations documented in the Zīj-i Malikshāhī (also known as Zīj-i Jalālī and Zīj-i Khayyām), which were necessary for the calendrical reforms that resulted in the establishment of the Jalālī calendar in 471/1079. Later, al-Isfizārī and al-Khayyāmī are known to have been together in Balkh in 506/1112.172 By 508/1114, al-Khayyāmī had moved east into “the religious, cultural, and intellectual heart of the Islamic world,” to Marw, the capital of the Great Seljuk sultan Sanjar, where he worked under the patronage of that sultan, with al-Khāzinī as his pupil.173 It is not known when or where al-Isfizārī died, but the Seljuk historian alBayhaqī (d. 565/1169) relates, probably spuriously, that his death was brought about by the destruction of a complex hydrostatic balance he had constructed for the measurement of density. The balance was designed to use the density of an alloy to ascertain the relative quantities of its constituent metals for the purpose of testing the purity of gold and silver used for currency. A treasurer wishing to hide his adulteration of the currency destroyed this balance, so the story goes, and, when al-Isfizārī learned of its destruction, he fell ill and died.174 Regardless of the veracity of this tale, al-Isfizārī’s interest in hydrostatics and mechanics more generally is well attested, as is the fact that he did construct a hydrostatic balance;175 this is another area of study, besides astronomy and awfāq, that unites al-Isfizārī, al-Khayyāmī, and al-Khāzinī. Al-Khāzīnī’s best known writing is the Book of the Balance of Wisdom (Kitāb Mīzān al-ḥikma), a comprehensive survey of literature on densimetry and the

172 173

174

175

Abattouy and al-Hassani, The Corpus of al-Isfizārī, 32–33. Charles-Henri De Fouchécour and Boris A. Rosenfeld, “ʿUmar K̲ h̲ayyām,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. On Central Asia as the heart of the Islamicate world during this period, see Deborah G. Tor, “The Importance of Khurāsān and Transoxiana in the Classical Islamic World,” in Medieval Central Asia and the Persianate World: Iranian Tradition and Islamic Civilisation, ed. Andrew C.S. Peacock and Deborah G. Tor (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 4. On Great Seljuk patronage of the sciences, see Andrew C.S. Peacock, The Great Seljuk Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 186–187, and on al-Khāzinī in particular see George Saliba, “Al-Khāzinī’s Astronomy under the Seljuqs: Inferential Observations (iʿtibār), Calendars and Instruments,” in The Seljuqs and Their Successors: Art, Culture and History, ed. Sheila Canby, Deniz Beyazit and Martina Rugiadi (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 180–196. Ẓahīr al-Dīn al-Bayhaqī, Tāʾrīkh ḥukumāʾ al-Islām, ed. Mamdūḥ Ḥasan Muḥammad (Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqāfa al-Dīniyyya, 1996), 144; translation in Max Meyerhof, “ʿAlī al-Bayhaqī’s Tatimmat Ṣiwān al-Ḥikma: A Biographical Work on Learned Men of the Islam,” Osiris 8 (1948): 175–176. See most recently the texts edited in Abattouy and al-Hassani, The Corpus of al-Isfizārī.

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practical construction and use of hydrostatic balances, which traces developments in these areas from Euclid (fl. 300 BCE) and Archimedes (d. 212 BCE) down to al-Khāzinī’s own day.176 In this work, al-Khāzinī summarizes texts by both al-Isfizārī and al-Khayyāmī concerning the hydrostatic balance. This close relationship between these three scholars—who shared interests, personal relationships of patronage, and training, and wrote on similar subjects and about each other’s work—should be considered as something of a school (in the sense of a node in the network of scholars) in which the study of the awfāq played an important role in the intellectual content of the worldview and output presented to their patrons. This Seljuk Iṣfahānī/Marwazī school specializing in, among other things, mathematical astronomy, mechanics, and awfāq is of particular interest to us because it seems probable that the author of the Dīwān was a member of this school himself or at least drew much inspiration from it. 6.2 The Author of the Dīwān The first indication that the author of the Dīwān may have been a member of the Seljuk school and probably a resident of Marw is its composition date, 517/1123–1124. When the authorities drawn upon by the Dīwān author are arranged chronologically there is, as we have seen, a general eastward shift in their locations, and the last two or three authors (i.e., those who were contemporaries of the Dīwān author) were located at Marw. The Dīwān author’s familiarity with the works of these contemporary authors suggests a proximity that made their works available to him soon after their publication. Furthermore, there are notable similarities between the works of al-Khāzinī and the Dīwān that suggest the strong influence of al-Khāzinī on the Dīwān author. First, there is a conceptual similarity between the Dīwān and al-Khāzinī’s Balance of Wisdom, in that both texts are unusual in approaching theoretical and technical subjects with an eye to charting their historical development, naming previous authorities, and quoting from their works. While the Dīwān does not keep to the strictly chronological structure of the Balance of Wisdom, in both works contributions of previous authorities are kept distinct and clearly attributed through explicit citations and clear signposting by means of section headings and diagram captions. The second similarity between the Dīwān and the works of al-Khāzinī is stylistic and has to do with the clear signposting just mentioned. The hierarchical 176

This text has been edited most recently in Abū l-Fatḥ ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Khāzinī, Kitāb mīzān al-ḥikma, ed. and trans. Faïza Laridhi Bancel (Carthage: Académie Tunisienne des Sciences des Lettres et des Arts, Beït al-Ḥikma, 2008).

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structure of the Dīwān is identical to that of al-Khāzinī’s Zīj for Sanjar (al-Zīj al-muʿtabar al-Sanjarī) composed at Marw in about 532/1137 and dedicated to the sultan Sanjar b. Malikshāh.177 Furthermore, the Zīj for Sanjar contains a table of contents with the same unusual and distinctive layout as that found in the Dīwān mentioned above.178 Based on this evidence, it is tempting to suggest that the Dīwān author may have been a close associate of al-Khāzinī, perhaps his student. An apparent anachronism in the Dīwān, however, raises some doubts about this. The only author mentioned in the text whose name is routinely followed by the Islamic benediction formula for the deceased (tarḥīm) is al-Khāzinī. But al-Khāzinī is believed to have died only after 532/1137.179 This means that, while al-Khāzinī was alive for at least a decade and a half following the composition of the Dīwān in 517/1123–1124, the Dīwān author appears to have believed he had already died by that date. It is hard to square these two facts unless a later copyist in the chain of transmission between the author’s autograph of the Dīwān and the surviving copy added the tarḥīm following al-Khāzinī’s death, but, then, why did other authorities mentioned in the text not receive the same treatment?180 177

178

179

180

David Pingree (“A Preliminary Assessment of the Problems of Editing the Zīj al-Sanjarī of al-Khazini,” In Editing Islamic Manuscripts on Science, ed. Yusuf Ibish [London: Al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation, 1999], 107) gives the composition date as c. 513/1120. In fact, al-Khāzinī seems to have written his zīj after 10 Rabīʿ I 532/26 November 1137, which is the latest date mentioned in the chronology of the Seljuk dynasty al-Khāzinī included in the Zīj for Sanjar (see BL, Or. 6669, fol. 77v, at foot of table). Pingree does not mention the occasional appearance of wujūh in the Zīj for Sanjar, but they can be found in BL, Or. 6669, on e.g., fols. 22r and 46v, https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100029495503.0x000001. See BL, Or. 6669, fols. 2v, 1r, 1v, and 3r and compare with the table of contents in the Dīwān, Delhi Arabic 110, fols. 28r–29r, https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100046596797 .0x000043. Just as in the Dīwān, the sections of the Zīj for Sanjar called wujūh are not included in the table of contents. See also the similar table of contents in al-Khāzinī’s Book of the Balance of Wisdom, University of Pennsylvania, LJS 386, pp. 17 [= 15] and 18 [= 16], http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017/d/medren/4824919. A less complex predecessor of the type of table of contents employed in the works of al-Khāzinī and in the Dīwān can be seen in Abū Rayḥan Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Bīrūnī’s (d. c. 440/1048) Canon for Masʿūd (al-Qānūn al-Masʿūdī, see BL, Or. 1997, fols. 2r–5r, https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/ vdc_100022880536.0x000001). For further evidence that al-Khāzinī was still alive in 517/1123–1124, see Pingree, “A Preliminary Assessment,” 105, who states that al-Khāzinī published a Summary of the Zīj for the Sultan (Wajīz al-zīj al-muʿtabir al-sulṭānī), an abridgment of his own Zīj for Sanjar, in 525/1130–1131. A second apparent anachronism in the Dīwān is that its author follows the first mention of Majd al-Dīn al-Amīr b. Abū Naṣr Manṣūr b. Muḥammad b. ʿAlī with benedictions that show that the author believed this scholar still to be alive (fol. 51r). I have not, however, been able positively to identify this scholar, who seems to have been a son of the math-

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Could the Dīwān author be among those studied by Sesiano and listed in Table 3.1? Because the Dīwān author would not have listed himself as a previous authority on awfāq, he cannot be among the authors listed in Table 3.2. If we remove these authors from the list in Table 3.1, also discarding authorities who lived too early to have written the Dīwān in 517/1123–1124, two authors remain: (a) the unknown author of the anonymous text edited in Sesiano, “Un compilation arabe” (text 9 in Table 3.1), and (b) Jamāl al-Zamān ʿAbd al-Jabbār b. ʿAbd al-Jabbār Abū Muḥammad al-Kharaqī (d. 533/1138–1139), who flourished at Marw and wrote the Epitome on the Harmonious Number (Talkhīṣ fī l-ʿadad alwafq; text 8 in Table 3.1). The anonymous author lists only three awfāq authorities in his text, one of whom (Ibn al-Haytham) is discussed in the Dīwān, but another of whom (al-Anṭākī, see text 1 in Table 3.1 for references) is not mentioned in the Dīwān; the third author appears in the unique manuscript of that text as Abū Ḥātim Muẓaffar al-Isfarāyinī, which Sesiano correctly emends to Abū Ḥātim Muẓaffar al-Isfizārī.181 If the error in this name was made by the author of the text rather than by a later copyist, then this, plus the references to al-Anṭākī, missing from the Dīwān, make it unlikely that the unknown author of this text is the Dīwān author. As for al-Kharaqī, both the title of his treatise and the Dīwān contain the phrase al-ʿadad al-wafq,182 so it might be hoped that the Epitome of the Harmonious Number is an epitome of the Dīwān (full title: Collection of the Harmonious Number). Unfortunately, a comparison between the contents of the two treatises reveals little other similarity in terms of terminology, structure, or subject matter. So, although there is some overlap in terminology and authorities used in the anonymous treatise and in the Dīwan and the date and location of al-Kharaqī match those expected for the Dīwān author, the available evidence does not permit a positive identification. It is therefore probable that the Dīwān author does not appear in Table 3.1.

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ematician and astronomer Abū Naṣr Manṣūr b. ʿAlī b. ʿIrāq (d. c. 427/1036), a student of al-Būzjānī and teacher of al-Bīrūnī. If this identification is correct, it is difficult to imagine that Ibn ʿIrāq’s son could have outlived his father by more than eighty-five years, which must have been the case had he still been alive at the time of the Dīwān’s composition. Süleymaniye, Fatıh 3439, fol. 181r, line 25 and Sesiano, “Une compilation arabe,” 138, 168 (translation) and 185 (text). The error in the manuscript is probably due to confusion with the name of the theologian Abū al-Muẓaffar al-Isfarāyinī (d. 471/1078–1079). The anonymous treatise just discussed also uses the phrase al-ʿadad al-wafq, but it is not known if it appeared in the work’s lost title (Sesiano, “Une compilation arabe,” 173).

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6.3 Awfāq in the Renaissance of Islam The other hub of awfāq activity, Buyid Baghdad, is also already known through the work of Sesiano. There, in the latter half of the fourth/tenth century, around the time the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity were written or shortly thereafter, Abū l-Qāsim ʿAlī al-Anṭākī (d. 376/987) and Abū l-Wafāʾ al-Būzjānī (d. 388/998) worked and wrote awfāq treatises under the patronage of Aḍud al-Dawla (r. 338–372/949–983) and subsequent Buyid amirs (see Table 3.1). Just as it did for the awfāq hub in Seljuk Isfahan and Marw, the Dīwān introduces us to a new Baghdādī authority, adding to the sense of there having been a school of awfāq thought in Buyid Baghdad. As mentioned above, it is reported by Ibn al-Qifṭī, on the authority of Abū ʿAlī al-Muḥassin b. Ibrāhīm b. Hilāl al-Ṣābiʾ, that Thābit b. Qurra wrote a treatise on awfāq, but this text is not mentioned by any author independent of Ibn al-Qifṭī. No trace of this work has been found, but the Dīwān introduces us to the previously unsuspected author of the earliest known awfāq treatise, al-Mufaḍḍal b. Thābit al-Ḥarrānī, providing new details about this author and his work, as well as insights into the Harranian Sabian community of Buyid Baghdad. At first glance, the name al-Mufaḍḍal b. Thābit al-Ḥarrānī appears to belong to one of the sons of Thābit b. Qurra. This identification even appears to be confirmed by the fact that, at one point in the Dīwān, we find him mistakenly referred to as al-Mufaḍḍal b. Thābit b. Qurra (fol. 80v, title to Book 4, Part 1, see below). In fact, however, this al-Mufaḍḍal is from another Harranian Sabian family in Baghdad descended not from Qurra but from Zahrūn (see Table 3.3). Keeping the two families distinct is not always easy, however, due not only to intermarriage but also to the popularity of certain names in the Sabian community at Baghdad. Al-Mufaḍḍal’s father, for example, shared not only his ism (Thābit) with Thābit b. Qurra but also the kunya Abū l-Ḥasan as well as the nisbas al-Ḥarrānī and al-Ṣābiʾ. This, combined with Thābit b. Qurra’s family’s reputation as mathematicians makes accidental co-option of al-Mufaḍḍal into the line of Thābit b. Qurra all but inevitable. The Harranian Sabian identity of al-Mufaḍḍal, the fact that no other mathematical texts are attributed to him, and confusion with Thābit b. Qurra in the manuscript of the Dīwān itself all suggest that al-Muḥassin b. Ibrāhīm al-Ṣābiʾ’s list of works by Thābit b. Qurra, which was copied by Ibn al-Qifṭī, erroneously contained a work actually by al-Mufaḍḍal b. Thābit, al-Muḥassin b. Ibrāhīm’s first cousin once removed (i.e., his great uncle’s son). At any rate, regardless of whether Thābit b. Qurra did indeed write a lost awfāq treatise or whether he has merely received credit for a work actually written by al-Mufaḍḍal b. Thābit, the Dīwān provides fascinating details of what is now the earliest known awfāq treatise. But what do we already know about its Sabian author?

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figure 3.3 Family tree of the Harranian Sabians of Baghdad After François C. de Blois, “Ṣābiʾ,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., and Muhammad Yonis Abdel All Riḍwan, “Abū l-Khaṭṭāb alMufaḍḍal b. Thābit al-Ṣābiʾ wa-mā tabqā min nathrihi: nathr wa-dirāsa,” Majallat Jāmiʿat al-Malik Saʿūd 2, al-Ādāb 1 (1990): 39

7

The Earliest Known Awfāq Author The Ḥarrānians can easily be made into secret agents or scapegoats of intellectual history … precisely because so little is known about them.183

Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal b. Thābit b. Ibrāhīm b. Zahrūn al-Ṣābiʾ al-Ḥarrānī (b. c. 315/927–928, d. before 368/978–979) is unknown to the history of science, and most references to him in pre-modern literature concern his poetry.184 Apart

183 184

Kevin van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 81. See above, Table 3.2, author 1. The only modern study devoted to Abū l-Khaṭṭāb alMufaḍḍal is Riḍwan, “Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal b. Thābit al-Ṣābiʾ,” in which the fra-

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from the discussion of his treatise on awfāq in the Dīwān, there is no indication in the historical record that he produced scientific literature or had strong interests in the sciences. His family context was, however, conducive to such interests. Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal was born into an influential family of Sabian physicians at Baghdad, descended from a certain Zahrūn, who lived in the generation of Thābit b. Qurra. Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal’s father, Abū l-Ḥasan Thābit b. Ibrāhīm b. Zahrūn (d. 365 or 369/976 or 980), was an elite physician in early Buyid Baghdad and an older friend and colleague to Thābit b. Qurra’s grandson Abū l-Ḥasan Thābit b. Sinān (d. 365/976).185 Beyond practicing medicine, Thābit b. Ibrāhīm translated Greek texts into Arabic (perhaps via Syriac intermediaries), wrote medical writings of his own, and perhaps studied mathematics.186

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gments of his poetry are assembled and discussed and a list of primary sources mentioning Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal is given on p. 38, n. 1. See also Daniel Abramovich Chwolson, Die Ssabier Und Der Ssabismus (St. Petersburg: Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1856), 1:586. Abū l-Haṣan Thābit b. Ibrāhīm was probably the character intended by the Muʿtazilī theologian ʿAbd al-Jabbār b. Aḥmad al-Hamadhānī (d. c. 415/1024) when he claimed that Abū l-Ḥasan b. Zahrūn al-Ṣābiʾ al-Ḥarrānī was “the principal and chief of medical science in Baghdad” (wāḥid al-ṭibb bi-Baghdād wa-raʾīsuhu; ʿAbd al-Jabbār b. Aḥmad al-Hamadhānī, Tathbīt dalā’il al-nubuwwa, ed. ʿAbd al-Karīm ʿUthmān [Beirut: Dār al-ʿArabiyya lil-Ṭibāʿa wa-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzīʿ, 1966], 619; on ʿAbd al-Jabbār see Margaretha T. Heemskerk, “ʿAbd al-Jabbār b. Aḥmad al-Hamadhānī,”Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed.). The popularity of the kunya Abū l-Ḥasan among the Sabians of Baghdad seems to have confused premodern and modern editors alike; for example, Gregor Schwarb, who cites in translation the passage referring to Abū l-Ḥasan b. Zahrūn al-Ṣābiʾ al-Ḥarrānī, can hardly be blamed for identifying this character as Thābit b. Qurra without further comment (“Early Kalām and the Medical Tradition,” in Philosophy and Medicine in the Formative Period of Islam, ed. Peter Adamson and Peter E. Pormann [London: Warburg Institute, 2017], 134; I adapt Schwarb’s translation here). Details of Thābit b. Ibrāhīm’s medical career are found in Ibn al-Qifṭī, Tāʾrīkh al-ḥukamāʾ (ed. Müller and Lippert), 111–115, and 396 line 11 and IAU, 1:227–230. Bar Hebraeus (d. 685/1286), Taʾrikh mukhtasar al-duwal, ed. Khalīl al-Manṣūr (Beirut: Dār alKutub al-ʿIlmiyyya, 1997), 152, relates an anecdote in which Thābit b. Ibrāhīm’s prodigious diagnostic skills are said to be “prophesy not medicine” (nubuwwa lā ṭibb), and their origins are discerned in his natal horoscope. Al-Nadīm, Fihrist, ed. Flügel, Roediger, and Müller, 1:292 and 303 (trans. in al-Nadīm, The Fihrist of al-Nadīm, ed and trans. Dodge, 696 and 710) lists four of his literary works: (1– 2) translations of two medical treatises by Philagrios (on whom see John Scarborough, “Philagrios of Ēpeiros (300–340 CE),” in The Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists: The Greek Tradition and Its Many Heirs, ed. Paul Keyser and Georgia Irby-Massie, 643–644. [London and New York: Routledge, 2008]), (3) a correction (iṣlāḥ, presumably a recension of the Arabic translation produced in 318/930) of some chapters from the Syriac Pandects (Kunnāsh) of Yūḥannā (or Yaḥyā) Ibn Sarābiyyūn (or Sarāfiyyūn, fl. latter half

134

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Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal is generally overshadowed by his older and more famous cousin Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm b. Hilāl al-Ṣābiʾ (d. 384/994), the greatgrandson of Thābit b. Qurra, and his rivalry with this cousin all but defines him in the literature. Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal and Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm were among the first generation of Harranian Sabians to serve as chancery secretaries (kuttāb dīwān al-inshāʾ) to the Abbasid and Buyid courts. Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm found greater political success than his younger cousin. He achieved great fame, first as secretary to the Abbasid caliph al-Muṭīʿ (r. 334–363/946–974), then as chief secretary (ṣāḥib dīwān al-inshāʾ) to the Buyid amīrs of Iraq from Muʿizz al-Dawla to Bahāʾ al-Dawla (combined reigns 324–403/945–1012).187 It was perhaps through his cousin’s intercession that Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal entered the circle and patronage of Abū Muḥammad al-Muhallabī (d. 352/963), vizier to Muʿizz al-Dawla (r. 324–356/936–67), where he consorted with some of the greatest minds of his day.188 Although nothing is known of Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-

187

188

of third/ninth century; see IAU, 1:174–175, and Ullmann, Medizin im Islam, 102), and (4) a Book of Answers to Questions Asked of Him. No mathematical work attributed to Thābit b. Ibrāhīm is known, but an interest in mathematics is suggested by his appearance in a list of the students (talāmīdh) of Thābit b. Qurra in a section of al-Nādim’s Fihrist (ed. Flügel, Roediger, and Müller, 1:272) devoted to the “Class of Modern Geometers and Masters of Mechanics, Numbers and the like” (Ṭabaqat muḥdathīn min al-muhandisīn wa-aṣḥāb alḥiyal wa-l-aʿdād wa-ghayrih). It is, however, chronologically difficult to imagine that Thābit b. Ibrāhīm studied with Thābit b. Qurra in person, because the former is thought to have been no older than eight when the latter died. Thābit b. Ibrāhīm’s propensity for mathematics is reiterated by al-Bayhaqī, Tāʾrīkh ḥukamāʾ al-Islām, 90 (trans. in Meyerhof, “ʿAlī al-Bayhaqī’s Tatimmat Siwān al-Hikma,” 152), who also calls him a “sage of the falsafa tradition” (ḥakīm mutafalsif ). For a précis of Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm’s political career and his role in the creation of Buyid dynastic propaganda, see Wilferd Madelung, “Abū Isḥāq al-Ṣābī on the Alids of Ṭabaristān and Gīlān,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 26, no. 1 (1967): 17–56. To the bibliography of Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm’s edited official letters given by Madelung, one can now add Klaus U. Hachmeier, Die Briefe Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm al-Ṣābiʾs (st. 384/994A.H./A.D.) (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2002) and Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm b. Hilāl al-Ṣābiʾ, Dīwān Rasāʾil al-Sābī, ed. Iḥsān Dhannūn al-Thāmirī, 2 vols. (London: Muʾassasat al-Furqān lil-Tūrāth al-Islāmī, 2017), which contains letters referring or addressed to Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal in 1:253–256, 620–621, 624–626 and 2:620–622. Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm was taken as a case study of elite Sabian success in Abbasid/Buyid society in Alexandre M. Roberts, “Being a Sabian at Court in Tenth-Century Baghdad,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 137, no. 2 (2017), 253– 277. See also van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes, 97, n. 144 and 106–108. On the circle of al-Muhallabī, see Joel L. Kraemer, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam. The Cultural Revival during the Buyid Age (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 54–55. One of the two anecdotes about Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal not relating to his poetry—both preserved by Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī (d. 414/1023)—is set in al-Muhallabī’s majlis. In this anecdote we find

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Mufaḍḍal’s scientific pursuits apart from his interest in awfāq, more can be said about those of his cousin Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm, and these may at least suggest Abū l-Khaṭṭāb’s own interests. Although best remembered as the consummate secretary, master of adab, prose stylist, and poet, Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm began his career, following family tradition, as a hospital physician before abandoning that path on account of a distaste for medicine.189 Throughout his subsequent secretarial career, however, he kept up his scientific activities in the other family specialties: mathematics and astronomy. His correspondence concerning questions of geometry and mechanics with the mathematician and astronomer Abū Sahl al-Kūhī (d. c. 384/995)—himself an associate of the awfāq author Abū l-Wafāʾ al-Būzjānī at Baghdad’s Bāb al-Tibn observatory—are partially extant, while the book of astronomical tables (zīj) and treatise on geometry he produced for the Buyid amīr ʿAḍud al-Dawla have not survived.190 Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm was also a noted maker of scientific instruments. He is known to have constructed an astrolabe for Qābūs b. Wushmgīr, the Ziyārid ruler of Tabaristan and Gurgan (r. 367–371/978–981 and 387–402/997–1012), and he combined his skills in mathematical astronomy with his poetic talents in the miniature astrolabes he constructed for ʿAḍud al-Dawla and his son Ṣamṣām alDawla (r. 372–388/983–998), both of which were presented with accompanying poems.191

189

190

191

a snippet of a conversation between Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal and his cousin, in which Abū l-Khaṭṭāb asks Abū Isḥāq about the physiological and temperamental basis for differences in thought and opinion amongst various people. In the second anecdote we find Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal in discussion with Abū Sulaymān al-Sijistānī (d. 375/985), a philosopher of the so-called Baghdad School of Aristotelians around the Jacobite philosopher Yaḥyā b. ʿAdī (d. 363/974), and approving of Abū Sulaymān’s reformulations of Sufi sentiments in philosophical language. For both anecdotes, see Kraemer, Philosophy in the Renaissance of Islam, 75–76. On Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm’s upbringing and education, see Muḥammad al-Dībājī, al-Udabāʾ al-Ṣābiʾa fī l-ʿaṣr al-ʿAbbāsī (Casablanca: Manshūrat Jāmiʿat al-Ḥasan al-Thānī, 1989), 53– 74; his abortive medical career is discussed on 55–56. On al-Kūhī, see J. Len Berggren, “Kūhī: Abū Sahl Wījan ibn Rustam [Wustam] al-Kūhī [alQūhī],” in BEA. Their correspondence has been edited and translated in J. Len Berggren, “The Correspondence of Abū Sahl al-Kūhī and Abū Isḥāq al-Ṣābī: A Translation with Commentaries,” Journal for the History of Arabic Science 7, nos. 1–2 (1983): 39–124. On Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm’s lost zīj and geometrical treatise, see Roberts, “Being a Sabian,” 266, and Mohamed Abuzayd, David A. King, and Petra G. Schmidl, “From a Heavenly Arabic Poem to an Enigmatic Judaeo-Arabic Astrolabe,” Suhayl 10 (2011): 87–88. See Aydın Sayılı, The Observatory in Islam and its Place in the General History of the Obser-

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Alexandre M. Roberts argues convincingly that much of Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm’s scientific output can be viewed, at least in part, as a conscious attempt to emphasize the distinctive attributes of his Sabian religious minority status (special mastery of mathematical and astronomical/astrological arts) in the hope of increasing his own cachet and cultural capital.192 A similarly overt expression of Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm’s Sabianism can be seen in an anecdote about a dinner at the house of the vizier Abū Muḥammad al-Muhallabī, at which Abū Isḥāq refused to eat on account of the presence on the table of fava beans, which were forbidden by Sabian dietary laws as they were by the Pythagorean precept (kuámōn apékhesthai—a fabis abstine—abstain from fava beans).193 Such a desire to highlight his Sabian uniqueness may well have been part of Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal’s own motivation in writing his treatise on awfāq. At least since the appearance of the “Epistle on Geometry” in the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity (2.26) in the mid-fourth/tenth century, the talismanic function of the awfāq had been considered part of astral magic. Therefore, by their mathematical and astral characteristics, awfāq could well have been expected to fall within the realm of Sabian expertise: the awfāq were part of what Roberts has called the “Ṣābian brand,” even though they had not originated with the Sabians.194 7.1

Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal b. Thābit al-Ṣābiʾ al-Ḥarrānī in the Dīwān From a historiographical point of view, the most unusual and valuable aspect of the Dīwān is that its author explicitly names his sources and indicates clearly which sections of the Dīwān are attributable to which authority. Judging by the wide range of subjects covered by the Dīwān that are attributed to Abū lKhaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal, we can assume that his lost treatise on awfāq was not a brief work. These subjects include the bordered (muḥallaq) wafq (fols. 60v– 64r), the unique, rare bordered (al-fard al-gharīb al-muḥallaq) wafq (fols. 80v–

192 193

194

vatory (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1960), 158; and François Charette, “The Locales of Islamic Scientific Instrumentation,” History of Science 44 (2006): 133 and Abuzayd, King, and Schmidl, “From a Heavenly Arabic Poem,” 85–96. See Roberts, “Being a Sabian.” Abū Manṣūr al-Thaʿālibī (d. 430/1038), Yatīmat al-dahr fī maḥāsin ahl al-ʿaṣr, ed. Mufīd Muḥammad Qumayḥa (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2000), 2:288–289, cited by van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes, 97, n. 144, and Roberts, “Being a Sabian,” 260. Roberts, “Being a Sabian,” 269.

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87r),195 the adorned (muwashshaḥ) wafq (fols. 94r–95v), a construction technique called the balanced mixture (al-mizāj al-muʿtadil) (fols. 95v–99r), and awfāq of mixed (mumtazij) composition (fol. 102r–109v). After mentioning Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal’s adorned wafq and balanced mixture, the author of the Dīwān claims that Abū l-Wafāʾ al-Būzjānī “alluded to” (ashāra ilayhi) the adorned wafq and “presented in his book” (awradahu … fī kitābihi) the balanced mixture. The Dīwān author does this in such a way as to imply that Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal treatise on awfāq predated al-Būzjānī’s. This is not unlikely, given the age difference between the two authorities (alBūzjānī was born in 328/940 and al-Mufaḍḍal in about 315/927).196 The preface to maqāla 3, qism 2 of the Dīwān (fol. 60v, lines 1–12) contains a long quotation from Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal’s treatise in which he describes his own autodidactic initiation into awfāq studies and the books he consulted along the way. This passage is especially noteworthy because it preserves the earliest known awfāq author discussing his predecessors in the field. It is thus the earliest known source for the history of mathematical interests in awfāq. The fact that this passage is historical rather than legendary sets it apart from other known Arabic discussions of the origins of awfāq, which, as we have seen, attribute their discovery and transmission to legendary figures, such as Fereydūn and Thales, who had nothing to do with them. This passage is full of details about Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal’s context, resources, and hermeneutic methodology, as well as several obscure references and phrases, so it warrants transcribing and translating in full here. ‫القسم الثاني من الوفق المحل ّق‬ ‫ضل بن ثابت الحراّ ني على سبيل الحكاية دون البرهان‬ ّ ‫في اختصار ما أورده المف‬

195

196

This section contains a wafq of 19× 19 cells (fol. 86v), the largest in any of the sections of the Dīwān attributed to Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal, and, indeed, one of the largest to appear in the Dīwān or in other early awfāq literature. See Behnaz Hashemipour, “Būzjānī: Abū al-Wafāʾ Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyā al-Būzjānī,” in BEA, and Ulrich Rebstock, “Abū l-Wafāʾ al-Būzjānī,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed. Al-Būzjānī’s only surviving work on awfāq, the Book on the Arrangement of the Harmonious Number in Squares (Kitāb fī tartīb al-ʿadad al-wafq fī l-murabbaʿāt), has been studied and partially edited and translated by Sesiano, Magic Squares in the Tenth Century, 207–252 (translation), 335–381 (text), and Sesiano, “Le Traité d’Abū’lWafāʾ sur les carrés magiques,” who does not, however, indicate that it contains references to Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal or, for that matter, to any other previous authorities.

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‫ كان أّول معرفتي بأمر العدد الوفق جدول الثلثة الذي ذكره نيقوماخس في‬:‫[ قال‬1] ‫[ ثم ّ وقع إلى أبي الٰقسم الحجازي جدول الأر بعة الذي يبتدئ من الواحد‬2] ‫الأرثماطيقي‬ ‫[ ثم ّ وجدت جدول الست ّة على ظهر‬3] ‫جب منه‬ ّ ‫يتفاضل واحٍد واحٍد إلى ست ّة عشر وكان تع‬ ‫[ ثم ّ وقع إليّ كتاب فيه ثلثة أو أر بعة جداول مما دون العشرة‬4] ‫كتاب أقليدس نسخة ِ إسحق‬ ‫ على أكثرهما حتى لا‬197‫ض‬ ُ َ ‫[ ثم ّ وجدت في خزانة من كتب شيوخنا كتابين قد أتت الَأر‬5] ‫[ وكان المختصر منهما بخّط الماهاني والورقة الأولى من الأكثر بخّط‬6] ‫يفهم منهما إلّا اليسر‬ ‫[ ولاح‬8] ‫[ فنظرت فيهما فوجدت استخراجهما متعب ًا جًّدا‬7] ‫ بن موسى النو بختي‬198‫الحسن‬ ‫ل واحد منهما بما سلم من صاحبه و بأْن يقوم في‬ ّ ‫لي أن ّه تهيأّ أْن يستخرج بعض ما تلف من ك‬ ‫ت الله‬ ُ ‫[ فابتدأت ذلك واستعن‬9] ‫ح العرض‬ ّ ‫النفس المعنى فيقام اللفظ مقام اللفظة حتى يص‬ .‫ طول اختصرناه مؤامرة ً وجدول ًا‬199‫ كان في تصنيفه‬:‫[ وقال الخازني‬10] ‫عليه‬ Part Two of the Bordered Wafq: Summary of what al-Mufaḍḍal b. Thābit al-Ḥarrānī presented by way of narrative, without proofs [1] He said: “My knowledge of the harmonious number began with the grid of three ( jadwal al-thalātha) mentioned by Nicomachus [of Gerasa] in the Arithmetic. [2] Then Abū l-Qāsim al-Ḥijāzī came upon the grid of four ( jadwal al-arbaʿa), which begins from one and increases ( yatafāḍal) one by one to sixteen, and he was amazed by it. [3] Then I found the grid of six ( jadwal al-sitta) on the flyleaf (ẓahr al-kitāb)200 of Isḥāq’s text201 of the book of Euclid. [4] Next, I came upon a book in which were three or four of the grids below [the order] ten. [5] Then, in a storehouse of the 197 198 199 200

201

‫ض‬ ُ َ ‫ ]الَأر‬scripsi: ‫ الأرضية‬cod. ‫ ]الحسن‬scripsi: ‫ الحسين‬cod. ‫ ]تصنيفه‬scripsi: ‫ تصنفه‬cod. The ẓahr al-kitāb is the “recto of the first folio” of a manuscript, often used as a flyleaf or title page, a typical location for owners’ inscriptions, seal impressions, and other notes. See Adam Gacek, “Ownership Statements and Seals in Arabic Manuscripts,”Manuscripts of the Middle East 2 (1987): 88, and Adam Gacek, The Arabic Manuscript Tradition. A Glossary of Technical Terms and Bibliography (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 96. Reading nuskhati Isḥāq (“of Isḥāq’s text”) rather than nasakhahu Isḥāq (“copied by Isḥāq”). Although the points on the presumed tāʾ marbūṭa of ‫ نسخة‬are not present in the manuscript, I prefer this reading for reasons mentioned below and because, properly speaking, the relative pronoun allādhī would be needed after the definite kitāb Ūqlīdis if “the Book of Euclid copied by Isḥāq” were meant.

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139

books of our elders, I found two books so destroyed by termites that only a little of each of them could be made out. [6] The shorter (mukhtaṣar [lit., “abridgment, summary”]) of the two was [copied] by the hand of al-Māhānī, and the first folio of the longer was [copied] by the hand of al-Ḥasan b. Mūsā al-Nawbakhtī. [7] When I read them, I found comprehending them extremely fatiguing ( fa-wajadtu istikhrājahumā muʿtiban jiddan),202 [8] but it occurred to me that it was possible to derive some of what was damaged in each one of them from what had survived in the other and from the fact that, because they deal with the same subject, the same terminology is used in the same ways, so that the collation can be confirmed. [9] So I began this [task], asking for God’s assistance in it.” [10] Al-Khāzinī said, “His [sc. Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal’s] work contains the whole of what we have summarized by way of instruction [i.e., algorithm?] and tabulation (muʾāmaratan wa-jadwalan).” It is not the custom in the Dīwān for qāla (“he said”) to introduce the authorial voice, which is typically introduced in this treatise by the 1st person plural nadhkuru/dhakarnā (“we will mention/we mentioned”). The use of qāla to introduce this passage thus indicates a quotation or paraphrase of a voice other than that of the author, namely that of Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal.203 It is also linguistically significant that al-Mufaḍḍal uses the term “harmonious number” (al-ʿadad al-wafq) to refer to the subject of his treatise: the “magic constant,” which stands by synecdoche for the awfāq themselves (i.e., for the harmonious arrangements of the numbers in their grids [ jadāwil]) and, by extension, for the science that seeks to understand these arrangements. This same term is found in the titles of the earliest known awfāq treatises, such as that attributed to Thābit b. Qurra and that by al-Būzjānī.204

202

203

204

Cf. the saying ِ‫ج المعُ َ َمّى م َت ْعبَ ةَ ٌ للِ ْ خوَ َاطِر‬ ُ ‫“( ا ِْست ِْخر َا‬the eliciting of the meaning of that which is made enigmatical is a cause of fatigue to minds”) transmitted by al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144; Asās, s.v. ‫تعب‬, cited in Edward William Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon, Derived from the Best and Most Copious Eastern Sources … [Beirut: Librarie du Liban, 1863], s.v. ‫ استخراج‬and ‫)تعب‬. The translation is Lane’s. Cf. The beginning of maqāla 4, qism 1 of the Dīwān, “On the unique, strange bordered [wafq] mentioned by al-Mufaḍḍal b. Thābit b. Qurra (!) in his book by way of narrative” ( fī l-fard al-gharīb al-muḥallaq allādhī dhakarahu al-Mufaḍḍal b. Thābit b. Qurra fī kitābihi ʿalā sabīl al-ḥikāya, fol. 80v, lines 19–21), which also starts with qāla introducing the quotation or paraphrase from his treatise. On this term see above, note 134. For examples of early awfāq treatises with titles containing this term, see Tables 3.1 and 3.2.

140

hallum

The passage takes the form of a stylized discovery narrative, so we should recognize that Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal is not simply recording a bibliography that can be taken at face value.205 Stylistics aside, it is significant that, although Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal was himself a Sabian, the authorities from which he claims to have drawn his knowledge of awfāq are not Sabians but rather a Graeco-Roman Pythagorean, a Nestorian Christian, a Persian Shiʿi Muslim, and Arab Sunnis. Far from indicating that awfāq were initially secret knowledge or the special preserve of Sabian scholars, Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal’s sources suggest that interest in awfāq was widespread and, more generally, that they are illustrative of the cosmopolitan and collaborative intellectual scene in Abbasid/Buyid Baghdad and of the Sabian engagement with that scene. It is curious to see that the first of Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal’s sources is the Arithmetical Introduction by the Neopythagorean philosopher and mathematician Nicomachus of Gerasa (d. c. 120 CE), in which Abū l-Khaṭṭāb alMufaḍḍal claims to have found the 3×3 wafq. The text of the Arithmetical Introduction survives in the original Greek and in an Arabic translation by Thābit b. Qurra, but neither of these texts mentions awfāq.206 Although the Arithmetical Introduction itself does not discuss awfāq, the third and only extant chapter of a Commentary on the Arithmetical [Introduction] (Kitāb tafsīr alArithmāṭīqī) by Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal’s contemporary Abū l-Qāsim ʿAlī alAnṭākī (d. 376/987) is devoted in part to awfāq, from 3 × 3 to 12 × 12. Perplexingly, there is no discernible connection between Nicomachus’s text and al-Anṭākī’s commentary.207 Why both al-Mufaḍḍal and al-Anṭākī should relate the Arithmetical Introduction to awfāq is a mystery, but if Vinel is correct in his claim that there are veiled allusions to magic squares in Iamblichus’s commentary on the Arithmetical Introduction (see §2.1 above), perhaps the tradition of that commentary had some influence on Arabic authors of the fourth/tenth century. 205

206

207

The idea, for example, that Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal came upon the awfāq in more or less consecutive order, learning first of the 3 × 3 wafq, then the 4×4 etc., is surely a literary conceit. The Greek text is edited in Nicomachi Geraseni Pythagorei Introductionis arithmeticae libri II, ed. Richard Gottfried Hoche (Leipzig: Teubner, 1866), and translated into English in Nicomachus of Gerasa, Introduction to Arithmetic, trans. Martin Luther D’Ooge (New York: Macmillan, 1926). The Arabic version is edited in Ṯābit B. Qurra’s arabische Übersetzung der “Arithmētikē eisagōgē” des Nikomachos von Gerasa, ed. Wilhelm Kutsch (Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 1959). Kutsch’s text, without apparatus, is available in “A Digital Corpus for Graeco-Arabic Studies,” https://www.graeco‑arabic‑studies.org/single ‑text/text/kutsch‑87.html, and a digital surrogate of the manuscript from which Kutsch edited the text (BL, Add. MS 7473, fols. 122r–164r [seventh/thirteenth century]) is available at http://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100023677047.0x00000f. See Sesiano, Magic Squares in the Tenth Century, 15.

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It is unclear whether the Abū l-Qāsim al-Ḥijāzī mentioned in sentence 2 is an authority read by Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal or a personal acquaintance of his. Either way, I have found no mathematical texts attributed to an author of that name, who may, however, be identifiable with the author of the Supplementary History (al-Taʾrīkh al-mulḥaq) and scribe of a copy of the Book of Internal Reports (Kitāb al-akhbār al-dākhila) seen by Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal’s contemporary, the bibliographer al-Nadīm.208 The next source is even more obscure. If I am correct in reading “Isḥāq’s text of the book of Euclid,” this is probably a reference to Isḥāq b. Ḥunayn’s (d. c. 298/910) translation of Euclid’s (fl. c. 300BCE) Elements. Al-Mufaḍḍāl does not, however, specify the identity of the author of the awfāq he saw on the flyleaf of that book. Sentences 5–9 give us our best insight into Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal’s world. Sentence 5 tells us that an ancestral library at Baghdad contained at least two manuscripts on awfāq, but to whom did al-Mufaḍḍal refer as “our elders” (shuyūkhunā)? With whom was he identifying when he wrote “our”? It is tempting to think that he meant the elders of the Sabian community at Baghdad, but there are other plausible explanations.209 For example, he may have been referring to the elders of some other group of which he felt a part, such as the majlis around the vizier al-Muhallabī. Sentence 6 identifies the scribes, but not the authors, of the two manuscripts he found in this ancestral library, the shorter of which is said to be an abridgment (mukhtaṣar) of the longer. The two scribes are, in their own right, illustrious characters from late third/ninthcentury intellectual history: the abridgment was copied by the mathematician Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā al-Māhānī (d. c. 275/888), while at least the first folio of the longer manuscript was copied by the Shiʿi Muʿtazilī mutakallim al-Ḥasan b. Mūsā l-Nawbakhtī (d. between 300/912 and 310/922), descendant of the Persian astrologer Nawbakht (who assisted in the calculations for the election of the most propitious moment for the founding of Baghdad in 145/762) and older associate of such translators of Greek and Syriac texts as Isḥāq b. 208 209

Al-Nadīm, Muḥammad b. Isḥāq. Kitāb al-Fihrist, ed. Riḍā Tajaddud (Tehran: Maṭbaʿat Dānishgāh, 1971) 119 and 263. On the question of whether the Harranian Sabians of Baghdad had an archive, see (with caution) Tardieu “La filiation ascendante de Ṯābit B. Qurra,” in Perspectives arabes et médiévales sur la tradition scientifique et philosophique grecque. Actes du colloque de la SIHSPAI (Société internationale d’ histoire des sciences et de la philosophie arabes et islamiques). Paris, 31 mars–3 avril 1993, ed. Ahmad Hasnawi, Abdelali Elamrani-Jamal, and Maroun Aouad (Leuven: Peeters; Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe, 1997), 270. Bear in mind the numerous criticisms of Tardieu’s understanding of the Sabians, usefully summarised in van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes, 69–77.

142

hallum

Hunayn and Thābit b. Qurra.210 The description in sentences 5 and 9 of the method of collation used by al-Mufaḍḍal in order to reconstruct the text of two manuscripts badly damaged by insects shows a rigorous scholarly approach to manuscript research and textual criticism akin to that demonstrated by the Risāla of the celebrated translator Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq (d. 264/873) on his translations of the works of Galen.211 Finally, in sentence 10, the author of the Dīwān states that al-Mufaḍḍal’s treatise on awfāq was discussed with approval by al-Khāzinī in his own lost awfāq treatise. The veracity and exact details of Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal’s statement about his personal initiation into the science of awfāq must await future research. For the moment, however, it appears to demonstrate that the science of awfāq already had, by about the mid-fourth/tenth-century, a developed literature in Arabic and a diverse set of engaged researchers, including at least one Harranian Sabian of Baghdad, and that this research and literature stretched back to the latter half of the third/ninth century, about the time al-Jāḥiẓ wrote his Book of Awfāq and Mathematics (see §4, above). This strongly suggests that Arabic mathematical texts on awfāq were already in existence when al-Jāḥiẓ wrote his Book of Awfāq and Mathematics (see above, § 4) and Ibn Rabban alṬabarī discussed the eutocic 3×3 wafq in his Paradise of Wisdom (see above, § 3.1).

8

Conclusion

Awfāq were believed, from their earliest appearance in Islamicate literature, to have wondrous healing powers. By the time of the earliest extant mathematical treatises devoted to awfāq were written in the mid-fourth/tenth century,

210

211

Although al-Mahānī is not known from other sources to have worked as a scribe, there are numerous examples of other mathematicians and scientists (most famously Ibn Haytham) earning an income in this way, especially by copying scientific texts. On alMahānī, see Jacques Sesiano, “Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā b. Aḥmad al-Māhānī,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. Al-Nawbakhtī, on the other hand, is known from al-Nadīm, Fihrist (ed. Flügel, Roediger, and Müller), 177, line 14 to have copied many books. On al-Nawbakhtī, see Marwan Rashed, Al-Ḥasan ibn Mūsā al-Nawbaḫtī, Commentary on Aristotle De generatione et corruptione, edition, translation and commentary (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 343–392 and Wilferd Madelung, “Al-Ḥasan b. Mūsā al-Nawbakhtī on the Views of Astronomers and Astrologers,” in Law and Tradition in Classical Islamic Thought. Studies in Honor of Professor Hossein Modarressi, ed. Michael Cook et al. (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 209–218. Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq, Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq on His Galen Translations: A Parallel English-Arabic Text, ed. and trans. John C. Lamoreaux (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2016).

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143

the occult properties (khawāṣṣ) of the awfāq that produced their occult properties had already been associated with astral forces. Two major concentrations of state-sponsored research into awfāq appear in the historical record. The first is in fourth/ninth-century Baghdad during the so-called Renaissance of Islam, especially under the patronage of the Buyid amīr ʿAḍud al-Dawla. The second is in the late-fifth/eleventh and early-sixth/ twelfth centuries under the patronage of the Great Seljuks, first at Sultan Malikshāh’s capital, Isfahan, and then at Marw, the capital of his son, Sultan Sanjar.212 Both of these efflorescences of awfāq literature appear at locations and times already known as sites of so-called “cultural revival.” In practice, they are situated at the sites of large-scale state-sponsored astronomical observation and zīj production. On the one hand, this says little, because state-funded astronomer-mathematicians would probably have accounted for the majority of people at any given moment who had the requisite mathematical knowledge and training to engage significantly with the mathematics of awfāq. Indeed, most of the known Buyid and Seljuk awfāq authors were state-sponsored astronomer-mathematicians involved in both observations and zīj production. On the other hand, the case of Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal offers an example of serious mathematical engagement with the awfāq by a figure not known to have been directly involved in astronomical work. His prominent place in the Buyid court, however, shows that research into the awfāq was, like astrology and talismanry, of central importance to the ruling classes of the day. Furthermore, the fragment of Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal’s lost awfāq treatise preserved in the Dīwān and presented above provides evidence that Arabic mathematical texts on awfāq already existed by the latter half of the third/ninth century. By the time of the Andalusians Ibn al-Zarqālluh and al-Mālaqī, in the latter half of the fifth/eleventh century, if not before, the first seven or eight awfāq (3×3 to 9×9 and sometimes 10×10) had become astral talismans in their own right. By at least the early sixth/twelfth century, mathematical procedures were well understood that allowed names and other words and phrases to be entered into and manipulated within awfāq. These centuries of development prepared the necessary technology for the boom in talismanic applications of

212

A recent study of royal patronage of the ancient and occult sciences amongst the Rūm Seljuks (the Anatolian Seljuk sultanate) highlights the likelihood that Great Seljuk patronage of awfāq studies sought talismanic results and not merely mathematical amusement or edification. See Andrew C.S. Peacock, “A Seljuq Occult Manuscript and its World: MS Paris person 174,” in The Seljuqs and Their Successors: Art, Culture and History, ed. S. Canby, D. Beyazit and M. Rugiadi (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 163–179.

144

hallum

awfāq in the number/letter-magic traditions called the “science of letters” (ʿilm al-ḥurūf ), which rose to great popularity from the seventh/thirteenth century onward under the influence of the Sufi-occultist synthesis spearheaded by Ibn ʿArabī and al-Būnī. Only when we have uncovered the early history of the science of letters, of which the science of awfāq was a fundamental part, and explored its protagonists, affiliations, patrons, detractors, and developments will we understand what was inherited by its later masters, codifiers, and popularizers in the seventh/thirteenth century and beyond.

Abbreviations A

Ibn al-Zarqālluh, Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm b. Yaḥyā al-Naqqāsh. Maqāla fī ḥarakāt al-kawākib al-sayyāra. Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg. 3.19, fols. 140r–148v. Anon. Pers. BL Anonymous awfāq treatise [Persian], BL, Add. MS 7713. B Ibn al-Zarqālluh, Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm b. Yaḥyā al-Naqqāsh. No Title. BL, Add. MS 9599, fols. 128r–131r and 133r–136v. BEA Thomas Hockey et al., eds. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, 2 vols. (New York: Springer, 2007). BEA articles on Islamicate astronomers are available at http://islamsci.mcgill.ca/RASI/BEA/. BL London, British Library. BnF Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France. C Jābir b. Ḥayyān. Kitāb al-nukhab. Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Carullah 1721. C1 Ibn al-Zarqālluh, Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm b. Yaḥyā al-Naqqāsh. Risāla fī ḥarakāt al-kawākib al-sayyāra wa-tadbīrihā. Cairo, Dār al-Kutub, MS Ṭalʿat majāmīʿ 424, fols. 51v–60v. CBL Chester Beatty Library Dīwān Dīwān al-ʿadad al-wafq. BL, Delhi Arabic 110, fols. 28ar–119v. https:// www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100040730535.0x000002. HR History of Religions. IAU Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, Aḥmad b. al-Qāsim. ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt alaṭibbāʾ, edited by August Müller, 2 vols. in 1 (Königsberg i. Pr.: published by the author, 1882–1884). P Jābir b. Ḥayyān. Kitāb al-nukhab. BnF, Arabe 5321, fols. 1r–102v. https:// gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b90653135. V Ibn al-Zarqālluh, Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm b. Yaḥyā al-Naqqāsh. Tadbīr amr al-kawākib wa-ashkālihā. Vienna, Nationalbibliothek Wien, MS A. F. 162d, fols. 1v–11v.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Manuscripts Anonymous awfāq treatise [Arabic]. Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Fatıh 3439, fols. 178r–182r. Anonymous awfāq treatise [Arabic]. Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Reşid Efendi 1068, fols. 49v–56r. Anonymous awfāq treatise [Persian]. BL, Add. MS 7713. al-Bīrūnī, Muḥammad b. Aḥmad. Al-Qānūn al-Masʿūdī. BL, Or. 1997. https://www.qdl .qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100022880536.0x000001. Dīwān al-ʿadad al-wafq. BL, Delhi Arabic 110, fols. 28ar–119v. https://www.qdl.qa/en/ archive/81055/vdc_100040730535.0x000002. Ibn Akhī Ḥizām, Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb. Kitāb al-furūsiyya wa-shiyāt al-khayl. BL, Add. MS 23416. https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100022599339.0x000001. Jābir b. Ḥayyān. Kitāb al-khawāṣṣ al-kabīr. BL, Or. 4041. https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/ 81055/vdc_100032090042.0x000001. Jābir b. Ḥayyān. Kitāb al-nukhab. BnF, Arabe 5321, fols. 1r–102v. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ ark:/12148/btv1b90653135. Jābir b. Ḥayyān. Kitāb al-nukhab. Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Carullah 1721. al-Khāzinī, Abū l-Fatḥ ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Kitāb Mīzān al-ḥikma. University of Pennsylvania, LJS 386. http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017/d/medren/4824919. al-Khāzinī, Abū l-Fatḥ ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Al-Zīj al-muʿtabir al-Sanjarī. BL, Or. 6669. https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100029495503.0x000001. Kitāb fī ʿilm al-bayṭara. BL, Add. MS 14056. https://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc _100045800789.0x0000a5. al-Mālaqī, Abū Walīd Ismāʿīl. Maqāla fī wujūd ʿillat al-aʿdād al-mutaḥāba wa-l-ashkāl al-murabaʿa dhuwāt al-suṭūḥ al-ʿadadiyya wa-khawāṣṣihā min jihat awḍāʿ khawāṣṣ al-ajrām al-falakiyya. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Orientabteilung, MS Or. Quart. 98, fols. 2r–7r. http://resolver.staatsbibliothek‑berlin.de/ SBB000041CE00000005. al-Marwazī, Sharaf al-Zamān Ṭāhir. Ṭabāʾīʿ al-ḥayawān. BL, Delhi Arabic 1949. https:// www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100028004317.0x000001. Nicomachus of Gerasa. al-Madkhal ilā ʿilm al-ʿadad, BL, Add. MS 7473, fols. 122r–164r. http://www.qdl.qa/en/archive/81055/vdc_100023677047.0x00000f. Pseudo-al-Būnī, Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. ʿAlī. Shams al-maʿārif al-kubrā, part 1. BnF, MS Arabe 2650. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b11002467q. Risāla-yi kanz al-tuḥaf dar mūsīqā. BL, Or. 2361, fols. 247v–269v. Shams-i Tahānsarī, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. Tarjuma-yi kitāb-i Barāhī. BL, IO Islamic 1262. [Treatise on charms and talismans]. Princeton University Library, Islamic Manuscripts, Third Series no. 591. http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/8336h195t.

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chapter 4

A Study of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ’s Epistle on Magic, the Longer Version (52b) Liana Saif

Khitāmuhu misk. Wa-fī dhālika fa l-yatanāfas al-mutanāfisūn. Its conclusion, musk. So for this, let the competitors compete. Qurʾan 83:26

∵ Magic is given a prestigious place in Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (“The epistles of the Brethren of Purity”). It is the subject of the concluding epistle, wherein the principal themes of the entire encyclopedia are brought together—the vital powers of the cosmos and its emanationist scheme, salvation, the intelligibility of nature, and the compatibility of philosophy and revelation. Mastering this knowledge gives power to humans over nature and, most importantly, actualizes their potential for spiritual enlightenment, the ultimate magical act and the real goal of the sage. Yet, this epistle is understudied. One finds little about it in Alessandro Bausani’s monograph on the Rasāʾil, in Ian Netton’s Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity, or in the works of Abbas Hamdani and Carmela Baffioni, all of whom studied the Rasāʾil in depth. It is also conspicuously overlooked by Manfred Ullmann in his Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam.1 Bausani explicitly dismisses it as irrele-

1 Alessandro Bausani, L’ enciclopedia dei Fratelli della Purità: Riassunto, con introduzione e breve commento dei 52 Trattati o Epistole degli Ikhwān aṣ-Ṣafā’ (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1978), 279–281; Ian Richard Netton, Muslim Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity, Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982), 50– 52; Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur-und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1972), Ullmann mentions the epistle as a source on the lunar mansion, see 351–353; he mentions them in passing also at 338, 370; no substantial mention is found in Abbas Hamdani, “The

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vant.2 The epistle’s subject matter, its asymmetrical structure, and its disorganized content may have been behind its exclusion, especially as it manifests in the uncritical yet widely available Bombay (1887–1889), Cairo (1928), and Beirut (1957) editions.3 Based on these uncritical editions, Yves Marquet pays much more attention to the epistle on magic. In La philosophie des Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, he describes its astrological content, the juxtaposition of miracles and magic, the typology of magic, and its relevance to prophecy and sacral power.4 In his Les Frères de la Pureté, pythagoriciens de l’Islam, he describes the content along lines similar to the aforementioned work, while trying to discern some structural logic by dividing the epistle into five sections interrupted by digressions and additions. His discussion of these sections and their authorship is, unfortunately, highly speculative.5 In La philosophie des alchimistes et l’ alchimie des philosophes, Marquet describes the Ikhwān’s distinction between licit and illicit magic and reiterates the relationship between the occult sciences, prophecy, and sacral power. Furthermore, he discusses its alchemical content.6 Marquet is interested mainly in the epistle on magic for its articulation of astrological doctrines and its references to the concepts of imamhood and caliphate, the primary theme of his doctoral dissertation that was later published as La philosophie des Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ.7

2 3

4 5

6 7

Arrangement of the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ and the Problem of Interpolation” (83–100), or Carmela Baffioni, “The Scope of the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ” (101–122), both in Epistles of The Brethren of Purity: The Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ and their Rasāʾil: An Introduction, ed. Nader elBizri (Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2008). Bausani, L’ enciclopedia dei Fratelli Della Purità, 12. The Brethren of Purity, On Magic I: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistle 52a, ed. and trans. Godefroid de Callataÿ and Bruno Halflants (Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2011), 1–3; on the uncritical editions, see Ismail K. Poonawala, “Why We Need an Arabic Critical Edition with an Annotated English Translation of the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ,” in el-Bizri, The Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ and Their Rasāʾil: An Introduction, 33–57. Yves Marquet, La philosophie des Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (Dakar: Université de Dakar, Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Departement d’ Arabe, 1973), 138, 485–486, 486–489. Yves Marquet, Les “Frères de la Pureté,” pythagoriciens de l’Islam (Paris: S. E. H. A.—Edidit, 2006), 9–23; Daniel de Smet, “Yves Marquet, les Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ et le pythagorisme,” Journal Asiatique 295 (2007): 491–500. Yves Marquet, La philosophie des alchimistes et l’ alchimie des philosophes. Jâbir ibn Hayyân et les Frères de la Pureté (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1988), 18–23, 32–39. Yves Marquet, “La détermination astrale de l’ évolution selon les Frères de la Pureté,” in

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The uncritical editions used in the aforementioned studies conflate what were shown by manuscript examination to be two independent versions of the epistle, which have become known as the shorter version (52a) and the longer version (52b).8 A critical edition of 52a was published in 2011, edited and translated by Godefroid de Callataÿ and Bruno Halflants. In the introduction, Halflants treats the manuscript tradition of the epistle on magic, noting that “the short and the long versions of the epistle do not seem to be reducible to one common origin,” which led to the publication of these versions separately. The introduction of the critical edition of 52a includes the first analysis of some of the Ikhwān’s ideas on magic based on manuscripts, heralding a new stage in the study of this subject.9 This article focuses on the structure and content of the longer version, comparing them with those of 52a while arguing for the integrality of 52b to the entire encyclopedia. The Ikhwān’s unique approach to magic in 52b will be analyzed. Some of 52b’s themes taken up by Marquet and Lory, such as the typology of magic and its relation to prophecy and sacral power, will be revisited here and presented in a new light directed by manuscript evidence and by situating magic within the religio-philosophical enterprise of the Ikhwān and their Rasāʾil as a whole. Finally, the influence of the epistle, particularly 52b, on magic will be considered.

1

Concordance10

The Beirut edition places the two versions under one heading, Fī māhiyyat alsiḥr wa-l-ʿazāʾim wa-l-ʿayn (“On the quiddity of magic, conjurations and the [evil] eye”). The following table shows the variation of the title across the manuscripts available to the present author (Table 4.1):

8 9 10

“Sciences occultes et l’ Islam,” ed. Pierry Lory and Annick Regourd, special issue of Bulletin d’ études orientales 44 (1992): 127–146. Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4 vols. (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 2008), 283–312 (short version), 312–463 (long version); The Brethren of Purity, On Magic I. The Brethren of Purity, On Magic I, 5. For the long version of the epistle on magic, I refer to manuscripts that are outlined by Godefroid de Callataÿ’s and Bruno Halflants’s critical edition of the shorter version of the epistle on magic but rely mainly on Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, which is the oldest (sixth/twelfth century). It is checked against other manuscripts from their list, in addition to four others to which I had access: London, British Library, Or. 2359 (dated 27

a study of the ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ’s epistle on magic table 4.1

165

Variation of the title across the manuscripts

Manuscript11

Title

Of 52a: The title in the 52a critical edition based on Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Köprülü 871, dated (820/)1417; and Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Esad Efendi 3637, dated c. seventh/thirteenth century.

Fī māhiyyat al-siḥr wa-l-ʿazāʾim wa-l-ʿayn wa-l-zajr wa-l-wahm wa-lruqā wa-fī kayfiyyat aʿmāl al-ṭillismāt wa-mā ʿummār al-arḍ wa-mā al-jinn, wa-mā al-shayāṭīn wa-mā al-malāʾika wa-kayf afʿālihim wataʾthīrāt baʿḍihim fī baʿḍ, wa-l-gharaḍ minhā huwa-l-bayān anna fī al-ʿālam fāʿilīn ghayr marʾiyīn wa-lā maḥsūsīn yusammayūn alrūḥāniyyīn: “On the quiddity of magic, conjurations, the [evil] eye, auspices, illusory magic, and charms, and the methods of making talismans; and [concerning] who populates the earth, who the jinn are, who the devils are, who the angels are, how they act [upon things] and their influences on each other. The purpose of it [the epistle] is to show that there exist in the world invisible12 and intangible agents called spiritualities.”

Of 52b (as all the rest below): Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atif Efendi 1681. Dated 577–578/1182.

Fī māhiyyat al-siḥr wa-l-ʿazāʾim wa-l-ruqā wa-l-kihāna wa-l-faʾl wal-zajr: “On the quiddity of magic, conjurations, charms, divination, auguries, and auspices.” (fol. 537r)

11 12

Ṣafar 1008/18 September 1599); Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Ragip Pasha 840; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Ragip Pasha 839; Sotheby’s Lot 27, p. 26 in Sotheby’s “Arts of the Islamic World,” London 26 April 2017 (683/1284). For the short version, I refer to de Callataÿ’s and Halflants’s critical edition, which employs two manuscripts that are on their list; I have also consulted London, British Library, Or. 4518 and Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Ragip Pasha 840, the latter containing both the long version and the short. For other epistles, I use the texts published so far by the OUP/IIS critical editions series. Where I refer to an epistle not published yet in that series, I use the widely available yet uncritical Beirut edition, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4 vols. (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 2008) checked against the manuscripts for accuracy. For details on the manuscripts, I refer to “the technical introduction” in The Brethren of Purity, On Magic I, 69–81. This title is similar to the one found on manuscripts of 52a, though, in the IIS/OUP critical edition and translation, ghayr marʾiyīn was transcribed erroneously as ghayr murattabayn (in the dual form), which was, as a result, translated as “autonomous”; see The Brethren of Purity, On Magic I, 5 (Arabic), 87–89 (English).

166 Table 4.1

saif Variation of the title across the manuscripts (cont.)

Manuscript

Title

Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Ragip Pasha 840: which contains both the long version and the short. Undated

Epistle title: Fī māhiyyat al-siḥr wa-l-ʿazāʾim wa-l-zajr wa-l-ʿayn wa-l-ruqā wa-kayfiyyat aʿmāl al-ṭillismāt wa-mā al-jinn wa-mā alshayāṭīn wa-ma al-malāʾika wa-kayf afʿālihim wa-taʾthīrāt baʿḍihim fī baʿḍ, wa-l-gharaḍ minhā huwa al-bayān anna fī l-ʿālam fāʿilīn ghayr marʾiyīn wa-lā maḥsūsīn: “On the quiddity of magic, conjurations, auspices, the [evil] eye, and charms, and the methods of making talismans; and [concerning] who the jinn are, who the devils are, who the angels are, how they act [upon things] and their influences on each other. The purpose of it [the epistle] is to show that there exists in the world invisible and intangible agents.” 52b heading: Fī l-siḥr wa-l-ruqā wa-l-ʿazāʾim wa-l-ṭillismāt: “On magic, charms, conjurations, and talismans.” (fol. 452r)

Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Ragip Pasha 839. Undated

Fī l-siḥr wa-l-ʿazāʾim: “On magic and conjurations.” (fol. 548bisr)

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale 6.647–6.648. Dated 695/1295

Fī l-siḥr wa-l-ʿazāʾim: “On magic and conjurations.” (fol. 184v)

Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Esad Efendi 3638. Dated c. 686/1287

Fī l-siḥr wa-l-ruqā wa-l-ʿazāʾim wa-l-ṭillismāt wa-l-kihāna wa-lnijāma wa-māhiyyatihā wa-kayfiyyatihā: “On magic, charms, conjurations, talismans, divination, astrology, their quiddity, and methods.” (fol. 284r)

Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Feyzullah 2131. Dated c. 686/1287

Fī māhiyyat al-siḥr wa-l-ʿazāʾim wa-l-ʿayn wa-l-zajr wa-l-wahm, wa-kayfiyyat aʿmāl al-ṭillismāt, wa-mā ʿummār al-arḍ, wa-mā al-jinn, wa-mā al-shayāṭīn wa-mā al-malāʾika wa-kayf af ʿālihim wa-taʾthīrāt baʿḍihim fī baʿḍ, wa-l-gharaḍ minhā al-bayān anna fī l-ʿālam fāʿilīn ghayr marʾiyīn wa-lā maḥsūsīn yusammūn al-qawm rūḥāniyyīn: “On the quiddity of magic, conjurations, the [evil] eye, auspices, and illusory magic, and the methods of making talismans, and [concerning] who populates the earth, who the jinn are, who the devils are, who the angels are, how they act [upon things], and their influences on each

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Variation of the title across the manuscripts (cont.)

Manuscript

Title other. The purpose of it is to show that in the world there exist agents who are invisible and intangible, called the spiritual folk.” (fol. 142r)

Oxford, Bodleian, Marsh 189. Undated

Fī māhiyyat al-siḥr wa-l-ʿazāʾim wa-l-qiyāfa wa-l-zajr wa-l-wahm: “On the quiddity of magic, conjurations, ichnomancy13 (qiyāfa), auspices, and illusory magic.” (fol. 376v)

Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Köprülü 870. Dated c. ninth/fifteenth century

Fī l-siḥr wa-l-ʿazāʾim: “On magic and conjurations.” (fol. 308r)

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Arabe 2303, Dated 1020/1611

Fī l-siḥr wa-l-ruqā wa-l-ʿazāʾim: “On magic, charms, and conjurations.” (fol. 492r)

Sotheby’s Lot 27, p. 26 in Sotheby’s Arts of the Islamic World, London 26 April 2017. Dated 683/1284

Fī l-siḥr wa-l-ruqā wa-l-ʿazāʾim wa-l-ṭillismāt: “On magic, charms, conjurations, and talismans.” (non-foliated)

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Arabe 2304. Dated 1064/1654

Fī l-siḥr wa-l-ʿazāʾim: “On magic and conjurations.” (fol. 454v)

Curiously, although manuscripts of 52a have titles that promise inclusion of some practical instructions, this version contains no such thing, whereas 52b contains various sections on divination, astrological elections, an explanation of the existence of jinn and devils, conjurations, and instructions to make talismans and magical concoctions for attracting animals. The content of 52b conforms most closely with the titles given in manuscripts and reflects the titles

13

Divination by observing footprints.

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and descriptions given to the epistle on magic in other parts of the Rasāʾil. In Epistle 49 the reader is referred to their “epistle on magic and conjurations,” where they discuss “the actions of the rūḥāniyyāt of the lunar mansions.”14 This discussion is absent from 52a but forms a long section in 52b.15 The tone of 52b indicates its interconnection with the entire encyclopedia. It is a personal one concordant with the general tone of the Rasāʾil. In the shorter version, the subjective perspective is completely lacking, and it reads more as a history of magic and astrology than as the esoteric agenda enunciated throughout the Rasāʾil. In contrast, in 52b, one of the Ikhwān16 even mentions his own involvement with magic and astrology. He relates how he was taught astrology by an esteemed practitioner and friend.17 Elsewhere, instructions in astrological prediction about a city under siege are given to the Ikhwān: “if one of our brethren were in a city that becomes besieged by his enemy …”18 These clues suggest that 52b is more integral to the Rasāʾil than is 52a,19 although a curious reference in 52a alerts us to a kind of continuity between the two texts. There, the Ikhwān tell us “that a group among the people of India influences others by causing them to experience strange things unbelievable to most people through illusions (bi iwhāmahum), thus fending off magic, as we have said about them in this epistle [my italics].”20 There is no other reference to Indian illusory magic in 52a, but the Ikhwān elaborate on it in the final section of 52b, where the power of wahm (hypnotic states, illusions) is discussed and the expertise of Indians in this art is emphasized. In fact, Chapter 7 of 52a, titled “On the power of charms, conjurations, and the [evil] eye” is a summary of the long chapter that forms the ending of 52b, as found in Atif Efendi 1681 14 15 16

17 18 19

20

Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:223. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:428–443; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fols. 572v–576r. This part is clearly related by a single member of the brotherhood. Though it begins with the first person plural, kāna lanā saḍīq (we had a friend), the rest is in the first personal singular: fa ḥaḍartuhu, fa saʾaltuhu, urīd an adhkur, Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ: 4:397; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi fol. 562v. It is clear that the epistles were written collectively, in a group and by individual contributors. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:397; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 562v. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:406; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 565r. The Brethren of Purity, On Magic I, “Introduction,” 5–10; here de Callataÿ’s suggests that 52a is “genuine” being “part and parcel of the encyclopaedic endeavor of the Brethren of Purity” to the exclusion of 52b, based on consideration of the former’s concordance with other epistles in size, the number of Qurʾanic references, inner structure, and crossreferences in 52a to other epistles. The Brethren of Purity, On Magic I, 97 (Arabic), 154 (English).

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(see above). In addition to the power of wahm, discussed in more detail below, it contains the same ideas on occult properties, with similar examples. Nevertheless, both 52a and 52b are “genuine,” for there is a precedence to the existence of multiple versions of the same epistle, such as Epistle 32: the longer version (32b), as Paul E. Walker surmises, seems to be an expanded text of the shorter version (32a), with changes and additions.21 This could be the result of a long editing and revision process during the composition of epistles 52 and 3222 or even of intervention by later members, if we understand the Ikhwān as a fraternity with continuous membership beyond its first founders. Furthermore, it is possible that the Ikhwān intentionally produced two versions simultaneously. One is inclined to accept the first of these possibilities and conclude that the fifty-second epistle never settled as a single stable text. The situation is complicated further by the existence of 52b in various redactions. After the section on the lunar mansions, the text differs in three ways: 1) Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atif Efendi 1681: in the last chapter, the part on the lunar mansions is followed by a discussion about the powers of wahm in healing and about magic and counteracting it. The scribe of Atif Efendi 1681 adds another ending that he found in other exemplars. It is a longer exposition on wahm, the influence of mind and soul on the body, and the theory of occult properties, with many examples of magical and medical uses of natural things. This longer ending is taken up by Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Feyzullah 2131; Oxford, Bodleian, Marsh 189; Oxford, Bodleian, Laud Or. 260, Paris, BnF, Arabe 2303, Sotheby’s and Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Esad Efendi 3638.23

21

22

23

The Brethren of Purity, Sciences of the Soul and Intellect. Part I: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistles 32–36, ed. and trans. Paul E. Walker, Ismail K. Poonawala, David Simonowitz, and Godefroid de Callataÿ (Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2016), 9. Maribel Fierro proposes the year 936 CE as the terminus ante quem of the Rasāʾil. We may add that if the mention of ʿīd Ghadīr in Epistle 42 “On Beliefs and Religion” is referring to the public commemoration of Ghadīr Khumm started by the Buyids then the terminus post quem should be 945, the year the Buyids took over Baghdad. This confirms Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī’s account of the Brethren being active under the Buyids. Abbas Hamdani, “Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī and the Brethren of Purity,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 9, no. 3 (October, 1978): 345–353. Maribel Fierro, “Bāṭinism in al-Andalus. Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī (d. 353/964), Author of the Rutbat al-Ḥakīm and the Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm,” Studia Islamica 84 (1996): 87–112 (106); Hugh Kennedy, The Prophets and the Age of the Caliphate (New York and Oxford: Routledge, 3rd ed., 2016), 196. Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fols. 576r–581v; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Feyzullah 2131, fols. 166v–169v; Oxford Bodleian, Marsh 189, fols. 395v–398v; Oxford, Bodleian, Laud

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2)

The scribe of Esad Efendi adds another “epistle” at the end, which deals with the meaning of divination after claiming to have dealt with magic, conjurations, charms, resolve (himma), illusory magic (wahm), and talismans.24 3) Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Köprülü 870; Paris, BnF, Arabe 2304; and Paris, BnF 6.647–6.648: the lunar mansions are followed by a long discussion on creating magical concoctions from various organic material, including four for the purpose of attracting animals. It also contains an anecdote about a sage who freed an imprisoned man by making the nīranj of Mars, followed by remarks on the difference between prophets and sages and ending with the same two paragraphs as Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atif Efendi 1681. Beirut follows this. Paris, BnF 6.647–6.648 is incomplete. The text stops in the middle of the discussion about the organic concoctions.25 This demonstrates how unstable a text 52b is, complicating further the question of its relation to 52a. Nevertheless, as the two versions appear to us now, 52b is more demonstrative of the Ikhwān’s ideas on magic in relation to the entire corpus. The earliest manuscripts are of 52b, not 52a, indicating the possibility that it (52b) was circulating more widely around the time of its composition.

2

The Polysemy of “siḥr”

Although the Ikhwān seem to expose their esoteric agenda by the very act of writing about it, they strategize their disclosure of “meanings” (maʿānī) consonant with the layer of the encyclopaedic discourse they want to emphasize. This is achieved in a way that has the potential both to reveal and to allude. This is most evident in their definitions of siḥr, generally translated as “magic,” which may at times seem to contradict each other. To understand Epistle 52b, one must be able to discern the sense the Ikhwān ascribe to the term siḥr, as their discourse drifts widely and wildly between the literal and metaphorical.26 Magic is included in Part IV of the Rasāʾil concerned with the divine and

24 25 26

Or. 260, fols. 270r–272v; Paris, BnF, Arabe 2303, fols. 525v–529v; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Esad Efendi 3638, fols. 300r–302v. Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Esad Efendi 3638, fol. 303r. Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Köprülü 870, fols. 330v–338r; Paris, BnF, Arabe 2304, fols. 86v–91v; and Paris, BnF 6.647–6.648, fols. 217v–218v. Marquet, La philosophie des alchimistes, 22; Marquet, La philosophie des Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 487.

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legal laws (al-ʿulūm al-nāmūsiyya wa-l-sharʿiyya). In Epistle 7, concerned with the classifications of sciences, magic and talismanry are considered parts of propaedeutic knowledge (riyāḍiyya) which comprises sciences that facilitate living well, such as writing, language, transactions, poetry, alchemy, and trade.27 This apparent ambiguity can be resolved by identifying the level of discourse in which the term siḥr is used: literal/practice, metaphorical/revelation, even political. 52b begins with a declaration that siḥr has many meanings in Arabic. Generally, however, magic is “clarifying and revealing the reality of a thing and causing it to manifest, [it is also] speed and precision in action”;28 this is the first definition provided. Then the Ikhwān provide the “senses” of this expertly action: 1) “telling what will happen before its occurrence,” to which astrology and divination belong. 2) “altering essences (qalb al-aʿyān) and violating norms (kharq al-ʿāda),” which include prestidigitation, trickery, and sense-altering suffumigations. Talismans and medicine can be added. 3) “that which the prophets were accused of and sages known for.” 4) “that which is the special knowledge of women.” 5) fine skill in rhetoric, eloquence, and wit.29 2.1 Astrology as Magic The Ikhwān explain that knowledge of astrology, divination, and even talismanry is achieved discursively. Their practitioners can attain them only after they know the foundations and the branches that emerge out of them. If they establish this, they gain knowledge [of something] according to those things which they must know [beforehand],30 and they disclose it by indicating what occurs and is caused by it. In this they [people]

27

28

29 30

Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 1:266–267; Godefroid de Callataÿ, “The Classification of Knowledge in the Rasāʾil,” in el-Bizri, The Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ and their Rasāʾil: An Introduction, 58–82. In the Beirut edition: al-bayān wa-l-kashf ʿan ḥaqīqat al-shayʾ wa-iẓhārihi bi surʿat al-ʿamal, Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:312; in Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681 and others it is: al-bayān wa-l-kashf ʿan ḥaqīqat al-shayʾ wa-iẓhārihi, wa-surʿat al-ʿamal, fol. 537v. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:312–313; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 537v. In the Beirut edition and other manuscripts: ʿamilū bi ḥasab mā yanbaghī lahum an yaʿmalūh; in Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681: ʿalimū … yaʿlamūh.

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are different in degrees and vary in ranks depending on their diligence in education, perseverance in learning, acquaintance with scholars; [how often] they accompany sages, and [how much] they occupy themselves with the study of the books31 composed on them [astrology, divination, and talismanry], testing32 them with mental purity, employing patience, and examining what was to judge what will be …. If he [the seeker] hits the correct target and savors its sweetness, little will he err, since, by being correct, his insight strengthens and he progresses in his pursuit and diligence.33 The importance of astrology stems from its being a branch of the superior science of mathematics. Mathematics is described as a king, and astrology as his vizier; the former produces quantitative knowledge, the latter qualitative. Moreover, mathematics is like “the First Intellect” and astrology like “the Soul emerging from the Intellect,” indicating the Ikhwān’s conviction that epistemological modes are inextricable from ontological realities.34 If one masters mathematics and astrology, one is engaging on both micro- and macrocosmic levels, tapping into the very principles of the universe, “aiding their master to attain the eminent rank and degree in religion (dīn) and this world.”35 Astrology reveals the ways by which all terrestrial beings and events are ruled and caused by the celestial spheres: “the lower world is connected to the higher world in all its conditions and states.”36 Yet the Ikhwān see the universe as governed by a volitional causality that does not exclude “spiritual forces” (quwā rūḥāniyya). These are astral vital agents—the celestial souls—that flow through causal

31

32

33 34 35 36

In the Beirut edition: wa-l-ishtighāl bi-l-dars; in Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681: istiʿmāl al-dars, which does not make sense. Other manuscripts, such as Paris, BnF 6.647–6.648 (fol. 190r), agree with the Beirut edition. In the Beirut edition, Paris, BnF 6.647–6.648; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Köprülü 870; Paris, BnF, Arabe 2304, Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Ragip Pasha 839: al-tabaḥḥur; in Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Esad Efendi 3638, Istanbul, Süleymaniye Feyzullah 2131; Oxford, Bodleian, Laud Or. 260; Sotheby’s Lot 27; Istanbul, Süleymaniye Ragip Pasha 840: wa-l-tajruba. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:332; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 543r. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:396; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 562r–v. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:396; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fols. 561v–562v. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:386; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fols. 559v–560r.

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channels, communicating the Divine Will.37 Sometimes they are referred to as the angels (al-malāʾika).38 The actions of the planets and their rūḥāniyyāt flow in the world of generation and corruption like the flow of the powers of the soul in bodies. Each planet in [its] sphere has aspects and terms, and the terms are in degrees that have forms. From each form a rūḥāniyya descends into the world of generation and corruption connected to that which is like it and attached to its image. It is assigned to it for a decreed time. These are the angels of God Almighty.39 After reiterating that “the higher celestial world governs (ḥākim) the terrestrial world,” the Ikhwān refer the reader to their epistle on the action of the spiritual principles (rūḥaniyyīn), citing their explanation of the influence of the macrocosm on the microcosm.40 Indeed, in Epistle 49 on the states of the spiritual principles, they discuss the place of the rūḥāniyyāt in the Neoplatonic emanative scheme. They use the term rūḥāniyyāt to describe the localizations of the power of the Universal Soul in the planets, being the agency by which planets influence the microcosm. There too they are referred to as angels. Moreover, under each planetary rūḥāniyya they provide a set of correspondences that includes plants, talents, professions, and other things.41 We find a Neoplatonic explanation of these spiritual forces in 52a. The Ikhwān explain that “the first power that flows from the Universal Soul towards the world is in the noble luminous entities that are the fixed stars and then after them [into] the moving stars.”42 The rūḥāniyyāt are linked to and interact with the terrestrial world in two ways; first, “by way of the natures of bodies [to

37 38

39 40 41 42

Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:340; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 546r. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:410; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 566r–v; Liana Saif, “From Ġāyat al-ḥakīm to Šams al-maʿārif : Ways of Knowing and Paths of Power in Medieval Islam,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 297–345, esp. 305–308; The Brethren of Purity, On Magic I, “Introduction,” 44– 45. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:339; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fols. 545v–546r. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:367; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fols. 553v–554r. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:212–226. The Brethren of Purity, On Magic I, 12–13.

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which they are linked], as is reported in the books of astrology,” and second, by way of their souls and volition.43 For the Ikhwān, astrology and divination constitute a type of magic because they conform to their definition of siḥr as the knowledge and art of predicting the future and revealing hidden things, including the concealed inner thoughts of the querent.44 They also emphasize that astrology is the foundation of talismanry.45 Most significantly, it is a kind of knowledge that elucidates the workings of the universe and the spiritual networks that govern the celestial and terrestrial worlds. Without astrology wisdom itself is out of reach.46 2.2 Magic as Salvation The second definition of siḥr given by the Ikhwān—“altering essences (qalb alaʿyān) and violating norms (kharq al-ʿāda)”—has exoteric and esoteric meanings. In the literal sense, it includes any magical operation that causes external transformation, such as talismans and amulets, but it also alludes to selftransformation. Magic and astrology-as-magic, in the esoteric sense, thus become eschatological tools. Such an undertone is missing in 52a, but we are told there that magic is that “whereby subjects are joined to [the rank of] kings and kings to that of angels.”47 In 52b, they write that acquiring “knowledge of this necessitates to whoever learns it the attainment of human excellence, that is receiving angelic forms after death,” which is the Ikhwān’s priority in their encyclopedic discourse as a whole.48 To demonstrate this, they include in their epistle on magic a fable that at first sounds out of place, that of the ailing king and his vizier.

43 44 45 46

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The Brethren of Purity, On Magic I, 120–121. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:353; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 550r. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:333. Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 543v. Astrology permeates the Rasāʾil, but it is not within the scope of this article to investigate the various ways it is incorporated into the world-view of the Ikhwān. Our interest here is the relationship between astrology and magic in 52b. For an overview of astrology in the Rasāʾil, see Marquet, “La détermination astrale,”passim; Godefroid de Callataÿ, “Introduction to Epistle 36,” in The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, Sciences of the Soul and Intellect, Part I: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistles 32–36, ed. Paul E. Walker, Ismail K. Poonawala et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2015), 137–190, here 137–142, 146–153. The Brethren of Purity, On Magic I, 95 (English); 16 (Arabic). Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:339; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 546r.

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At the pinnacle of his wealth and power, a Persian king sees an apparition of a well-dressed handsome young man who stares at the king with derision and scorn. He orders his men to capture the young one but to no avail. The king demands to know who he is. The young man replies: “O you pitiful man! O you who is enticed by temporal sovereignty and partial kingship! What kind of king are you? You are a slave (mamlūk) and not master (mālik) …. I am heavenly kingship and divine sovereignty!” From this encounter, the king becomes overwhelmed by the mundanity of his powers, and as a result, he falls ill, in mind and body. His vizier consults a sheikh who recommends that they seek the help of a wise man from the mountains of Sarandīb [present-day Sri Lanka]. Hope reinvigorates the king and he begins to recover. They send for the wise man who dispatches two of his pupils. He orders them to begin instructing the king on the propaedeutic sciences after which they ought to progress to the divine sciences. They instruct the king and his vizier accordingly until both of them reach enlightenment and spiritual salvation. The king rewards the two wise men and grants them his own kingdom. The temptations of mundane kingship overwhelm them and they trade “heavenly kingship” for it. We are told “they desert the licit magic (siḥr ḥalāl) that descended onto them, by which they were ordered to abide, and through which salvation was reached by those who were saved. They returned to illicit magic (siḥr ḥarām), misguided and misguiding.”49 To assert this eschatological narrative, the Ikhwān subvert the traditional interpretation of the Qurʾanic verses dealing with Hārūt and Mārūt that presents them as the angels who tested humans by teaching them sorcery.50 Instead, the Ikhwān engage in a kind of esoteric exegesis and correlate the demise of the monks with that of Hārūt and Mārūt, explaining, As for the magic mentioned in the Qurʾan, endowed upon the two angels in Babel, Hārūt and Mārūt, the public has made many banal statements about it without any truth. This narrative [concerning Hārūt and Mārūt] has a subtle meaning described by the scholars who have [attained knowledge] of the Book [and communicated it] to the elite (khawāṣṣ) whom they trusted. They conferred it to their noble progeny and eminent friends. We want to give an example of this.51 49 50 51

Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:327; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fols. 538r–542r. Yahya Michot, “Ibn Taymiyya on Astrology: Annotated Translation of Three Fatwas,” Journal of Islamic Studies 11, no. 2 (2000): 147–208, here 158–159. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:315; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 538r.

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This example is the fable of the king and his vizier. In a section concerned with magic in the Qurʾan, 52a refers to the verse containing the story of Hārūt and Mārūt, but no such taʾwīl (interpretation) is given, only the exoteric meaning of magic is delivered: “If, from the power and the science of magic, one could already ensure the separation of man and wife, what would be left after that? Or would there be doubt about this narrative after what is uttered by the Qurʾan, whose validity we know?”52 This attests again to the compatibility of 52b with the rest of the Rasāʾil and the Ikhwān’s methods. It is not only magic but astrology too that are given eschatological meanings.53 The Ikhwān write, “Know O Brother, may God support you and us with a spirit from Him, that through knowledge of astrology, you attain guidance in ascending the heavens and entry to the Highest Location.”54 Elsewhere, they assert that it is through astrology that one is able “to reach the angelic home and the heavenly rank.”55 Astrology allows this because: All things in the world of generation and corruption, small or large, subtle or manifest, are [what they are] by celestial decree and heavenly command. All of this is delineated in a manifest book. Whoever reads it well will have knowledge of all these, and his soul will yearn (tashawwaqat) to ascend to the world of the spheres, the expanses of the heavens, the abode of life, the space of bliss, the garden of spirits, the home of jubilance and fulfilment.56 This reflects a Neoplatonic leaning and is reminiscent of the following statement from Plotinus’s second Enneads (II.3): We may think of the stars as letters perpetually being inscribed on the heavens or inscribed once for all and yet moving as they pursue the other tasks allotted to them: upon these main tasks will follow the quality of signifying, just as the one principle underlying any living unit enables us 52 53

54 55 56

The Brethren of Purity, On Magic I, 105 (English), 27 (Arabic). Pierre Lory, “La magie chez les Ikhwân al-Safâʾ,” in “Sciences occultes et l’Islam,” ed. Pierry Lory and Annick Regourd, special issue of Bulletin d’études orientales 44 (1992): 147–159, here 156. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:367; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 554r. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:386; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fols. 559v–560r. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:393. Not in Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681.

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to reason from member to member, so that for example we may judge of character and even of perils and safeguards by indications in the eyes or in some other part of the body. If these parts of us are members of a whole, so are we: in different ways the one law applies. All teems with symbol; the wise man is the man who in any one thing can read another, a process familiar to all of us in not a few examples of everyday experience. But what is the comprehensive principle of co-ordination? Establish this and we have a reasonable basis for divination, not only by stars but also by birds and other animals, from which we derive guidance in our varied concerns. All things must be enchained [my italics].57 The Ikhwān even say, in their justification of astrology, that knowledge of God is achievable through the study of His creation because “things are chained to one another” (al-ashyāʾ kullahā marbūṭa baʿḍuhā bi baʿḍ).58 Despite the striking similarity of expression here, only enneads IV, V, and VI are believed to have been paraphrased into Arabic and available at the time of the Ikhwān as the Theology of Aristotle.59 In this rendition, ascendance is fueled with the soul’s “yearning” (shawq and tashawwuq), an idea the reader also encounters in Epistle 3 on “astronomy,” where knowledge of the stars is presented as facilitating liberation from materiality and the attainment of salvation and enlightenment.60 There the Ikhwān quote explicitly the Theology of Aristotle.61 Moreover, in Epistle 16, knowledge of the stars (astrology and astronomy) is related to the ascent of the individual soul to the world of universals through the celestial world. It is even stretched to explain the return or ascent of the macrocosmic Soul to the realm of the Intellect, an event that leads to the Great Resurrection (qiyāma).62 57 58 59 60 61

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Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Penguin Books, 1991) II.3, 80– 81. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:387, 412; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 560r. Peter Adamson, The Arabic Plotinus: A Philosophical Study of the Theology of Aristotle (London: Duckworth, 2002), 6–8. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī, ed., Uthūlūjiyā Aflūṭīn ʿind al-ʿarab (Qom: Intishārāt Bīdār, 1992 [1413 AH]), 19–20, 117–118. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 1:137–138; The Brethren of Purity, Epistles of the Brethren of Purity: On Astronomia: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistle 3, ed. and trans. F. Jamil Ragep and Taro Mimura (Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Institute, 2015), 89; Badawī, Uthūlūjiyā Aflūṭīn, 22. The Brethren of Purity, On the Natural Sciences: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistles 15–21, ed. and trans. Carmela Baffioni (Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2013), 147–154.

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To the Ikhwān, siḥr is thus never only just magic. Particular and transitive magical actions and astrological knowledge can disclose universal truths, the absorption of which transforms the soul of the operator by loosening its bonds to the material world. This is licit magic (siḥr ḥalāl), described as “the talisman composed for the cultivation of the world, the sought-for stone, the desired mineral. It is the grand magnet, and the red sulfur.”63 2.3 Magic of Prophets and Sages The second definition of magic as “that which the prophets were accused of and sages known for,” subverts the traditional “binary logic of revelation,” according to which siḥr of the unbelievers is contrasted with the authentic signs of divine revelation.64 Instead, the Ikhwān promote siḥr by subsuming miracles under it and positioning philosophy on a level with prophecy: “every prophet who spoke, every sage who told the truth and brought about miracles and showed [divine] signs; he was labeled with this name [sāḥir, mage] and became known by this brand among the tyrannical nations and unjust parties, as a way to discredit the prophets and challenge the sages.”65 But the Ikhwān reclaim the term siḥr and apply it to the feats of sages and the miracles of prophets. To do this, they formulate another, wider definition of magic: “all words and actions that charm (v. saḥara) the minds, and submit souls with the intention to fascinate and submit [them], to be listened to, to receive satisfaction, to be obeyed, and to be complied with.”66 Here one recalls the Theology of Aristotle, where siḥr ḥaqq (true magic) is distinguished from siḥr ṣināʿī (artificial trickery). The former is described as the magic of scholars: And the scholar (al-ʿālim) mage is the one who imitates the world (alʿālam) and performs its actions to the extent that he is able to, in that he uses love in one situation and domination in another. If he wishes to use these, he uses medicines and natural operations, and these permeate earthly things; but some of them often strengthen the action of love in 63 64

65 66

Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:413; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 567v. Travis Zadeh, “Magic, Marvel, and Miracle in Early Islamic Thought,” in The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West from Antiquity to the Present, ed. David J. Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 235–267, esp. 239. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:314; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 537v. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:314; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 538r.

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others, and some of them react to others and thus yield to them. At the outset of a magical operation the mage ought to know well the things that yield to one another. If he does know them, he is able to attract something through the power of love that acts on the thing.67 The Ikhwān extend this dichotomy by juxtaposing the magic of the sage/ scholar with that of the prophets. First, they assert that the magic of prophets is siḥr ḥalāl (licit magic); it is Calling to God, the Exalted, with truth and honest speech. That which is illicit is the opposite, like the actions of those who oppose the prophets and the enemies of sages, embellishing falsity and making it manifest, pushing away the truth and denying it with false speech, inserting doubt and ambivalence into [the minds of] weak men and women to turn them away from the path to God and the road to the Hereafter, to enchant their minds with falsity.68 However, the Ikhwān still distinguish the extraordinary actions of prophets from those of sages. The first belong to what they call intellectual magic (siḥr ʿaqlī), by which prophets “enchant the minds of the faithful” under divine decree. God inspires the intellectual faculty of prophets directly. On the other hand, the magic of the sages, philosophers, and scholars is “soul-enabled magic” (sīḥr nafsī) achieved through nature (bi wāsiṭa al-ṭabīʿa); it is also called “natural magic” (siḥr ṭabīʿī). In this case, the senses register natural phenomena, then the soul communicates the input to the intellect. The Neoplatonic hypostases are reflected in this process: the Universal Soul directs its attention to the Intellect from which it emanated and for which it yearns. Unlike intellectual magic, the magic of the sages is discursive, but, by achieving this knowledge with the resolve to achieve enlightenment, the sage is able to engage with the emanative universe.69 Marquet refers to the intellectual magic of the prophets as one that operates “by means of reason,” understanding the word ʿaql as the faculty of reason, implying discursive thinking instead of the activation of the higher part of the soul that receives divine revelation which is a more accurate

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Badawī, Uthūlūjiyā Aflūṭīn, 75–76. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:314–315; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 538r. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:408–409; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fols. 565v–566r; Lory, “La magie chez les Ikhwân al-Safâʾ,” 154.

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way of understanding it.70 Here, too, one is reminded of the Theology of Aristotle, where a distinction is made between intellectual revelatory knowledge and discursive thought.71 It is with this in mind that we must understand this statement by the Ikhwān: Know, O Brother, that in all crafts, their exoteric aspects (ẓawāhir) are established for the benefit of bodies, and their esoteric aspects (bawāṭin) are for the benefit of the souls … their exoteric aspects are identical to their esoteric aspects and do no negate them. Their exoteric aspects indicate the skill of the Sublime Wise Maker, and their esoteric aspects indicate His transcendence and calls to His worship; they signify (His right to) obedience.72 Attending to the transformation and nurture of souls is the magic of the prophets that they actualize through the highest faculties of the soul. Second to it, but sublime nevertheless, is the magic of the sages that attends to nature and works with the elements; such action makes the sage more intimate with the works of God. 2.4 Political Implications According to the Ikhwān, enlightenment privileges the individual to become a rightly guided leader of the Muslim community. That great intellectual magic is the manifestation of power received directly by divine inspiration and aid, and the Ikhwān stress that “this is the trait of the great walāya/wilāya and the grand khilāfa; this is the deputyship with which God privileged the People of the Message (ahl al-risāla, i.e., the prophets) who do not need a director or a scholar but themselves … that is why they deserved leadership (riyāsa) and were marked by deputyship (khilāfa).”73 The Ikhwān also see the Macrocosmic Man as a khalīfa, God’s deputy in the created world.74 This recalls the notion of khilāfa in the Qurʾan: “Your lord said to the angels, ‘I will make upon the earth a khalīfa’ ” 70 71 72 73 74

Marquet, La philosophie des Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 488–489. Badawī, Uthūlūjiyā Aflūṭīn, 6–8, 31–32, 61–64. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:396; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 562r. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:375; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 556v. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 1:29, 306; Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, al-Risāla al-jāmiʿa, ed. Jamīl Ṣalība, 2 vols. (Damascus, 1949–1951), 1:496–497; Michael Ebstein, Mysticism and Philosophy in al-Andalus: Ibn Masarra, Ibn ʿArabī, and the Ismāʿīlī Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 176–177.

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(Q 2:30). Grand deputyship is divine and bestowed upon Adam, the prophets, and the imams.75 The riyāsa of this divine deputyship is contrasted with the siyāsa of terrestrial and temporal deputyship, which requires astrological expertise.76 For the Ikhwān, therefore, true caliphate, prophecy, and imamate constitute the “Great Magic.”77 The Ikhwān then stress that those people who become temporal caliphs, preoccupied with mundane affairs, are really the caliphs of Satan; they are unjust and hostile. Such a caliph is a slave (mamlūk) and not a master (mālik), coming upon his position with trickery and disobedience. They become restricted by a planetary spiritual force (rūḥāniyya) and thus need astrology to manage their affairs.78 Here the Ikhwān appear to articulate anti-Abbasid sentiments—the Abbasids, as widely known, were avid patrons of astrology79—a sentiment they also express in the animal fable, as Marquet has pointed out.80 The Ikhwān also write: And know, O compassionate and loyal brother, that every science perfected and action that issued from the prophets, messengers, the Rightly Guided Caliphs who succeeded them, the pure people of their houses, and their companions among the faithful, these [belong to] intellectual magic and divine command … every action, art, craft, and labor, that manifest from sages and philosophers, [including] the propaedeutic sciences, announcing astral matters and judging according to them, these [belong to] soul-enabled magic that arise by the mediation of nature.81 75 76 77 78 79

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Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:377; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 558r. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:374, 376; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 556r–v. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:378; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 557v. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:374–376; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fols. 556r–557r. Stephen Blake, Astronomy and Astrology in the Islamic World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Damien Janos, “Al-Maʾmūn’s Patronage of Astrology,” in The Place to Go: Contexts of Learning in Baghdad, 750–1000 C.E., ed. Jens Scheiner and Damien Janos (Princeton: Darwin Press, 2014), 389–454; Edward S. Kennedy, Astronomy and Astrology in the Medieval Islamic World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); David Pingree, “Astrology,” in Religion Learning and Science in the ʿAbbasid Period, ed. M.J.L. Young, J.D. Latham, and R.B. Serjeant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 290–300. Marquet, Les Frères de la Pureté, 568. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:408; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 565v.

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We must understand intellectual magic in this religio-political context as the ability to lead people into rectitude and the establishment of a sacral state and the power to transform a mundane caliphate into a sublime one. It may seem a contradiction to dismiss the use of astrology and the mediation of the rūḥāniyyāt in a text that is occupied with them, but their employment is only legitimate in soul-enabled magic of the sages, not that of caliphs and imams.82 Furthermore, the apparent contradiction can be resolved by understanding that a metaphorical/esoteric discourse is at work here, along with the literal/exoteric explication. Soul-enabled magic can nevertheless be used pragmatically in state administration. The Ikhwān write: “Know, O brother, that the best thing people have attained from this art [magic] and absorbing its sciences is knowing the state of kings, sultans, caliphs, successors, princes, generals, leaders of war, viziers, secretaries, royal custodians, and the rise of states and their fates, longevity of natives ….”83 This is followed by astrological elections for ensuring the legitimacy of the caliph/king who receives the official oath of allegiance (bayʿa).84 The use of magic and divination in state administration and military matters is found in the ps.-Aristotelian Hermetica, a group of texts that take the form of epistles and conversations between Alexander the Great and Aristotle, in which the philosopher teaches his royal pupil about the workings of the universe, the forces within it, the hidden powers of nature, and magic. Aristotle bases his instructions on knowledge he received from Hermes. The Ikhwān cite the ps.-Aristotelian text known as al-Istūṭās as the source of the

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Liana Saif, “Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ’s Religious Reform and Magic: Beyond the Ismāʿīlī Hypothesis,” Journal of Islamic Studies 30, no. 1 (2019): 34–68. There I argue that the Brethren aimed with “their Rasāʾil to establish an anti-sectarian religio-political reform that they refer to as the Third Way. Its strategy comprises reconciling revelation and philosophy; valuing the message of religions other than Islam (Christianity, Judaism, Brahmans, and Sabians); and addressing some Shīʿī specific practices and doctrines which it scrutinizes. The Ikhwān mitigate the doctrinal boundaries between Shīʿism and other denominations by adopting a more equable position which is consonant with Zaydī and Ibāḍī attitudes towards the contentious issues of imamate, caliphate, and wilāya/walāya. Furthermore, magic for them is a characteristic feature of the Third Way. The Ikhwān see magic as the conceptual and practical pivot of the Third Way, since it is the culmination of philosophy and revelation, making it the appropriate tool for regulating state guardianship and sublimating the temporal state itself into a sacred city instead of investing sacral power into a single person. The Ikhwān themselves are the ushers of this utopia.” Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:369; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 554v. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:369; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fols. 554v–556r.

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epistle’s magic of the lunar mansions.85 They also reproduce almost the entire content of another ps.-Aristotelian text concerned with attracting animals by magic.86 In another text that belonged to this corpus and might have been known by the Ikhwān, called al-Isṭimākhīs, Aristotle gives instructions for creating four talismans and four amulets that would aid Alexander in securing victory.87 In the same text, Aristotle tells Alexander that every king has a spiritual power (rūḥāniyya) attached to him that connects him to his star, adding that kings made covenant with these powers to guide them away from harm, ensure their victory, and defeat their enemies.88 As we saw above, this precise idea is deemed by the Ikhwān to be characteristic of temporal sovereigns. The espousal of occult sciences and state administration is also found in the ps.-Aristotelian (but not expressly Hermetic) Kitāb al-Siyāsa fī tadbīr al-riyāsa (“The book of governance on managing leadership”) which purports to be an epistle from Aristotle to Alexander the Great offering political, moral, and dietary advice. The final chapter of the text, Sirr al-asrār, is concerned with astral magic. The work itself claims in the proem to be a translation from Greek into Syriac then into Arabic by the translator Yaḥyā b. al-Biṭrīq, who flourished in Baghdad in the third/ninth century, but there is insufficient evidence for the existence of a Greek original.89 Aristotle tells Alexander: “If you are able, do not stand, sit, eat, drink, or undertake any action without consulting astrology.”90

85 86

87 88 89

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Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:443–445; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fols. 572r–576r; Turkey, National Library of Manisa, MS 1461, fols. 18v–25v. This section does not appear in Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, but in Ikhwān alṢafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, IV, 450–457; also in Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Köprülü 870 and Paris, BnF, Arabe 2304. Compare with London, British Library, Delhi Arabic 1946, fols. 21v– 32r. London, British Library, Delhi Arabic 1946, fols. 1v–21r. London, British Library, Delhi Arabic 1946, fols. 5v–5r. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī, ed., al-Uṣūl al-yūnāniyya lil-naẓariyyāt al-siyāsiyya fī l-Islām (Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahḍa al-Miṣriyya, 1954), 69. On the influence, circulation, and structure of this text, see Mario Grignaschi, “L’origine et les métamorphoses du Sirr al-ʾasrâr,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 43 (1976): 7–112; Mario Grignaschi, “La diffusion du Secretum Secretorum dans l’ Europe occidentale,” Archive d’Histoire Doctrinale et Litterature du Moyen Age 48 (1980): 7–70; Mario Grignaschi, “Remarques sur la formation et l’ interprétation du Sirr al-asrâr,” in Pseudo-Aristotle The Secret of Secrets. Sources and Influences, ed. W.F. Ryan and C.B. Schmitt (London: Warburg Institute, 1982), 3–33; Steven J. Williams, “The Early Circulation of the Pseudo-Aristotelian ‘Secret of Secrets’ in the West,” in Micrologus 2 (1994): 127–144; Mahmoud Manzalaoui, “The PseudoAristotelian ‘Kitāb Sirr al-Asrār.’ Facts and Problems,” Oriens 23–24 (1974): 147–257. Badawī, al-Uṣūl al-yūnāniyya, 85.

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In the last chapter, Aristotle prescribes an elaborate talisman known as “the talisman of the king,” which insures obedience, awe, and victory.91 2.5 Magic as Medicine The fable of the king and his vizier, overlooked in studies of the Ikhwān’s magic and occult sciences, encapsulates their esotericism,92 which reveals and obfuscates. It unfolds into many layers of meanings that extend even beyond Epistle 52. For example, the king’s salvation represents magic as an eschatological tool to transcend mundane kingship, and hints at magic as sacral power. His physical recuperation is a demonstration of magic as a form of medicine. The Ikhwān expand on this latter meaning after the fable. They write that medicine “is a kind of licit magic (siḥr ḥalāl) because it is the alteration of essences from a state of corruption to soundness, from deficiency to completion. Illicit magic (al-siḥr al-ḥarām) is its opposite, introducing corruption into sound bodies with that which ruins and corrupts its temperament and weakens its natures.”93 Astonishingly, here the Ikhwān refer to the hadith that calls for the execution of the sorcerer.94 Illicit magic is magic that hurts and damages, and in this way, in this particular meaning, the Ikhwān endorse the Qurʾanic denunciation of sorcery: And they followed [instead] what the devils had recited during the reign of Solomon. It was not Solomon who disbelieved, but the devils disbelieved, teaching people magic and that which was revealed to the two angels at Babylon, Hārūt and Mārūt. But the two angels do not teach anyone unless they say, “We are a trial, so do not disbelieve [by practicing magic].” And [yet] they learn from them that by which they cause separation between a man and his wife. But they do not harm anyone through it except by permission of God. And the people learn what harms them and does not benefit them. Q 1:102

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Badawī, al-Uṣūl al-yūnāniyya, 159–164. For an extensive discussion on the evolution of Islamic esotericism, bāṭiniyya, as a shifting and historically contingent discourse, see Liana Saif, “What is Islamic Esotericism?,” in “Islamic Esotericism,” ed. Liana Saif, special issue of Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism 7, no. 1 (2019): 1–59. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:327; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 542r. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:328; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 542r; al-Tirmidhī, al-Jāmiʿ, bk. 17, ch. 27, ḥadīth 44, https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi/17/ 44.

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The same verse that, above, was interpreted esoterically is now taken literally when the discourse shifts into the transitive practice of medicine, which is akin to talismanry. Both practices must be used to achieve amelioration and progress; this is the condition of their legitimacy. Furthermore, just as in making talismans, in medicine, a physician needs to learn “the starry craft” (al-ṣināʿa al-nujūmiyya) “because it is the root and the foundation of all terrestrial operations and occurrences in natural bodies.”95 The miracles of the prophets and the actions of the sages work on deficient souls just as the medicines of the physicians heal the bodies. Any soul that lacks knowledge of God is “deficient and incomplete, sick and unhealthy.” Prophets and sages direct “people with illnesses of the soul” (aṣḥāb al-ʿilal al-nafsāniyya) back to the path to God by calling for patience.96 At this point, the Ikhwān refer the reader to the fable of the physician in Epistle 44 (on the convictions of the Brethren of Purity) in which medicine as magic now takes on a metaphorical garb. There we are told of the sage/physician who comes upon a city whose people are suffering from an “invisible illness” (maraḍ khafī) without being aware of their affliction. Believing that if he gives them a diagnosis bluntly, they would turn away from him and reject his help, he approaches one of the noblemen of the city and gives him a medical potion and some snuff. His health is restored immediately. Grateful, the nobleman asks the physician what he can do in return; the physician requests only that the nobleman heal with these medicines just one more person. This has a secret ripple effect. Eventually the healers are strengthened and emboldened by the increase in public health, they eventually make the truth known and administer by force the medicines to the rest, until the entire population is healed.97 This is an allegory expressing the mission of the Ikhwān themselves, whose identity is hidden but is destined to emerge: “It is we, the society ( jamāʿa) of Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, noble and pure friends, who were asleep in the cave of our father Adam for a period of time while the vicissitudes of ages and the calamities of misfortune rolled on, till the day of reckoning following the dispersal in the lands of the kingdom of the Greatest Law (al-nāmūs al-akbar).”98 The Ikhwān refer to themselves as “physicians of the souls,” making them similar to the prophets. It is clear, then, that 95

96 97 98

Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:328; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 542r (margins); Liana Saif, “Between Medicine and Magic: Spiritual Aetiology and Therapeutics in Medieval Islam,” in Demons and Illness from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, ed. Siam Bhayro and Catherine Rider (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 313–338. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:329–330; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 542v. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:14–15. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:18.

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their discussion of medicine exemplifies perfectly the subtle shifts in discourse that characterize their style of writing. Medicine is medicine, but it is also magic and a religio-political mission. 2.6 Magic as wahm For the Ikhwān, it is the faculty by which the feat is facilitated that distinguishes the magic of the prophets from that of the sages. The miracles of the prophets are direct divine effusions that are received by their intellect, whereas the sagemage acts on nature and others through the soul (nafs). In the final portions of all the manuscripts, save the ones containing the ps.-Aristotelian concoctions (including the Beirut edition), the Ikhwān describe the most inferior type of magic, that is, illusory magic. The Ikhwān explain that the sphere of the Moon is its body, upon which its soul acts. Similarly, “the [human] body is the sphere of the pneuma” upon which it acts. The parts of the body correspond to parts of the zodiac, and the kind of effect the pneuma has on the body is therefore determined by celestial conditions. The pneuma courses through the body at the command of the “head,” the body’s sun. The welfare of the pneuma depends on the welfare of the body. The link between body and pneuma is forged by the faculty of wahm. This word can be translated as “imagination,” but in this context it indicates the capacity to process sensory input to perceive internal significance and related images. The Ikhwān say, “Know that wahm is a power that extracts meanings from sensory input (maḥsūsāt) and channels them to the pneuma.” Consequently, if the physical temperament is balanced, the wahm would channel well-rounded and balanced perceptions to the pneuma. Because the body follows the pneuma, it is affected by its vacillations. The Ikhwān give an example of this: A man eats a good meal. Just as he finishes, another comes and tells him that the food is poisoned. If the man is intellectually limited (qalīl al-ʿaql), he will believe this to be true, making his pneuma and then his body sick, and he may even die because of this wahm. The Ikhwān then employ a tactic used before, conflating the vocation of the physician with that of the mage. They tell us that physicians strengthen the physical temperament using “good wahm.” One of Galen’s friends, they report, believed he was cursed by a woman. Galen reassured him that it could not be so, but the man insisted that he had been bewitched. The next time the friends met, Galen gave him a recipe for a “magical” concoction, which the friend prepared and used. As a result of his wahm, he recovered (a kind of the placebo effect). According to the Ikhwān, conjurations and invocations taken from the Torah, Bible, and Qurʾan also work by wahm. They especially affect women, children, and fools but have little effect on “people of understanding.” The evil

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eye is facilitated by the same faculty. They emphasize that these things take effect by belief and are made ineffective by denial.99 In the alternative ending provided in Atif Efendi 1681, we finally have an explanation of what the Ikhwān mean by women’s magic: “the magic that women specialize in [works] through awhām (pl. of wahm) and penetrates the [minds of] fools among men, women, and youths by the superstitions (khurāfat) and old wives’ tales (makhārīq) that they use, the nonsense they write, and the incitements and nīranjs they create.” This is immediately contrasted with the magic of the scholars (ʿulamāʾ), which depends on the knowledge of the spiritual forces of the cosmos, constituting the foundation of talismanry and “the transformation of essences,” the true siḥr of the Ikhwān.100 To understand this “womanly” magic, a distinction must be made between what is referred to in this article as “soul-enabled” magic, practiced by philosophers and sages, and pneumatic magic, that is, wahm magic. This is based on the Aristotelian conceptualization of the soul. Wahm is the lowest faculty of the soul (nafs); it operates on the level of perception and interacts with semisubstantial pneuma (nafs), which is the intermediary between body and soul. It is more akin to the medical spiritus/rūḥ (rūḥ/arwāḥ), whereas soul-enabled magic operates at the high level of understanding ( fahm). The magic of the prophets is actualized through the highest faculty of intellection.

3

Practice

One of the main features of 52b that distinguishes it from 52a is the dominance of astrological theory and practical instructions, despite being scattered randomly through the text. It includes chapters on advantageous states of the planets, astrological correspondences, methods of astrological interrogation (such as those aiming to discover a hidden thing), ascertaining the occurrence of conception, the state of a fetus, the validity of news, and the identity of a thief. It has chapters also on the properties of stones and other natural materials. The longest chapter of the epistle is on the twenty-eight lunar mansions and the talismans to be constructed under each of them. It is derived from the ps.-Aristotelian Hermetic text al-Istūṭās.101 In some manuscripts of 52b 99 100 101

Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi, fols. 576v–577r; 579v–580v. Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fols. 560v–561r. Turkey, National Library of Manisa, MS 1461, fols. 18v–25v; Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4: 428–443; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fols. 572r–576r. Most of the texts that constitute the ps.-Aristotelian Hermetica are given strange, Greek-sounding

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this is followed by recipes for natural amulets known as nīranjs and four concoctions to attract animals, which are likewise taken from another known ps.Aristotelian Hermetic text.102 In 52a, the Ikhwān devote the longest chapter to the magic and rituals of Sabians and Harranians, but there is nothing resembling the content of the ps.-Aristotelian Hermetica.103 Although the content of the ps.-Aristotelian Hermetica accords well with some descriptions found in medieval histories concerning the Sabians,104 their conflation with a Hermetic or ps.-Hermetic body of belief and practice, a tendency found in Pingree, Marquet, and many others, is problematic.105 In the versions of 52b that contain the ps.-Aristotelian Hermetic concoctions (see above), a more explicit restriction on practice is found: “I ask you to stay away, loyal and gentle brother, may God Almighty support you and us with a spirit from him, from prohibited [magical] work or that which is not allowed by the Law, except for asset burial, digging a well or a river, building

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titles: Isṭimākhīs, Isṭimāṭīs, Istūṭās, Hadīṭūs, and Madīṭīs. See also Kevin van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 101–102, 114, and Charles Burnett, “Arabic, Greek and Latin Works on Astrological Magic Attributed to Aristotle,” in Pseudo Aristotle in the Middle Ages: The Theology and Other Texts, ed. J. Kray, W.F. Ryan, and C.B. Schmitt (London: Warburg Institute, 1989), 84– 97. London, British Library, Delhi Arabic 1946, fols. 21v–32r; Oxford, Bodleian, Arab 221, fols. 1v– 4r; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Köprülü 870, fols. 333r–338rv; Paris, BnF, Arabe 2304, fols. 88v– 89v. The Brethren of Purity, On Magic I, 116–146 (English), 44–85 (Arabic). The Brethren of Purity, On Magic I, “Introduction,” 36–41; David Pingree, “The Sabians of Harran and the Classical Tradition,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 9 (2002): 8–35; J. Hämeen-Anttila, “Continuity of Pagan Religious Traditions in Tenth-Century Iraq,” in Ideologies as International Phenomena, ed. A. Paniano and G. Pettinato (Bologna: International Association for Cultural Studies, 2002), 89–107; Tamara Green, The City of the Moon God: Religious Traditions of Harran (Leiden: Brill, 1992); F.E. Peters, “Hermes and Harran: The Roots of Arabic-Islamic Occultism,” in Intellectual Studies on Islam: Essays Written in Honour of Martin B. Dickson, ed. Michael Mazzaoui and Vera B. Moreen (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990), 185– 215. Marquet, Les Frères de la Pureté, 10, Pingree, “Some Sources of the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 43 (1980): 1–15, here 15; for an assessment of Marquet’s views on the Sabians of Harran and Hermeticism, see Godefroid de Callataÿ, “Les sabéens de Ḥarrān dans l’ oeuvre d’Yves Marquet,” in Images et Magie: Picatrix entre Orient et Occident, ed. Jean-Patrice Boudet, Anna Caiozzo, and Nicolas Weill-Parot (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011), 41–56; the conflation of Harranians and Sabians is thoroughly analyzed and proven to be historically unfounded by Kevin van Bladel, in The Arabic Hermes.

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a ship or house, marriage, entering [the presence of] a sovereign, travel, sowing and planting, buying property, and what is similar to these things. As for the rest, God Almighty has safeguarded our brethren from doing them: I mean controlling emotions (al-ʿuṭūf ), tying and binding, and similar things. We have explained these to our brethren in order to introduce the methods of those who practice them.”106 To these reprehensible practices they add trickery by prestidigitation and necromancy. The former is too mundane and useless.107 The latter, they assert, is real and serious, as demonstrated by Jesus. They warn their reader that “this type of magic spoils minds and ruins the souls fascinated by and approaching it. Our brethren must not, God aid them, turn to this art by way of comparison, reading books, or experimenting.”108

4

Influence

The earliest evidence of the influence of the Ikhwān’s 52b is found in Ghāyat alḥakīm, written in the 340s/950s by the Cordoban ʿālim, bāṭinī (esotericist), and occultist Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī (293–353/906–964).109 In their German translation of the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm, Martin Plessner and Helmut Ritter highlight numerous elements taken from 52b and similar content: the talismans of the lunar mansions and one of the definitions of magic mentioned above, namely, “all words and actions that charm (v. saḥara) the minds, and submit souls with the intention to fascinate and submit [them], to be listened to, receive satisfaction, to be obeyed, and to be complied with.”110 They also recount conceptual parallels, such as the correspondences of body parts to parts of the macrocosm.111 For now, it suffices to refer the reader to the Plessner/Ritter translation 106 107 108 109

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Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:444; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Köprülü 870, fol. 333r. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:387; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 560r. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:426. Maribel Fierro, “Bāṭinism in al-Andalus. Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī (d. 353/964), Author of the ‘Rutbat al-Ḥakīm’ and the ‘Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm’ (Picatrix),” Studia Islamica 84 (1996): 87–112; Godefroid de Callataÿ, “Magia in al-Andalus: Rasāʾil Ijwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rutbat al-ḥakīm y Ghāyat al-ḥakīm (Picatrix),” Al-Qantara 34, no. 2 (2013): 297–344; Godefroid de Callataÿ and Sébastien Moureau, “Towards the Critical Edition of the Rutbat al-ḥakīm: A Few Preliminary Observations,” Arabica 62 (2015): 385–394, here 391. Maslama al-Qurṭubī, Picatrix: das Ziel des Weisen, translated into German by Hellmut Ritter and Martin Plessner (London: Warburg Institute, 1962), lx–lxi; Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, IV: 314; Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 538r. Ritter and Plessner, Picatrix, lxi.

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for the textual parallels between the two texts. The Ghāya is the earliest evidence of the influence of 52b, rather than 52a, which supports the antiquity of the former. Accepting the erroneous attribution of the Ghāya to the mathematician Maslama al-Majrītī (339–398/950–1007), Holmyard and Flügel perceive a connection with the Rasāʾil based on statements made by the author himself in the Rutbat al-ḥakīm—the Ghāya’s alchemical sister text—the most significant of which is: And we have presented (qaddamnā) among [our] compositions on the mathematical sciences and philosophical secrets / books and epistles / fifty-one epistles /112 in which we have assimilated (istawʿabnā fīhā) [knowledge] that no one among the people of our age has preceded us in assimilating. These epistles spread and prevailed among them, so they competed in investigating them and impelled the people of their times to [read] them without knowing who composed them (allafa) and where they were composed. The ingenious among them, when they strove to read them diligently due to liking them and enjoying their turn of phrases, realized that they are contemporary compositions, without knowing who composed them and where.113 Elsewhere in the Rutba, the author even presents his alchemical work as a substitute for the epistles. I insist, I wrote this book as a substitute for these Epistles in their totality. Please find here, therefore, as a compensation for you, a reflection on animals according to what the experts in the art of alchemy have described. You will appreciate what I have arrived at. Next I shall report on minerals and their causes, having left aside the discussion of plants, because it is found in a well known epistle from among these Epistles and because a philosopher does not require it, unless he wants to become a physician. Who wishes this—well, let him read it in the Epistles, God the Exalted willing.114

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“Philosophical secrets,” in Istanbul, Nuruosmaniye, 2794, fol. 141r, and Nuruosmaniye, 3623, fol. 3r; “fifty-one epistles,” in Tehran, Center for the Great Islamic Encyclopedia, MS 463, fol. 5v; “books and epistles,” in Pakistan, Karachi University Library, MS 2159, 7. Pakistan, Karachi University Library, MS 2159, 7. Pakistan, Karachi University Library, MS 2159, 23.

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S.M. Stern mentions this in passing, without giving any weight to it in his discussion of the authorship of the Rasāʾil.115 On account of Maribel Fierro’s compelling attribution of the Ghāya and Rutba to Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī rather than al-Majrītī the mathematician, the question of the connection between these two texts and the Rasāʾil must be revisited, now that this is chronologically plausible. Fierro notes that the suggestion that al-Qurṭubi had made a new recension of the Rasāʾil “should be taken into consideration.”116 This was taken up by Godefroid de Callataÿ and Sébastien Moureau in two recent articles. They demonstrate the reasons that a historical connection was made between Maslama al-Majrītī, as author of the Ghāya, and the Rasāʾil, buttressed by the existence of some manuscripts that explicitly attribute their authorship to him.117 They also show that this was especially true among the intellectuals of western Islamic regions, such as Ibn Sabʿīn (d. c. 667/1269).118 They then reject the possibility that Maslama al-Qurṭubī is the author or one of the authors of the Rasāʾil, basing their argument on their interpretation of the verb qaddama in the previous long quotation from the Rutba as meaning “made them known.” Al-Qurṭubi thus merely introduced the Rasāʾil to al-Andalus through a copy he brought from his eastern sojourn.119 It is, indeed, unlikely that al-Qurṭubī contributed to the composition of the Rasāʾil. There is, however, another possibility, which is to see Ghāyat alḥakīm as an elaboration on 52b, which employs various other sources to substantiate its arguments, such as the ps.-Aristotelian Hermetica, works attributed to Jābir ibn Ḥayyān and Ibn Waḥshiyya’s al-Filāḥa al-nabaṭiyya (“The Nabatean agriculture”). As the above statement from the Rutba shows, al-Qurṭubī was eager to be seen as a member of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ whom he might have met in Iraq during his travels in the eastern regions or even as their representative in al-Andalus.120 Although the verb qaddama can mean to “present” or “introduce,” his use of the expression waḍaʿnā hādhihi al-kutub (“we composed these books”) and writing that they are the Rasāʾil “wherein we have assimilated (istawʿabnā fīhā) [knowledge] that no one 115 116 117

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S.M. Stern, “New Information about the Authors of the ‘Epistles of the Sincere Brethren’,” Islamic Studies 3 (1964): 405–428, here 420. Fierro, “Bāṭinism in al-Andalus,” 106–108. Godefroid de Callataÿ and Sébastien Moureau, “Again on Maslama ibn Qāsim al-Qurṭubī, the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ and Ibn Khaldūn: New Evidence from Two Manuscripts of Rutbat alḥakīm,” Al-Qanṭara, 37 (July–December 2016): 329–372, here 331–333. De Callataÿ and Moureau, “Again on Maslama ibn Qāsim al-Qurṭubī,” 336–337. Godefroid de Callataÿ, “Magia en al-Andalus: Rasaʾil ijwan al-Safaʾ, Rutbat al-hakim y Gayat al-hakim (Picatrix),” Al-Qanṭara 34, no. 2 (July–December, 2013), 297–344, here 319–320, 327–328; de Callataÿ and Moureau, “Again on Maslama Ibn Qāsim al-Qurṭubī,” 333–336. Fierro, “Bāṭinism in Al-Andalus,” 106.

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among the people of our age have preceded us in assimilating” indicate at least a desire to seem to have been involved in the writing of the Rasāʾil.121 In the Rutba, following the statement regarding it being a replacement of some or all epistles, al-Qurṭubī mentions the value of the other “craft” and “outcome”—that is magic—which is integrated into (dākhila fī) alchemy, “for whoever wants to advance into the one called alchemy, mastering the other is indispensable.”122 This suggests that the Ghāya is part of his declared objective of expanding themes that are found in the Rasāʾil. The Ghāya and 52b share the same worldview, in which everything is governed by a system of volitional causality in a Neoplatonically hypostatic universe. In both texts, the micro-macro links and resulting correspondences justify the potential for interacting with and manipulating the astral and terrestrial worlds. The Ghāya’s structure as a manual contrasts with 52b’s irregularly sized chapters and random sequence of topics;123 and the freedom with which alQurṭubī recommends aggressive magic in the Ghāya,124 which accords with the siḥr ḥarām (illicit magic) that the Ikhwān describe as corrupt and dangerous. Nevertheless, we do find in 52b some references to destructive magic in the section on the talismans of the lunar mansions. For example, we are instructed to make “nīranjs for hostility, feuds, the separation of two people, lethal poisons, and all kinds of it [nīranj] that lead to feuds and harm” under the seventeenth mansion, known as al-iklīl and similarly under the twenty-first mansion, albalda.125 However, the Ikhwān assert that they “have explained these to our brethren to introduce the methods of those who practice them” rather than to recommend them.126 The description of the lunar mansions in the Ghāya differs markedly from that found in 52b. 52b’s list is similar to that found in Kitāb al-Tabṣira fī ʿilm al-nujūm (“The book of insights into the science of the stars”) by al-Malik al-Ashraf (d. 695/1296).127 It is possible that al-Malik’s list was

121 122 123 124

125 126 127

Pakistan, Karachi University Library, MS 2159, 7. Pakistan, Karachi University Library, MS 2159, 24. Constant Hamès, “La Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm: son époque, sa postérité,” in Boudet, Caiozzo, and Weill-Parot, Images et magie, 215–232, here 220–224. Maslama al-Qurṭubī, Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm wa-aḥaqq al-natījatayn bi-l-taqdīm, ed. Helmut Ritter (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1933), examples of aggressive talismans at 27 (destruction of a country, annihilation of enemies) and 31–32 (causing separation and animosity). Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:437, 439; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 574v, fol. 575v. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:444; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Köprülü 870, fol. 333r. Daniel Martin Varisco, “The Magical Significance of the Lunar Stations in the ThirteenthCentury Yemeni Kitāb al-Tabṣira fī ʿilm al-nujūm of al-Malik al-Ashraf,” in “Divination,

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derived from 52b, but it is more likely that the authors of both independently consulted the ps.-Aristotelian Hermetic source. The influence of the Rasāʾil is also discernible in texts attributed to the occultist Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad al-Būnī (d. c. 622/1225). Jean-Charles Coulon points out several parallels in Shams al-maʿārif wa-laṭāʾif al-ʿawārif (“The sun of knowledge and the secrets of gnosis”)128 that indicate knowledge of the Rasāʾil as a whole, including a reference to their doctrine of revolutions. Coulon also mentions that the angelology of this text is derived from the Rasāʾil.129 None of these, however, point to the content of 52b but rather to other epistles, such as number 49, on the action of the spiritual principles (rūḥāniyyīn), and number 36, on cycles and revolutions. Shams al-maʿārif ’s list of the lunar mansions nevertheless contains elements found only in 52b’s list. The author reformulates this list to reflect his lettrist knowledge, according to which each mansion corresponds to a set of letters and divine names, all of which encapsulate the mansion’s talismanic powers, including aggressive ones. As mentioned earlier, the ps.-Aristotelian Hermetic text known as Kitāb al-Istūṭās was a major source of magic for the lunar mansions.130 It is the Ikhwān’s direct source, as evinced by the similarities in detail. However, they introduce a specific expression in their version: “from this [lunar mansion], descends ( yanḥaṭṭu) to this world a rūḥāniyya,” and elsewhere a variation of this, which is not found in the Kitāb al-Istūṭās but is used in Shams almaʿārif.131 Other similarities of expression in this section indicate the author’s use of 52b. The lunar-mansion list of the Shams al-maʿārif is taken from an original text by al-Būnī called Laṭāʾif al-ishārāt (“The secrets of signs”), which also contains these expressions and other similarities.132 The lunar mansions apparently constitute the nexus of 52b’s influence. This is demonstrated also by a ninth/fifteenth-century manuscript in the Biblio-

128

129 130 131 132

magie, pouvoirs au Yémen,” ed. Anne Regourd, special issue of Quaderni di Studi Arabi 13 (1995): 19–40. This is a text incorrectly attributed to al-Būnī but which formed the basis of the eleventh/ seventeenth-century al-Būnian compendium known as Shams al-maʿārif al-kubrā (“The sun of knowledge: the larger version”) on which his wide fame mainly rests; see Noah Gardiner, “Esotericism in a Manuscript Culture: Aḥmad al-Būnī and His Readers through the Mamlūk Period” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2014), 6, 20, 27–30, 96, 102–103; Jean-Charles Coulon, “La magie islamique et le corpus bunianum au Moyen Âge” (PhD diss., Université Paris IV—Sorbonne, 2013), 1:80–84. Coulon, La magic islamique, 1:718, 906, 906, 958. Turkey, National Library of Manisa, MS 1461, fols. 18v–25v; Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:428–443; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fols. 572r–576r. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:429; Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fols. 572v–573r; Paris, BnF, Arabe 2647, fol. 13v, fol. 15r. Paris, BnF, Arabe 2658, fols. 25v–27r.

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thèque Nationale de France (Arabe 2596) that contains an anonymous text titled Anwār al-jawāhir wa-l-laʾāliʾ fī asrār manāzil al-maʿdan al-ʿālī (“The glow of jewels and pearls over the secrets of the stations of the sublime metal”). Its unnamed author discusses the influence and magical applications of the lunar mansions from various sources, including al-Būnī and other lettrists (asḥāb alḥurūf ), the ps.-Aristotelian Hermetica, and other authorities.133 Although the text itself contains no reference to the Ikhwān, the compiler of the manuscript appends Epistle 52b in its entirety to the anonymous text, most likely to complement it with the Ikhwān’s description.134 A tantalizing reference to the Rasāʾil as a whole is found in Kitāb Sharāsīm al-hindiyya (“the book of Sharāsīm the Indian”), a magic text containing mostly practical instructions regarding suffumigations, fermentations (taʿāfīn), and concoctions, as well as a chapter on the names of planetary spirits and another on magical scripts.135 At the end of the text (only in some manuscripts), a strange reference is made to the fiftyone epistles: “There are too many scripts (aqlām) to enumerate, and I have mentioned the scripts that were used by the people of knowledge to codify their books. People had used the script of the fifty-one introductions known as The Epistles of the Brethren that has appeared in this age and with it they wrote much.”136 It is not clear what this refers to, as there is no discussion of magical scripts in the Rasāʾil, and no manuscript written in code is known. The rest of the text contains nothing that indicates knowledge of 52b or the other epistles. It is notable that the text stresses the contemporaneousness of the Rasāʾil, an emphasis that we encountered above, made by al-Qurṭubī in the Rutba. Another reader of the Ikhwān by whom we can gauge the influence of the epistle on magic is the Mamluk theologian Ibn Taymiyya (661–728/1263–1318). As Yahya Michot demonstrates, Ibn Taymiyya was acquainted with the Rasāʾil. He adopted Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī’s narrative on the identity of the Ikhwān and labeled them pejoratively as philosophers, esotericists (bāṭinīs), Qarāmiṭa, and Ismāʿīlīs. He criticized them for reconciling Divine Law and Greek philosophy. For him, their thought consists of “insipid crumbs of Pythagoras’s

133

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Paris, BnF, Arabe 2596, fols. 1r–215v. The scribe used an exemplar dated 19 Rabīʿ al-Awwal 867 (12 December 1462). The date of the completion is the day of ʿAshūrā of what appears to be the year 971(/1564) (fol. 215v), but on the title page one reads that the manuscript came to be owned by a certain ʿUmar in 884 (/1479). Paris, BnF, Arabe 2596, fols. 217r–286v. Jean-Charles Coulon is preparing an edition of Kitāb Sharāsīm al-hindiyya. I am grateful for his guidance on this text. See his chapter in this volume. Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Hamidiyi 189, fols. 193v–194r.

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philosophy.”137 Most interesting is his description of the Ikhwān as AristotelianSabian philosophers. In Bayān talbīs al-jahmiyya, Ibn Taymiyya delineates the transmission of Greek knowledge into the Islamic domain, saying that it included the religion of the Sabians (central to which is the veneration of the planets) including “Aristotle and his kin” (Arisṭū wa-dhawīh) from whom the Ikhwān, as Qarāmiṭa, have taken their doctrines on the soul, intellect, light, and darkness.138 This reference is reminiscent of 52a’s introduction to the section on the Sabians and their rituals, which states that among the Greeks are the Sabians and Harranians, who base their doctrines on Babylonian and Egyptian knowledge as a result of “the transmission of arts and sciences.” Their chief sages were Agathodaimon, Hermes, Ūmahris, and Aratus, from whom Pythagoreanism, Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Epicureanism branched out. After this introduction, the Ikhwān delve into the doctrine of soul.139 Admittedly, this is not wholly conclusive evidence for Ibn Taymiyya’s knowledge of 52a, as such associations were made by others, including al-Masʿūdī in Murūj al-dhahab (“The fields of gold”).140 Other signs perhaps point to 52b in his works. Ibn Taymiyya’s condemnation of the Ikhwān’s equating the prophets’ miracles with the feats of philosophers—and specifically their description of the former as a sort of soulenabled power—is an indication of his possible knowledge of 52b, because it is there where they elaborate most on this. They do, however, also touch upon it elsewhere.141 This inconclusive evidence of the influence of the fifty-second epistle (whether in the long or the short version) on Ibn Taymiyya is made even more equivocal in light of the fact that, in al-Nubuwwāt (“Prophecy”), he spends much effort and space to distinguish between prophecy and magic in a way that might be seen as a response to the Ikhwān’s discourse on this matter in 52b. He does not cite them in this discussion, but, elsewhere in this work, they are briefly referred to as bāṭinīs and Ismāʿīlīs in an unrelated context.142 137

138 139 140 141 142

Yahya Michot, “Misled and Misleading … Yet Central in Their Influence: Ibn Taymiyya’s Views on the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ,” in el-Bizri, The Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ and their Rasāʾil: An Introduction, 139–179, here 143–144, 140, 145, 149, 151; Nader el-Bizri, “Prologue,” in el-Bizri, The Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ and their Rasāʾil: An Introduction, 3–5. Michot, “Misled and Misleading,” 150–151; Ibn Taymiyya, Bayān talbīs al-jahmiyya, 8 vols. (Munawwarah: Majmaʿ al-Malik Fahd, 1426/2005–2006) 2:473–474. The Brethren of Purity, On Magic I, 44–45 (Arabic), 116–118 (English). Abū l-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿ ādin al-jawāhir, ed. Kamāl Marʿī, 4 vols. (Beirut 2005), 2:133. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 2: 10; The Brethren of Purity, On the Natural Sciences, 19–23; Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 3:13. Ibn Taymiyya, al-Nubuwwat, ed. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Ṭweiān, 2 vols. (Riyadh: Aḍwāʾ al-Salaf, 2000), 1:403–405.

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Contrary to what one would expect, he does not seem to denounce them as mages or authors on siḥr. The case is similar with Ibn Khaldūn (732–808/1332–1406), who dedicates long sections of his Muqqadima to defining, explicating, and denouncing the occult sciences: magic, the science of letters, astrology, alchemy, and divination. He even decries the author of the Ghāya and Rutba (whom he believes to be Maslama al-Majrītī) and Jābir b. Ḥayyān as arch-sorcerers of the West and East, respectively, adding al-Būnī and Ibn ʿArabī to the list of infamy.143 Yet, the Rasāʾil are conspicuously absent from the entire work, especially as authors on magic.144 De Callataÿ and Moureau argue for the impact of the Ikhwān on him, and, taking into account his knowledge of the Ghāya and Rutba, they suggest that Ibn Khaldūn followed other thinkers and considered Maslama al-Majrītī the author of the Rasāʾil; this implies that the denunciation of al-Majrītī is also a denunciation of the Ikhwān. After all, if Ibn Khaldūn did derive some of his ideas from the Rasāʾil, it would be counterintuitive to denounce them harshly by name, as he does with Maslama al-Majrītī and Jābir b. Ḥayyān. Nevertheless, this remains speculative, especially given that he speaks of al-Majrītī only as the author of the Ghāya and Rutba. The intellectual influence of the Rasāʾil on the thought of Ibn Khaldūn is yet to be fully substantiated. Some propose that he derived his idea of the evolutionary potential of species, especially humans, from the Ikhwān, but he could have also been exposed to such ideas from others, such as Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (597–672/1201–1274).145 The fact that both the Rasāʾil and the Muqaddima refer to the science of letters has been used to forge a link between the texts, but the alphanumerical theory of the Ikhwān differs markedly from the Sufi-oriented ʿilm al-ḥurūf (science of letters), which began to develop and become systematized from the sixth/twelfth century. They have different epistemological foundations: the Ikhwān’s is naturalistic and arrived at by intellection, while Ibn Khaldūn’s is revelatory and downplays the intellect.146

143 144

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Ibn Khaldūn, al-Muqaddima, ed. Darwīsh Juwaidī (Beirut: al-Maktaba l-ʿAsriyya, 2000), 482–483, 485, 488. As de Callataÿ and Moureau highlight, some literature overstated the influence of the Rasāʾil on the thought of Ibn Khaldūn. On their argument for the impact of the Brethren of Purity on him, see de Callataÿ and Moureau, “Again on Maslama,” 338–341. Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah. An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal, 3 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 2:423; de Callataÿ and Moureau, “Again on Maslama,” 337–338; Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, The Nasirean Ethics, trans. G.M. Wickens (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964), 49–50, 78–79. Saif, “From Ġāyat al-ḥakīm to Šams al-maʿārif,” 316–317, 326–330; Ibn Khaldūn, Al-Muqqadima, 488–490.

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There is nothing in the Muqaddima that shows Ibn Khaldūn’s familiarity with the Ikhwān or any of its members as proponents of magic or sorcery. However, if he had at his disposal the shorter version (52a), he would have had no reason to denounce them as sorcerers or mages. As noted above, 52a contains no practical elements and is very “objective” in its tone. This might also be the reason that they were excluded from the anti-magic discourse of Ibn Taymiyya, who had perhaps likewise read only 52a. The best candidates for demonstrating a deep influence of the Ikhwān’s epistle on magic are the informally networked occultists and lettrists self-styled as the neo-Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, who were influential cultivators of the occult sciences in Timurid, Mamluk, and Ottoman domains. Among its best known members are Sayyid Ḥusayn al-Akhlāṭī (d. 799/1397); ʿAbd al-Raḥmān alBisṭāmī (d. 858/1454), Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Turka Iṣfahānī (d. 835/1432), and Sharaf alDīn ʿAlī Yazdī (d. 858/1454), in whose works al-Būnī’s influence is detected. This association is probably due to “the Pythagorean and Neoplatonic philosophical orientation of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ or the shroud of anonymity which lent both authority and mystery to their Rasāʾil.”147 In addition to his erudition in the science of letters, al-Bisṭāmī was acquainted with ancient and medieval philosophy and occult sciences, as demonstrated by the list of sources he provides in his autobiographical account Durrat tāj al-rasāʾil (“The crown jewel of the epistles”) and Shams al-āfāq fī ʿilm alḥurūf wa-l-awfāq (“The sun of horizons on the science of letters and magic squares”). This list includes some ps.-Aristotelian Hermetica and Ghāyat alḥakīm, but not Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ.148 Furthermore, his Shams al-āfāq

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İlker Evrim Binbaş, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī and the Islamicate Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 8–15, es8, 104–113; Matthew Melvin-Kouski, “The New Brethren of Purity: Ibn Turka and the Renaissance of Neopythagoreanism in the Early Modern Persian Cosmopolis,” in Companion to the Reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism, ed. Irene Caiazzo and Constantin Macris, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming); Cornell Fleischer, “Ancient Wisdom and New Sciences: Prophecies and the Ottoman Court in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries,” in Falnama: The Book of Omens, ed. Massumeh Farhad and Serpil Bağcı (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009), 232–243; Gardiner, “Esotericism in a Manuscript Culture,” 156–157, 322– 325; Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “The Quest for a Universal Science: The Occult Philosophy of Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Turka Iṣfahānī (1369–1432) and Intellectual Millenarianism in Early Timurid Iran” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2012); and see Noah Gardiner’s and Matthew MelvinKoushki’s chapters in this volume. Binbaş, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran, 105; London, British Library, Add MS 7494, fols. 4r–6r. This list is studied by Noah Gardiner, “The Occultist Encyclopedism of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī,” Mamlūk Studies Review 20 (2017): 3–38.

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reveals no conceptual parallels that could testify to their influence or that of the epistle on magic particularly. It contains a table on the lunar mansions, but it is clearly derived from al-Būnī, one of the major sources of this work, rather than 52b.149 It seems that there is no real influence in these works of the epistle on magic specifically or the Rasāʾil generally. This survey does not, of course, deal with all the readers of the Rasāʾil. It is impossible, so far, to speak of a deep and lasting impact of Epistle 52b or 52a, except on Ghāyat al-ḥakīm. It is clear that Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī’s work on magic was connected to 52b through borrowings and also by possibly being an expansion of 52b. The lack of mention of the Ikhwān in Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddima and in Ibn Taymiyya’s works begins to show the insubstantial recognition of the Ikhwān as authors on magic. This could also mean that 52a is the version accessed by these intellectuals or that their knowledge of the Rasāʾil itself was not so intimate. With al-Būnī, the only indicator of reception is the lunar-mansions list, which seems to be taken from 52b, as attested by linguistic borrowings. As shown, no influence is detected in the works of al-Bisṭāmī, a member of the neo-Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ network.

5

Conclusion

This article sought to provide a thorough analysis of the Ikhwān’s conceptualization of magic based on the longer version of their epistle on magic (52b). Unlike the shorter version (52a), its detailed content, esoteric layers, and personal tone is in better alignment with the rest of the Rasāʾil. Once this alignment has been established, it becomes clear how the layering of meaning the Ikhwān give to magic encapsulates their ideas on the enlightenment of the soul and the sublimation of leadership and state, the ultimate objective of the Rasāʾil. To the Ikhwān, siḥr is essentially any act of transformation directed by will: And know, O brother (may God support you with a spirit from Him) that all actions, creations, crafts, professions, and all that takes place among people, giving and taking, buying and selling, talking and responding, disagreement in creeds, establishing proof and evidence, and anything that involves violating the norm and transforming essences, converting things from one thing to another, and mixing them with one another—all of this

149

London, British Library, Add MS 7494, fols. 87r–89v.

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is magic (siḥr) and will. All the [the people in the] world depend on knowledge thereof, but everyone acts upon it according to their abilities.150 Cooking, making, transforming matter, minds, or souls, and medicine are all siḥr. According to the Ikhwān, one must not adhere to a single assumed definition or commit to one of the many that they give us. Instead, the reader must navigate a polysemous discourse that exercises the various faculties of the soul: sensory and intellectual. Perhaps the Ikhwān aim with this epistle, as with the rest of their encyclopedia, to hone the soul of the reader through the very act of reading, especially reading their Rasāʾil and the subtle meanings in it, derived from an all-embracing attitude toward various sources of knowledge: And know, oh brother, that we do not oppose any science nor are we intolerant toward (nataʿassab ʿalā) any religious school (madhhab), nor do we cast aside any book among the books of the sages and philosophers, [containing] all sorts of knowledge that they have set down and authored and [containing] the subtleties of meaning that they had extracted with their intellects and scrutiny.151 One wonders if this dilution of the term “magic,” which distances it from sorcery, has limited the impact of the epistle on Islamicate magical traditions or even stood in the way of recognizing the Ikhwān as authors on magic. The influence of 52b apparently occurred through the reception of Ghāyat al-ḥakīm of Maslama al-Qurṭubī, who was keen to be known as one of the Ikhwān, as we see in his Rutbat al-ḥakīm. Despite being received enthusiastically in early modern Europe as the Picatrix, translated into Spanish and Latin in the second half of the seventh/thirteenth century, the Ghāya’s influence is difficult to discern in late medieval and early modern Islamicate occult thought. Nevertheless, it is not an exaggeration to say that it, like 52b, paved the way for later magical and even lettrist traditions by reworking the Neoplatonic worldview in a way that accommodates ideas of volitional causality, allowing for the incorporation of transitive and theurgic magical practices in the dynamics of the universe. We have shown that the length and themes of 52b attest to its importance and intellectual weight in the Rasāʾil. This is not surprising, given that the very identity of the Ikhwān is vested with magic. They write in 52b: 150 151

Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atıf Efendi 1681, fol. 546r; Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4:340. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Epistle 48 (Fī kayfiyat al-daʿwa ilā allāh, “The Method of Calling to God”), 4:167.

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We have called this epistle of ours “the epistle on magic and invocations” and revealed our discourse on what they are, the number of their divisions, and methods of their practice, in order for our loyal brethren to infer the hidden secrets when they investigate them with luminescent souls and virtuous talents, and [when] they become thoroughly occupied with examining them with deliberation and reflection, in order to need no one else for [obtaining] the necessities of life that they require. And if they reach this rank and attain this grade, it is appropriate for us to call them the Brethren of Purity. Know, O Brother, that the truth behind this name is the quality (al-khāṣṣa) that exists in those who are worthy of it, in reality and not by way of metaphor only.152

Acknowledgements Research for this article was facilitated during my work as a fellow in the research project “Speculum Arabicum: Objectifying the contribution of the Arab-Muslim world to the history of science and ideas: the sources and resources of medieval encyclopaedism” at the Université Catholique de Louvain, 2012–2017. I am grateful to Godefroid de Callataÿ, Sébastien Moureau, Travis Zadeh, and Francesca Leoni for their feedback. I am also deeply indebted to my friend A.O.M. for his generousity and help in accessing some of the manuscripts consulted for this project.

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Edited Texts Badawī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, ed., al-Uṣūl al-yūnāniyya lil-naẓariyyāt al-siyāsiyya fī l-Islām. Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahḍa al-Miṣriyya, 1954. Badawī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, ed. Uthūlūjiā Aflūṭīn ʿind al-ʿarab. Qum: Bīdār, 1413/1992. The Brethren of Purity. On Magic I: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistle 52a, edited by Godefroid de Callataÿ and Bruno Halflants. Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2011. The Brethren of Purity. On the Natural Sciences: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistles 15–21, ed. and trans. Carmela Baffioni. Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2013. The Brethren of Purity. Epistles of the Brethren of Purity: On Astronomia: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistle 3, edited and translated by F. Jamil Ragep and Taro Mimura. Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Institute, 2015. The Brethren of Purity. Sciences of the Soul and Intellect. Part I: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistles 32–36, edited and translated by Paul E. Walker, Ismail K. Poonawala, David Simonowitz, and Godefroid de Callataÿ. Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2016. Ibn Khaldūn. The Muqaddimah. An Introduction to History, translated by Franz Rosenthal. 3 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.

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Ibn Khaldūn. Al-Muqaddima, edited by Darwīsh Juwaydī. Beirut: al-Maktaba alʿAṣriyya, 2000. Ibn Taymiyya. al-Nubuwwāt, edited ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Ṭwayān. 2 vols. Riyadh: Aḍwāʾ alSalaf, 2000. Ibn Taymiyya. Bayān talbīs al-jahmiyya, 8 vols. Majmaʿ al-Malik Fahd, 1426/2005. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ. Al-risāla al-jāmiʿa, edited by Jamīl Ṣalība, 2 vols. Damascus, 1949– 1951. Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ. Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, 4 vols. Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 2008. al-Masʿūdī, Abū l-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī. Murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawāhir, edited by Kamāl Marʿī, 4 vols. Beirut 2005. Plotinus. The Enneads, translated by Stephen MacKenna. London: Penguin Books, 1991. al-Qurṭubī, Maslama. Ghāyat al-ḥakīm wa-aḥaqq al-natījatayn bi-l-taqdīm, edited by Helmut Ritter. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1933. al-Qurṭubī, Maslama. Picatrix: das Ziel des Weisen, translated into German by Hellmut Ritter and Martin Plessner. London: Warburg Institute, 1962. al-Ṭūsī, Nāṣir al-Dīn. The Nasirean Ethics, translated by G.M. Wickens. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964.

Secondary Sources Adamson, Peter. The Arabic Plotinus: A Philosophical Study of the Theology of Aristotle. London: Duckworth, 2002. Baffioni, Carmela. “The Scope of the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ.” In Epistles of The Brethren of Purity: The Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ and their Rasāʾil: An Introduction, edited by Nader elBizri, 101–122. Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2008. Bausani, Alessandro. L’ Enciclopedia dei Fratelli della Purità: Riassunto, con introduzione e breve commento dei 52 Trattati o Epistole degli Ikhwān aṣ-Ṣafā’. Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1978. Binbaş, İlker Evrim. Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī and the Islamicate Republic of Letters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. el-Bizri, Nader. “Prologue.” In Epistles of The Brethren of Purity: The Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ and their Rasāʾil: An Introduction, edited by Nader el-Bizri, 3–5. Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2008. Blake, Stephen. Astronomy and Astrology in the Islamic World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Burnett, Charles. “Arabic, Greek and Latin Works on Astrological Magic Attributed to Aristotle.” In Pseudo Aristotle in the Middle Ages: The Theology and Other Texts, edited by J. Kray, W.F. Ryan, and C.B. Schmitt, 84–97. London: Warburg Institute, 1989. de Callataÿ, Godefroid. “The Classification of Knowledge in the Rasāʾil.” In Epistles of The Brethren of Purity: The Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ and their Rasāʾil: An Introduction, edited

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by Nader el-Bizri, 58–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2008. de Callataÿ, Godefroid. “Les sabéens de Ḥarrān dans l’oeuvre d’Yves Marquet.” In Images et Magie: Picatrix entre Orient et Occident, edited by Jean-Patrice Boudet, Anna Caiozzo, and Nicolas Weill-Parot, 41–56. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011. de Callataÿ, Godefroid. “Magia in al-Andalus: Rasāʾil Ijwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rutbat al-ḥakīm y Ghāyat al-ḥakīm (Picatrix).” Al-Qantara 34, no. 2 (2013): 297–344. de Callataÿ, Godefroid. “Introduction to Epistle 36.” In Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, Sciences of the Soul and Intellect. Part I: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistles 32–36, edited by Paul E. Walker, Ismail K. Poonawala et al., 137–190. Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2015. de Callataÿ, Godefroid, and Sébastien Moureau, “Towards the Critical Edition of the Rutbat al-ḥakīm: A Few Preliminary Observations.” Arabica 62 (2015): 385–394. de Callataÿ, Godefroid, and Sébastien Moureau. “Again on Maslama Ibn Qāsim alQurṭubī, the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’ and Ibn Khaldūn: New Evidence from Two Manuscripts of Rutbat al-ḥakīm.” Al-Qanṭara 37 (July–December, 2016): 329–372. Coulon, Jean-Charles. “La magie islamique et le corpus bunianum au Moyen Âge.” PhD diss., Paris, Université Paris IV–Sorbonne, 2013. Ebstein, Michael. Mysticism and Philosophy in al-Andalus: Ibn Masarra, Ibn ʿArabī, and the Ismāʿīlī Tradition. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Fierro, Maribel. “Bāṭinism in al-Andalus. Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī (d. 353/964), Author of the Rutbat al-Ḥakīm and the Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm (Picatrix).” Studia Islamica 84 (1996): 87–112. Fleischer, Cornell. “Ancient Wisdom and New Sciences: Prophecies and the Ottoman Court in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries.” In Falnama: The Book of Omens, edited by Massumeh Farhad and Serpil Bağcı, 232–243. London: Thames and Hudson, 2009. Gardiner, Noah. “Esotericism in a Manuscript Culture: Aḥmad al-Būnī and His Readers through the Mamlūk Period.” PhD diss., Ann Arbor University of Michigan, 2014. Gardiner, Noah. “The Occultist Encyclopedism of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī.” Mamlūk Studies Review 20 (2017): 3–38. Green, Tamara. The City of the Moon God: Religious Traditions of Harran. Leiden: Brill, 1992. Grignaschi, Mario. “L’origine et les métamorphoses du Sirr al-ʾasrâr.” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 43 (1976): 7–112. Grignaschi, Mario. “La diffusion du Secretum Secretorum dans l’Europe occidentale.” Archive d’histoire doctrinale et litterature du moyen age 48 (1980): 7–70. Grignaschi, Mario. “Remarques sur la formation et l’interprétation du Sirr al-asrâr.” In

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the Reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism, edited by Irene Caiazzo and Constantin Macris, 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming. Michot, Yahya. “Ibn Taymiyya on Astrology: Annotated Translation of Three Fatwas.” Journal of Islamic Studies 11, no. 2 (2000): 147–208. Michot, Yahya. “Misled and Misleading … Yet Central in Their Influence: Ibn Taymiyya’s Views on the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ.” In The Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ and Their Rasāʾil: An Introduction, edited by Nader el-Bizri, 139–179. Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2008. Netton, Ian Richard. Muslim Neoplatonists: An Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity, Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ. London: Allen & Unwin, 1982. Peters, F.E. “Hermes and Harran: The Roots of Arabic-Islamic Occultism.” In Intellectual Studies on Islam: Essays Written in Honour of Martin B. Dickson, edited by Michael Mazzaoui and Vera B. Moreen, 185–215. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990. Pingree, David. “Some Sources of the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 43 (1980): 1–15. Pingree, David. “Astrology.” In Religion, Learning and Science in the ʿAbbasid Period, edited by M.J.L. Young, J.D. Latham and R.B. Serjeant, 290–300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pingree, David. “The Sabians of Harran and the Classical Tradition.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 9 (2002): 8–35. Poonawala, Ismail K. “Why We Need an Arabic Critical Edition with an Annotated English Translation of the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ.” In The Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ and Their Rasāʾil: An Introduction, edited by Nader el-Bizri, 33–57. Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2008. Saif, Liana. “Between Medicine and Magic: Spiritual Aetiology and Therapeutics in Medieval Islam.” In Demons and Illness from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, edited by Siam Bhayro and Catherine Rider, 313–338. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Saif, Liana. “From Ġāyat al-ḥakīm to Šams al-maʿārif : Ways of Knowing and Paths of Power in Medieval Islam.” In “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” edited by Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner. Special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 297–345. Saif, Liana. “Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ’s Religious Reform and Magic: Beyond the Ismāʿīlī Hypothesis.” Journal of Islamic Studies 30, no. 1 (2019): 34–68. Saif, Liana. “What is Islamic Esotericism?.” In “Islamic Esotericism,” edited by Liana Saif, special issue of Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism 7, no. 1 (2019): 1–59. de Smet, Daniel. “Yves Marquet, les Iḫwān al-Ṣafā’ et le pythagorisme.” Journal Asiatique 295 (2007): 91–500. Stern, S.M. “New Information about the Authors of the ‘Epistles of the Sincere Brethren.’” Islamic Studies 3 (1964): 405–428.

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chapter 5

Sabian Astral Magic as Soteriology in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s al-Sirr al-maktūm Michael Noble

1

Introduction

The Islamic philosopher-theologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210) was one of the most prominent, influential, and prolific writers in the post-Avicennan period.1 Many of his works evince a deep critical engagement with the philosophy of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 428/1037). Among al-Rāzī’s earliest works was al-Sirr al-maktūm (“The hidden secret,” henceforth al-Sirr), a magisterial study of astral magic.2 While much of it is devoted to the recording of celestialsublunary correspondences and the practical details of the craft (ṣināʿa), alSirr contains one of the most philosophically sophisticated theories of astral magic ever produced in the Islamicate world. Drawing on the astrology of Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī (d. 171/787) and the cosmology and psychology of Avicenna, al-Sirr presents the craft as the culmination of philosophy by means of which the soul can realize perfection: it is an occult soteriology.3 The Sabians, to whom al-Sirr attributes this craft, were a historical group representing the last vestiges of Mesopotamian astrolatrous religion surviving into the Islamic period, but, in the Islamicate historical imagination of the sixth/twelfth century, the Sabians came to represent any form of learned pagan culture—be it Greek, Indian, or Mesopotamian—that was versed in

1 On al-Rāzī’s biography, see Frank Griffel, “On Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Life and the Patronage He Received,” Journal of Islamic Studies 18, no. 3 (2007): 313–344. 2 Because the definition of “magic” is the subject of interminable scholarly debate, I shall restrict the meaning of the phrase “astral magic” to that provided by al-Rāzī in his work and discussed below. The only existing edition available of al-Sirr is the undated lithograph, produced by Mīrzā Muḥammad Shīrāzī in Cairo. All subsequent references to the work are from this edition. For a chronology of his works, see Eşref Altaş, “Fahreddin er-Rāzī’nin Eserlerinin Kronolojisi,” in İslâm düşüncesinin dönüşüm çağında Fahreddin er-Râzî, ed. Ömer Türker and Osman Demir (Istanbul: İSAM Yayınları, 2013), 91–164. 3 On Abū Maʿshar’s theories on astral influence, see Liana Saif, The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 9–26.

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natural philosophy and steeped in the worship of the heavenly bodies.4 The Sabians also stimulated the interest of al-Rāzī’s predecessor, the philosophertheologian Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Shahrastānī (d. 548/1153), with whose heresiological work Kitāb al-Milal wa-l-niḥal (“Book of the religions and sects”) al-Rāzī was deeply familiar.5 For the Sabians provide al-Shahrastānī with a useful analytical framework in which to organize those belief systems, such as the Indic, which are rooted in soil foreign to the Abrahamic scriptural traditions. Although more clearly articulated in al-Sirr, the Sabian body of theory and practice that emerges from the writings of both philosopher-theologians coordinated cosmology, astrology, alchemy, medicine, and psychology to elevate natural philosophy to the level of an alternative soteriology. For the Sabians, an infinitely intricate pattern of hidden celestial-sublunary connections bound together the reality disclosed by sense perception to the embodied human soul. Their soteriological vision identified man’s salvation in his potential to transcend his embodied existence by forging a noetic connection with the spirits animating the celestial spheres, the motions of which determined the rhythms of change and impermanence that characterize the terrestrial plane. Since they knew of the sublunary effects of their motions, this connection imbued man not only with knowledge of the future and matters which lie beyond the ken of human perception but also with power over generation and corruption in the sublunary world. Working with this intricate pattern, employing sacrifice, special diet, suffumigation, ceremonial clothing, and sacred liturgy, the Sabians’ astral ritual established a noetic link with the operative planet of his need

4 See Kevin van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 121–234; Godefroid de Callataÿ, “The Ṣābians of Ṣāʿid alAndalūsī,” Studia graeco-arabica 7 (2017): 291–306; Alexandre M. Roberts, “Being a Ṣābian at Court in Tenth-Century Baghdad,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 137, no. 2 (2017): 253–277. 5 Henceforth, I shall refer to Kitāb al-Milal wa-l-niḥal simply as al-Milal. I rely on the edition prepared by Amīr ʿAlī Mahna and ʿAlī Ḥasan Fāʿūr (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, 1993). For a succinct biography of al-Shahrastānī, see Toby Mayer, Keys to the Arcana: Shahrastānī’s Esoteric Commentary on the Qurʾān (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 3–19. For a partial English translation of alMilal, see Muslim Sects and Divisions: The Section on Muslim Sects in Kitāb al-Milal wa’l-Niḥal, trans. Abdul Khaliq Kazi and John G. Flynn (London: Kegan Paul, 1984); for a French translation, see Livre des religions et des sects, trans. Daniel Gimaret, Guy Monnot, and Jean Jolivet, 2 vols. (Paris: UNESCO, 1986–1993). For an analysis of the section treating of the Sabians in al-Milal, see Bruce Lawrence, Shahrastani on the Indian Religions, ed. L. Laeyendecker and J. Waardenburg (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 63–74.

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in order to fulfill his purpose, be it that of self-transformation or of a transitive sublunary goal. In the perfection of such knowledge and power, man could transcend his own humanity to join the ontological rank of the celestial spirits. A corollary of this perfection was his ability to work marvels here on earth. In al-Shahrastānī’s al-Milal, thaumaturgical power was wielded also by Indian Brahmins who, belonging to a learned pagan culture, are nevertheless treated separately from the Sabians, along with other Indic subgroups. They are portrayed as masters of meditation, the concentrated focus of which could direct the transitive power of an Avicennan internal sense-faculty, called the wahm, to work prodigies. In al-Sirr, al-Rāzī invokes Indian sources along with Avicennan psychology to amplify the importance of spiritual training, ritual, meditation and the power of the wahm to establish the noetic connection necessary for the occult soteriology. With the aim of proposing al-Shahrastānī as an important influence on al-Rāzī’s al-Sirr, this article will outline the main contours of the Sabian system of belief and practice as portrayed in al-Milal; touch briefly on alShahrastānī’s depiction of the Brahmin masters of meditation; and then sketch al-Rāzī’s elaboration of the occult soteriology in al-Sirr. Forging a stronger bond between Sabian practice and Indian meditation, this elaboration adapted the Avicennan naturalistic theory of prophethood to account for the power of the wahm to facilitate connection with the celestial souls and to both transform the soul of the practitioner and act with thaumaturgic effect on terrestrial phenomena.

2

Al-Shahrastānī on the Sabians

That al-Rāzī was well familiar with al-Shahrastānī’s celebrated study in comparative religion and philosophy al-Milal is evident from al-Munāẓarāt, al-Rāzī’s autobiographical account of his travels and debates in Transoxania.6 While the first of the two main divisions of al-Milal treats of religions rooted in recognized Abrahamic scriptural traditions, the second treats of those, such as the Sabians, the philosophers and the Indians, who stand in opposition to the religions based on a prophetic dispensation, claiming to rely purely on “sound primordial predisposition” (al-fiṭra al-salīma), on “perfect intellect” (al-ʿaql al-

6 Fathalla Kholeif, A Study on Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and his Controversies in Transoxania (Beirut: Dar el-Machreq, 1966), 62–63.

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kāmil), and on “pure mind” (al-dhihn al-ṣāfī).7 The second division begins with a detailed treatment of the Sabians, which provides the analytical framework for his subsequent discussions of the other groups, particularly the Indians.

3

Sabian Belief and Practice

Less an actual doctrinal school than a general current of thought characterized by a resurgent form of degraded, popularized Avicennism, the philosophical orientation of the Sabianism depicted in al-Shahrastānī’s al-Milal enshrined the following: (1) an angelo-astrolatrous belief in the heavenly bodies as the proximate causes of change in the sublunary world and the worthy objects of human devotion; (2) a naturalistic psychology; and (3) antipathy toward the Islamic institution of prophethood. Insofar as Avicenna never defended such attitudes, this trend in thought cannot be said per se to be Avicennan. It is possible, however, to select creatively from Avicenna’s thought certain arguments that can be deployed to defend them.8 Sabian antipathy to the institution of prophethood, which we encounter as a prominent feature of Sabian belief in al-Shahrastānī’s al-Milal, is the natural corollary of their angelo-astrolatrous belief system and naturalistic psychology: God is absolutely transcendent; the spiritual beings (rūḥāniyyāt) that govern the planets provide the only effective mediation between Man and God; any man can train his own soul to connect with and receive knowledge and occult power from them. Prophecy and knowledge of the unseen world are thus no longer the monopoly of the Islamic prophets. In al-Shahrastānī’s typology of religions, the Sabians occupy a liminal category that separates the Abrahamic faiths from those religions and philosophies that deny altogether the institution of prophethood. Restricting themselves to the revelation of Agathodaimon and Hermes, who taught them the names of the zodiac, the heavenly bodies, and their relationship to sublunary change, the Sabians’ soteriological paragon was that of Hermes who, providing the paradigm for the planetary ascent ritual in al-Sirr, divested himself (khalaʿa) of the outer garment of humanity to ascend to the heavenly realm.9 It is for this reason that al-Shahrastānī reports the Sabian claim that “Sabianism is 7 Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 305. 8 Jean Michot, “L’avicennisation de la sunna, du ṣabéisme au leurre de la ḥanîfiyya. À propos du Livre des religions et des sectes, II d’ al-Shahrastânî,”Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 35 (1993): 113–120. 9 Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 346.

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being released from the [ontological] shackle of humanity (al-ṣabwa al-inḥilāl ʿan qayd al-rijāl).”10 As man occupies the highest ontological rank in the sublunary world, his release from the “shackles” of his own humanity would entail his salvific liberation from his terrestrial embodied existence and his elevation to the ontological rank of the spiritual beings that animate the celestial spheres. While al-Shahrastānī’s Sabians affirm a wise creator God, His utter transcendence demands that humans petition the intercession of the Spiritual beings whose purity and sanctity qualify them uniquely for this soteriological role.11 Because they are the proximate causes of the perfection of all sublunary phenomena, including man, it is to the spiritual beings and the planets that serve as their temples (hayākil) that the Sabian turns in pursuit of his own perfection.12 Even on the terrestrial plane, presiding over each type of phenomenon perceived by the Sabian eye is a hierarchy of spiritual beings that are equated with angels. Thus, beneath the authority of a universal spirit which governs the rain operates a manifold host guiding the descent of each particular raindrop: Moreover, the influences could be universal, issuing from a universal spiritual being; or they could be particular, issuing from a particular spiritual being. So, together with the genus of rain there is an angel, [just as] there is with each raindrop an angel. There are [other] spiritual beings that govern metereological phenomena including those that rise from the earth and descend thereon such as rain, snow, ice, and wind; those that descend from the sky, such as thunderbolts and meteorites; and those that occur in the atmosphere, such as thunder, lightning, clouds, fog, rainbows, comets; other spiritual beings govern the snow, rains, wind, comets, thunder, lightning, clouds, earthquakes.13 But the superiority of the celestial spirits to Man was guaranteed by their essential transcendence beyond space and time, being naturally disposed toward

10

11 12 13

Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 308. The word qayd carries a technical philosophical meaning of “individuating specificity;” see Ayman Shihadeh’s “Avicenna’s Corporeal Form and Proof of Prime Matter in Twelfth-Century Critical Philosophy: Abū l-Barakāt, al-Masʿūdī and al-Rāzī,” Oriens 42 (2014): 384. In this context, however, I translate it more literally as “ontological shackle,” in order to convey the sense of dissolution, release, and untying connoted by the verbal noun inḥilāl. Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 308. Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 310. Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 310.

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purity and the worship of God.14 Being pure lights (anwār maḥḍa) created ex nihilo (ubdiʿat ibdāʿan lā min shayʾ) neither from matter nor hyle, they were held to be so subtle that neither vision nor intellect nor imagination could apprehend them. By way of contrast, humans are composite, made of matter and form, subject to base desire and anger, by which the Spiritual beings are unencumbered.15 Unlike humans, they are pure form, abstracted from matter which is nonexistence (ʿadamiyya), the source of all evil, corruption, and ignorance.16 They do not oscillate between good and evil.17 Moreover, they excel corporeal beings ( jusmāniyyāt) in both knowledge of unseen matters and action [in worship]. As for knowledge, their complete awareness of matters that are hidden from us (iḥāṭatuhum bi-mughayyabāt al-umūr) and their cognizance of states that will affect us in the future, cannot be denied, because their knowledge is universal, while the knowledge of corporeal beings is particular; their knowledge is active (ʿulūmuhum fiʿliyya), while the knowledge of corporeal beings is passive; their knowledge [springs from] their natural disposition ( fiṭra), while the knowledge of corporeal bodies is acquired (kasbiyya). Thus, in these aspects is realized their nobility over corporeal beings.18 Belonging to a completely transcendent ontological order, in relation to which physical reality is merely lesser and derivative, the hope of men, according to the teaching of Agathodaimon and Hermes, is to place trust in their intercession. For men, they are gods (āliha and arbāb).19 To secure this intercession, man must establish a special correspondence (munāsaba) between them and his soul by exerting himself diligently in spiritual discipline in the imitation of their purity and freedom from base desire. Success in this enterprise is ensured by a synergy between his own efforts and the aid of the spiritual beings themselves, whose succor he entreats by way of prayer, fasting, charity, ritual diet, sacrifices, incense offerings, and the repetition of incantations.20

14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 308. Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 311–314. Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 318. Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 332. Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 322. Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 308–309. Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 309.

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If successful in his devotions, the Sabian worshiper will achieve within his soul a state of receptivity (istiʿdād) to their revelations and an ability to call on their aid directly (istimdād): Thus will there occur to our souls a receptivity and ability to entreat [their aid] (istiʿdād wa-istimdād) without intermediary. Indeed, judgment on our [practice] and judgment on [the practice] of him who claims divine revelation is that [both follow] the same procedure (bal yakūn ḥukmu-nā wa-ḥukmu man yaddaʿī al-waḥy ʿalā watīra wāḥida).21 Drawing on Avicenna’s naturalistic theory of imaginational prophethood, and especially the last section of Avicenna’s Ishārāt, al-Shahrastānī’s allusion to the use of ritual and spiritual discipline to gain noetic connection with the spiritual beings, is, as we shall see, developed much further in al-Rāzī’s al-Sirr. For al-Shahrastānī’s Sabians, their method of achieving this noetic connection is the same as that which produces the revelation claimed by the prophets of the Abrahamic faiths. A sound understanding of the naturalistic means by which this connection is established thus democratizes revelation and renders otiose the institution of prophethood on which the Abrahamic traditions are grounded: for, in essence, the prophets and the Sabian divines observe the same procedure for revelation. In imitating the planets through mimetic astral ritual, man becomes closer to the spiritual beings which govern them, and thence to God. In this way his requests may be fulfilled: It is necessary for individuals, in their actions and motions, to imitate [lit., follow] the traces of the spiritual beings (iqtifāʾ āthār al-rūḥāniyyāt) in their actions and their motions such that they closely observe the states of the temples (hayākil) [i.e., the planets] and the motions of their spheres [with respect to] time and space; substance and configuration ( jawhar wa-hayʾa); garments, incense, incantation (taʿzīm), astral ritual (tanjīm), invocation (duʿāʾ), and specific need (ḥāja khāṣṣa) [governed by] each temple. This is in order to become closer to the temple; thence to the spiritual being that is specific to it; thence to the Lord of Lords, the Cause of Causes, such that his need is fulfilled and request granted.22

21 22

Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 309. Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 335–336.

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The Shahrastānīan Sabian follows the traces of the planet that has dominion over the nature of his specific need; he gathers together in mimetic astral ritual those sublunary phenomena that are governed by its motion; in imitating the celestial sphere’s motions and by reflecting its substance and appearance in his ritual garments, incense, and invocation, he comes nearer to the spiritual being that governs it and thence to God and the fulfilment of his need.

4

Perfection, Mimesis, and the Eschatological Return

The eschatological return to the world of the spiritual beings represents the denouement of the drama of cosmogenesis and thus the final perfection of all subordinate spirits. The return of the latter to the former is the process by which the human soul is perfected: The spiritual beings are the principles of existing things; their world [represents] the eschatological return of spirits (ʿālamu-hā maʿād al-arwāḥ). The principles are essentially nobler than, ontologically prior to, and higher in rank and level than all other existing things that have come about through their mediation. Moreover, their world is the world of the eschatological return (ʿālam al-maʿād); and the eschatological return is perfection (al-maʿād kamāl); so their world is the world of perfection (ʿālam al-kamāl).23 To bring into sharp focus their soteriological aim of actualizing the angelic principle that lies latent in the human soul, al-Shahrastānī’s Sabians contrast two definitions of humanity, cast in terms of the nature of the soul and its relation to embodiment: one that understands man in the context of his sublunary existence, and the other that understands man insofar as he is to be contrasted with the angels. Thus, while the former definition maintains that the soul is the perfection of the body, the latter proposes that the soul is the perfection of the body to the extent to which the intellectual principle is actualized. Man is man if this principle merely lies in potential, but man is angel to the extent that it is actualized, to become the guiding principle of the body, just as the intellectual principle is the guiding principle for the motion of the celestial spheres.24

23 24

Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 337. Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 348.

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The degree to which the Sabian can imitate the angels that govern the celestial spheres is thus the degree to which he can bring the intellectual principle, that lies in potential in his soul, into actuality, and realize his own perfection and angelic nature. Concerning the ability of the human soul to realize its intellectual potential, al-Shahrastānī’s Sabians say: As for the intellect, it is a faculty or disposition (hayʾa) of the soul, endowed with the propensity to receive the essences of things, abstracted from matter (mustaʿidda li-qabūl māhiyyāt al-ashyāʾ al-mujarrada ʿan almādda); with respect to it, people are on equal footing (ʿalā istiwāʾ min al-qadam). Difference arises [by reason of] two matters: one of them is beyond human control (iḍṭirārī) and relates to the temperament that facilitates the reception of the soul; the other is subject to choice, and that is a matter of effort that is effective in raising the veils of materiality and [a matter] of polishing from the soul the rust that hinders the inscription of intelligible forms (taṣqīl al-nafs ʿan al-ṣadaʾa al-māniʿa li-irtisām al-ṣuwar al-maʿqūla), such that, if the [exertion of such] effort reaches the furthest extent of perfection, then all would be on an equal footing and all would be the same (tasāwat al-aqdām wa-tashābahat al-aqdām.) So, no man excels another by [virtue of] prophethood, nor does any man dominate another, demanding that he be followed ( fa-lā yatafaḍḍalu bashar ʿalā bashar bi-l-nubūwwa, wa-lā yataḥakkamu aḥad ʿalā aḥad bi-l-istitbāʿ).25 The process of the intellectual abstraction from matter of the essences of sensible objects (tajrīd) has a distinctly Avicennan tone and provides the rationale for Sabian astral ritual, a hermeneutical process of cognition that returns the forms of sensibilia to their celestial origin. Equally Avicennan is the allusion to the inscription (irtisām) of intelligible forms in the Sabian’s soul after it has been polished from the “rust” of corporeal desire. All men have the ability to receive such inscription: thus does the Sabian religion break the monopoly of the Abrahamic prophets on revelation and bring to an end their claim to authority over men.

25

Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 347–348.

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Sabianism and the Delusion of Divinity

As a heresiological category, the Sabians provided al-Shahrastānī the theological space in which to frame a meta-history of religions that could account for the emergence of idolatry and, ultimately, the ego-inflation of tyrants, such as the Qurʾanic pharaoh, who were seduced from the Sabian religion by delusions of divinity. Al-Shahrastānī divides the Sabians into two groups, those who worship the seven planets directly and those who worship planetary idols. While both have fallen from the pure worship of God, the latter have fallen further than the former. The justification adopted by the former for their practice reasons that, because man cannot worship God except by intermediaries, he requires those intermediaries to be visible, that he might direct his veneration toward them; in learning astrology and the relationship between the heavenly bodies and sublunary sensibilia, he is able to perform rituals in worship of the planets, and he is able, by means of such rituals, to work wonders (ʿajab). Such rituals are referred to as “talismans,” co-ordinating planetary correspondences with invocations, evocations, and other ceremonial verbal acts, with suffumigations and the forging of rings. Al-Shahrastānī uses the word “talisman” primarily to refer to the astral ritual rather than the ring or idol that is manufactured as the physical product of the process. “Talisman” is thus primarily a process word.26 The error committed by this first group of Sabians is further compounded by the second group, who venerate planetary idols, reasoning that, because the planets rise and set, disappearing from view, idols (ashkhāṣ) must be wrought in lieu of the planets and worshiped for the fulfilment of the needs of that second group. Man thus declines from the worship of the transcendent God to pursue his own sublunary concerns.27 The Ḥanīfs, notional primordial monotheists who engage the Sabians in theological debate in al-Milal and whose views can safely be assumed to reflect al-Shahrastānī’s own, argue that Sabian decadence ends ultimately in the delusion of being a god on earth. They condemn what they view as the Sabian error that God delegated to the spiritual beings that are His creation complete authority in the supralunary cosmos to move the celestial spheres, and thus a

26

27

Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 308–309. On talismans see Liana Saif’s “From Ghāyat al-ḥakīm to Shams al-maʿārif : Ways of Knowing and Paths of Power in Medieval Islam,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 297–345. Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 358–361.

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fortiori authority over the sublunary world. Such people “believe the rūḥāniyyāt are gods (āliha) and the temples [i.e., the celestial spheres] are lords (arbāb),” represented by their idols; it is by means of these idols, which are cast at the correct astrological time, that they are able to effect change in this world.28 The Ḥanīfs observe, however, that the logic that informs such beliefs is vulnerable to the following criticism: surely the astrological configurations that prevailed over the birth of the idol maker were nobler and more perfect than those that obtained when the idol maker wrought his idol; this being the case, reason compels him to conclude that the one who is possessed of the knowledge of how to employ the celestial spheres and spiritual beings is more powerful than the idol that he fashions.29 It is precisely this logic which seduced Pharaoh to claim for himself divinity and lordship (al-ilāhiyya wa-l-rubūbiyya). Having originally cleaved to the doctrine of the Sabians (madhhab alṣābiʾa) he deviated ( fa-ṣabā) from it and summoned [the people declaring] “I am your Lord the Most High.”30 Reflecting on his divine pretensions, al-Shahrastānī says that Pharaoh wanted to penetrate the mysteries of creation by subjecting the celestial spheres and their movements to observation and analysis. Commenting on Q 40:36–37, he reports that Pharaoh wanted to build a lofty structure (ṣarḥ) like an observation tower (raṣad) by which he could attain [knowledge of] the movements of the celestial spheres and the heavenly bodies; [of] how they are composed; and [of] their structure, and the magnitude of their cycles and revolutions (kamiyyat adwāri-hā wa-akwāri-hā) that he might haply peer into the mystery of the ability to create ( yaṭṭaliʿ ʿalā sirr al-taqdīr fī l-ṣanʿa).31

28 29 30

31

Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 341. Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 341–342. Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 342. The quotation is from Q 79:24, in exegesis of which al-Rāzī says: “Pharaoh never claimed to be the creator of the world. Knowledge that one is not the creator of the world is self-evident [ḍarūrī]: he who is devoid of this knowledge is insane. Were he actually insane, God never would have sent to him a prophet” (Al-Rāzī, al-Tafsīr al-kabīr, 32 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1991), 31:43). Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 342. “O Hamān, construct for me a tower that I might haply reach the causes—the causes of the heavens—that I might peer on the god of Moses” (Q 40:36– 37).

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While both Pharaoh and Nimrod claimed to be “earthly gods” (ilāhān arḍiyyān) just like the heavenly rūḥānī gods, they were not seduced into believing that they were the creators of the world. Such would be the delusion of a lunatic. But rather, empowered by their knowledge of the heavens with control over sublunary phenomena, they became despots on earth and tyrants over men.32 Against the tyranny of Pharaoh, who falls from the worship of celestial intermediaries into the worship of his own vain passion for power, stands the prophet of the Ḥanīfs whose unique ontological position represents a conjunction between humanity and angelicity. His role as intermediary between Man and God guarantees the guidance of humanity and its freedom from tyranny. The prophet in one aspect resembles the species (nawʿ) of human; on the other, he resembles the type of angels, and, in bringing them together (bi-majmūʿihimā), he excels both species, such that his humanity is superior to the humanity of [members] of the [former] type in respect of temperament and propensity (mizāj wa-istiʿdād) and his angelicity (malakiyyatuhu) is superior to the angelicity of [members] of the latter type in respect of receptivity and the rendering of service (qabūlan wa-adāʾan) so that he is neither misled nor seduced into error in his human aspect, nor does he deviate [from the true religion], nor does he act tyrannically ( yaṭghā) in his angelic aspect.33 While for the Ḥanīfs, angelicity and humanity are combined in the soteriological figure of the prophet, the Sabians contend that the salvific path to perfection lies in angelomorphosis through spiritual discipline and the ritualized mimesis of the celestial spheres.

6

Al-Shahrastānī on Indians

The chapter on Indian religion in al-Milal titled Ārā al-hind (“Opinions of the Indians”), leads the reader to infer a close philosophical and theological affinity between Sabianism and Indian religion.34 The various categories of Sabian 32 33 34

Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 343. Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 345. Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 305–369. Lawrence observes, “Ṣābianism provides the organizing principle as well as the theological impetus for Ārāʾ al-hind. All the groups which

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whose gradual decadence from worship of supracelestial spiritual beings, to worship of the planets, to worship of idols, and finally into the self-deifying delusion of Pharaoh, provide the basic structure for his analysis of Indian religion, which yields approximately equivalent heresiological categories: the Brahmins; the people of the spiritual beings (aṣḥāb al-rūḥāniyyāt); the worshippers of the planets (ʿabadat al-kawākib); the worshippers of idols (ʿabadat al-aṣnām); the sages of India (ḥukamāʾ al-hind). Of particular interest to the exploration of al-Rāzī’s Sabians, is al-Shahrastānī’s description of a certain sect of the Brahmins whom he designates the masters of meditation and wahm (aṣḥab al-fikra wa-l-wahm).35 For these Brahmins, the practice of meditation ( fikr) is given the utmost importance as the mediator between the sensible and intelligible worlds (almutawassiṭ bayn al-maḥsūs wa-l-maʿqūl); the means by which the forms of sensibilia, and the essences of intelligibilia, are apprehended; and the reservoir of knowledge derived from the two worlds (mawrid al-ʿilmayn min alʿālamayn). This being the case, they exert their utmost to divert the faculty of the wahm and their meditative focus (al-fikr) away from sensible objects by means of rigorous spiritual disciplines and strenuous exertions. So, when the meditating mind (al-fikr) is abstracted from this [sensible] world, that [intelligible] world discloses itself to it. Sometimes it is informed of occult matters; sometimes it is empowered to withhold the rains; sometimes it can direct the faculty of the wahm to [strike] a living man dead in an instant. This possibility is not remote, for the estimative faculty [can] wield an astonishing effect that acts on bodies.36

35

36

Shahrastānī cites and all the data which he has gathered are related to the categories transposed from the earlier section on the Ḥarrānian Ṣābians” (Shahrastānī on the Indian Religions, 74). Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 604–605. For a full translation of and commentary on the relevant passage, see Lawrence, Shahrastānī on the Indian Religions, 44–45 and 114–118. Lawrence translates aṣḥab al-fikra wa-l-wahm as proponents of “meditation and imagination.” This translation overlooks the significance of al-wahm was a faculty distinct from the imagination. This sect is not only the most accomplished in the use of meditation and the direction of the estimative faculty but also “the most knowledgeable concerning the starless sphere”. According to al-Sirr, this is a field in which the Indian Ṭumṭum al-Hindī has particular expertise and for which he is cited as the main authority. Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 604: “fa-yajtahidūna kulla al-juhd ḥattā yuṣarrifū al-wahm wa’lfikr ʿan al-maḥsūsāt bi’l-riyāḍāt al-balīgha wa’l-ijtihādāt al-mujahhada ḥattā idhā tajarrada al-fikr ʿan hādhā al-ʿālam tajallā lahu dhālika al-ʿālam fa-rubbamā yukhbar ʿan mughayyabāt al-aḥwāl wa-rubbamā yuqwā ʿalā ḥabs al-amṭār wa-rubbamā yūqiʿ al-wahm ʿalā

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Once the mind has been trained to a high level of meditative focus, it acquires both knowledge of occult matters and the power to act directly on bodies and to influence souls: it can even influence the rain and kill a man remotely. The ability to perform such remarkable acts at a distance is by means of the wahm, which al-Rāzī brings to the heart of the talismanic theory proposed in al-Sirr. Noted by Avicenna and reproduced by al-Rāzī for the same purpose in al-Sirr, al-Shahrastānī adduces, as evidence of the operative power of the estimative faculty on the physical world, the reality of the Evil Eye, and the power of the wahm to exert a vertiginous effect on a man walking on a high wall: Is not the power of the Evil Eye (iṣābat al-ʿayn) the action of the estimative faculty on an individual? Does not a man, walking along a high wall, instantly fall, though the steps that he takes are no longer than those which he takes on flat ground?37 Both Avicennan examples are reproduced by al-Rāzī for the same purpose in al-Sirr.38 As we shall see, the power of heightened meditative focus, inculcated by spiritual discipline and a strict diet, to facilitate (1) the cognition of intelligibilia, (2) communication with spiritual beings, and (3) the control of natural phenomena, is also displayed by al-Rāzī’s masters of the occult astral craft.

7

Sabians according to al-Rāzī

In the assessment of al-Sirr, occult knowledge, of all fields of inquiry, possesses the highest virtue. According to its learned pagan masters, as reported by al-Rāzī, occult astral knowledge is the summit of human intellectual endeavour, combining the most august knowledge with the most effective power. The object of its inquiry is the mysteries of the Higher and Lower Worlds and how the spirits that inhabit the former effect the generation and corruption of tem-

37 38

rajul ḥayy fa-yaqtuluhu fi’l-ḥāl. wa-lā yustabʿadu dhālika fa-inna li’l-wahm atharan ʿajīban fī taṣrīf al-ajsām wa’l-taṣarruf fi’l-nufūs.” In order to convey the range of meanings conveyed by the word fikr as it is used in this passage, I have rendered it in three different ways: ‘meditation,’ ‘meditative focus,’ and ‘meditating mind.’ Al-Shahrastānī, al-Milal, 605. Al-Rāzī, al-Sirr, 11.

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porally originated phenomena (ḥawādith) in the latter. These spirits, referred to inconsistently as arwāḥ (sing. rūḥ) or rūḥāniyyāt, are the denizens of the celestial spheres. In al-Sirr, al-Rāzī coordinates these celestial spirits with the angels of the Islamic revelation.39 The purpose of pursuing this occult knowledge and its practical application is the soul’s perfection and its ontological transformation into being: “a witness unto the Spiritual beings (rūḥāniyyāt), their interlocutor—indeed one of their company and one of their like.”40 From al-Rāzī’s perspective, this transformation constitutes a claim to angelomorphosis. By means of this transformational knowledge, the adept is empowered to act in the sublunary world in ways that are superior to those who act by means of the corporeal. In so doing, he is liberated from engrossment in material reality and raised to the rank of the celestial angels. The Sabians of al-Shahrastānī’s al-Milal and of al-Rāzī’s al-Sirr inhabit the same ensouled universe, which the latter attempts to reconcile with the spiritualized vision of the cosmos that is evident in the hadith tradition: Many are the prophetic traditions which indicate that the one entrusted with the clouds, the thunder, and the lightning is an angel, and the one entrusted with provision is an angel, and the one entrusted with the mountains is an angel, and that an angel is entrusted with the seas, and so on for all phenomena.41 And since, just as al-Shahrastānī’s Sabians assert, any given sublunary phenomenon is governed by a universal spiritual being, while its particular manifestations are governed by subordinate spiritual beings, it follows that al-Rāzī’s Sabians believe that it is not beyond possibility that a man, if he calls on their names, seeking their aid, beseeching them, adjuring them by the names of their chiefs and those appointed in authority over them, that they should respond to him and perform what he desires from them.42

39 40 41 42

Al-Rāzī, al-Sirr, 109–110. Al-Rāzī, al-Sirr, 3. Al-Rāzī, al-Sirr, 110. Al-Rāzī, al-Sirr, 110.

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Sabians and the Emergence of Idolatry

For al-Rāzī, any practitioner of astral magic, irrespective of his theological commitments, his race, language, and culture, was a Sabian. A practitioner could be a Sabian whether or not he believed in multiple necessarily existent beings; God as the only Necessarily Existent whose creation is by way of non-volitional emanation; or God as the only Necessarily Existent Being, and as an agent possessed of volition. While the second of these theological orientations represented for al-Rāzī the Avicennan position, it was, of course, the last that approximated most closely al-Rāzī’s own theological commitment, which insisted not only on God as the only Necessarily Existent Being and as an agent possessed of choice and volition, but also (4) that there existed no real agency, human or celestial, that was external to divine will and power. But because, theoretically, someone of any theological conviction could learn and practice Sabianism, it was less a religion than an approach to understanding and working with the patterns of celestial configurations that characterized the generation and corruption of sublunary phenomena. To what ends this knowledge was put would determine the extent to which it could foster the soul’s perfection or hasten its debasement into pure idolatry, the pursuit of sublunary gain, and immersion in corporeal pleasure. The decadent arc that describes the descent from the pure monotheism of al-Rāzī to the compromised monotheism of the third and second of the aforementioned categories of Sabian—to end with the unmitigated polytheism of the first—mirrors al-Shahrastānī’s heresiological narrative and encapsulates a theory on religion and the aetiology of idolatry that is articulated more expansively, albeit diffusely, in al-Rāzī’s voluminous Qurʾanic commentary. According to al-Rāzī’s religious metahistory, idolatry was the oldest form of religion after the primordial Adamic religion.43 It was first practiced by the community of Noah which, observing that phenomena in the lower world were contingent on celestial motion, initiated the veneration of the planets. While some believed them to be essentially necessarily existent, others held that they were created but nevertheless empowered to govern the terrestrial plane, acting as mediators between God and the sublunary world.44 This latter position was adopted by the Chaldean community of Abraham, which wrought metal idols of the planets to stand in their lieu when they disappeared from sight.45 These idols they believed to be talismans which would benefit their devotees 43 44 45

Al-Rāzī, al-Tafsīr al-kabīr, 13:38. Al-Rāzī, al-Tafsīr al-kabīr, 13:39. Al-Rāzī, al-Tafsīr al-kabīr, 13:39.

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and harm those who would spurn them.46 The descent into idolatry begins with the striking of talismans at certain astrologically propitious times to attract felicity or avert misfortune, continues with their veneration in the belief in their essential efficacy, and concludes with their worship once their original purpose has been forgotten with the passage of time.47

9

The Sabian Craft

The Sabian craft as presented in al-Sirr involved the “blending” (tamzīj) of celestial forces into an earthly object by means of a noetic connection that the practitioner establishes, through ritual and spiritual discipline, with the celestial spirits. This earthly object was then empowered to bring about, in accordance with the practitioner’s intention, a terrestrial phenomenon that ran contrary to the course of natural events. This object could either be a metal idol or, indeed, the very person of the practitioner himself. Both the process of blending and the object into which celestial forces were blended are referred to by al-Rāzī as ṭilasm, “talisman.” To prepare for this noetic connection, the practitioner must purify his soul and cease its engrossment in material reality and sensual pleasure by engaging in rigorous spiritual discipline, fasting, and focusing mentally on the operative planet. Ritual preparatory diet serves two functions. First, in ceasing engrossment with material reality, he must reduce his consumption of food to the barest minimum required to sustain life. Such privation causes inevitable imbalances in the soul and thus requires a subtle knowledge of medicine to ensure its humoral balance and well-being. Second, in consuming ritual foods the practitioner participates sympathetically in the nature of the spirit he invokes. The two distinct objects into which the Sabian practitioner could blend celestial powers, namely the talismanic idol, or his very own person, represent 46

47

Al-Rāzī, al-Tafsīr al-kabīr, 22:183. Al-Rāzī’s identification of the community to which Abraham preached as Sabian is confirmed in his Iʿtiqādāt. See Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Iʿtiqādāt firaq al-muslimīn wa-l-mushrikīn (Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahḍa al-Miṣriyya, 1938), 90. Al-Rāzī, al-Tafsīr al-kabīr, 2:123–124. In this same passage, al-Rāzī reports on the astral idolatry of the pre-Alexandrian Greeks, who erected circular temples to the First Cause, Pure Intellect (ʿaql ṣarīḥ), Absolute Governance (al-siyasa al-muṭlaqa), and the Soul and Form. Their temple to Saturn was hexagonal, Jupiter’s triangular, Mars’s rectangular, the Sun’s square, “Venus’s triangular, its internal shape being square, Mercury’s triangular, its internal shape being rectangular, and the Moon’s octagonal” (al-Rāzī, al-Tafsīr 2:125). A closely corresponding passage is to be found in al-Milal, 368.

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the two major categories of astral ritual described in al-Sirr. Much of the work is devoted to the description of talismanic idols and the astrologically propitious timing for casting them into their molds. Having blended with the power of his purified soul celestial forces into the idol, he then, with the same meditative focus, performs a ritual mimetic of his intended effect, which dispatches these forces to bring about his desired result. But at the heart of the work is a detailed account of how the Sabian practitioner might summon into his own person the knowledge and power of the celestial spheres. This long ritual, lasting many years, involves invocations that address the planets. It represents the central focus of the al-Sirr, I refer to it as the planetary ascent ritual. A pre-condition of the ritual is a stabilized noetic connection with his perfect nature (al-ṭibāʿ al-tāmm), an astral spirit that is the ontological source of his soul. Its role is that of hierophant that mediates between him and the celestial spirits with which he will communicate during his long astral ascent, which, observing the Ptolemaic planetary order, lasts several years, comprising seven successive stages. During each, the aspirant addresses the rational soul of the planet with a liturgical prayer. Through a ritualized planetary mimesis involving cultic props, gesture, bodily comportment, and emotional attitude, he radically identifies with the celestial object of his devotion. For some stages, the aspirant is to expect a certain visionary experience; for others, he must perform certain acts that violate moral and social taboos. Particularly shocking are the Venusian and Martian stages: the former requires that the aspirant engage in an orgy with singing girls and wine boys lasting three nights, and the latter demands from him the decapitation of a man, cannibalism, and the brandishing of his severed head. Each stage concludes when the aspirant receives a sign that the planet has accepted his devotions and is favourably disposed to his entreaties. He is then to petition the planet for knowledge and power over all in the sublunary world that it governs. Knowledge of the unseen, power over all in the sublunary world, and ontological transformation elevating him to the rank of the celestial spirits are the rewards for completion of the ritual.

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Theory of Talismanic Magic

Of primary concern to al-Rāzī was the formulation of a rational theory that could account for the efficacy of Sabian practices. In al-Sirr, al-Rāzī renders explicit the crucial role in the talismanic process of human psychic interaction with celestial forces. The philosophical core of the work theorizes on that interaction, which can be used either for transitive sublunary ends or for a subjective

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soteriological goal. He needed to explain two things: how the human soul might connect with the celestial spheres to receive occult knowledge and visions of the unseen world; and how the human soul might use this connection to bring about a magical objective.48 Al-Rāzī constructed his theory by adapting Avicenna’s theory on prophethood, crucial to which was a faculty within the soul called the wahm. The wahm perceives non-material intentions, such as the hostility of the enemy or the goodwill of a friend, and it can direct the activity of the imagination and function as a kind of intelligence that mediates between the immaterial intellect and those cognitive faculties inherent in the brain. But, more than this, it can also affect corporeal reality, including not only the body of the subject but also external bodies. It is the faculty with which the prophet performs his miracles, and the envier destroys the object of his envy. It is the faculty of thaumaturgy.49 Now, Avicenna’s theory on imaginational prophethood explains veridical dreams and visions as the result of human souls being imprinted by the celestial souls with “traces” that encode their knowledge of sublunary events— both present and future—that are the effect of heavenly motion. Crucially, in Avicennan psychology, it is the wahm—mediating mercurially between the material human brain, the physical substrate of the internal sense faculties, and the supralunary world—that delivers this celestial “trace” to the imagination. The imagination then sets about constructing what is experienced as a revelatory vision or a veridical dream. In this way, Avicenna explains that, while the immediate object of the vision is the creation of the perceiver’s own internal senses, its cause is nevertheless extra-mental, of a celestial origin. In al-Sirr, al-Rāzī thus builds his theory on what is common to both imaginational prophethood and prophetic occult power: the faculty of the wahm. But the raw occult power of a prophet or magician, exercised by the wahm is, in the Avicennan theory, innate. A central focus in al-Sirr is in the notion that spiritual techniques, including radical asceticism, fasting, and meditation, can develop and train this power in one not so fortunate as to possess this capacity innately. Once trained, the practitioner can connect with the celestial souls and somehow draw down their forces into a talismanic idol or into his own person, to transformative effect.

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For a more detailed presentation of al-Rāzī’s account, see my article “The Avicennan aestimatio (al-wahm) in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Theory of Talismanic Action at a Distance,” Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 59 (2017): 79–89. Al-Rāzī, al-Sirr, 11–12.

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Sabians and Indians

While he drew on the Avicennan accounts of noetics and thaumaturgy to erect his theory on the Sabian talismanic process, it was the authority of the learned pagan culture of India that al-Rāzī invoked to articulate the meditative discipline demanded. Not only was the legendary figure of Ṭumṭum al-Hindī the key source for the images of the three hundred and sixty degrees of the starless sphere, which are so crucial to the talismanic craft described in al-Sirr, but he was also the authority cited by al-Rāzī to describe the kind of meditative focus involved in astral ritual.50 According to this Indian divine, the practitioner abstains from sexual relations; sustains himself on a meagre diet devoid of all animal products; abjures all that would distract from his mental focus; and coordinates every object of sense perception and every bodily posture or movement with the object of his meditation, such that they share in its genus. With sustained effort, he reaches the centre point of meditation (markaz alfikr), achieving which, metereological and geological phenomena such as the rains, lightning, and earthquakes are brought under his command. The earth’s elements yield to his will; his body becomes a dwelling place that he can freely inhabit or depart; he can visualize all manner of sublime forms; and he will delight in communion with wondrous spiritual beings.51 Ṭumṭum’s account of the perfectly realized meditator resonates deeply with the theme of spiritual discipline as a means of using materiality to transcend corporeal reality and to gain control over it. The physical senses serve the practitioner’s meditative focus. Not only do the ritual objects of physical perception share in an occult correspondence with the celestial object of intent, but the meditating practitioner’s cognition of that relationship must arise from such a level of mastery of natural philosophy as to be instinctual and immediate. And such is the level of meditative focus that the noetic connection with the celestial spirits remains unbroken. This degree of intellectual and spiritual accomplishment represents human perfection, whereby the soul, unshackled by the body, can roam wherever it wills; command nature; commune with numinous beings; and possess knowledge of all forms and power over physical reality. In this way, the Sabian adept transcends his own humanity and achieves the ontological rank of the celestial realm. It appears, however, from al-Sirr that the Ḥanīf argument in al-Milal that Sabianism can lead to tyranny has merit. It is for this reason that this occult 50 51

On Ṭumṭum al-Hindī as a authority in Islamic occult works, see Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften Im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 298–299. Al-Rāzī, al-Sirr, 16.

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knowledge must be concealed, for fear that, if it were to fall into the hands of the man who is unworthy, he would become tyrannical and hubristic, as he leaves the ontological rank of humanity to enter the rank of divinity: The wise have agreed that one of the conditions of this knowledge is that it must be concealed. Sahmiyaṭīs said that the spirits of the wise (arwāḥ al-ḥukamāʾ) have commanded that these secrets be concealed because if those who are intent on [pursuing] nature (al-rākibīn li’l-ṭabīʿa) came to possess this knowledge, they would use it [in the pursuit of] base desires which are fatal to the living soul; and also because the spirits of the higher world hate that men come to know their secrets, for when they learn them, they become tyrannical and arrogant (ṭaghā wa-istakbara), leaving the [ontological] rank of humanity for the rank of divinity (ḥadd alnāsūtiyya ilā al-lāhūtiyya).52

12

Conclusion

Common to the accounts of the Sabians in both al-Shahrastānī’s al-Milal and alRāzī’s al-Sirr is the following constellation of ideas: their liminality between the theological realms of true and false religion; their belief in the celestial spirits as Man’s only intercessors with an absolutely transcendent God; their deployment of natural philosophy for spiritual aims; their emphasis on spiritual discipline, asceticism, and mimetic astral ritual to establish a noetic connection with the celestial realm; their use of talismanic ritual to control sublunary reality; and their gradual decadence into idolatry. While the Avicennan naturalistic theory of prophethood remains in the subtext of al-Shahrastānī’s depiction, in al-Rāzī’s account it is foregrounded, its different aspects being adapted and integrated to produce a sophisticated theory of astral magic that represents a dynamic occult soteriology. The extent to which al-Rāzī could integrate this soteriology with his own Islamic theological commitments will be explored in my forthcoming study of al-Sirr al-maktūm.53

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Al-Rāzī, al-Sirr, 6. In the Qurʾan, the verbs ṭaghā (to act tyrannically) and istakbara (to act arrogantly) are frequently connected with Pharaoh. Based on my PhD dissertation, this study will be published by De Gruyter under the title Philosophising the Occult: Avicennan Psychology and the ‘The Hidden Secret’ of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (2020).

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Bibliography Primary Sources al-Rāzī, Fakhr al-Dīn. Al-Sirr al-maktūm, lithograph edition. Cairo: Mirzā Muḥammad Shīrāzī, n.d. al-Rāzī, Fakhr al-Dīn. Iʿtiqādāt firaq al-muslimīn wa-l-mushrikīn. Cairo: Maktabat alNahḍa al-Miṣriyya, 1938. al-Rāzī, Fakhr al-Dīn. Al-Tafsīr al-kabīr (Mafātīḥ al-ghayb), first edition. 32 vols. Beirut: Dār al-Fikr lil-Ṭibāʿat wa-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzīʿ, 1981. al-Shahrastānī, Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Karīm. Muslim Sects and Divisions: The Section on Muslim Sects in Kitāb al-Milal wa’l-niḥal, translated by Abdul Khaliq Kazi and John G. Flynn. London: Kegan Paul, 1984. al-Shahrastānī, Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Karīm. Kitāb al-Milal wa-l-niḥal, trans. Daniel Gimaret, Guy Monnot, and Jean Jolivet, Livre des Religions et des sects, 2 vols. Paris: UNESCO, 1986–1993. al-Shahrastānī, Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Karīm. Kitāb al-Milal wa-l-niḥal, edited by Amīr ʿAlī Mahna and ʿAlī Ḥasan Fāʿūr. Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, 1993.

Secondary Sources Altaş, Eşref. “Fahreddin er-Rāzī’nin Eserlerinin Kronolojisi.” In İslâm düşüncesinin dönüşüm çağında Fahreddin er-Râzî, edited by Ömer Türker and Osman Demir, 91– 164. İstanbul: İSAM Yayınları, 2013. de Callataÿ, Godefroid. “The Sabians of Ṣāʿid al-Andalūsī.” Studia graeco-arabica 7 (2017): 291–306. Griffel, Frank. “On Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Life and the Patronage He Received.” Journal of Islamic Studies 18, no. 3 (2007): 313–344. Kholeif, Fathalla. A Study on Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and his Controversies in Transoxania. Beirut: Dar el-Machreq, 1966. Lawrence, Bruce. Shahrastani on the Indian Religions, edited by L. Laeyendecker and J. Waardenburg. The Hague: Mouton, 1976. Mayer, Toby. Keys to the Arcana: Shahrastānī’s Esoteric Commentary on the Qurʾān. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Michot, Jean. “L’avicennisation de la sunna, du ṣabéisme au leurre de la ḥanîfiyya. À propos du Livre des religions et des sectes, II d’al-Shahrastânî.”Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 35 (1993): 113–120. Noble, Michael. “The Avicennan aestimatio (al-wahm) in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Theory of Talismanic Action at a Distance.” Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 59 (2017): 79– 89. Noble, Michael. Philosophising the Occult: Avicennan Psychology and the ‘The Hidden Secret’ of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020.

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Roberts, Alexandre M. “Being a Sabian at Court in Tenth-Century Baghdad.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 137, no. 2 (2017): 253–277. Saif, Liana. The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Saif, Liana. “From Ghāyat al-ḥakīm to Shams al-maʿārif : Ways of Knowing and Paths of Power in Medieval Islam.” In “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” edited by Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner. Special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 297–345. Shihadeh, Ayman. “Avicenna’s Corporeal Form and Proof of Prime Matter in TwelfthCentury Critical Philosophy: Abū l-Barakāt, al-Masʿūdī and al-Rāzī.” Oriens 42, nos. 3–4 (2014): 364–396. Ullmann, Manfred. Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam, edited by B. Spuler. Leiden: Brill, 1972. van Bladel, Kevin. The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

chapter 6

Lettrism and History in ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī’s Naẓm al-sulūk fī musāmarat al-mulūk Noah Gardiner

God apprised us that He is time (dahr) and possesses days. These are the days of God, which receive their particular being in the world as properties of the divine names. Each name has days, which are the time (zamān) of the ruling property of that name. But all are God’s days and all are the differentiations of time (dahr) in the world by virtue of the ruling property. These days penetrate, enter, and cover each other. This is the diversity of properties that is seen in the world at a single time (zamān wāḥid). It derives from the commingling, covering, resumption, and repetition of the days. Each of these divine days has a night and a daytime. Ibn ʿArabī1

∵ Shahzad Bashir has challenged scholars of Islamic thought, particularly historiography, to consider more carefully the complexities of “Islamic time” by recognizing temporality as “an ideological and narrative product that is forever being made and remade within Islamic perspectives.”2 Bashir’s proposal is highly pertinent to the growing field of inquiry into the “science of letters and names” (ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-asmāʾ), also known as “lettrism,” the Kabbalahlike magico-mystical discourse on the relationship between divine speech and manifest existence that flourished vigorously in mature Islamic thought. This is because lettrism, in its most influential late-medieval expressions, is above all a cosmological discourse and as such is deeply concerned with issues of the

1 Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya, 4 vols. (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1968), 3:201. From a translation in progress by Dr. Ali Hussain, University of Michigan. 2 Shahzad Bashir, “On Islamic Time: Rethinking Chronology in the Historiography of Muslim Societies,” History and Theory 53 (2014): 521.

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nature of time and change over time.3 For Sufi arch-lettrists such as Muḥyī lDīn Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) and Aḥmad al-Būnī (d. 622/1225 or 630/1232–1233), for example, the turnings of the heavenly spheres that mark time in the world and continuously shape the sublunary realm through their influences are consubstantial with cyclical effluxes of the divine names and the letters of God’s creative speech.4 But while these authors sometimes dwell on these and other issues of temporality, including the occult prognostication and manipulation of future events, they do not venture far into the realm of historiography proper, which is Bashir’s field of investigation. However, a major lettrist author of a later period did try his hand at Clio’s art, the Antioch-born, Aleppo-initiated Sufi, occultist, littérateur, and muḥaddith ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī (d. 858/1454), who not only explores lettrism as a device for understanding the grand narrative of human history as Islamic Heilsgeschichte but also delves into the history of the science itself. He also imbues these topics with a crucial relevance to the events of his own historical moment, which, to his mind and those of many of his contemporaries, stood indubitably in the shadow of the end of days. While these subjects run throughout al-Bisṭāmī’s many works, the present paper is limited to their place in his explicitly historical treatise Naẓm alsulūk fī musāmarat al-mulūk, a work mostly unexamined in modern scholarship.5 As we will see, the temporality that al-Bisṭāmī constructs in the text is

3 Bashir has done his own share of work on lettrism, particularly on Faḍlallāh Astarābādī (d. 796/1394), founder of the messianic Ḥurūfiyya movement; Shahzad Bashir, Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005). 4 As Denis Gril puts it with reference to Ibn ʿArabī’s ideas: “Far from being original or simple entities … [the] letters themselves are produced by the rotation and interaction of a specific number of celestial spheres (aflāk) among all the spheres that move concentrically within the total, ultimate sphere (al-falak al-aqṣā). Along with bringing the letters into existence, the rotation of the spheres combines physical qualities (heat, cold, dryness, and humidity) together in pairs. The letters are thus located on the edge of the physical world (ṭabīʿah), since these qualities or Original Elements (al-ʿanāṣir al-uwal) give birth to the physical elements (fire, air, water, and earth) when they combine …. The science of letters can thus not be looked at independently of the science of the heavenly bodies or of the cosmic cycles”; Denis Gril, “The Science of Letters,” in The Meccan Revelations, ed. Michel Chodkiewicz, 2 vols. (New York: Pir Press, 2004), 2:108. On al-Būnī’s similar but more explicitly astrological conception of things, see Noah Gardiner, “Stars and Saints: The Esotericist Astrology of the Sufi Occultist Ahmad Al-Buni,” Journal of Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 12, no. 1 (2017): 39–65. 5 Cornell Fleischer refers to it briefly in his article “A Mediterranean Apocalypse: Prophecies of Empire in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61, no. 1–2 (2018): 18–90. The present author has discussed some passages from it in “Occultist Encyclopedism,” mentioned above. On the contemporary development and propagation of similar lettrist theories of history and historiography across the Persianate world, see Matthew Melvin-Koushki’s chapter in this volume.

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one structured by astral-prophetic cycles and epicycles and a gradual unveiling of knowledge of the divine, ideas many of which are directly inspired by the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ, the high-Abbasid-era encyclopedic ensemble of philosophical, religious, and occult-scientific writings. Though concerned little with letter-speculation per se, the Rasāʾil significantly influenced fourthsixth/tenth-twelfth-century thinkers in the Islamic west who developed the discourse on lettrism that Ibn ʿArabī, al-Būnī, and others of their generation expanded upon and that so influenced al-Bisṭāmī.6 Within the temporal framework of the Naẓm, each of earth’s seven millennia is ruled over by the influence of a particular planet and a major prophet, every century within a millennium being subject to an epicycle of religious and civilizational renewal (tajdīd) and degeneration enacted by various saints and villains. Iterative rather than merely repetitive, the process entails a progressive expansion of human knowledge of the secrets of God and the creation, culminating in the final unveiling of the divine that will mark the end of time and history—though only, of course, after a final series of terrible tribulations. The history of knowledge is thus a central concern of this narrative, and the science of letters and names is mentioned periodically throughout the work as a prophetic, saintly, and philosophical science par excellence, its appearances often corresponding to crucial historical moments. Beyond such reports on the history of the science itself, al-Bisṭāmī sometimes also has recourse to a gematria-like method of ḥisāb aljummal7 in exploring connections between the names of God, prophets, and other sanctified actors and the dates of certain past and future events, a historiographical technique in keeping with the logic of a cosmos shaped by the cyclical efflux of God’s names and creative speech. As Naẓm al-sulūk has been little explored in modern scholarship, a brief outline of the vast array of topics discussed in the book is included in what follows. In focusing on lettrist content and issues of temporality, however, the bulk of the paper addresses just four parts: the introduction (muqaddima) to the work, the bāb (chapter) on the prophets, a faṣl (section) on pagan philosophers (“the nation of the wise ones,” ummat al-ḥukamāʾ), a faṣl on ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 40/661), and the final 6 On the relationship of the Rasāʾil to lettrism and related currents in western-Islamic thought, see Godefroid de Callataÿ, “Philosophy and Bāṭinism in al-Andalus: Ibn Masarra’s Risālat alʿitibār and the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 41 (2014): 261–312; Godefroid de Callataÿ, “From Ibn Masarra to Ibn ‘Arabī: References and Subtle Allusions to the RasāʾIl Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ in the Literature of al-Andalus,” Studi Magrebini 12 (2015): 217– 267; Michael Ebstein, Mysticism and Philosophy in al-Andalus: Ibn Masarra, Ibn al-ʿArabī, and Ismāʿīlī Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Yousef Casewit, The Mystics of al-Andalus: Ibn Barrajān and Islamic Thought in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 7 That is, totaling the numerical values of the Arabic letters in a name or other word.

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parts of the book on the events of al-Bisṭāmī’s own century and apocalyptic predictions for the one following.

1

Al-Bisṭāmī and Naẓm al-sulūk fī musāmarat al-mulūk

Writing in the first half of the ninth/fifteenth century, al-Bisṭāmī was an avid interpreter and popularizer of the thought of Ibn ʿArabī, al-Būnī, and others of their ilk but was, in many respects, a different and more political kind of actor than his lettrist predecessors. As a sort of professional court-intellectual circulating in Ottoman and Mamluk milieus, one of his chief offerings was a presentation of lettrism aimed at his courtly audiences and the elite ranks of cosmopolitan, Sufism-inclined scholar-bureaucrats who served them. This is evidenced most clearly in his widely-copied encyclopedic lettrist opus Shams al-āfāq fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-awfāq, which claims to assimilate the vast body of lettrist literature that preceded it while cutting through the obscurities and secrecy that typified earlier texts on the topic, thus rendering a more accessible, “post-esotericist” lettrism that offered food for philosophical and devotional thought as well as sound occult-practical method.8 Though aimed at much the same audience, Naẓm al-sulūk fī musāmarat al-mulūk is a different sort of work from Shams al-āfāq, being al-Bisṭāmī’s idiosyncratic contribution to the genre of the universal chronicle; that is to say, a historical narrative that begins with the creation and continues up to the author’s time, or nearly so.9 Completed in Bursa in 833/1429–1430, it is a vanishingly brief work by the standards of the genre, a mere 137 folia in the holograph copy preserved in the Topkapı Palace collection (a small fraction of the multivolume works of such writers as al-Ṭabarī and Ibn al-Athīr), but it nonetheless comprises a history of the world and, indeed, the cosmos. Written in the ecstatically florid sajʿ (rhyming prose) for which al-Bisṭāmī was much admired by his contemporaries, and liberally interspersed with poetry, the text seems ideally suited to the tastes of courtly audiences of the time: concise but monumental in scope, adamantly self-important, and exceptionally pretty to listen to or read. Lettrism is not the

8 This is argued in Gardiner, “Occultist Encyclopedism.” I use the term “post-esotericist” to mean a discursive tradition that was once transmitted only in secret (at least notionally), the public proponents of which trade on the cultural capital of that history of secrecy. 9 On the universal chronicle (or “universal history”), see Chase Robinson, Islamic Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 42–43 and 137–138. On the development of this genre in the Mamluk period, see Fozia Bora, Writing History in the Medieval Islamic World: The Value of Chronicles as Archives (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 11–27.

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book’s central topic, but lettrist and lettrism-adjacent ideas, such as ḥisāb aljummal and astral-prophetic cycles, pervade it.10 In the introduction (muqaddima) to the Naẓm, which consists of eight sections ( fuṣūl), al-Bisṭāmī outlines various ideas that would have alerted occultinclined readers to his indebtedness to such works as the Rasāʾil Ikhwān alṢafāʾ, Ibn ʿArabī’s al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya, and al-Būnī’s Laṭāʾif al-ishārāt fī lḥurūf al-ʿulwiyyat. Some of these references are delivered sotto voce, but alBisṭāmī can hardly be accused of excessive discretion. In the first faṣl, for instance, which extols the excellence of the science of history (ʿilm al-taʾrīkh), he posits that the discipline holds special significance for the initiated. The latter he refers to as “brethren of purity and friends of sincerity,”11 while mentioning as their spiritual patron “the angel of illumination” (malak al-ḍiyāʾ), an uncited reference to the Futūḥāt: The scholars of the schools and eminences eastern and western have gone to great lengths in the refining of its [ʿilm al-taʾrīkh’s] fundamentals, the undoing of its knots, the rectification of its sources, and the establishment of its parts, because in it are treasures and, for the brethren of purity and friends of sincerity, a healing in the angel of illumination.12 The relevance of the “brethren of purity” reference has already been mentioned and is discussed in greater detail below. As for the “angel of illumination,” per the great shaykh himself, this is the angel of inspired knowledge (kashf, “unveiling”) and the names of God.13 Both are fundamental to Sufi thought generally, but the divine names are of particular importance in Sufi lettrism. Ibn ʿArabī 10

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The study of the science of letters and names is still at an early stage relative to the abundance of textual materials and other artifacts. Questions of precisely what counts as lettrist, lettrism-adjacent, and not-lettrist have not yet been subject to vigorous scholarly debate. We can presumably look forward to many such debates in coming years. The fact that al-Bisṭāmī and a coterie of his contemporaries referred to themselves with this label has been much discussed of late, especially in İlker Evrim Binbas̨, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī and the Islamicate Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). While this may have been, in part, a matter of intellectually fashionable posturing, it seems clear that, throughout his introduction, al-Bisṭāmī is indeed courting readers actually familiar with the Rasāʾil. All references to Naẓm al-sulūk in this paper are marked “NS” and refer to Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi MS 1597, the aforementioned holograph. NS, fol. 4a. “Wa-qad bālagha ʿulamāʾ al-madhāhib wa-fuḍalāʾ al-mashāriq wa-l-maghārib fī tanqīḥ qawāʾidihi wa-taftīḥ maʿāqidihi wa-taḥrīr uṣūlihi wa-taqrīr fuṣūlihi bi-mā fīhi ghunya wa-shifāʾ fī malak al-ḍiyāʾ li-ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ wa-khullān al-wafāʾ.” Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, 2:107 ff.

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portrays them as the vehicles of both God’s powers of poiesis and the human capacity to know the divine,14 also discussing the prophets as avatars of particular names15—an approach that al-Bisṭāmī imitates later in the Naẓm, through recourse to ḥisāb al-jummal. For al-Bisṭāmī, I would suggest, this angel of the names becomes the angel of history as well, enabling the worthy to perceive the divine plan and the promise of ultimate redemption in the tumult and tragedies of the long course of human events. As we will see near the end of this paper, the sack of Aleppo by Tīmūr (d. 807/1405) marks a dramatic eschatological turning point in al-Bisṭāmī’s account of the Muslim millennium, his immense personal suffering over the destruction of a city to which he was dearly attached being somewhat salved, perhaps, by the promise of the end of time. Subsequent sections of the introduction venture into thoroughly Ikhwanian territory regarding historical cycles and other topics. The second, third, and fourth fuṣūl address various issues of calendrics, including the reconciliation of various calendars and the fact that both ancient tribes and the Muslims began their calendars from key prophetic events, such as the expulsion of Adam from the garden, the Deluge, and the hijra. Al-Bisṭāmī’s goal is a prophetbased universal chronology, one that seems at first straightforwardly linear but which is complicated upon reaching the seventh faṣl, which assigns a major prophet and a ruling planet to each of the seven millennia of human history. Adam inaugurates the first, which belongs to Saturn; Idrīs heads the second, which belongs to Jupiter; Noah heads the third, which belongs to Mars; Abraham heads the fourth, which belongs to the Sun; Moses heads the fifth, which belongs to Venus; Jesus heads the sixth, which belongs to Mercury; and Muḥammad heads the seventh, which belongs to the Moon. Al-Bisṭāmī does not elaborate on the implications of these correspondences, but readers versed in occult-scientific thought would have required no further prompting to infer a cyclical nature to prophecy and the course of human events. The Rasāʾil (as well as some Ismaʿili thinkers) similarly assign a prophet and a planet to each of the seven millennia, along with a “delegate” (waṣī) and a chain of Imams who reveal the inner dimensions of the prophet’s teachings over the course of

14

15

William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 34 and the index entries for “attributes” and “names.” For overviews of Ibn ʿArabi’s hagiological thought, see Michel Chodkiewicz, Seal of the Saints: Prophethood and Sainthood in the Doctrine of Ibn ʿArabī (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1993); Richard McGregor, Sanctity and Mysticism in Medieval Egypt: The Wafāʾ Sufi Order and the Legacy of Ibn ʿArabī (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 0–26.

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each millennium.16 Al-Bisṭāmī does not adhere slavishly to the Ikhwān’s teachings. Most importantly, whereas their sequence of prophets is Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muḥammad, and the qāʾim (the messianic figure who abrogates Muḥammad’s teachings to usher in the final millenium), al-Bisṭāmī interposes Idrīs between Adam and Noah, pushing Muḥammad forward into the position of initiating the seventh era, thereby rendering an altogether more Sunni version of the concept. As for the awṣiyāʾ and Imams of the Ikhwanian model, al-Bisṭāmī substitutes the well known idea of mujaddidūn (“renewers” [of religion]), who appear at the beginning of each century to clear away unwarranted religious innovations and otherwise revivify the umma, thus constructing a hundred-year epicycle of sanctified actors in each millennium. In the concise discussion of this topic in the seventh faṣl of the introduction, al-Bisṭāmī also identifies the mujaddidūn as aqṭāb (“poles,” sing., quṭb) in the invisible hierarchy of Sufi saints, further nativizing the concept in the popular imaginary of his period.17 In actual historiographical application later in the Naẓm, however, his ideas on the mujaddidūn prove more complex, such that he enlists more than one figure to fill the role in each century, including political actors as well as Sufis and scholars. Other fuṣūl of the introduction further delineate the temporal, spatial, and metaphysical dimensions of the cosmos. Part of the fourth addresses the “days”—periods of revolution about the earth—of the planetary spheres, as well as those of the divine footstool or pedestal (al-kursī) and the divine throne 16

17

Godefroid de Callataÿ, Ikhwan Al-Safaʾ: A Brotherhood of Idealists on the Fringe of Orthodox Islam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 41–44; Godefroid de Callataÿ, “Introduction to Epistle 36,” in Epistles of the Brethren of Purity: Sciences of the Soul and Intellect. Part I: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistles 32–36, ed. Paul E. Walker et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2015), 137–189; Yves Marquet, La philosophie des Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Nouvelle éd. augmentée (Paris: Société d’Études de l’ Histoire de l’ Alchimie, 1999); Yves Marquet, “Imâmat, résurrection et hiérarchie selon les Ikhwân al-Safâʾ,” Revue des études islamiques 30 (1962): 49–142; Yves Marquet, “La révélation par l’ astrologie selon Abū Yaʿqūb as-Sijistānī et les Iḫwān aṣ-ṣafāʾ,” Studia Islamica 80 (1994): 5–28. This list is headed by Muḥammad himself, but see below regarding al-Bisṭāmī’s esteem for ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, who functions as Muḥammad’s waṣī in Ismaʿili thought. As for the mujaddidūn of subsequent centuries, he names the fifth Shiʿi Imam Muḥammad al-Bāqir (d. c. 114/732), the great jurist al-Shāfiʿī (d. 204/820), the historian and exegete al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923), the Sufi thinker Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021), the famous theologian and Sufism-apologist Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), the philosophertheologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1209), the scholar and Mamlūk-era grand qāḍī Ibn Daqīq al-ʿĪd (d. 702/1302), and, finally, his own master in the Aleppo-based Bisṭāmiyya Sufi order, Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Aṭʿānī (d. 807/1405). This list does not, however, correspond neatly with discussions of the mujaddidūn later in the book.

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(al-ʿarsh). Somewhat as in the Rasāʾil, these Qurʾanic entities are understood as the two outermost spheres of the cosmos, a “day of the throne” extending for fifty thousand earth years and a “day of the pedestal” for a thousand—although, we are told, the pedestal’s day somehow can also be discerned as twenty-four thousand years, once the turnings of all the “subtle and dense worlds” (alʿawālim al-laṭāʾif wa-l-kathāʾif ) it encompasses are taken into account. The fifth faṣl establishes the physical dimensions of the cosmos, discussing various reckonings of its age as well. The sixth, in contrast, transcends the measurable confines of creation with an account of sundry imaginal worlds that is cribbed, mostly verbatim, from Ibn ʿArabī’s travels on the visionary plane he calls “the vast earth” (al-arḍ al-wāsiʿa).18 Beyond establishing the parameters of the cosmos in which al-Bisṭāmī’s narrative transpires, these data testify to the immensity of the knowledge humanity has accumulated in the 6,900 years or so since Adam, particularly in the Muḥammadan era. The eighth and final faṣl, the longest of the introduction, discusses alphabets (ḥurūf al-umam) written right-to-left and vice versa, observing that the former use connected letters while the others do not; the history of writing in Arabic; twelve major writing-systems (kitābāt) across various languages and their correspondences to the planets and signs of the zodiac; twenty-three scripts (alaqlām al-samāwiyya wa-l-aḥruf al-raqamiyya al-nabawiyya) across various languages, which are made to correspond to certain prophets and saints; the structural identity of the primordial Syriac script of Adam and the Arabic script; and a variety of cipher alphabets attributed to various sages, such as Hermes Trismegistus and Dioscorides. This concluding faṣl of the introduction might also be seen as inspired by the Rasāʾil, in which an essentially astrological theory of the multiplicity of languages and diversity of peoples is elaborated. However, much as with his delineation of astral correspondences for the prophets and millennia, al-Bisṭāmī seems content here simply to invoke the notion that the stars regulate such processes of cultural change, leaving his audience to ponder it to the best of their ability. It indicates that he regards languages and writing systems—without which knowledge could hardly be transmitted—as fundamental elements of the cosmology cum Heilsgeschichte he sketches throughout the introduction, rather than mere creatures of convention.19 It could also be

18 19

NS, fols. 6b–8b; Ibn ʿArabī, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyya, 1:126ff. Al-Bisṭāmī promises, near the end of this faṣl, that he is working on a book on the secrets of scripts to be titled Mabāhij al-aʿlām fī manāhij al-aqlām. In his autobibliographical work Durrat tāj al-rasāʾil wa-ghurrat minhāj al-wasaʾil, he lists it as having been completed in 834 (1430–1431 CE), a year after the Naẓm. A surviving copy is Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi MS Yeni Cami 785/2 (fols. 81a–104b).

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taken to imply that lettrism is a discipline not limited to the Arabic language and/or script but rather one that applies to all languages, a notion in keeping with his discussions elsewhere in the book of prophets and philosophers associated with languages other than Arabic who were nonetheless master lettrists. Following the introduction, the main body of Naẓm al-sulūk is divided into two books. Book one discusses the prophets, from Adam to Muḥammad, in chronological order; the Jewish prophets; the kings of the Jews, Persia, the Copts, the Greeks, the Romans, Yemen, Hira, the Sham, the Hijaz, and Kinda; the nations (umam) of the Sabeans, the Copts, the Persians, the Greeks, the Jews, the Christians, the Hindis, the Sudanese, the pre-Islamic Arabs, and a special collective he refers to as the “nation of the wise ones” (ummat al-ḥukamāʾ, more on which below); some notes on the classification of the sciences; notes on geography, the seven climes, Mount Qāf and other special mountains, and related subjects; eschatological predictions (malāḥim) drawn from the hadith and other sources; and various wonders of land and sea. The first bāb of book two contains a more detailed discussion of the prophet Muḥammad. The next comprises sections on the first four caliphs, ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib most prominently, along with various of the Prophet’s Companions. The final bāb of the work— the longest single section—is a century by century chronicle of the history of Islamic civilization centered on the mujaddidūn of each century. It ends with a discussion of the tenth Islamic century, in which the tribulations of the final days would surely occur.

2

Lettrism and the Prophets

We have seen that al-Bisṭāmī sets the stage for his universal chronicle on the basis of an Ikhwanian vision, mutatis mutandis, of a cosmos that, in its very turnings, effects an iterative unveiling of God and his creation to humanity. Prophets are central to this process, as is obvious from the introduction. In the bāb on prophets that opens Book One, it soon becomes clear that the science of letters and names is also central. Lettrism originates with Adam, we are told, to whom God sent down “ten scrolls on which were a thousand languages and the letters of the alphabet on twenty-one leaves.”20 It is also said that God “sent down to him alkalimāt al-wujūdiyya wa-l-ʿadamiyya”;21 this phrase does not lend itself to easy

20 21

NS, fol. 15b. NS, fol. 15b.

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translation—perhaps “existentializing and nihilizing words”—but they are words of great power in any case. Another report is included, to the effect that Adam spoke seven hundred languages, the best of which was Arabic. Like most medieval historians, al-Bisṭāmī is largely compiling bits and pieces from earlier works of history, hadith collections, Sufi manuals, and other sources and rarely attempts to reconcile contradictory reports or align them with his earlier statements.22 No mention is made here, for example, of the Syriac language, with which Adam is linked in the introduction. On the authority of Ibn ʿAṭāʾ (d. 309/922), we learn further of Adam that God “disseminated in him” (baththa fīhi) the secret of the letters at the time of his creation, a privilege not afforded to the angels,23 and also that God made him in the form (ṣūra) of the letters.24 Both claims recall al-Būnī’s assertion that Adam’s intellect, spirit, soul, and body were sown (gharasa) with the letters as he was formed.25 These are, of course, riffs on the Qurʾanic account of Adam being taught “the names, all of them,” an endowment variously interpreted as the names of all the created things or, particularly in Sufi exegeses, all the names of God.26 Such reports relate to a vast complex of exegetical, theological, and mystical speculations. That about Adam being given the form (ṣūra) of the letters, for example, can be read against the history of attempts to reconcile the hadith-based notion of Adam having been made in God’s image (ṣūra) with the apophatic tendencies of Muslim theology (kalām), a conflict often resolved by assertions that Adam was made to embody God’s moral characteristics as conveyed by the divine names rather than some logically inconceivable body of God. Much the same complex of ideas underlies the notion of takhalluq bi-akhlāq Allāh, the taking on of the divine character through recitation (dhikr) of God’s names, a praxis central to Ibn ʿArabī and al-Būnī’s prescriptions for spiritual accomplishment, and one that al-Bisṭāmī also addresses, as discussed below.27 On a final, strikingly concrete note, Adam is credited with having composed the first text on lettrism, a work from which all branches of the lettristic sciences are

22 23 24 25 26 27

Though it is a desideratum, I have not, except in a few instances, attempted to identify al-Bisṭāmī’s unidentified sources for this paper. NS, fol. 15b–16a. Qāla [Ibn ʿAṭāʾ] khalaqa Allāh al-aḥruf wa-jaʿala lahā sirran fa-lammā khalaqa Ādam baththa fīhi al-sirr wa-lam yabuththahu fī l-malāʾika. NS, fol. 15b–16a. Fa-jaʿalahu ṣūratan lahā. Al-Būnī, Laṭāʾif al-ishārāt fī al-ḥurūf al-ʿulwiyyat, BnF MS Arabe 2658, fol. 5a. Q 2:30–33. On takhalluq in Ibn ʿArabī’s thought, see Gerald Elmore, “Shaykh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Mahdawī, Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Mentor,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 121 (2001): 609; Chittick, Sufi Path of Knowledge, 21–22.

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derived.28 This is presumably the Sifr Ādam al-Bisṭāmī mentions in the long list of lettrist works he includes in the introduction to his Shams al-āfāq— works he there implies he has studied personally, though such a claim is not made in the Naẓm.29 Various Hebrew occult texts attributed to Adam, such as Sefer ha-razim, circulated in the medieval and early modern periods. Alexander Fodor identified an Arabic translation of the latter, and it is conceivable that al-Bisṭāmī had access to texts of that sort.30 Adam’s son Seth (Shīth) was versed in lettrism and is credited with having written a work on it, presumably the one that appears as Sifr Shīth in the booklist in Shams al-āfāq. He was also the first to build the Kaʿba with clay and stone and to formulate the notion of a divine law (sharīʿa).31 He is firmly identified with the Sabean Agathodaemon and, later in the book and more tentatively, with Zoroaster.32 The next prophet discussed, Seth’s descendant Idrīs, is also credited with mastery of lettrism, and the work Kanz al-asrār wa-dhakhāʾir alabrār fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf is ascribed to him.33 He was the first to write with the pen and the first to articulate the science of astrology and the knowledge of plants. He was the first to build temples and celebrate God therein and the first to divide people into three classes—priests, kings, and subjects. Idrīs is identified with the Greco-Egyptian Hermes and biblical Enoch, and it is said that he was known as Trismegistus (“thrice-great”) because he was a prophet, a king, and a philosopher. The Idrīs-Hermes-Enoch identification and the association of Seth with Agathodaemon are both thoroughly conventional, but they are noteworthy here as keys to al-Bisṭāmī’s construction of a pedigree for the knowledge of lettrism among pagan philosophers, as discussed below. Finally among the antediluvian prophets, Noah, the first to divide the earth among his sons, is also accounted a master of lettrism and credited with a sifr on the topic.34 In short, lettrism is a body of prophetic knowledge as old as humanity, and it was

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NS, fol. 16a. Wa-lahu sifr jalīl al-shaʾn fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-minhu tafarraʿat sāʾir al-ʿulūm alḥarfiyya. For this list, see the appendix to Gardiner, “Occultist Encyclopedism.” Alexander Fodor, “An Arabic Version of Sefer Ha-Razim,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 13, no. 4 (2006): 412–427. NS, fol. 16a–b. NS, fol. 43b. NS, fol. 16b. On this work, on which numerous commentaries were written, see Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 375. NS, fol. 17a. On various books attributed to Noah circulating among medieval and early modern European Jews, many of an occult-scientific nature, see Rebecca Scharbach, “The Rebirth of a Book: Noachic Writing in Medieval and Renaissance Europe,” in Noah and His Book(s), ed. Michael E. Stone et al. (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010), 113–133.

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an integral part of the wisdom of the ancients who shaped every major aspect of human civilization. All the major millennial prophets discussed thus far— Adam, Idrīs, and Noah—were lettrists. This pattern holds for the others in that class, but, as we have seen with Seth, lesser prophets are sometimes portrayed also as masters of the science. The first of the postdiluvian prophets al-Bisṭāmī names as a lettrist is Abraham, who receives the further distinction of having been the first to speak of the science of awfāq, the mathematical “magic squares” that are among the most essential tools of occult-practical lettrism. Abraham is said to have placed a hundred-by-hundred wafq in the foundation of Mecca, which, one presumes, will protect the holy city until its destruction by the Antichrist (al-Dajjāl), an event discussed in the later section on eschatological predictions. Al-Bisṭāmī further notes that “one [or some] of the shaykhs” counts the science of letters among the prophetic miracles (muʿjizāt) of Abraham, which can be taken to imply that he displayed his mastery as a proof of his prophethood against those who challenged him.35 The hundred-by-hundred wafq comes up again later in the bāb, in the discussion of the original Dhū l-Qarnayn, whose vizier was al-Khiḍr, the quasi-immortal patron of the Sufis; al-Bisṭāmī distinguishes him from Alexander the Great, who also was known as Dhū l-Qarnayn and whose vizier was Aristotle. The wafq is said to have been flown on the standard (liwāʾ) of the first Dhū l-Qarnayn, and its occult properties (khawāṣṣ) are said to have included healing diseases, curing madness/epilepsy (al-maṣrūʿ), routing enemy armies, and revealing hidden treasures.36 The wafq is mentioned again at various points in the Naẓm, including in a martial context in relation to the Abbasid caliph al-Maʾmūn, as discussed below. There is at least one surviving early-modern example of a royal standard bearing a wafq of similar proportions.37 Moses also was a lettrist, though al-Bisṭāmī notes him above all as the inventor of alchemy, a science he elsewhere calls “the sister of prophecy.”38 Moses’ knowledge of the science of letters is demonstrated by his having employed a six-by-six wafq inscribed on a golden scroll to raise the bones of Joseph from the Nile—a lettrist gloss on the biblical account of Moses’ salvaging of Joseph’s remains before escaping Egypt, in fulfilment of an oath.39 While

35 36 37 38 39

NS, fol. 17b. The notion that prophetic miracles (muʿjizāt) are enacted in response to the challenges of unbelievers is a standard tenet of the Ashʿari school of theology. NS, fol. 18a. Francesca Leoni ed., Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2016), 66–67. NS, fol. 67a. Exodus 13:19.

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some antediluvian prophets are credited with great knowledge of the letters, it is only beginning with Abraham’s discovery of the wafq that we hear explicitly of the science being put to occult-practical use, whether toward sacred or imperial ends. This implies that, although based in revelation and thus in some sense eternal, the science as revealed to the world was susceptible to development over time, a theme we will encounter again with regard to the ummat al-ḥukamāʾ.40 Among the minor Israelite prophets, only Ezekiel and Jeremiah are named as lettrists, and each is credited with a sifr on the topic. One wonders whether the malāḥim-like nature of those prophet’s visions, or even their prominent place in Jewish Kabbalistic literature, recommended their being remembered as lettrists. Jeremiah, in particular, was portrayed in some late-medieval Jewish texts as having worked from Sefer Yeẓira to derive the letter combinations necessary to make the Golem.41 As for Jesus, al-Bisṭāmī records that “he was among the most knowledgeable of the prophets in the intricacies of the sciences and the subtleties of the legal meanings, and the most exalted of his sciences was the science of letters.”42 Finally, regarding Muḥammad (who is discussed in Book One only briefly, compared with the long section on him in Book Two), al-Bisṭāmī, on the authority of al-Sulamī, cites Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī as stating: The science to which al-Muṣṭafā was called is knowledge of the letters. Knowledge of the letters is in lām-alif. Knowledge of lām-alif is in the alif. Knowledge of the alif is in the point (nuqṭa). Knowledge of the point is in the original gnosis. Knowledge of the original gnosis is in knowledge of the sempiternal. Knowledge of the sempiternal is in the will of God (al-mashīʾa), meaning that which is fixed (al-maʿlūm). Knowledge of the will of God is in the mystery of the divine essence (ghayb al-huwiyya). He whom God called to be His prophet said, “Know that the hāʾ belongs to the mystery of the divine essence.”43 40 41

42 43

On the development of this science, see Bink Hallum’s chapter in this volume. On the complex of ideas involving Jeremiah, Kabbalah, astrology, Golem-making, and messianism, see Marla Segol, Word and Image in Medieval Kabbalah: The Texts, Commentaries, and Diagrams of the Sefer Yetsirah (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 105–139. Speculation about al-Bisṭāmī having had access to such sources relies on their having circulated in Arabic, as I am unaware of any evidence that he read Hebrew. NS, fol. 20a. “Wa-kāna min aʿlam al-anbiyāʾ bi-daqāʾiq al-ʿulūm wa-laṭāʾif al-maʿānī alḥikmiyya wa-kāna ajalla ʿulūmihi ʿilm al-ḥurūf.” NS, fol. 20b–21a. “Qāla Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī al-ʿilm allādhī duʿiya ilayhi al-Muṣṭafā huwa ʿilm alḥurūf wa-ʿilm al-ḥurūf fī lām-alif wa-ʿilm lām-alif fī l-alif wa-ʿilm al-alif fī al-nuqṭa wa-ʿilm

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A full exegesis of this report could occupy a volume of its own, but a few comments can be offered here. The lām-alif ligature was often regarded as a letter in its own right; al-Būnī, for example, is adamant on this point.44 Bashir points out that the Ḥurūfiyya under Faḍlallāh Astarābādī held that lām-alif represents the human body as a whole, which they thought it resembled graphically.45 This idea almost certainly preceded Faḍlallāh and probably relates to the traditions al-Bisṭāmī cites earlier about Adam having been formed from the letters. Similarly, the alif is often associated with the intellect (al-ʿaql), that is, the human intellect as something capable of intersection with the Intellect (nous) as primary metaphysical hypostasis, as in al-Būnī’s cosmology.46 Insofar as this report can be taken to describe a method of spiritual attainment, it might be read as one that begins from the body, proceeds to the individual intellect and the knowledge of God inherent therein, and thence proceeds to contemplation of the macrocosm. As for the hāʾ and the “mystery of the divine essence” (ghayb al-huwiyya), this relates to the final letter in the name “Allāh” but also to Hū as a name of God. The latter is regarded by some Sufi thinkers as the “greatest name” (al-ism al-aʿẓam), and it was the subject of a treatise by al-Bisṭāmī’s lettrist shaykh Abū ʿAbdallāh al-Kūmī (d. early-ninth/fifteenth century), Risālat al-Hū, which survives in at least one copy.47 Beyond questions of interpretation, the function of this report in the context of al-Bisṭāmī’s discourse is to clarify that lettrism is not, in the final analysis, merely a source of wisdom and an effective prognosticative and occult-practical tool but the mystery of mysteries at the heart of Islam. With regard to the history of lettrism, the implication is that the mystical-experiential, unitive potential of the science was brought to fruition only at the hands of Muḥammad, who then made it available to Muslim adepts. Thus, we see again the knowledge of lettrism developing and expanding in successive eras. Another way in which al-Bisṭāmī explores the prophets’ relationships to the letters is through ḥisāb al-jummal, that is, observations based on the numerical values of the prophets’ names and their correlations with divine names of the same value. His ruminations on this topic touch on several prophets, many of whom he does not otherwise associate with lettrism. Ṣāliḥ totals 129,

44 45 46 47

al-nuqṭa fī l-maʿrifa al-aṣliyya wa-ʿilm al-maʿrifa al-aṣliyya fī ʿilm al-azal wa-ʿilm al-azal fī l-mashīʾa ay al-maʿlūm wa-ʿilm al-mashīʾa fī ghayb al-huwiyya wa-huwa allādhī daʿā Allāh ilayhi nabiyahu qāla fa-aʿlam annahu wa-l-hāʾ rajiʿ ilā ghayb al-huwiyya.” Al-Būnī, Laṭāʾif al-ishārāt, fol. 3b–4a. Shahzad Bashir, Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 45. On the alif as the Intellect in al-Būnī, see Gardiner, “Stars and Saints,” 49. Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi MS Reşid Efendi 608/3 (fols. 80b–108a).

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which is equal to God’s name (al-)Laṭīf.48 Abraham (Ibrahīm) comes to 258, which is the value of (al-)Raḥīm.49 Joseph (Yūsuf) totals 154, which is equal to (al-)Qayyūm. Furthermore, the wāw and sīn of the prophet’s name equal sixtysix, the value of the name Allāh, while the yāʾ and fāʾ equal ninety, the value of (al-)Malik.50 Moses (Mūsā) equals 116, the value of (al-)Qawī.51 Jesus (ʿĪsā) is 150, which equals (al-)ʿAlīm.52 In noting these correlations, al-Bisṭāmī typically goes on to mention briefly various benefits that can be gained through the aforementioned praxis of takhalluq bi-akhlāq Allāh—that is, the dhikr of the names in order to take on the divine qualities. In most cases he does so without dwelling explicitly on how the divine names specifically informed the lives of the prophets, but one case in which he does go into such detail is that of Moses and al-Qawī. He explains that one who attains a vision of the “presence” (ḥaḍra) of al-Qawī (the Possessor of All Strength) is weakened by the experience. God possesses all strength, so His servant possesses none. This weakness explains why Moses begged God to send Aaron with him to speak on his behalf in confronting Pharaoh. Al-Bisṭāmī goes on to note that, while the letters of al-Qawī total 116, its “pronounced” (lafẓan) value is 126—that is, due to the geminated yāʾ being counted twice—which is equal to the name Jonah (Yūnus). Citing a hadith in which the Prophet refers to Jonah as “a weak man,” al-Bisṭāmī avers that both Moses and Jonah were affected in this way by al-Qawī. This relationship between the two prophets is further shown, he argues, by Moses having been cast into the water in the darkness of the reed basket and Jonah having been cast into the water in the darkness of the fish’s belly. Such gematriatic applications of ḥisāb al-jummal are, to my knowledge, uncommon in the Muslim exegetical tradition, and these findings may be original to al-Bisṭāmī. Such methods are relatively common in Jewish exegesis, where gematria is sometimes used to discover hidden connections between otherwise unrelated pericopes. It is tempting to think that al-Bisṭāmī was inspired by such methods, though this is purely speculative. The idea that the prophets are in some sense embodiments of the divine names is a central tenet of Ibn ʿArabī’s elaborate hagiology.53 Put simply, the prophets embody the names, and the saints in turn inherit their particular

48 49 50 51 52 53

NS, fol. 17a. NS, fol. 17b. NS, fol. 19a. NS, fol. 19b. NS, fol. 20b. On Ibn ʿArabī’s hagiology, see footnote 15, supra.

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forms of sanctity from the prophets, such that some living saints act as the avatars of each of the names/prophets at every moment in time, with the inheritors of the major prophets consistently occupying the highest offices of the invisible hierarchy. It is an understanding of the hidden structure of sanctity and the cosmos that—in combination with Ibn ʿArabī and other Sufis’ vivid accounts of imaginal encounters with prophets and saints of the past— complicates linear temporality through the enduring presence of long-dead figures from the past. No figure better embodies this complication of linear human time than al-Khiḍr, the quasi-immortal teacher of mystics who sometimes intervenes in events recounted in Naẓm al-sulūk. Al-Bisṭāmī’s corpus includes many such encounters with figures out of time, particularly as he traces his own authority to speak on lettrism, history, and other matters to a series of visionary meetings with the Prophet and other discarnates.54 His use of ḥisāb al-jummal in the Naẓm is thus one means of detecting and explicating these forces at work in the world, a way of hinting at the ever-present roles of the divine names, letters, and prophets in the unfolding of the history he chronicles, and at the iterative nature of history as a whole.

3

Lettrism and the ummat al-ḥukamāʾ

The narrative in Naẓm al-sulūk on the history of lettrism is not restricted to prophets but also includes several pagan thinkers. Much of this information is found in the section on the ummat al-ḥukamāʾ (“the nation of the wise ones [sages, philosophers]”) in the fifth faṣl of the tenth bāb of Book One.55 This bāb contains discussions of nine nations or peoples (umam), the other eight of which are recognizable ethno-religious groups, such as Sabeans, Egyptians (alQibṭ, Copts), Greeks, and Jews. The nation of the wise ones, however, is unique in that, as discussed below, its members are distinguished by their access to higher realms of knowledge rather than by confession or ethnicity. Prophets play important roles in the histories of all these peoples as told by al-Bisṭāmī, not necessarily as law-bringers or warners, as in common Muslim understandings of prophethood, but rather as wellsprings of philosophical and occult knowledge. The aforementioned identifications of Seth with Agathodaemon and Idrīs with Hermes are key. The Sabeans and Egyptians were pagans,

54 55

One narrative of such encounters, from al-Bisṭāmī’s Shams al-āfāq, is discussed in Gardiner, “Occultist Encyclopedism,” 24–27. NS, fols. 44a–48b.

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that is, star worshippers. It is implied that, for both groups, this derives from Idrīs-Hermes, perhaps as a corrupted understanding of his astrological wisdom. Al-Bisṭāmī goes into some detail on the Sabean’s astrologically timed ritual practices, and he disapproves of their alleged sacrifices of children. Both groups are masters of magic (siḥr), while the Egyptians also excel at talismanry and alchemy. A colorful description is provided of an Egyptian templecity filled with marvels that is effectively a giant astral talisman.56 The Persians, too, have a link to the prophets through Zoroaster (Zarādasht). According to “the historians” (ahl al-tawārikh), he is identical with Seth, though alBisṭāmī unblinkingly includes another report according to which Zoroaster was deceived by the devil into thinking he was a prophet.57 The overall impression is that these nations are powerful due to knowledge derived from the antediluvian prophets but that this has afforded them little in the way of moral or soterial benefits and has presumably not granted them a deep enough understanding of the occult practices at which they excel to perceive God as the singular author of the cosmos, at least not en masse. What sets the members of the ummat al-ḥukamāʾ apart from their nations of origin is their ability, to varying degrees, to commune with and draw wisdom from the universal Intellect, a skill linked to the teachings of Idrīs-Hermes on the attainment of a “perfected inner nature.” Al-Bisṭāmī’s discussion of the ancient philosophers’ capacity for enlightenment is remarkable, in that he blurs the lines between prophetic revelation (waḥy) and other types of divine inspiration, as when he uses waḥy’s verbal form in the following: Hermes mentioned that, when he wanted to learn the secret of the universe and the clarification of the secrets of the natures, his perfected inner nature made it visible to him in the world of dreams, guiding him to the wonders and advising him on the prodigies …. It was asked of him, what is the perfected inner nature? He said, the astral spirit (rūḥāniyya) of the philosopher that is joined to his star. The contemplation of it opens for him the locks of wisdom, teaches him that which is difficult for him, reveals to him (tuwaḥiyu ilayhi) that which is correct, and grants him the keys to the gates in sleeping and waking.58

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NS, 42b. NS, 43b. NS, fol. 44a–b. “Dhakara Hurmus annahu lammā arāda istikhrāj ʿilm sirr al-khalīqa wabayān asrār al-ṭabīʿa ẓahara lahu ṭabāʿahu al-tamm fī ʿālam al-manām wa-arshadahu ilā l-ʿajāʾib wa-awqafahu ʿalā al-gharāʾib …. Fa-qīla lahu wa-mā al-ṭibāʿ al-tāmm fa-qāla rūḥāniyyat al-faylasūf allati hiya muttaṣila bi-najmihi wa-mudabbira lahu taftaḥu lahu maghālīq

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In a related passage, al-Bisṭāmī outlines a spectrum of divine inspiration, in this case concerning knowledge of the letters specifically, to which at least some members of the ummat al-ḥukamāʾ were privy: Thus some of the prophets acquire comprehension of the secrets of the letters through divine revelation and holy dictation, and some of the saints through luminescent witnessing in the spiritual existingness, and some of the pure friends in the purity of constitution and the guidance granted, and some of the sages through clairvoyance and episodes of inspiration, and some of the scholars though vision and dreams. All of them have set down an understanding of some of what God has granted of knowledge and expertise, whether through the path of explanation or the path of the symbol and the allusion.59 Al-Bisṭāmī’s final point regarding the two paths these inspirati have taken in imparting their knowledge of the letters—either by discursive explanation or symbols and allusions—provides a vital justification for Muslim seekers of illumination to plumb the depths of pagan knowledge in order to decode their ancient revelations. Indeed, this bāb as a whole marks al-Bisṭāmī as an avid participant in what John Walbridge has referred to as “Platonic Orientalism,” a fascination with the ancient sages of the east that assumed major proportions in mature Islamic thought.60 This tendency was predicated on the proposition that the ancients had concealed genuine holy wisdom in works that otherwise seemed irredeemably pagan and thus void of valid religious knowledge. It gave Muslim thinkers a fresh set of tools with which to construct new understandings of Islamic scriptures and traditions, including by using ancient wisdomtexts to discover a tradition of secret teachings within Islam that exceeded the bounds of traditional theology and was more permissive of types of philosophical speculation and occult-scientific practice that, in previous periods, had largely been proscribed in public discourse.

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al-ḥikma wa-taʿallamuhu mā ashkala ʿalayhi wa-tuwaḥiyu ilayhi bi-l-ṣawāb wa-yulqiyu ilayhi mafātiḥ al-abwāb fī l-nawm wa-l-yaqaẓa.” NS, fol. 44b. “Fa-baʿḍ al-anbiyāʾ astafādū l-wuqūf ʿalā asrār al-ḥurūf bi-l-waḥy al-sabūḥī wa-l-ilqāʾ al-qudūsī wa-baʿḍ al-awliyāʾ bi-l-shuhūd al-nūrānī fī l-wujūd al-rūḥānī wa-baʿḍ al-aṣfiyāʾ bi-l-ṣafāʾ al-fiṭrī wa-l-irshād al-itī wa-baʿḍ al-ḥukamāʾ bi-l-firāsa wa-l-ilhāmāt wabaʿḍ al-ʿulamāʾ bi-l-ruʾyā wa-l-manāmāt wa-kull minhum qad alqiya ilā mustafadīhi baʿḍ mā ātāhu Allāh min al-ʿilm wa-l-mahāra immā bi-ṭarīq al-ʿibāra aw bi-ṭarīq al-ramz wa-lishāra.” John Walbridge, The Wisdom of the Mystic East: Suhrawardi and Platonic Orientalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 5–16.

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Walbridge’s coining of “Platonic Orientalism” is primarily in reference to the ideas of the “illuminationist” mystical philosopher Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 587/1191), whose ideas claimed a lineage from such giants as Pythagoras, Plato, and Zoroaster. In Shams al-āfāq, al-Bisṭāmī counts al-Suhrawardī as among his sources of lettrist knowledge, and he can be counted as an influence on the discourse in Naẓm al-sulūk. Pythagoras and Plato are thus each treated of at length in the faṣl on the ummat al-ḥukamāʾ, and the reader is even asked to consider that Pythagoras may have been a full-fledged prophet (nabī).61 However, neither figure is explicitly discussed as a lettrist per se. Zoroaster is credited with having written a text on the science, but no tales of his exploits with it are included. Surprisingly, the only detailed account of lettrist expertise among the philosophers is attached to the more obscure figure of Thales (Thālīs) of Miletus. It describes his discovery of the hundred-by-hundred wafq, with a walk-on part at the end for Archimedes (Arshimīdis): [Thales] took a tablet of equal length and width and drew on it a hundredby-hundred wafq until he had inscribed ten thousand cells filled with non-repeating numbers comprising numerous awfāq and various kinds of wafq-related arrangements. It is said that he discovered that through divine inspiration and a type of prophecy. He then placed it in the Temple of Mercury, and the Greeks, as a group, were blessed by that tablet, and they exalted it with utmost exaltation. They had recourse to it when they were concerned with an enemy or other such, taking refuge in it and drawing on its good fortune, and thus they were protected from that calamity by the permission of God the Highest. That tablet remained among them for many long years, until the appearance of the sage Archimedes. He inspected it, deduced its special nature, and explained its utility. The path to it was unveiled to him by the permission of God the Highest. This tablet has occult properties and wondrous secrets too numerous to explain.62

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NS, fol. 45a–b. NS, fol. 45b. “Fa-innahu attakhadha lawḥan mutasāwī al-ṭūl wa-l-ʿaraḍ wa-rasama fīhi wafq miʾa fī miʾa ḥattā artasama fīhi ʿasharat ālāf bayt mashḥūna bi-aʿdād ghayr mukarrara tashtamilu ʿalā ʿiddat awfāq wa-nisab min ṣunūf al-munāsabāt al-wafqiyya wa-dhukira annahu astanbaṭa dhālika min al-ilhām al-rabbānī wa-nawʿ min al-waḥy thumma annahu waḍaʿa dhālika fī haykal ʿuṭārid wa-ahl yūnān bi-ajmaʿihim kānū yatabarrakūnu bi-dhālika al-lawḥ wa-yuʿaẓẓimūnuhu ghāyat al-taʿẓīm wa-idhā ahammahum amr min ʿadūw aw ghayrihi lādhu bihi wa-fazaʿū ilayhi wa-astamaddū min mayāminihi [sic] fa-tankashafa tilka al-dāhiya ʿanhum bi-idhn Allāh taʿālā wa-baqiya dhālika al-lawḥ bayn aẓharihim sinīn mutaṭāwila ilā anna ẓahara Arshimīdis al-ḥakīm fa-naẓara fīhi wa-astakhraja khāṣ-

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The story reveals an important qualifier about the prophetic or semiprophetic status of the ancient sages. Thales is granted the ability to construct the wafq, but it is not clear that he fully comprehends it. The Greeks benefit from it, but nothing suggests that they learn from it in any moral or soterial sense. Archimedes then has to rediscover the secrets it contains and perhaps does so at a deeper level than Thales had, as he is able to perceive and explain (bayyana) something of its hidden properties. Moments of revelation occur at both ends of the story, but there is a chasm of ignorance between them. The ancient quest for knowledge was not confined to solitary inspirati, as the final part of the faṣl on the ḥukamāʾ describes how “generation after generation” of the Greek ʿulamāʾ after Plato discovered ever more varied and complex awfāq as they became increasingly skilled in arithmetic. Furthermore, their accomplishments were not purely arithmetical, as they also learned, through experience (tajriba), the occult-practical uses of the figures, with knowledge of the simpler awfāq spreading even to the common people. In recounting these accomplishments, however, al-Bisṭāmī makes no reference to knowledge of the letters, much less to the divine names that are a vital component of lettrist awfāq in the manner of al-Būnī and his intellectual descendants. This suggests that he considers the science of awfāq to be a line of inquiry that was, at some stages, pursued through mere practice and inductive reasoning, independent of revelation. The task for al-Bisṭāmī and like-minded “Platonic orientalists” of his period, then, is to rediscover the various traces of knowledge the ancients had left behind and to reintegrate them with the secret Islamic tradition of lettrist knowledge that was coming to light in the final centuries of the seventh millennium. Indeed, al-Bisṭāmī sees this task as essential in preparing for the trials of the final days.

4

Lettrism and ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib

Book One of Naẓm al-sulūk is concerned primarily with history before Muḥammad, and Book Two covers the period from the life of the Prophet until Bisṭāmī’s own time, that is, the seventh and final millennium of the series of prophetic-astrological cycles alluded to in the text’s introduction. As mentioned previously, an essential element of the Ikhwanian version of this cosmohistorical vision is the “delegates” (awṣiyāʾ) and Imams of each prophetic cycle,

ṣiyyatahu wa-bayyana manfaʿatahu wa-kashafa al-ṭarīq ʿalayhi bi-idhn Allāh taʿālā wa-lihādhā al-lawḥ khawāṣṣ kathīra wa-asrār ʿajība yaṭūlu sharḥuhu.”

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who, gifted with an esoteric knowledge of their prophet’s message, work to guide humanity. For this al-Bisṭāmī substitutes the more conventionally Sunni concept of the “renewers” of religion (mujaddidūn) who emerge at the beginning of each century. In Book Two, it becomes obvious that al-Bisṭāmī is working with a fluid—even murky—concept of such delegates, one that loosely combines notions of the mujaddidūn with the concept of the invisible hierarchy of Sufi saints as well as sanctified political actors, all of it infused with a dose of Sufi ʿAlidism. Though not labeled a mujaddid per se, ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib is pre-eminent in the crowd of saints with which al-Bisṭāmī populates the seventh millennium. In the faṣl devoted to him in the second bāb of book two, he is portrayed as a key figure in the history of lettrism in the age of Muḥammad. Following a selection of well known hadiths and other reports about ʿAlī’s closeness to the Prophet and his unparalleled access to the hidden meanings of the Qurʾan, al-Bisṭāmī declares: The Imam ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, may God be pleased with him, inherited the science of letters from the messenger of God, may God honor him and grant him peace. He, may God honor him and grant him peace, alluded to it in saying, “I am the city of knowledge and ʿAlī is its gate.” … He is the inheritor of the sciences of the prophets and the ones who are sent [by God] and the pure friends and the righteous ones, the support of the saints and the Sufis and the proof of the scholars and the lettrists (al-ḥarfiyya).63 This statement calls on notions, well established in the Sufism of the period, that ʿAlī was the first initiate into the inner mysteries of Islam and that he is thus the “support” (ʿumda) or foundation of all the saints and Sufis who come after him. Indeed, numerous Sufi orders trace their initiatic lineages (salāsil, sing. silsila) back to him. In attaching lettrism to the body of secret knowledge to which ʿAlī was privy, al-Bisṭāmī follows Ibn ʿArabī and al-Būnī in placing the science at the heart of the esoteric tradition in Islam. Thus ʿAlī is said, in another passage, to have learned the secrets of the past and future, in part through an understanding of one of the mysterious sets of “disconnected letters” (almuqaṭṭaʿāt) that appear at the heads of several chapters of the Qurʾan:

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NS, fol. 96b. “Inna al-imām ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib raḍiya Allāh ʿanhu waritha ʿilm al-ḥurūf min rasūl Allāh ṣallā Allāh ʿalayhi wa-sallama wa-ilayhi ashāra ṣallā Allāh ʿalayhi wa-sallama bi-qawlihi anā madīnat al-ʿilm wa-ʿAlī bābuhā … Wa-huwa … wārith ʿulūm al-anbiyāʾ wal-mursalīn wa-l-aṣfiyāʾ wa-l-ṣiddīqīn ʿumdat al-awliyāʾ wa-l-ṣūfiyya wa-ḥujjat al-ʿulamāʾ wa-l-ḥarfiyya.”

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ʿAlī said, “the science of letters is of the knowledge that is kept hidden; none know of it except the holiest scholars.” He inherited the knowledge of the first and the last of the prophets and the saints and those who were sent [by God], and he spoke of the past and the future. He said, “the messenger of God, may God honor him and grant him peace, taught me from ḥ-m-ʿ-s-q what will be until the day of resurrection.”64 The disconnected letters, a perennial subject in lettrism, come up again in another episode in which al-Khiḍr teaches ʿAlī a potent prayer (duʿāʾ) in which all the sets of disconnected letters are invoked and which ʿAlī is said to have used to secure victory at the Battle of Badr.65 The story echoes that of alKhiḍr teaching ʿAlī the famous “Duʿāʾ Kumayl.” ʿAlī is also said to have been the first among the Companions of the Prophet to wield the hundred-by-hundred wafq—a report that, in a rare act of citation, al-Bisṭāmī notes is taken from alKūmī’s al-Kanz al-bāhir fī sharḥ ḥurūf al-malik al-Ẓāhir, a work discussed below. It states that, during ʿAlī’s caliphate, the Muslims were unable, on multiple occasions, to defeat a certain army of infidels, because the infidels themselves bore that wafq on their banner. On learning this, ʿAlī added it to the banner of a party of his warriors, who then swiftly defeated their opponents.66 This jibes with al-Bisṭāmī’s earlier accounts of the science of awfāq as well known among the pagans, although the hundred-by-hundred wafq plainly is more potent when deployed by ʿAlī.67 This framing of ʿAlī as a master of the letters is hardly original to al-Bisṭāmī. The Imam’s name had been associated with the eschatologically inclined prognosticative science of jafr since the early centuries of Islam, a discourse that, by al-Bisṭāmī’s time, was practically synonymous with lettrism.68 He is thus on well trod ground when he mentions ʿAlī’s having composed (ṣannafa) the book al-Jafr wa-l-jāmiʿa fī asrār al-ḥurūf wa-maʿānī al-ẓurūf, from which “are derived all the lettristic sciences and numerical secrets.”69 Nonetheless, two

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NS, 98a. “Wa-qāla ʿilm al-ḥurūf min al-ʿilm al-makhzūn lā yaʿrifuhu illā al-ʿulamāʾ alrabbāniyyūn wa-qad waritha ʿilm al-awwalīn wa-l-ākhirīn min al-anbiyāʾ wa-l-awliyāʾ wal-mursalīn wa-takallama fī l-māḍī wa-l-mustaqbal wa-qāla ʿallamanī rasūl Allāh ṣallā Allāh ʿalayhi wa-sallama min ḥ-m-ʿ-s-q mā yakūnu ilā yawm al-qiyāma.” The letters ḥ, m, ʿ, s, and q appear at Q 42:1–2. NS, fol. 99a. NS, fol. 98b. On this point, see Bink Hallum’s Chapter 3 in this volume. Noah Gardiner, “Jafr,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed. NS, fol. 98a. Wa-ṣannafa al-Jafr wa-l-Jāmiʿa fī asrār al-ḥurūf wa-maʿānī al-ẓurūf wa-minhu tafarraʿat sāʾir al-ʿulūm al-ḥarfiyya wa-l-asrār al-ʿadadiyya.

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things stand out with regard to the place of ʿAlī in al-Bisṭāmī’s larger account of the history of lettrism and the role of lettrism in history. First, there is an implication that it is in the figures of Muḥammad and ʿAlī that the full spiritual and occult-practical powers of lettrism are realized. For, if al-Bisṭāmī’s account of the Greeks suggests that the science of awfāq was developed among them largely independently of knowledge of the Arabic letters or the names of God, then the superior potency of ʿAlī’s wafq banner over that of the infidels suggests that these bodies of knowledge have been remarried owing to ʿAlī’s mastery of the deepest secrets of the Qurʾan, especially the muqaṭṭaʿāt. Second, ʿAlī functions as the figure from whom the lettrist wisdom of Muḥammad, and indeed all the prophets, is disseminated down through the generations of the Muḥammadan millennium as an esoteric tradition limited to spiritual elites. As al-Bisṭāmī notes, “God concealed his [ʿAlī’s] knowledge from the majority of the scholars.”70 As I have discussed elsewhere, the secrecy with which lettrism had long been guarded is, in fact, a key component of al-Bisṭāmī’s efforts in Shams al-āfāq to make the science more widely known in his own time, as he claims to be finally revealing it in full in order to combat the catastrophic spiritual degradation of his own period, thus writing a part for himself into the drama of the impending eschaton.71

5

Lettrism in al-Bisṭāmī’s Lifetime

The third bāb of Book Two addresses the second through ninth centuries of Islamic history, with a closing section on the final, apocalyptic century to follow. The bāb opens with a discussion of Muḥammad’s prognosticative powers, largely as a prelude to a discussion of the hadith preserved in Sunan Abī Dawūd that is the basis for the notion of the mujaddidūn: “God will send to this community at the head of every century someone who [or some people who, man] will renew for it the authority of its religion.”72 Al-Bisṭāmī affirms the validity of the hadith, dwelling at length on an argument that the Israelite prophets who came in each generation to scold the Jews had fulfilled the same function for the prophetic era of Moses—a confirmation, one can deduce, that such renewers form an epicycle within every prophetic cycle, as with the awṣiyāʾ and Imams for the Ikhwān. Indeed, although al-Bisṭāmī is coy as usual about the relation70 71 72

NS, fol. 98a. “Wa-qad satara Allāh ʿilmahu ʿan akthar al-ʿulamāʾ.” Gardiner, “Occultist Encyclopedism,” 14–15. Sunan Abī Dawūd, first ḥadīth of Kitāb al-malāḥim. “Inna Allāh yabʿathu li-hādhihi alumma ʿalā raʾs kull miʾat sana man yujaddid lahā amr dīnihā.”

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ship of his ideas to the Rasaʿil, he forthrightly informs his audience that “the objective of the introduction that we set forth beforehand and the designs that we explained [there] is the discourse (kalām) of this hadith.”73 This suggests that the cyclical, iterative nature of God’s renewals of religion—along with the descents into ignorance that necessitate the renewals—is the very essence of history as al-Bisṭāmī would have us comprehend it. The nature and identity of the mujaddidūn was much debated among Muslim scholars, though it was generally agreed that the renewers were sent (baʿatha) by God at regular intervals to attend to the moral decay and unwarranted religious innovations that inevitably accumulated over time.74 Particularly for late-medieval thinkers, the concept sometimes takes on a millenarian tone, the centennial cycle of decay and regeneration foreshadowing the war against Antichrist and other tribulations of the final days that will precede the coming of the mahdī and the day of judgment. Like some other thinkers of his day, alBisṭāmī’s approach to identifying the mujaddidūn is flexible, and he embraces the ambiguity of whether the word man (“who”) in the hadith means one or many people to suggest that numerous actors fill the role in each century. He also argues that, though it is sometimes assumed that the mujaddidūn must come from among the scholars, they can just as well be political actors operating under divine sanction. Neither opinion is radical; Ibn al-Athīr and Ibn Kathīr, for example, each concurred with both.75 For each century discussed in the bāb, al-Bisṭāmī identifies at least one political leader and one scholar as fulfilling the function, usually lavishing the most attention on the former. Many of his candidates are conventional. For the second century he names ʿUmar II (r. 99/717 to 101/720) as the ruler-mujaddid,76 and, for the third through seventh centuries, whichever Abbasid caliph reigned at the turn of those centuries. As for scholars, his list concords largely with the choices of other writers on the topic: al-Shāfiʿī in the third century (d. 204/820),77 al-Isfarāʾīnī (d. 418/1027– 1028) in the fifth,78 Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) in the sixth,79 Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210) in the seventh,80 Ibn Daqīq al-ʿĪd (d. 702/1302) in 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

NS, 106b. “Wa-l-gharaḍ min hādhihi al-muqaddima allatī qaddamnāhā wa-l-maqāṣid allatī awḍaḥnāhā huwa al-kalām ʿalā hādhā al-ḥadīth.” For an overview of debates on the concept of the mujaddid, see Ella Landau-Tasseron, “The ‘Cyclical Reform’: A Study of the Mujaddid Tradition,” Studia Islamica 70 (1989): 79–117. Ella Landau-Tasseron, “The ‘Cyclical Reform’,” 85. NS, fol. 108b. NS, fol. 117a. NS, fol. 121b. NS, fol. 123b. NS, fol. 130b.

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the eighth,81 and al-Bulqīnī (d. 805/1403) in the ninth82 all appear frequently in other lists of the mujaddidūn (though his choice of the theologian and historian al-Ṭabarī [d. 310/923] for the fourth century seems idiosyncratic83). He generously lists other possible candidates for each century as well, often taking pains to include one from each of the major Sunni schools of law. The ambiguity of his choices is exacerbated by the fact that the list of scholarly mujaddidūn he gives in his brief discussion of the topic in the introduction does not align precisely with those named in the third bāb of Book Two. Thus, for example, his potentially daring choice of the Shiʿi Imam Muḥammad al-Bāqir as the scholarly mujaddid of the second century is later mentioned only in passing.84 Furthermore, while he names in the introduction his own teacher from the Bisṭāmiyya Sufi order, Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Aṭʿānī (d. 807/1405), as the scholarly renewer of the ninth Islamic century, the shaykh is not mentioned in the third bāb of Book Two. The resolution to this seeming inconsistency may lie in the fact that he specifically refers to the mujaddidūn named in the introduction as being among the aqṭāb, a category not typically evoked in the discussion in book two. Given the air of secrecy that generally surrounds the notion of the invisible hierarchy of saints, it seems probable that the mujaddidūn from the introduction are meant to represent specifically those who transmitted the esoteric Islamic tradition passed down from Muḥammad through ʿAlī, although this is nowhere stated. The overall impression is of an abundance of actors bearing forth the spirit of renewal in each century. Despite that abundance, the story told in the third bāb is that of a continual struggle of God’s servants against the forces of ignorance and irreligion as the epicycle of each century runs its course, a struggle that ultimately—and imminently—will be all but lost before it is won. The accounts of the second through eighth Islamic centuries establish a pattern of crisis and resolution. Al-Bisṭāmī typically focuses on some religiopolitical threat the ruler-mujaddid of a given century faced and overcame, such as the Qarmatian revolts or the Fatimids. A scholar-mujaddid is sometimes represented as having combated a particular threat as well, such as the Muʿtazilīs. Lettrism plays no visible role in most of these accounts, an exception being with regard to the ruler-mujaddid of the third century, the seventh Abbasid caliph al-Maʾmūn (r. 198–218/813–833). Al-Maʾmūn, we are told, “had a power-

81 82 83 84

NS, fol. 132a. NS, fol. 132b. NS, fol. 118a. NS, fol. 112a.

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ful grasp of many sciences, even of the secrets of the astral-spiritual forces and the occult properties of numbers.”85 He apparently put that knowledge to work, as he was feared by his enemies because of a ring inscribed with a wafq of the divine names al-ʿAlī and al-ʿAẓīm, which ensured that he could not be defeated. Al-Bisṭāmī includes a copy of the wafq, though presumably one would need to be a mujaddid-caliph to wield it so effectively. One wonders if al-Maʾmūn’s important role in patronizing the Abbasid translation movement, in which numerous Hellenistic occult-scientific works were brought into Arabic, underlies this memory of him as someone versed in the occult arts. More pointedly, this most famous of the Abbasids is made here to represent a fusion of Muslim religio-political power and occult—specifically lettrist—knowledge that aligns with an image of the sanctified, occultly potent ruler that was beginning to be cultivated by many court intellectuals of al-Bisṭāmī’s period, a phenomenon of late-medieval and early-modern Islam that has garnered considerable attention in recent years.86 As for the century in which al-Bisṭāmī was writing, the ruler-mujaddid is declared to have been the Mamluk sultan al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Barqūq (r. 784– 791/1382–1389 and 792–801/1390–1399). He is the second of the Mamluks to have filled this role, al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn (r. 693/1294, 698–708/1299– 1309, 709–741/1309–1340) having been the mujaddid of the previous century, following the violent termination of the Abbasid line by the Mongols in 656/ 1258. However, while al-Nāṣir Muḥammad’s entry follows the usual formula— he is praised for defeating the “apostate” Ilkhanid Qāzān Khān in Syria—the

85 86

NS, fols. 115b–116a. “Wa-kāna lahu yad ṭūlā fī ʿulūm kathīra ḥattā fī asrār al-rūḥāniyyāt wakhawāṣṣ al-aʿdād wa-laṭāʾif al-asmāʾ al-rabbāniyyāt.” On these notions of sacred/occult kingship, see, for example, Cornell Fleischer, “Mahdi and Millennium: Messianic Dimensions in the Development of Ottoman Imperial Ideology,” in The Great Ottoman-Turkish Civilization, vol. 3: Philosophy, Science, and Institutions, ed. Kemal Çiçek (Istanbul: Isis, 2000), 42–54; Cornell Fleischer, “Shadow of Shadows: Prophecy in Politics in 1530s Istanbul,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 13 (2007): 51–62; Cornell Fleischer, “Ancient Wisdom and New Sciences: Prophecies at the Ottoman Court in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries,” in Falnama: The Book of Omens, ed. Massumeh Farhad and Serpil Bağcı (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2009), 231–244; Cornell Fleischer, “A Mediterranean Apocalypse”; Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Binbas̨, Intellectual Networks; Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Early Modern Islamicate Empire: New Forms of Religiopolitical Legitimacy,” in The Wiley-Blackwell History of Islam, ed. Armando Salvatore, Roberto Tottoli, and Babak Rahimi (Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell, 2017), 353–375; Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Astrology, Lettrism, Geomancy: The Occult-Scientific Methods of Post-Mongol Islamicate Imperialism,” The Medieval History Journal 19, no. 1 (2016): 142–150.

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account of Barqūq and the ninth century stands out from all the preceding ones in both form and content. The first part of the entry deals with Barqūq’s reign. He was, we are told, a “just, discerning, awe-inspiring, and courageous king.”87 Unlike al-Bisṭāmī’s comments on the rulers of previous centuries, however, Barqūq is commemorated not for the defeat of some enemy of the faith (though one might think that the so-called Ẓāhirī Revolt would have qualified), but rather for having gathered around himself “a group from among the learned Sufis and a coterie of the most skillful of the lettrists,” some of whom composed works in the sultan’s name.88 This group included the aforementioned Abū ʿAbdallāh al-Kūmī, a well-known Sufi lettrist from Tunis, and Sayyid Ḥusayn al-Akhlāṭī (d. 799/1397), a Persian lettrist, alchemist, and physician who was a central figure in Cairene occultist circles at the turn of the eighth/fourteenth century, as Evrim Binbas̨ has discussed in detail.89 Though al-Bisṭāmī himself arrived in Cairo only after Barqūq’s death, both these figures were of central importance to his vocation as a popularizer of lettrism to the learned classes. In Shams al-āfāq, he claims al-Kūmī as one of his most important teachers,90 while al-Akhlāṭī initiated into the occult sciences several of the people al-Bisṭāmī claimed as fellow neoIkhwān al-Ṣafāʾ. Al-Bisṭāmī thus has a personal stake in crediting the divinely appointed mujaddid-king with having facilitated the coterie of occult masters to which his own roots trace. There are also connections between the works these lettrists wrote for Barqūq and themes running through the rest of Naẓm al-sulūk. The work by al-Kūmī mentioned by al-Bisṭāmī is the aforementioned al-Kanz al-bāhir fī sharḥ ḥurūf al-malik al-Ẓāhir, from which the report about ʿAlī and the hundred-by-hundred wafq is taken. Though I have not yet been able to locate a copy of this work, the title suggests strongly that it involves analysis through ḥisāb al-jummal of the sultan’s name, probably to prove that he was fulfilling a divinely appointed role as ruler of the umma and perhaps to establish that he had some eschatological role to play. As for the work written for Barqūq by al-Akhlāṭī, which al-Bisṭāmī refers to only as “a comprehensive book” (kitāb jāmiʿ), I have argued elsewhere that this may have been a book of jafr—a prognosticon—specially prepared for the sultan.91 Taken together, the description of Barqūq and his lettrist courtiers echoes the portrayal of al-

87 88 89 90 91

NS, fol. 132a. Wa-kāna malikan ʿādilan ʿāqilan muhīban shajāʿan. Ibid., fol. 132a. Waḍaʿa jamāʿa min al-ʿulamāʾ al-ṣūfiyya wa-zumra min ḥudhdhāq al-ḥarfiyya bi-ismihi kutuban. Binbas̨, Intellectual Networks, 114–140. As discussed in Gardiner, “Occultist Encyclopedism,”19–22. Gardiner, “Occultist Encyclopedism,” 18.

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Maʾmūn as a divinely guided ruler armed with lettrist knowledge. Seen in this light, Barqūq’s reign appears as a kind of latter-day golden age, one product of which, at a slight remove, was al-Bisṭāmī himself. The second and final part of the account of the ninth Islamic century is also unusual relative to earlier entries, in that it is consumed by an event that occurred just after Barqūq’s death, the sack of Aleppo by Tīmūr in 803/1400. Though he does not otherwise address it in the Naẓm, al-Bisṭāmī has a personal stake in the city of Aleppo, where, as a young man, he was initiated into the Bisṭāmiyya Sufi order and first introduced to the occult arts by his shaykh. His rage and suffering shine hotly through the sajʿ-laced prose of his lament for the city and its vicious subjugation by Tīmūr’s army, an event he portrays as following directly from Barqūq’s death, while also describing it as the “point” (qaṣd) of the book as a whole:92 The point [of this book] is that it was the sultan al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Barqūq whom God appointed to this century, the eight-hundreds. And when God, may He be praised, willed the execution of his fate and the conclusion of his destiny, He caused him to die in Cairo at the height of his splendid rule, and upon his death piety [lit., the Qurʾān stand, al-riḥāl] died, and upon his passing perfection passed away, and controversy ensued and harmony was abolished, even until a vainglorious tyrant appeared from the east and struck like lightning. He terrorized the lands and worked corruption in them. He gathered armies, bringing together every scoundrel and trickster, unleashing heresies and horrors, shedding blood and pillaging properties. Then, on the fifth of Rabīʿ I of 803 [24 October 1400] he descended upon the lands of Aleppo in its golden fields. He pillaged its properties, murdered its men, subjugated the country, oppressed its faithful, and captured its women and children. He set his army upon the shrines, the sanctuaries, the mosques, the prayer halls, and the homes of the faithful. They put them to the torch and razed them. They abused the Qurʾans (maṣāḥif ) and the books of knowledge and hadith, throwing 92

The reason for the brackets in the quotation that follows is al-Bisṭāmī’s roundabout means of stating that this account is the “point” of the book, which results from his perfunctory mention of the muḥaddith Sirāj al-Dīn al-Bulqīnī as the scholar-mujaddid of the century: “At the head of this century among the scholars was the shaykh Sirāj al-Dīn ʿUmar alBulqīnī al-Shāfiʿī, and he died in the year 804 [1401–1402CE] in Cairo. It is not the purpose of this book to mention these matters, but rather the point [of this book] is …” “Wakāna ʿalā raʾs hādhihi al-miʾa min al-ʿulamāʾ al-shaykh Sirāj al-Dīn al-Bulqīnī al-Shāfiʿī wa-tuwuffiya fī sanat arbaʿ wa-thāmaniya bi-l-Qāhira wa-laysa al-gharaḍ fī hādhā l-kitāb dhikr hādhihi al-abwāb wa-innamā al-qaṣd anna …” (NS, fol. 132b).

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them out in the street and into every disgusting place. O the calamities he imposed! The tribulations he labored at! The disaster unlike any other! The misfortune as has never occurred! In short, that which happened in Aleppo and its districts and environs and outskirts—swords unsheathed, injustices inflicted, armies vanquished, minds ruined, women victimized and shackled, spilled blood unavenged—the like of it was never heard of in ages past or in any land.93 This grim note is the end of the al-Bisṭāmī’s remarks on the ninth century in the Naẓm, the remainder of it apparently being beneath mention. Certainly he provides a dismal assessment in Shams al-āfāq of the state of learning and spirituality that prevailed in the 820s/1420s when he was writing that book, describing it as an age in which “the remains of the sciences of wisdom and metaphysical gnosis are effaced, the paths of the laws of the prophets are wiped out, [and] the paths of the way of the saints are fallen into oblivion.”94 It is as if he regards the sack of Aleppo as the end of all that was good in his own century, an atrocity the severity of which could only be interpreted as an apocalyptic portent. The final section of Naẓm al-sulūk relates to the events of the impending tenth/sixteenth century, which, al-Bisṭāmī states, will be “the mother of all centuries with regard to calamities.”95 The secrets of this century to come are 93

94 95

NS, fol. 132b–133a. “Al-qaṣd [fī hādhā al-kitāb] anna al-sulṭān al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Barqūq huwa aqāmahu Allāh fī awwal hādhihi al-miʾa wa-hiya al-miʾa al-thāmina fa-lammā arāda Allāh subḥānuhu infādh qaḍāʾihi al-sābiq wa-imḍāʿ qadarihi al-lāḥiq amātahu bi-l-Qāhira fī quwwat dawlatihi al-zāhira wa-māta bi-mawtihi al-riḥāl wa-fāta bi-fawātihi al-kamāl wa-waqaʿa al-ikhtilāf wa-rafaʿa al-iʾtilāf ilā an ẓahara min al-sharq wa-lamaʿa ka-al-barq ṭāghiyyat al-fakhra wa-ṭaghiya fī l-bilād wa-saʿā fīhā bi-l-fasād wa-jamaʿa al-ʿasākir waqarraba kull mufsid wa-mākir wa-aẓhara al-ahwāʾ wa-l-ahwāl wa-safaka al-dimāʾ wanahaba al-amwāl thumma nazala ʿalā al-bilād al-ḥalabiyya fī murūjihā l-dhahabiyya fī khāmis rabīʿ al-awwal sanat thalāth wa-thamān miʾa fa-nahaba amwālahā wa-qatala rijālahā wa-dawwakha bilādahā wa-ẓalama ʿibādahā wa-sabā ḥarīmahā wa-awlādahā wamakkana ʿaskarahu min al-mashāhid wa-l-mazārāt wa-l-jawāmiʿ wa-l-masājid wamawāṭin al-ʿibādāt fa-aṭlaqū fīhā l-nīrān wa-adkhalūhā fī khabar kān wa-ahānū al-maṣāhif wa-kutub al-ʿilm wa-l-ḥadīth wa-ramawhā fī l-ṭuruq wa-fī kull makān khabīth fa-yā lahu min khaṭb mā awḍaʿahu wa-balāʾ mā ashnaʿahu wa-muṣība lā tashabbahahā al-maṣāʾib wa-nāʾibah lam yaqaʿ mithluhā fī l-nawāʾib wa-ʿalā al-jumla fa-allādhi jarā fī Ḥalab wanawāḥīhā wa-ḥawāḍirihā wa-ḍawāḥīhā min suyūf maslūla wa-ḥuyūf maʿlūla wa-ʿasākir maflūla wa-mafākir makhlūla wa-nisāʾ mankūba maghlūla wa-dimāʾ maskūba maṭlūla mā lam yusmaʿ bi-mithlihi fī-mā maḍiya min al-aʿṣār fī quṭr min al-aqṭār.” Gardiner, “Occultist Encyclopedism,” 14. The quotation is from Shams al-āfāq, Chester Beatty MS 5076, fol. 7a. NS, fol. 133a. “Wa-hiya umm al-miʾāt fī l-shadāʾid.”

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best known, he says, by “the masters of the malāḥim, the people of divine alleviations, the adepts of ḥisāb [al-jummal?], and the manifesters of marvels from among the learned Sufis and lettrist shaykhs.”96 It is to their predictions that the section is devoted. He begins by avowing that knowledge of all future events (and indeed all knowledge) is contained in the Qurʾan, citing in support of this assertion the examples of Ibn Barrajān’s having predicted the date of the reconquest of Jerusalem from the crusaders on the basis of alif, lām, mīm, and the incident recorded in the Futūḥāt in which an unnamed companion of Ibn ʿArabī accurately predicts the date of the Almohad conquest of al-Andalus through the application of ḥisāb al-jummal to a phrase in Sūrat al-Fatḥ.97 From this he proceeds to various calculations pertaining to the end of days, which, as he establishes on the basis of a hadith, must be calculated through the application of ḥisāb al-jummal to the Qurʾanic muqaṭṭaʿāt. He attributes to “the scholars of the West” (ʿulamāʾ al-maghrib) the conclusion that the year 903 will mark the abolition of the Qurʾan and the dissolution of the Islamic faithcommunity (al-milla al-islāmiyya), to be followed by a period of ninety-three years in which “there will not remain on the face of the earth anyone who knows God,” after which will come the final hour.98 He includes here another bit of ḥisāb, noting that the final two muqaṭṭaʿāt, qāf and nūn,99 total 150, which is equal to God’s name (al-)ʿAlīm, which is further equal to Jesus (ʿĪsā) and the word “sword” (sayf ), which is the symbol of the mahdī. This is followed by various demonstrations that yāʾ-sīn and ḥāʾ-mīm—which together make (al-) masīḥ, “the messiah”—further gesture toward the appearance of Jesus and the mahdī. Among the many other predictions that follow is one by the Damascene seer Ibn Ṭalha (d. 652/1254), to the effect that 990 will be “the end of the days of the world,” after which no further “worldly events” (ḥawādith al-dunyā) will occur, bringing about “the extinction of the world of generation and decay” (inqirāḍ ʿālam al-kawn wa-l-fasād).100 Also given is a prediction attributed to ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib that, in the year ninety-nine (i.e., 999), not a single Arab will remain on the face of the earth. Obliteration is also foretold for Rome and “the 96 97

98 99 100

NS, fol. 133b. “Arbāb al-malāḥim wa-ahl al-taysīrāt wa-aṣḥāb al-ḥisāb wa-muẓhirī al-karāmāt min al-ʿulamāʾ al-ṣūfiyya wa-mashāyikh al-ḥarfiyya.” NS, fol. 133b. On Ibn Barrajān’s prediction, see Casewit, Mystics of al-Andalus, 294–306; Jose Bellver, “Ibn Barraǧān and Ibn ʿArabī on the Prediction of the Capture of Jerusalem in 583/1187 by Saladin,” Arabica 61, nos. 3–4 (2014): 252–286. On the prediction of the Almohad victory by Ibn ʿArabī’s companion, see Claude Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ʿArabī, trans. Peter Kingsley (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1993), 132–133. NS, fol. 134b, Lā yabqī ʿalā wajh al-arḍ man yaʿrif Allāh. NS. The letters appear at the heads of the 50th and 68th sūras, respectively. NS, fol. 135a.

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regime of the Turks” (dawlat al-atrāk), a term commonly used to refer to the Mamluk sultans but which here may indicate the Ottomans.101 After a series of reports on the ways in which the major cities of the region will be destroyed and which will endure the longest, al-Bisṭāmī ends with a hadith in which the Prophet states that the final hour will not arrive until after the conquest of Constantinople,102 an event that already had an air of inevitability at the time the book was written and that would indeed be accomplished the year before alBisṭāmī’s death. Except for the colophon, that is the end of Naẓm al-sulūk fī musāmarat al-mulūk.

6

Conclusion We will show them Our signs on the horizons and in themselves until it becomes clear to them that this is the Truth. Qurʾan 41:53

This paper is an initial foray into al-Bisṭāmī’s compact but wonderfully complex contribution to Islamic historiography and lettrist thought in Naẓm al-sulūk fī musāmarat al-mulūk, and the arguments made here will no doubt require adjustment as more exploration is done of this text and the rest of his vast, mostly uninvestigated corpus of erudite and visionary works.103 In conclusion, I will only offer, in response to Bashir’s challenge, some impressions of what alBisṭāmī has to tell us about modalities of “Islamic time” and how the science of letters and names inflects notions of temporality and the art of historiography. One way to approach these questions is via the trope, central to the thought of Ibn ʿArabī and other Sufi lettrists, of the “three books”: the idea that the Qurʾan, the human soul, and the world are texts—continuously unfolding products of the divine speech set down in the Preserved Tablet—that the adept reads, interprets, and acts upon in light of one another.104 Crucial to this con101 102 103 104

NS. fol. 135a. NS, fol. 136a. He claims to have written more than 180 works; see al-Bisṭāmī, Durrat tāj al-rasāʾil, fols. 21b–37b. This idea pervades Ibn ʿArabī’s works. William Chittick is, as usual, the best guide. The tripartite concept largely structures his monumental The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-ʿArabi’s Cosmology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), as he discusses in the introduction, beginning at p. xxvii. A more concise rendering is found in his “Ibn ʿArabī on the Ultimate Model of the Ultimate,” in Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities, ed. Jeanine Diller and Asa Kasher (New York: Springer, 2012), 915–930.

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ception is that the cosmos, the self, knowledge of the cosmos and self, and knowledge of God are inextricably entwined in a process of becoming. The creation, the ongoing consequence of God’s cosmogonic speech, is simultaneously an act of revelation, and knowledge will not be complete until the world’s time is completed. Thus, for al-Bisṭāmī, “history itself [is] as significant a form of revelation as scripture,” as Cornell Fleischer puts it.105 The historian, then, is the world’s exegete, of necessity working in media res, though for our author the end of the story, the fullness of time and knowledge, glimmers just over the horizon. Its contours can be deduced through patterns reflected in the greater and smaller cycles of time that have already come to pass; in the synchronies of letters, names, and numbers that ring out from the tales of the prophets, the corpus of apocalyptic hadith, and the visions and utterances of saints long departed or more recent; and in the horrors that have befallen his beloved Aleppo at the hands of the proto-Antichrist Tīmūr. A stubbornly persistent orientalist canard is that of Muslim fatalism, a passivity supposed to be born from resignation to the inevitable execution of God’s will, to the future being maktūb, already written. Al-Bisṭāmī’s iteratively cyclical vision of history, or that of the Ikhwān on which he builds, could conceivably be read as exemplifying this alleged trait, perhaps the more so for being occult and thus “superstitious.”106 But such a gross misreading could only come about through mistaking the historian and the exegete for passive intermediaries of the texts, interpretive traditions, and events on which they work. Nothing could be further from the truth, at least in the case of al-Bisṭāmī and the lettrist predecessors who so inspired him. The middle term in the notion of the three books, the book of the soul that mediates between Qurʾan and world, is of utmost importance in this respect. Ibn ʿArabī is explicit in postulating that the meanings of the holy text are ineluctably mediated through the soul of the individual, different facets of the meanings of the Qurʾan—the speech of God, for whom “there is no repetition in self-disclosure”107—being revealed uniquely in each reader and reading. Nothing less could be expected of history in the hands

105

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107

Cornell Fleischer, “Learning and Sovereignty in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” in Treasures of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3–1503/4), ed. Gülru Necipoğlu, Cemal Kafadar, and Cornell H. Fleischer, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 158. On the orientalist tendency to see Muslims as at once slavishly dogmatic and mired in pagan superstition, see Travis Zadeh, “Magic, Marvel, and Miracle in Early Islamic Thought,” in The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West, ed. S.J. Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 235–238. Lā takrār fī al-tajāllī, another major axiom of Ibn ʿArabī’s thought. See Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 103–105.

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of an interpreter like al-Bisṭāmī, in whose elaborately allusive prose and verse the mysteries of history and history-to-come are revealed. In Shams al-āfāq, al-Bisṭāmī takes it upon himself to unveil lettrism to the world in the face of his own age’s miring in ignorance and irreligion. He takes great pains there to narrate his own initiation into lettrism, detailing his personal asānīd in lettrist matters through teachers whose lineages stretch back to the Prophet and ʿAlī, thus establishing his authority to undertake such a grave task.108 In Naẓm al-sulūk, on the other hand, he is more concerned with establishing lettrism’s pedigree, not just back to Muḥammad but also through the millennia preceding the advent of Islam. Indeed, al-Bisṭāmī’s framework of astral-prophetic cycles is arguably inseparable from his “Platonic orientalist” project, the knowledge of past ages being essential, in his mind, to the understanding of God’s self-disclosure in time. However, despite its universalism and vast temporal scale, the Naẓm seems to me the more personal of the two works, most vividly in the penultimate climax that is the sack of Aleppo. It is infused with an anxiety that reflects the travails of the period in which it was produced, an age marked not only by the living memory of Tīmūr’s ravages, both in Syria and the territories of the still young Ottoman sultanate, but also by such things as the Ottoman civil war that erupted in the wake of his depredations, the steadily worsening economy and internecine fighting of the late Mamluk sultanate, and the continuing outbreaks of plague (a subject on which al-Bisṭāmī also wrote109). The whole divinely and astrally-driven history of the world spirals down onto al-Bisṭāmī’s present moment, weighing on his soul with the promise of even worse to come before the end. Despite this, the Naẓm also offers out the promise of a meaningful role in a world where the centers of political life and piety no longer hold. There is little doubt that al-Bisṭāmī perceived an important place for himself in the grand eschatological drama he penned, even though it was impossible that he would live to see the grand finale. The passing mention in the introduction of his first Sufi master al-Aṭʿānī being a mujaddid and quṭb may be an important clue, as if his initiation at the hands of that turnof-the-century master had obligated him to carry on the sacred task of guiding history toward its end. This is not to say that the Naẓm is just a monument to self-aggrandizement. However highly al-Bisṭāmī regarded himself, he was also plainly motivated by a genuine desire to help place the Ottomans on an eschatological war footing, to prepare them for their role in at last conquering 108 109

Gardiner, “Occultist Encyclopedism,” 19–27. Al-Bisṭāmī, Waṣf al-dawāʾ fī kashf afāt al-wabāʾ, Süleymaniye MS Şehid Ali Paşa 2811/44, fols. 260b–265b; al-Bisṭāmī, al-Adʿiya al-muntakhaba fī al-adwiya al-mujarraba, Süleymaniye MS Ayasofya 377/3, fols. 51a–101b.

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Constantinople and thereby throwing open the gates to the events of the final days. For al-Bisṭāmī and his ilk, if history was already written in the primordial moment when God created and determined the course of things,110 this made apprehending and participating in its unfolding no less meaningful or agentive. Within the temporal logic of the three books, to “do history” is to witness, know, write, and enact it in all its dizzying circumambulations.

Acknowledgements In the paper I delivered at the January 2017 gathering at the Ashmolean Museum from which this volume stems, I assessed, mostly positively, the historical credibility of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī’s account in Naẓm al-sulūk of the Mamluk sultan al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Barqūq’s court as a hotbed of occult thought, particularly with regard to the science of letters and names. I further proposed that the anti-occult diatribes in the famous Muqaddima of Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406)—a Barqūq courtier—should be read as a reaction against the enthusiasm for such theologically risqué discourses at the court of arguably the most powerful Muslim ruler of his time. I have since expanded many of those arguments into two pieces, one already published and the other currently in press. The former is the article “The Occultist Encyclopedism of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī,” Mamlūk Studies Review 20 (2017): 3–38. The latter is in the form of a short monograph, Ibn Khaldūn versus the Occultists at Barqūq’s Court: The Critique of Lettrism in al-Muqaddimah (Berlin: EB-Verlag, 2020). The present paper can be considered a companion to them both. Regarding this paper and all things Bisṭāmī, I thank Cornell Fleischer for his guidance and insights.

Bibliography Primary Sources al-Bisṭāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Al-adʿiya al-muntakhaba fī l-adwiya al-mujarraba. Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi MS Ayasofya 377/3, fols. 51a–101b. al-Bisṭāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Durrat tāj al-rasāʾil wa-ghurrat minhāj al-wasāʾil. Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi MS Nuruosmaniye 4905. al-Bisṭāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Mabāhij al-aʿlām fī manāhij al-aqlām. Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi MS Yeni Cami 785/2, fols. 81a–104b. 110

Q 25:2.

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al-Bisṭāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Naẓm al-sulūk fī-musāmarat al-mulūk. Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi MS 1597. al-Bisṭāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Shams al-āfāq fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-awfāq. Chester Beatty Library MS 5076. al-Bisṭāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. Waṣf al-dawāʾ fī kashf afāt al-wabāʾ. Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi MS Şehid Ali Paşa 2811/44, fols. 260b–265b. al-Būnī, Aḥmad. Laṭāʾif al-ishārāt fī l-ḥurūf al-ʿulwiyyāt. Bibliothèque Nationale de France MS Arabe 2658. Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥyī l-Dīn. Al-futūḥāt al-makkiyyah. 4 vols. Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1968. al-Kūmī, Abū ʿAbdallāh. Risālat al-Hū. Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi MS Reşid Efendi 608/3. Fols. 80b–108a.

Secondary Sources Addas, Claude. Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ʿArabi, translated by Peter Kingsley. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1993. Bashir, Shahzad. Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis. Oxford: Oneworld, 2005. Bashir, Shahzad. Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Bashir, Shahzad. “On Islamic Time: Rethinking Chronology in the Historiography of Muslim Societies.” History and Theory 53 (2014): 519–544. Bellver, Jose. “Ibn Barraǧān and Ibn ʿArabī on the Prediction of the Capture of Jerusalem in 583/1187 by Saladin.” Arabica 61, nos. 3–4 (2014): 252–286. Binbaş, İlker Evrim. Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf Al-Dīn Alī Yazdī and the Islamicate Republic of Letters. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Bora, Fozia. Writing History in the Medieval Islamic World: The Value of Chronicles as Archives. London: I.B. Tauris, 2019. de Callataÿ, Godefroid. “Philosophy and Bāṭinism in Al-Andalus: Ibn Masarra’s Risālat al-ʿitibār and the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 41 (2014): 261–312. de Callataÿ, Godefroid. “From Ibn Masarra to Ibn ‘Arabī: References and Subtle Allusions to the Rasā’Il Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ in the Literature of Al-Andalus.” Studi Magrebini 12 (2015): 217–267. Casewit, Yousef. The Mystics of al-Andalus: Ibn Barrajān and Islamic Thought in the Twelfth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Chittick, William. The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. Chittick, William. The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-ʿArabi’s Cosmology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Chittick, William. “Ibn ʿArabī on the Ultimate Model of the Ultimate.” In Models of God

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and Alternative Ultimate Realities, edited by Jeanine Diller and Asa Kasher, 915–930. New York: Springer, 2012. Chodkiewicz, Michel. Seal of the Saints: Prophethood and Sainthood in the Doctrine of Ibn ʿArabī. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1993. Ebstein, Michael. Mysticism and Philosophy in al-Andalus: Ibn Masarra, Ibn Al-ʿArabī and Ismāʿīlī Tradition. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Elmore, Gerald. “Shaykh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Mahdawī, Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Mentor.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 121 (2001): 593–613. Fleischer, Cornell. “Mahdi and Millenium: Messianic Dimensions in the Development of Ottoman Imperial Ideology.” In The Great Ottoman-Turkish Civilization, vol. 3: Philosophy, Science, and Institutions, edited by Kemal Çiçek, 42–54. Istanbul: Isis, 2000. Fleischer, Cornell. “Shadow of Shadows: Prophecy in Politics in 1530s Istanbul.” International Journal of Turkish Studies 13 (2007): 51–62. Fleischer, Cornell. “Ancient Wisdom and New Sciences: Prophecies at the Ottoman Court in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries.” In Falnama: The Book of Omens, edited by Massumeh Farhad and Serpil Bağcı, 231–244. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2009. Fleischer, Cornell. “A Mediterranean Apocalypse: Prophecies of Empire in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61, nos. 1–2 (2018): 18–90. Fleischer, Cornell. “Learning and Sovereignty in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.” In Treasures of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3– 1503/4), edited by Gülru Necipoğlu, Cemal Kafadar, and Cornell Fleischer, 155–160. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Gardiner, Noah. Ibn Khaldūn versus the Occultists at Barqūq’s Court: The Critique of Lettrism in al-Muqaddimah. Berlin: EB-Verlag, 2020. Gardiner, Noah. “Jafr.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed. Gardiner, Noah. “Stars and Saints: The Esotericist Astrology of the Sufi Occultist Ahmad Al-Buni.” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 12, no. 1 (2017): 39–65. Gardiner, Noah. “The Occultist Encyclopedism of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī.” Mamlūk Studies Review 20 (2017): 3–38. Gril, Denis. “The Science of Letters.” In The Meccan Revelations, edited by Michel Chodkiewicz, 2:103–219. New York: Pir Press, 2004. Marquet, Yves. “Imâmat, résurrection et hiérarchie selon les Ikhwân al-Safâʾ.” Revue des études islamiques 30 (1962): 49–142. Marquet, Yves. “La révélation par l’astrologie selon Abū Yaʿqūb as-Sijistānī et les Iḫwān aṣ-Ṣafāʾ.” Studia Islamica 80 (1994): 5–28. Marquet, Yves. La philosophie des Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ. Nouvelle éd. augmentée. Paris: Société d’Études de l’Histoire de l’Alchimie, 1999.

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chapter 7

Kāshifī’s Asrār-i qāsimī: A Late Timurid Manual of the Occult Sciences and Its Safavid Afterlife Maria Subtelny

Qāsimī, do not speak openly of these secrets in front of this blind folk; Where there is no understanding, no questions can be asked. Qāsim-i Anvār1

∵ The Persian author and renowned preacher Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī Vāʿiẓ-i Kāshifī (d. 910/1504–1505) and his son Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī Ṣafī (d. 939/1532–1533) played a key role in the popularization of Persian literature on the occult sciences in late Timurid and early Safavid Iran. Kāshifī’s writings covered virtually all aspects of learning in his time, from Qurʾan commentary and hadith collections to political ethics and epistolography. Not surprisingly, he also wrote several works on the occult sciences, or ʿulūm-i gharība, as these were considered to be integral to the scientific outlook of medieval Islam and were customarily included in the classifications of the sciences.2 Among his works in this field are the Ikhtiyārāt al-nujūm (or Lavāyiḥ al-qamar), a work on elective astrology, which appears to be the only book of his septet on astrology, Sabʿa-yi kāshifiyya, to have survived;3 Javāhir al-tafsīr li-tuḥfat al-Amīr, a lettrist commentary on the Qurʾan in four projected volumes;4 Marṣad al-asnā fī istikhrāj al-asmāʾ al1 Qāsim-i Anvār, Kulliyyāt, ed. Saʿīd Nafīsī (Tehran: Kitābkhāna-yi Sanāʾī, 1337sh/1958), 92. 2 Thus, for example, in the Jāmiʿ al-ʿulūm of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210); see Živa Vesel, Les encyclopédies persanes: Essai de typologie et de classification des sciences (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1986), 35–37; and Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Powers of One: The Mathematicalization of the Occult Sciences in the High Persianate Tradition,”Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 5 (2017): 145–147. 3 It was composed in 878/1473–1474 for the Timurid vizier Majd al-Dīn Muḥammad Khvāfī. For the work, see Sergei Tourkin and Živa Vesel, “The Contribution of Husayn Vaʿiz-i Kashifi to the Transmission of Astrological Texts,” Iranian Studies 36, no. 4 (2003): 589–599. 4 Apparently commissioned by ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī and begun some time before 888/1483, the year

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ḥusnā, a treatise on the manipulation of the Divine Names;5 Tuḥfa-yi ʿaliyya, a treatise on lettrism;6 Risāla dar ʿilm-i aʿdād, a treatise on numerology and magic squares;7 and Asrār-i qāsimī, completed in 907/1501–1502 and the topic of the present study. Because he originated in Sabzavar, a well known Shiʿi town in the province of Bayhaq, and especially on account of his authorship of the ʿAlid martyrology, Rawḍat al-shuhadāʾ (“The garden of the martyrs”), which became a quasicanonical text used in the commemorative practice of rawḍa-khvānī during the Safavid period, Kāshifī was regarded by many (mainly Iranian) scholars as a Twelver Shiʿi.8 The biographical evidence, however, appears to contradict this categorical assessment, which resulted largely from his being appropriated by Shiʿi biographers of the late Safavid period. To begin with, Kāshifī was a member of the Naqshbandiyya Sufi order, famous for its staunch adherence to Sunnism, especially of the Hanafi variety. In his son’s telling, when he first came to Herat in 860/1456, after spending time in Sabzavar, Nishapur, and Mashhad, it was in response to a dream he had of the recently deceased Naqshbandī Sufi master Saʿd al-Dīn Kāshgharī.9 In Herat he came under the influence of Kāshgharī’s spiritual successor, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, and was initiated into the Naqshbandiyya order. Thereafter he served for some time as chief judge (qāḍī al-quḍāt) in Sabzavar—presumably a Sunni post to which he had

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in which the commentary on the first chapter, Sūrat al-Ḥamd, was completed. Two more chapters and part of the fourth were completed in 890/1485. In 897/1491 Kāshifī abandoned the project in favor of the four-volume Qurʾan commentary Mavāhib-i ʿaliyya. Edition of the commentary on the first chapter: Javāhir al-tafsīr: Tafsīrī adabī, ʿirfānī, ḥurūfī, shāmil-i muqaddimaʾī dar ʿulūm-i qurʾānī va tafsīr-i sūra-yi Ḥamd, ed. Javād ʿAbbāsī (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1379sh/2000–2001). Mentioned by Kāshifī’s son, Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī Ṣafī, in the list of five of his father’s works on the occult sciences in his Ḥirz al-amān min fitan al-zamān, MS, Tehran, Kitābkhāna-yi Majlisi Shūrā-yi Islāmī, 15708, p. 54. See also Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “The Occult Challenge to Philosophy and Messianism in Early Timurid Iran: Ibn Turka’s Lettrism as a New Metaphysics,” in Unity in Diversity: Mysticism, Messianism and the Construction of Religious Authority in Islam, ed. Orkhan Mir-Kasimov (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 269, who points out that these do not seem to include all his works. ʿAlī Ṣafī, Ḥirz al-amān, MS, Majlis, 15708, p. 54. Presumed lost, but a manuscript copy was recently discovered in the Āstān-i Quds-i Raḍavī Library in Mashhad; see Muṣṭafā Dirāyatī, Fihristgān-i nuskhahā-yi khaṭṭī-i Īrān (Fankhā), 34 vols. (Tehran: Sāzmān-i Asnād va Kitābkhāna-yi Millī-i Jumhūrī-i Islāmī-i Īrān, 1390sh–/2011–), 7:544, s.v. Tuḥfat al-ʿilliyya. Unpublished. On the development of Islamicate magic squares, see Bink Hallum’s chapter in this volume. See Kāshifī, Javāhir al-tafsīr, introduction, 88–93. Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī Ṣafī b. Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ-i Kāshifī, Rashaḥāt-i ʿayn al-ḥayāt, ed. ʿAlī Asghar Muʿīniyān, 2 vols. ([Tehran], 2536 (Shāhinshāh calendar)/1977), 1:252–253.

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been appointed by the Timurid ruler Sulṭān-Abū Saʿīd, and he remained there until 875/1470 when Sulṭān-Abū Saʿīd’s successor, Sulṭān-Ḥusayn-i Bayqara, who came to power after a brief interregnum, released him from his duties and allowed him to return to Herat with his disciples.10 The Timurids professed adherence to Hanafi Sunnism, although they accommodated the Shafiʿi madhhab, and despite what appears to have been a brief flirtation with Twelver Shiʿism on the part of Sulṭān-Ḥusayn, they remained Sunni in their religious orientation. Kāshifī was an extremely popular preacher (vāʿiẓ) and famous dispenser of moral advice (nāṣiḥ), regularly preaching at the most prestigious venues in Herat and drawing large, presumably Sunni, crowds.11 Given his close affiliation with the Timurid court and the patronage he enjoyed from such individuals as Mīr ʿAlīshīr Navā’ī, he could not have been a Shiʿi, at any rate not an overt one. At the same time, given his frequent expressions of philo-ʿAlidism Kāshifī’s confessional orientation has been deemed ambiguous by many scholars.12 The Shiʿi cleric and scholarly editor of the Rawḍat al-shuhadāʾ, Āyatallāh Ḥājj Shaykh Abū l-Ḥasan Shaʿrānī, believed, on the basis of his writings, that Kāshifī was a Sunni; at the same time, however, he kept his options open, so to speak,

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See M.E. Subtelny, “Kašefi, Kamāl-al-Din Ḥosayn Wāʿeẓ,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica. Also Gottfried Herrmann, “Biographisches zu Ḥusain Wāʿiẓ Kāšifī,” in Corolla Iranica: Papers in Honour of Prof. Dr. David Neil MacKenzie on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday on April 8th, 1991, ed. Ronald E. Emmerick and Dieter Weber (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1991), 93–94 and 98–99 [on the basis of a document in a Timurid chancery collection, MS, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Supplément Persan 1815; also in Niẓām al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ Niẓāmī, Manshaʾ al-inshāʾ, vol. 1, ed. Rukn al-Dīn Humāyūnfarrukh (Tehran: 1357sh/1978), 116–117, the introduction to which contains many allusions to Kāshifī’s interest in astrology/astronomy; my interpretation of this document differs from Herrmann’s, in that I identify the issuer as Sulṭān-Ḥusayn, and not Sulṭān-Abū Saʿīd, on the grounds that the latter is referred to by his posthumous title, Sulṭān-i Shahīd]. Ghiyāth al-Dīn b. Humām al-Dīn al-Ḥusaynī Khvāndamīr, Tārīkh-i Ḥabīb al-siyar fī akhbār afrād-i bashar, ed. Jalāl al-Dīn Humāʾī, 4 vols. (reprint ed., Tehran: Khayyām, 1362sh/1984), 4:345. In his 1999 dissertation, Adam Jacobs analyzed, among other texts, Kāshifī’s Rawḍat alshuhadāʾ. He observed that Kāshifī’s views were frequently in concert with mainstream Twelver Shiʿism but that he was unable to come to a satisfactory conclusion regarding his confessional orientation and surmised that he was a Shiʿi who had left his Shiʿi majority homeland in Sabzavar/Bayhaq for a Sunni-majority one and was masquerading as a Sunni for his Timurid patrons, who were not well enough informed about Sunnism to understand what he was up to; see Adam Jacobs, “Sunnî and Shî’î Perceptions, Boundaries and Affiliations in Late Timurid and Early Ṣafawid Persia: An Examination of Historical and Quasi-Historical Narratives” (PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1999), chap. 2, esp. 78–79.

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when he stated that “If [Kāshifī] was confessionally a Shiʿi (madhhab-i tashayyuʿ), he did justice to the topic [of the martyrdom of the Shiʿi Imams]. And if he was a Sunni (madhhab-i ahl-i sunnat), he outdid the Shiʿis and taught them about their own religious tradition.”13 There is no doubt that Kāshifī had sympathies for the Ahl al-Bayt and the Imams and respect for sayyids (descendants of the Prophet) in general. Several of his works were dedicated to or inspired by sayyids, and in his books he drew frequently on Shiʿi traditions, in addition to Sunni ones. According to an authorization to transmit (ijāza) that he granted to an unnamed individual in 872/1468 (the location of which is unfortunately not recorded), he transmitted the well known Shiʿi work al-Ṣaḥīfa al-riḍawiyya (also known as Ṣaḥīfat al-Riḍā, Musnad al-Riḍā, and Ṣaḥīfat ahl al-bayt), a compendium of prophetic Traditions related by the eighth Shiʿi Imam ʿAlī al-Riḍā.14 Kāshifī describes his chain of transmission as going through his late father, who transmitted directly from the early Timurid-era Hanafi scholar, traditionist, preacher, and Sufi Jalāl al-Dīn al-Qāyinī (d. 838/1434–1435),15 who was a prominent Sunni figure in early Timurid Herat. In addition to having composed a book of advice for the Timurid ruler Shāhrukh, titled Naṣāʾiḥ-i shāhrukhī, which depended heav-

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Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Kāshifī, Rawḍat al-shuhadāʾ, ed. Āyatallāh Ḥājj Shaykh Abū l-Ḥasan Shaʿrānī (reprint ed., Tehran: Intishārāt-i Islāmiyya, 1379sh/2000–2001), 5–6 (introduction). The ijāza is found in some manuscript copies of the work. It has been reproduced in facsimile in the above-mentioned edition of Rawḍat al-shuhadāʾ, p. 420, from a manuscript copy of Ṣaḥīfat al-Riḍā, dated 989/1581, in the Kitābkhāna-yi Masjid-i Aʿẓam of Qum, MS 2677/3 (where it is recorded on the back of the book). For other references and transcriptions of the ijāza, see Ṣaḥīfat al-Imām al-Riḍā, ed. Muḥammad Mahdī Najaf, 2nd ed. (Beirut: Dār al-Aḍwāʾ, 1406/1986), 37–38, 20–21; and Kāshifī, Javāhir al-tafsīr, introduction, 42–43. For al-Qāyinī, his works, and chains of transmission, see Maria Eva Subtelny and Anas B. Khalidov, “The Curriculum of Islamic Higher Learning in Timurid Iran in the Light of the Sunni Revival under Shāh-Rukh,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 115, no. 2 (1995): 217–220. His name appears in slightly different forms in the various transcriptions of the ijāza. Crucially, his chain of transmission is the same as that recorded in the ijāzas he himself granted or that were presented to him, thereby confirming his identity: al-Qāyinī transmitted from his shaykh, Tāj al-Dīn Ibrāhīm b. ʿUmar al-Qaṣṣāʿ al-Ṭabasī, who transmitted from Tāj al-Dīn ʿAlī b. ʿUmar al-Turka al-Kirmānī, who transmitted from Hibatallāh b. Yūsuf b. Ibrāhīm al-Ḥamūya/Ḥamūʾī, who transmitted from Ṣadr al-Din Abū l-Majāmiʿ Ibrāhīm al-Ḥamūya (d. 722/1322), the famous mystic and theologian of the Ilkhanid period, et al. To this should be added the ijāza he granted in Herat in 826/1423, for which see MS Tashkent, State Public Library of Uzbekistan, no. 3294. My thanks to Ashirbek Muminov for providing me with a digital copy of the manuscript.

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ily on Sunni sources, he also compiled a book of selections (muntakhab) from Ṣaḥīfat al-Riḍā.16 Moreover, al-Qāyinī’s son, Nūr al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-Qāyinī, appears to have been Kāshifī’s master (shaykh) in the chivalric order of futuvvat, the esoteric practices of which he described in great detail in his Futuvvat-nāma-yi sulṭānī, which he dedicated to the servitors of the shrine of Imam Riḍā at Mashhad.17 While he extolled ʿAlī as the model of the fatā (chivalrous youth) who embodied the ideal of javānmardī (virtuous manliness), Kāshifī also enumerated the names of the four orthodox caliphs in the introduction to the work.18 Confessionally, Kāshifī acted as a mainstream Sunni, a member of the madhhab, or confessional orientation, of the Timurid elite, including his patrons, Mīr ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī and Sulṭān-Ḥusayn-i Bayqara. But his interest in the occult sciences transcended conventional notions of confessionalism, and like other occultists, he used the language of philo-ʿAlidism and even Imamism to legitimate his involvement with the occult sciences and to lend authority to his writings. His Rawḍat al-shuhadāʾ is a case in point. What is so striking about this work is its intense focus on Ḥusayn (d. 61/680), the son of the prophet Muḥammad’s cousin and son-in-law, ʿAlī, and third Shiʿi imām, despite the fact that it purports to deal with all the martyred ʿAlids. In fact, the entire work may be viewed as devoted to him.19 To be sure, Ḥusayn was the hero of the battle of Karbala, where he was killed, and commemoration of the tragedy served to galvanize Shiʿi piety, but the figure of Ḥusayn apparently served an altogether different purpose for Kāshifī and occultists like him. I contend that Kāshifī’s philo-ʿAlidism and especially Ḥusayn-centered devotion stemmed from the reputation of ʿAlī as an occultist master and of his line through his son Ḥusayn as authorizing Ḥusaynī sayyids in particular to practice the occult sciences and to write works on their various branches, particularly lettrism and letter divination.

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18 19

In the istijāza, or request for an ijāza, presented to him by a student in 828/1425, it is referred to as al-Arbaʿūn al-muntakhaba min Ṣaḥīfat al-Riḍā; see Subtelny and Khalidov, “Curriculum,” 221 and 233, where it is referred to as al-Riḍāwiyyāt. Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Kāshifī, Futuvvat-nāma-yi sulṭānī, ed. Muḥammad Jaʿfar Maḥjūb (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Bunyād-i Farhang-i Īrān, 1350sh/1971), 123; for which see Maria E. Subtelny, “Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ Kāshifī,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed. The “sulṭānī” in the title is an allusion to Imam ʿAlī Riḍāʾs epithet, Sulṭān-i Khurāsān (“the [spiritual] sultan of Khurasan”). Additionally, in the introduction to the work, Kāshifī refers to him as sulṭān al-awliyāʾ (“the sultan of the saints”). Kāshifī, Futuvvat-nāma-yi sulṭānī, 3 n. 4. Three chapters out of ten (plus khātima) are devoted to him; chap. 8 on Muslim b. ʿAqīl, Ḥusayn’s cousin who was blindly devoted to him, may also be said to be on Ḥusayn.

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Historically, Imamism and the occult sciences went hand in hand. According to the Tabrizi Kurdish occultist Sayyid Ḥusayn Akhlāṭī (d. 799/1397 in Mamluk Cairo), teacher of such occultist luminaries of the early Timurid period as Shāh Niʿmatallāh Valī (d. 834/1431), Ṣāʾin al-Dīn ʿAlī Turka Iṣfahānī (d. 835/1432), and the historian Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī (d. 858/1454),20 the chief prerequisite for composing a book on jafr, that is, divination from letters and their numerical values, was that one had to be a sayyid, that is, a descendant of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 40/661), the first Shiʿi Imam, preferably through his son Ḥusayn.21 Many alchemical treatises were attributed to ʿAlī, and well-known authors of alchemical works claimed him as an authority.22 Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765), the sixth Imam through the line of Ḥusayn, was credited with works on astrology, letter divination, and especially alchemy,23 and he was regarded as the teacher of the notorious alchemist Jābir b. Ḥayyān, the purported author of the voluminous Jabirian corpus.24 In the Rawḍat al-shuhadāʾ Kāshifī ascribes to Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq a work titled Jafr khāfiya, and he records him as stating to his progeny that “our knowledge (ʿilm) is of great antiquity (ghābir) and recorded in books (mazbūr) … and to us belong (nazdīk-i māst) [such works as] Jafr-i aḥmar [= al-Jafr alaḥmar] and Jafr-i abyaḍ [= al-Jafr al-abyaḍ] and Muṣḥaf-i Fāṭima [“The codex of Fatima”], and also the Jāmiʿa [“Compendium”], which contains everything

20

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22 23 24

Kāshifī cites Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī’s work Ḥulal-i muṭarraz dar fann-i muʿammā va lughaz on the poetical form of the enigma in his treatise on rhetorics; see Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Kāshifī, Badāyiʿ al-afkār fī ṣanāyiʿ al-ashʿār, ed. Mīr Jalāl al-Dīn Kazzāzī (Tehran: Nashr-i Markaz, 1369sh/1990), 127. Best known for being the author of the Timurid history Ẓafarnāma, Yazdī also wrote works on the occult sciences, such as Kunh al-murād fi vafq alaʿdād, a treatise on magic squares, and a treatise on finger counting (angusht-shumārī). For Yazdī, see Ilker Evrim Binbaş, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī and the Islamicate Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); for Ibn Turka, see Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “The Quest for a Universal Science: The Occult Philosophy of Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Turka Iṣfahānī (1369–1432) and Intellectual Millenarianism in Early Timurid Iran” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2012); and Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Ibn Turka,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed. Binbaş, Intellectual Networks, 152 and 162, where he also cites Ibn Turka’s statement that “the family of the Prophet (i.e., the Ahl-i Bayt), who are his glorious descendants, were entrusted with jafr, which included the totality of meanings.” Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 195. For example, his Risālat Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq fī ʿilm al-ṣināʿa wa-l-ḥajar al-mukarram, also known as Risālat al-waṣāyā wa-l-fuṣūl. Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften, 195 and 221; Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Shrifttums, vol. 4, Alchimie, Chemie, Botanik, Agrikultur bis ca. 430H. (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 128–129 and 224; and Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Shrifttums, vol. 7, Astrologie, Meteorologie und Verwandtes bis ca. 430 H. (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 323.

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people require.”25 These works on letter-number divination and magic, and other occult sciences were believed to have been dictated or handed down to ʿAlī by the prophet Muḥammad himself, and from ʿAlī to the Imams through ʿAlī’s son Ḥusayn. The ascription of divinatory powers, mastery of the talismanic arts, and special healing capabilities to sayyids, including female members of the Ahl alBayt, are yet other widespread features of sayyido-Sharifology (to cite Kazuo Morimoto’s helpful construct) that deserve to be studied in a systematic manner both synchronically and diachronically. The fact that not all those who bore the sayyid moniker were genetically related to the Prophet’s family proves the point made by Morimoto that sayyid pedigree was often used as a rationale to explain a certain extraordinary quality or saintliness in a particular individual whose sayyid status was in fact socially constructed.26

1

The Scope of Asrār-i qāsimī

Kāshifī’s Asrār-i qāsimī begins with his enumeration of the five “classical” occult sciences, kīmiyā, līmiyā, hīmiyā, sīmiyā, and rīmiyā, the first letters of which formed an anagram that spelled out the Arabic phrase kulluhu sirrun (“It is all a secret”).27 Kāshifī provides definitions of these five occult sciences and mentions some of the authoritative works associated with each. He calls kīmiyā (alchemy), “the science of creating an elixir” (ʿilm-i ṣināʿat-i iksīr) and mentions,

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Kāshifī, Rawḍat al-shuhadāʾ, Khātima, 412. For the traditions about the divine sources of the Imams’ knowledge of the occult and their access to these books on the occult sciences, see Andrew J. Newman, The Formative Period of Twelver Shīʿism: Ḥadīth as Discourse Between Qum and Baghdad (London: Routledge, 2000), 71–76 and 123–124. Kazuo Morimoto, “Toward the Formation of Sayyido-Sharifology: Questioning Accepted Fact,” Journal of Sophia Asian Studies 22 (2004): 95–96. For the anagram, see Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Tehran, Kitābkhāna-yi Majlis-i Shūrā-yi Islāmī, 12559/2, p. 53. In their epistle on magic, the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā referred to the five divisions of the occult sciences, and, in what has been termed “a gross simplification,” they ascribed to them a “Greek” origin, particularly in the case of the science of talismans (ʿulūm al-ṭilismāt), even though the transmission of the talismanic sciences and the occult sciences in general went back to the Babylonians and ancient Egyptians through such groups as the Sabians and Harranians. See the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ), On Magic I: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistle 52a, ed. and trans. Godefroid de Callataÿ and Bruno Halflants (Oxford: Oxford University Press and Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2011), 41–43 and 95 (the divisions being kīmiyā, alchemy; aḥkām al-nujūm, astrology; siḥr wa-ṭilismāt, magic and talismans; ṭibb, medicine; and tajrīd, asceticism) and 143 (for a slightly different list).

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among other works, the treatises of Jābir b. Ḥayyān, al-Jildakī, and Maslama b. Aḥmad al-Majrīṭī; he calls līmiyā, “the science of talismans” (ʿilm-i ṭilismāt) and mentions the works of the legendary sages Ṭumṭum-i Hindī and Hermes Trismegistus;28 he calls hīmiyā (astral magic) “the science of harnessing the power [of the planets]” (ʿilm-i taskhīrāt)29 and mentions al-Sirr al-maktūm, a well known grimoire by Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī; he calls sīmiyā “the science of imaginal entities” (ʿilm-i khayālāt), which he says was described in the works of the ancients—Plato, Galen, and Apollonius;30 and he calls rīmiyā “the science of conjuring” (ʿilm-i shuʿbadāt).31 However, Kāshifī states that, in his treatise (risāla), he will be treating only the sciences of sīmiyā and rīmiyā in two chapters, or maqṣads.32 This is confirmed by his son, ʿAlī Ṣafī, in the introduction to his own work, titled Tuḥfa-yi khānī, which he composed after his father’s death.33 In view of the narrow focus of the Asrār-i qāsimī, it may be that the word asrār (“secrets”) in the title alluded to the sirr (“secret”) in the Arabic anagram, the two constituent letters of which represented the occult sciences of sīmiyā and rīmiyā. More will be said later about the title of the work. Sīmiyā took on a variety of meanings over time and was sometimes equated with lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf ).34 In the succinct definition provided by Melvin28 29 30 31

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34

See Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften, 368–374 and 381. Taskhīr, lit., “subjugation” or “control.” For the Arabic Apollonius, see Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften, 378–379. Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, p. 53; and Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Tehran, Kitābkhāna-yi Majlis-i Shūrā-yi Islāmī, 12568, p. 4. Al-Rāzī’s work is studied in Michael Noble’s Chapter 5 in this volume. Each maqṣad is subdivided into aṣls, faṣls, vaṣls, and nawʿs, which, later in the treatise, become confused. Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, p. 55; and Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12568, p. 6. These two manuscripts (with additional references to others) form the basis of the current study of Kāshifī’s Asrār-i qāsimī proper rather than the Bombay lith. editions that represent an interpolated version of the text and that I refer to as “ps.-Kāshifī”—for details see n. 120 below. Majlis 12559/2 is dated 1252/1837; for a description, see Muṣṭafā Dirāyatī, Fihristvāra-yi dastnivishthā-yi Īrān (DNA), 12 vols. (Tehran: Kitābkhāna-yi Mūza va Markaz-i Asnād-i Majlis-i Shūrā-yi Islāmī, 1389sh/2010), 1:788, no. 20742; and Majlis 12568 is dated 1283/1866; for a description, see Dirāyatī, Fihristvāra, 1:788, no. 20748. Majlis 12559/2 is the more nearly complete of the two manuscripts; maqṣad 1 is on pp. 52–109; and maqṣad 2 (incorrectly numbered maqṣad 1) is on pp. 109– 167. These correspond to pp. 2–54 and pp. 54–80 of ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed., Bombay: Fatḥ al-Karīm Press, 1302/1885. Majlis 12568 lacks many pages and sections, including the beginning, and was consulted only for clarification, where possible. Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī Ṣafī, Tuḥfa-yi khānī, MS, Tehran, Kitābkhāna-yi Majlis-i Shūrā-yi Islāmī, 12575/2, p. 273; and Alī Ṣafī, Tuḥfa-yi khānī, MS, Tehran, Kitābkhāna-yi Majlis-i Shūrā-yi Islāmī, 1065/5, p. 176. Sīmiyā is perhaps from Greek semeia (the plural of semeion, meaning “sign”) via Syriac— see Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften, 361–362; Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd

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Koushki, lettrism is “any type of methodology … centered on letters as keys to deciphering (and manipulating) all levels of physical, imaginal and spiritual reality; to this end the letters are held to be matrices of numerological, astrological, alchemical, magical, and other correspondences.”35 In the Asrār-i qāsimī, however, as Kāshifī himself states, sīmiyā refers rather to an enhanced type of illusionism (ʿilm-i khayālāt), that is, magical practices that often involved the application of letter and number symbolism in talismanic formulas, magic squares, seals, and the like.36 The chapter on sīmiyā describes such operations (ʿamal, pl. aʿmāl) as causing various types of meteorological events, affecting the growth of crops, making people disappear, changing their physical appearance, preventing them from sleeping, making it possible for them to walk on water, find buried treasure, or travel long distances in a short time.37 Most of these operations involve the preparation of arcane potions, suffumigations (dukhna), and tinctures (taʿfīn) that include such ingredients as the dried bones or blood of birds and animals, ashes, kohl (antimony), and inks, the formulas for which are written in cipher to keep them from the uninitiated. Some operations also involve invocations (daʿvāt) and incantations (nīranjāt) and are often astrologically synchronized. Rīmiyā (conjuring) included prestidigitation (shuʿbada), various types of magic writing, and many types of tricks (dukūk), some of which are playful,

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ed., s.v. Sīmiyāʾ; and Pierre Lory, La science des lettres en Islam (Paris: Éditions Dervy, 2004), 37. According to the eighth/fourteenth-century North African sociologist of history Ibn Khaldūn, in his overview of magic: “At the present time, [the science of the secrets of letters] (ʿilm asrār al-ḥurūf ) is called sīmiyā. The word was transferred from talismans to this science and used in this conventional meaning in the technical terminology of its Sufi practitioners. Thus, a general term came to be used for a particular aspect (of magic)”; see ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn Khaldūn, al-Muqaddima, ed. ʿAbd al-Salām al-Shaddādī, 5 vols. (Casablanca: Khizānat Ibn Khaldūn, Bayt al-Funūn wa-l-ʿUlūm wa-l-Ādāb, 1912/2005), 3:119; and Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), 3:171. Melvin-Koushki, “Occult Challenge to Philosophy,” 250. For a corrective view on sīmiyā, see Liana Saif, “From Ġāyat al-ḥakīm to Šams al-maʿārif : Ways of Knowing and Paths of Power in Medieval Islam,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 335–336. My remarks about sīmiyā in my article “The Works of Ḥusayn Vā’iẓ Kāshifī as a Source for the Study of Sufism in Late 15th- and Early 16thCentury Central Asia,” in Sufism in Central Asia: New Perspectives on Sufi Traditions, 15th– 21st Centuries, ed. Devin DeWeese and Jo-Ann Gross (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 110–111, are to be amended. That is, surʿat-i sayr, which Kāshifī says is described in Kitāb sirr al-asrār; see Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, p. 75, and ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 22. For the Kitāb Sirr al-asrār, see below.

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such as igniting a lantern or candle from afar.38 We would today associate these with performance magicians and conjuring artists, as in the case of the trick with a handkerchief (mandīl). Other tricks involve creating the illusion of buildings being built of precious metals, of torches appearing as animals when lit, or of angels descending from the ceiling of a room where the king is seated (useful to overawe courtiers). Some of these tricks are harmless enough and meant simply for amusement, but others involve potions and tinctures that cause people to cry, laugh, love, hate, pass out, go insane, or become terrified (e.g., the illusion that a person is sitting on the banks of a sea from which a whale emerges to devour him). Others are downright devious strategems (ḥiyal) meant to cause harm, such as one by which an astrologer can trick an unsuspecting person into believing that his horoscope indicates he has some physical defect, or one designed to give a scribe writer’s cramp. As if sensing that he had gone too far, Kāshifī ends the chapter on rīmiyā (and the treatise) on a cheerful note, with a trick for making the sweetest and tastiest dessert known as pālūda.39 Thus, sīmiyā and rīmiyā were two closely related occult sciences, and it is no doubt for this reason that Kāshifī chose to group them together in a single work. Given the negative associations that some of their operations had acquired with trickstery and charlatanism, perhaps Kāshifī intended, by focusing on them, to rehabilitate them in the eyes of his Persian audience. At the end of the chapter on sīmiyā he reminds its practitioners that the effects of the operations of this occult science are not the result of human endeavor but rather the product of God’s will, who acts through a practitioner who has suitably prepared himself to be the worthy instrument of God’s power. In keeping with occultist tradition, he also warns that knowledge of this science should be kept from the uninitiated: The advice of the great masters [of sīmiyā] (vaṣiyyat-i akābir) is that the intelligent person (ʿāqil) should know with certainty that God, may He be praised and exalted, is all-powerful and does whatever He wants. It is

38

39

The origin of the term rīmiyā is unknown; perhaps it was simply meant to rhyme with sīmiyā. Ibn Khaldūn describes it as practiced by those who use their imaginative faculties to plant phantasms in the mind of the observer who believes they really exist, but this sounds much like sīmiyā; see Ibn Khaldūn, al-Muqaddima, 3:110, and Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah, 3:158. “Since it is customary to conclude a meal with sweets, it will not be inappropriate if, at this point, the table of discourse ends with this sweet (shīrīnī).” Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, p. 167, and ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 80.

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necessary that he understand that He is the Creator of causes (musabbib)40 and that those [secondary] causes are the means by which He manifests the effects of His power. [Hence], in every operation [the intelligent person] should contemplate the wonders of divine Creation with the gaze of instructive example (naẓar-i ʿibrat). [As the Qurʾan says], “Take it as an instructive example, O you who possess insight.”41 He must not abandon the path of asceticism (zuhd), scrupulousness (varaʿ), eating only that which is lawful (ḥalāl), and piety (diyānat), and he must not use his knowledge as a means of attaining wealth and status, because wealth is an ephemeral loan, whereas knowledge (ʿilm) is a lasting jewel.42 Under no circumstances should he reveal these secrets to an uninitiated person (nā maḥram) nor should he withhold them from one who is worthy and deserving. Whoever veils the hidden secret (sirr-i maktūm)43 from strangers (bīgāna), in his acquaintance (āshnāʾī) with the verities (ḥaqāyiq) his friend (āshnā) [will be] the One who facilitates all matters (muyassir al-umūr) (i.e., God), “And He knows everything that is in people’s hearts.”44 Kāshifī’s sīmiyā was thus not the high philosophical lettrism espoused by such well known Persian occultists of the Timurid period as Ibn Turka Iṣfahānī and ʿAlī Yazdī, who regarded it as a universal science that provided access to reality through the power inherent in the letters of the Arabic alphabet and their corresponding numerical values. Ibn Turka and Yazdī had studied lettrism and letter divination (ḥurūf va jafr) in Cairo with Sayyid Ḥusayn Akhlāṭī, whose views on the role of lettrism in understanding (and controlling) the cosmos they shared as members of what some scholars maintain was an informal network of elite intellectuals who referred to themselves as Ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ wa-khullān al-wafāʾ (“The brethren of purity and friends of fidelity”), an allusion to the self-designation of the anonymous Neopythagorean Neoplatonists

40

41 42 43 44

God is usually referred to in Islamic philosophical/theological literature as the “Causer of causes” (musabbib al-asbāb), i.e., the First Cause, because he acts through “secondary causes,” i.e., all existent things. Cf. Q 24:44. Here Kāshifī cites an Arabic saying of ʿAlī’s that underscores this idea. An allusion to al-Sirr al-maktūm, a well known work on astrological magic by Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1209); it is studied in Michael Noble’s chapter in this volume. Cf. Q 3:119. Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, pp. 108–109; lacking (along with other pages) in Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis 12568, and in ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885).

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of fourth/tenth-century Iraq.45 Nor was Kāshifī’s the abstruse lettrism of the fringe Ḥurūfiyya movement and its leader Faḍlallāh Astarābādī (d. 796/1394), whose messianic activism had been proscribed in the early part of the ninth/fifteenth century in the wake of the failed attempt on the life of the Timurid ruler Shāhrukh by an alleged Ḥurūfī adherent.46 Rather, it was an applied magic that was more illusionist than lettrist, making use of lettrism without making it the central preoccupation.

2

Kāshifī’s Sources

Kāshifī’s exposition of sīmiyā and rīmiyā was, by his own admission, based on two Arabic works that he says dealt with these two “arts” ( fannayn), namely, ʿUyūn al-haqāʾiq wa-īḍāḥ al-ṭarāʾiq (“The sources of truths and the exposition of the methods [of attaining them]”) by Abū l-Qāsim Aḥmad al-Sīmāwī; and a work by Abū ʿAbdallāh al-Maghribī titled Siḥr al-ʿuyūn (“The bewitchment of the eyes”), which Kāshifī says was also known as Kitāb Ibn Ḥallāj (“The book of Ibn Ḥallāj”).47 Abū l-Qāsim Aḥmad al-Sīmāwī, also known as al-ʿIrāqī, was a well known author of mid seventh/thirteenth-century Mamluk Egypt, who wrote principally on alchemy.48 Abū ʿAbdallāh al-Maghribī might be identified with the North African occultist Muḥammad Ibn al-Ḥājj al-Tilimsānī (d. 737/1336), also known as al-Maghribī, the author of Shumūs al-anwār wakunūz al-asrār, the popular title of which was Kitāb Ibn al-Ḥājj (not Kitāb Ibn Ḥallāj).49 But he is not known to have composed a work titled Siḥr al-ʿuyūn, and elsewhere in the text Kāshifī names a certain Yasūf (?) b. Aḥmad Ḥallāj, whom he calls a master (ṣāḥib) of conjuring and talismans (shaʿābid va ṭilismāt),50

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For the moniker, see Binbaş, Intellectual Networks, 106–107. For Akhlāṭī and his circle, see Binbaş, Intellectual Networks, 114–122; and Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “The New Brethren of Purity: Ibn Turka and the Renaissance of Neopythagoreanism in the Early Modern Persian Cosmopolis,” in Companion to the Reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism, ed. Aurélien Robert, Irene Caiazzo, and Constantin Macris (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). For the Ḥurūfiyya, see Shahzad Bashir, Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 66–81. Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, p. 54 (where the title is given as Lubāb Ibn Ḥallāj), and Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12568, p. 5. For him, see Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften, 391–392 and 235–236. For him, see Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften, 392. Others give the nisba of this native of Tlemcen, Algeria, as Talmasānī. Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, pp. 92–93, and ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 40. For Yāsuf b. Aḥmad, see also n. 62 below.

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as the author (ṣāḥib) of Kitāb Siḥr al-ʿuyūn.51 So perhaps this unidentifed individual, whose name may be read Yasūf b. Aḥmad-i Ḥallāj (i.e., Ibn Ḥallāj), is intended by the title Kitāb Ibn Ḥallāj.52 Kāshifī explains that al-Sīmāwī and al-Maghribī, whom he calls “those two greats” (ān daw buzurgvār), had translated the sciences of sīmiyā and rīmiyā from Greek into Arabic, in some cases using a talismanic cipher (bi-khaṭṭ-i ṭilismāt).53 On account of the difficulty of the Arabic text and terminology that could only be understood under expert guidance, he says the “benefits” ( favāyid) of those sciences reached a limited audience. For this reason, he translated them into Persian so that “every sincere seeker and confidant of the secrets of spiritual subtleties might be able to derive benefit therefrom in accordance with his own aptitude (istiʿdād) and degree of [spiritual] realization (istiḥqāq).”54 His Asrār-i qāsimī was thus part of his larger project to make works on a wide range of topics available to a Persian-speaking audience.55 The relationship of Kāshifī’s Persian translation to these two Arabic works is not straightforward, as he draws on many other works to which he refers in

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Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, p. 66, and ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 14. The title, with its allusion to the Qurʾan verse (Q 7:116) about Pharaoh’s sorcerers having “bewitched the eyes of the people” (saḥarū aʿyun al-nās), is an apt one for a book on illusionism and conjuring. Complicating matters further, some manuscripts of Asrār-i qāsimī are referred to by the title Siḥr al-ʿuyūn and described as a translation by Kāshifī; see Dirāyatī, Fihristvāra, 6:49, s.v. Siḥr al-ʿuyūn, especially no. 151,144, which corresponds to Asrār-i qāsimī, as it refers to Amīr Sayyid Qāsim (incorrectly) as the person to whom it was dedicated; and no. 151,146 (which is described as being a tarjuma, or translation, by Kāshifī). One of the manuscripts under discussion even contains the title Siḥr al-ʿuyūn written in a cipher in the introduction, with the corresponding Arabic letters provided above each sign; see Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12568, p. 6: “īn risāla ki s-ḥ-r-a-l-ʿ-y-y-w-n musammā gasht” (translation: “This treatise, which is titled Siḥr al-ʿuyūn”). See also the description of other manuscripts of Siḥr al-ʿuyūn in C.A. Storey, Persian Literature: A Bio-bibliographical Survey, vol. 2, pt. 3, Encyclopaedias and Miscellanies; Arts and Crafts; Science; Occult Arts (Leiden: Royal Asiatic Society and Brill, 1977), p. 461, no. 807, s.v. Siḥr al-ʿuyūn (where it is described as being by an anonymous author, although, judging by the description, it is clearly Kāshifī’s Asrār-i qāsimī). Most authors of works on the occult sciences speak of the necessity of keeping their knowledge secret and not divulging it to the general public; writing in a cipher was one way to protect their contents. For references to various types of ciphers, see below. Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, p. 54, and Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12568, p. 5. As I have not compared the Asrār-i qāsimī with these two Arabic works, I cannot say to what degree Kāshifī’s is actually a “translation,” but, given his penchant for lifting entire passages from the works of others, I would expect some correlations. See my article “A Man of Letters: Hoseyn Va’ez Kashefi and His Persian Project,” in The Timurid Century, ed. Charles Melville, vol. 9 of The Idea of Iran (London: I.B. Tauris, 2020).

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connection with individual magical operations.56 These include the pseudepigraphical “Laws” (Nawāmīs) of Plato,57 a book called Shāmil-i akbar (“The great comprehensive book”),58 Risāla-yi khavāṣṣ al-ḥurūf (“Treatise on the properties of letters”) by a certain Baʿalbakī,59 the Maqālāt (“Statements”) of Suhravardī,60 the Maqālāt-i sīzdahgāna (“The thirteen chapters”) of “Abū Zakariyyāʾ” al-Rāzī,61 and a translation (tarjuma) of Kitāb Sirr al-asrār,62 along with references to many named (albeit often unidentified) practitioners of sīmiyā and rīmiyā.

3

The Identity of the “Qāsim” Alluded to in the Title

In the introduction to his work, Kāshifī explains that he had been ordered to undertake his Persian translation by a certain Sayyid Qāsim or Amīr Sayyid

56 57 58

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See his statement to this effect in Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, p. 55, and Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12568, p. 6. E.g., Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, p. 67, and ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 15. Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, p. 74; and ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 21. Possibly Kitāb al-Shāmil min al-baḥr al-kāmil, a grimoire associated with both al-Ṭabasī (d. 482/1089) and al-Sakkākī (d. 626/1229); on the former, see Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften, 386. Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, pp. 104–105, and ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 52. I have not been able to identify him. That is, Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā, Shaykh al-ishrāq, who is referred to simply as “one of the greats of [the town of] Suhravard”; Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, p. 76 (where the title is given as Muqābil?), and ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 23. I could not identify the work. That is, Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʾ al-Rāzī. “The thirteen chapters” must refer to his work Kitāb al-Ramādāt (“The book of ashes”), which was written in thirteen chapters; Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, p. 76, and ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 23. For him, see Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften, 383. In fact, Kāshifī states that an entire section in the maqṣad on sīmiyā consists of a translation of the Kitāb Sirr al-asrār—see Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, pp. 93 and 94, and ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 40 and 42. I have not been able to identify this Kitāb Sirr al-asrār. It does not appear to be al-Rāzī’s alchemical work, Kitāb Sirr al-asrār, for which see Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften, 213. Kāshifī states that it was ascribed to the great Sufi Ḥusayn b. Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj (d. 309/922) but that the author was, in fact, Yasūf b. Aḥmad Ḥallāj; see Kashifi, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, pp. 92–93, and ps.-Kāshifī, Asrar-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), p. 40. This must be the same Yasūf b. Aḥmad Ḥallāj (Ibn Ḥallāj?) identified by Kāshifī as the author of Siḥr al-ʿuyūn, for which see above. The identity of the translator (mutarjim) of this Kitāb Sirr al-asrār is unknown—perhaps Kāshifī himself?

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Qāsim,63 whose name is accompanied by a long string of epithets and honorifics that point to the fact that he was not only a great Sufi master but also a sayyid, that is, a descendant of the prophet Muḥammad traditionally entitled to certain perquisites and enjoying great social prestige. In the introduction to his Tuḥfa-yi khānī, ʿAlī Ṣafī corroborates the fact that his late father had written the Asrār-i qāsimī at the “request” (iltimās) of a certain eminent sayyid and marshal of sayyids ( yakī az nujabāʾ-i sādāt va nuqabā-yi ṣāḥib-i saʿādāt) whom, tellingly, he does not name.64 Asrār-i qāsimī has often been described incorrectly as having been written for this Sayyid Qāsim or Amīr Sayyid Qāsim, and I myself had, at one point, tentatively identified the supposed patron and dedicatee as Amīr Abū l-Qāsim, the marshal of sayyids of Nishapur during the late Timurid period.65 Others, purely on the basis of his title amīr, have suggested that he was a Safavid military commander.66 None of these identifications, however, is supported by the evidence of the text, and closer scrutiny of Kāshifī’s opaquely worded introduction, preserved in full only in some manuscript copies, reveals that the Sayyid Qāsim in question was the charismatic and controversial Sufi master, mystical poet, and occultist Qāsim-i Anvār (d. 837/1433). In some manuscripts of the Asrār-i qāsimī he is, in fact, referred to as Sayyid Qāsim-i Anvār67 and Amīr Sayyid Qāsim-i Anvār.68 Later authors referred to him variously as Amir Sayyid Qāsim Tabrīzī, Amīr Qāsim-i Anvār, Amīr Sayyid Qāsim-i Anvār, and Shāh Qāsim-i Anvār.69 There is no question that he was a sayyid, the title amīr often being applied 63 64 65

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Thus in Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, p. 54, and Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12568, p. 5, respectively. ʿAlī Ṣafī, Tuḥfa-yi khānī, MS, Majlis, 12575/2, p. 273. See, for example, G̲ h̲ olam Hosein Yousofi, “Kās̲h̲ifī, Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī,” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.; Pierre Lory, “Kashifi’s Asrār-i Qāsimī and Timurid Magic,” Iranian Studies 36, no. 4 (2003): 531; and M.E. Subtelny, “Kāšefi, Kamāl-al-Din Ḥosayn Wāʿeẓ,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica. See Muḥammad Āṣaf Fikrat, Fihrist-i alifbāʾī-i kutub-i khaṭṭī-i Kitābkhāna-yi markazī-i Āstān-i quds-i raḍavī (Mashhad: Intishārāt-i Āstān-i Quds-i Raḍavī, 1369sh/1990–1991), 47, s.v. “Asrār-i Qāsimī,” and Kāshifī, Javāhir al-tafsīr, 79 (introduction). Thus in Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Tehran, Kitābkhāna-yi Millī, 11920 (unfoliated). My thanks to Abolfazl Moshiri for securing a digital copy of the manuscript. Thus in Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, Q.3. (dated 1267/1851), fol. 3a. In the Nafaḥāt al-uns, Jāmī refers to him as Amīr Sayyid Qāsim Tabrīzī; see Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Nafaḥāt al-uns min ḥaḍarāt al-quds, ed. Maḥmūd ʿĀbidī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Iṭṭilāʿāt, 1370sh/1991–1992), 590. Khvāndamīr calls him Amīr Qāsim-i Anvār and Amīr Sayyid Qāsim-i Anvār; see Khvāndamīr, Ḥabīb al-siyar, 4:10 and 3:617. Kāshifī refers to him in his Futuvvat-nāma-yi sulṭānī as Shāh Qāsim-i Anvār; see Kāshifī, Futuvvatnāma-yi sulṭānī, 56.

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to sayyids, just as the royal title shāh denoted a mystic of the highest spiritual accomplishments. Qāsim-i Anvār’s full name, which is alluded to in the texts, was Jalāl al-Din ʿAlī b. Naṣīr, while Qāsim-i Anvār was his sobriquet.70 Following is a full translation of the passage in question, in which Kāshifī refers to the “order” he received from Qāsim-i Anvār, as it has been subject to much misinterpretation, if not downright incomprehension: In view of the universal benefits and advantages ( favāyid, ʿavāyid) of those two books (i.e., by al-Sīmāwī and al-Maghribī), which are recognized as the quintessence (lubb-i lubāb) by those endowed with perception, the incomparable order that must be obeyed (mithāl-i bī-mithāl-i lāzim al-imtithāl) was issued (samt-i ṣudūr yāft) by his Eminence, who is characterized by the hereditary rank of naqīb (naqābat-intisāb),71 the one from whom true guidance emanates (hidāyat-niṣāb), who has attained sanctified power (valāyat-iktisāb), the epitome of naqībs and sayyids (khulāṣat al-nuqabāʾ va al-sādāt), noblest of the great men of the People of Felicity (i.e., Sufis) (naqāwat al-nujabāʾ min aʿāẓim ahl al-saʿādāt),72 exemplar of the exalted, celestial, manifest, and pure Family of the Chosen One (i.e., the prophet Muḥammad) (qidwat al-usra al-ʿaliyya al-ʿulwiyya al-jaliyya al-ṣafiyya al-muṣṭafawiyya),73 (Arabic verses) [He who was] of the lineage (min nasl) of the one who, when he was asked by the Trusted Spirit (i.e., the angel Gabriel) whether he needed help, answered, “I have no need of you”74 70

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See ʿAbd al-Razzāq Kirmānī, Manāqib-i Ḥaḍrat Shāh Niʿmatullāh Valī, in Jean Aubin, ed., Matériaux pour la biographie de Shah Niʿmatullah Wali Kermani (Tehran: Département d’ Iranologie de l’ Institut Franco-Iranien, 1956), 65. He was sometimes also referred to in later sources as Muʿīn al-Dīn ʿAlī; see Qāsim-i Anvār, Kulliyyāt (editor’s introduction), xlvi– xlvii, lvi, lviii–lix, and especially lx. The office of naqīb was charged with checking the genealogies of sayyids; see Hans Robert Roemer, ed. and trans., Staatsschreiben der Timuridenzeit: Das Šaraf-nāmä des ʿAbdallāh Marwārīd (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1952), 149. It appears that Qāsim-i Anvār held the post of naqīb, probably in Herat. For the similar way in which he is addressed by the lettrist intellectual Ibn Turka in his correspondence with him, see Melvin-Koushki, “Quest for a Universal Science,” 422 n. 20. For the notion of “felicity” (saʿādat) in Sufi epistemology, see Lloyd V.J. Ridgeon, Azīz Nasafī (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 1998), 109–114. Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12568, p. 5, shortens the epithets. The Trusted Spirit (al-rūḥ al-amīn) is the epithet of the angel Gabriel. According to Qurʾanic legend, it was the prophet Abraham who, on account of his love for God, refused

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Who took greater pride in his outstanding virtues (zawāhir iḥsānihi) than in the loftiness of his descent ( jaww al-ansāb), Who was renowned for tracing his “pedigree” (al-intisāb) from his good deeds (aʿmāl) [rather than from] the nobility of his ancestry (karāyim alaḥsāb),75 (Persian verses) He who adorns the throne (sarīr-ārāy) in the portico of Felicity (ayvān-i saʿādat), Who brings felicity (saʿādat-bakhsh) to the assembly of sayyidhood (dīvān-i siyādat), Foremost (naqīb) of the sayyids in the world, In dignity the noblest of the sons of Adam, Distinguished by everlasting glory (al-ʿizz al-dāyim) and perpetual grace (al-faḍl al-qāyim),76

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Gabriel’s help when he was about to be thrown into the fire by the evil king Nimrod; see [alThaʿlabī], ʿArāʾis al-majālis fī qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ or “Lives of the Prophets” as Recounted by Abū Isḥāq Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Thaʿlabī, trans. William M. Brinner (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 132. Of all the prophets, Abraham was, for the Sufis, the greatest model of the true lover of God, who withstood the many tests to which God subjected him, earning him the epithet Khalīlallāh, or “Friend of God”; see Hellmut Ritter, Ocean of the Soul: Man, the World and God in the Stories of Farid al-Din ʿAttar, trans. John O’Kane, ed. Bernd Radtke (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 535–536. The verse may be interpreted to mean that, as a Sufi, Qāsimi Anvār was a spiritual descendant of Abraham who exemplified the Sufi tenet of tavakkul (i.e., unquestioning trust in God) and refused to acknowledge any intermediary between himself and God. In Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis 12568, p. 5, only the first part of this verse is recorded, and all following verses are omitted. I have not been able to identify the source of these verses. They may be interpreted to mean that Qāsim-i Anvār did not flaunt his sayyid descent but sought validation by emulating Abraham’s exemplary behavior. This interpretation appears to be supported by references to the fact that he allegedly played down his sayyid status out of humility; see Kazuo Morimoto, “The Earliest ʿAlid Genealogy for the Safavids: New Evidence for the Pre-Dynastic Claim to Sayyid Status,” Iranian Studies 43, no. 4 (2010): 459, citing ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn Zarrīnkūb, Dunbāla-yi justujū dar taṣavvuf-i Īran (Tehran: Amīr Kabīr, 1362sh/1983–1984), 59 and 355–356 n. 15, where he quotes lines from Qāsim-i Anvār’s poetry to that effect. For the pre-Islamic Arab concepts of nasab (genealogical descent) and ḥasab (honor acquired by virtue of birth), see Louise Marlow, “Some Notes on Premodern Islamic Social Description,” Pembroke Papers 1 (1990): 124. I have not been able to identify these verses. If they are by Kāshifī, he is presenting Qāsim-

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the glory of the age, of the [Muslim] nation, of the rank of naqīb, of nobility, and of [this] world and the [Islamic] religion ( jalāl al-dawla wa-l-milla wa-l-niqāba wa-l-najābat wa-l-dunyā wa-l-dīn),77 Sayyid Qāsim78—May he not cease to be aided by God (lā zāla muʾayyadan min ʿinda ilāh) in his sanctified soul (bi-l-nafs al-qudsiyya) [and] favored (makhṣūṣan) with the gift of divine intimacy (bi-l-karāma al-unsiyya)79 from the effulgence of His grace (min fayḍān faḍlihi)80—[the order being] that this miserable creature, Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī al-Vāʿiẓ al-Kāshifī—May God who is exalted assist him with His hidden grace (ayyadahu ilāh taʿālā bi-al-luṭf al-khafī)— should translate into Persian (bi-lughat-i fārsī tarjuma kunad) those two excellent books,81 each of which is a veritable garden full of fresh roses and a treasure chest brimming with coins and jewels, and that he should disseminate [them] in every hidden corner (or: Sufi convent) (zāviya)— And how many hidden things there are secreted away in corners!82—in such a way that every sincere seeker (har yak az ṭālibān-i ṣādiq) and confidant of the secrets of spiritual subtleties (maḥramān-i asrār-i daqāyiq) might be able to derive benefit ( fāyida) from it in accordance with his own aptitude (istiʿdād) and degree of [spiritual] realization (istiḥqāq) …. Obeying that imperative (ān amr-i muṭāʿ) to the utmost, I busied myself with the translation of the aforementioned two books (kitābayn-i

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i Anvār, who has long been dead, as still present in the world, perhaps as the hidden saint who animates the universe. Perhaps an allusion to Qāsim-i Anvār’s name, Jalāl al-Dīn ʿAlī b. Naṣīr; see ʿAbd al-Razzāq Kirmānī, Manāqib-i Ḥaḍrat Shāh Niʿmatullāh Valī, in Aubin, Matériaux, 65. See also below, for another form of his name. Emphasis mine. That is, the charismatic gift (karāma) of intimacy (uns) with the Divine that permits the saint to perform miracles (karāmāt). For the Sufi technical term uns, see Abū l-Qāsim alQushayrī, al-Qushayri’s Epistle on Sufism: al-Risala al-qushayriyya fi ʿilm al-tasawwuf, trans. Alexander D. Knysh (Reading, UK: Garnet, 2007), 81–82. Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12568, p. 5, adds the following, which is reminiscent of the Arabic and Persian verses translated above: “This ʿAlid (murtaḍā) of the lands of Islam, master (muʾayyil) of the greatest of the great naqībs—the Family of the Prophet (āl-i Aḥmad) boasted about him and manifested in him the lineage of Ḥaydar (i.e., ʿAlī). [Verse] On account of his ancestors, Baṭḥā [Mecca] and Yathrib [Medina] were honored; on account of his forefathers, mihrāb and minbar [i.e., Islam] were made resplendent.” My thanks to Walid Saleh for his assistance with the translation. Thus also in Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12568, p. 5. Kam (or: Kam min) khabāya fī l-zawāyā, an Arabic proverb. Interestingly enough, it is also cited in a similar context by Ibn Turka in his lettrist treatise Risāla-yi ḥurūf ; see MelvinKoushki, “Quest for a Universal Science,”473 and 487.

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madhkūrayn).83 I supplemented the principles of the two sciences (qavāʿid-i ʿilmayn) contained in them with other books I was able to consult on those two arts (ān daw fann), and I cited them in a precise manner, using clear expressions. Certain technical terms (alfāẓ) that it was deemed unwise to divulge have been transcribed in a special cipher (biqalam-i khāṣṣa),84 so that those who are not privy (nā maḥram) [to them] might be kept away from the harem of their [secrets].85 As Qāsim-i Anvār would have been long dead by the time Kāshifī set about composing his Asrār-i qāsimī, the telepathic “order” he received from him can only be understood as a trope.86 Similar formulations in other works of his, in which he cites the inspiration that came to him from the world of the Unseen, support this contention. By way of example, in the introduction to his Mavāhibi ʿaliyya, he states that he had been commissioned to compose the Qurʾan commentary Javāhir al-tafsīr li-tuḥfat al-Amīr (“The jewels of Qurʾan exegesis presented as a gift to the Amir”) by ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī, to whom the work was to be dedicated.87 But seeing that it was going to take too long to complete all four projected volumes, in Muḥarram 897/November 1491, acting upon “a sign from an unseen inspirer from the Realm of Indisputability” (īmāʾ-i mulhim-i ghaybī az ʿālam-i lā-raybī), Kāshifī decided to abandon the project and compose the much shorter Mavāhib-i ʿaliyya (“Gifts presented to ʿAlī[shīr]”)—the title of which can also be interpreted to mean “Gifts from the Supernal World”—that

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Thus also Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12568, p. 6. Later Kāshifī says that, in his treatise, he is the first to use a cipher called the “Davidian cipher” (qalam-i dāvudī); see Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, p. 61, and ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 10. The Davidian cipher was much used in India; see [Ibn Waḥshiyya], Ancient Alphabets and Hieroglyphic Characters Explained […], trans. Joseph Hammer (London: Bulmer, 1806), 8 and 39 (Arabic text). Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, pp. 54–55, and Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12568, pp. 5–6. Qāsim-i Anvār was born in 757/1356, came to Herat in 779/1377–1378, was expelled in 830/1427, and died in 837/1433, in Kharjird-i Jam. Kāshifī was born in the 820s/1420s, came to Herat in 860/1456, and died in 910/1504–1505. Hence, at the time of Qāsim-i Anvār’s death, Kāshifī would have been only about thirteen years old. The date of completion of Asrār-i qāsimī is usually given as 907/1501–1502, although this date is by no means certain, as it is not provided in the text. He refers to ʿAlīshīr by his honorific title, muqarrab al-ḥaḍrat al-sulṭāniyya, that is, member of the royal household of the Timurid ruler Sulṭān-Ḥusayn; see Maria E. Subtelny, Timurids in Transition: Turko-Persian Politics and Acculturation in Medieval Iran (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 72. For this lettrist Qurʾan commentary, see Melvin-Koushki, “Quest for a Universal Science,” 263–267.

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he would be able to complete in a more timely fashion.88 Similarly, in the introduction to his al-Risāla al-ʿaliyya, Kāshifī states that he received “an indisputable directive” (ishārat-i lā-raybī) “from an inspirer from the Unseen” (az mulhim-i ghaybī) to compose this commentary on forty prophetic Traditions.89 Although such claims may strain a modern researcher’s credulity, they would have been entirely in keeping with the worldview of medieval Sufis and occultists like Kāshifī who purported to be in touch with the world of the Unseen (ghayb). A sayyid from the environs of Tabriz, Qāsim-i Anvār had, in his youth, been a disciple of Shaykh Ṣadr al-Dīn Mūsā Ardabīlī (d. 794/1391–1392), who headed the Ṣafaviyya order after the death of its eponymous founder, Shaykh Ṣafī alDīn, and who oversaw the expansion of Safavid propaganda from the order’s centre at Ardabil into eastern Anatolia, Syria, and Iran, including Khurasan. It was apparently in a dream vision that Qāsim-i Anvār received from Shaykh Ṣadr al-Dīn his sobriquet, Qāsim-i Anvār (“Distributor of lights”), by which he became best known.90 He came to Herat in 779/1377–137891 but was forced to leave in 830/1427 for alleged complicity in the attempt on the life of the Timurid ruler Shāhrukh, supposedly by an adherent of the Ḥurūfiyya, a messianic movement whose beliefs were largely based on Sufi lettrist speculation.92

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Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Kāshifī, Mavāhib-i ʿaliyya yā Tafsīr-i Ḥusaynī, ed. Muḥammad Riḍā Jalālī Nāyinī, 4 vols. (Tehran: Iqbāl, 1317–1329sh/1938–1950), 1: i–ii (author’s introduction). See also Alisher Navoii, Mazholisun nafois [Chaghatay], ed. Suiima Ghanieva (Tashkent: Uzbekiston SSR Fanlar Akademiiasi Nashriyoti, 1961), 143; and Mīr Niẓām al-Dīn ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis: Dar tadhkira-yi shuʿarāʾ-i qarn-i nuhum-i hijrī, trans. and expanded by Sulṭan-Muḥammad Fakhrī Harātī and Ḥakīm Shāh-Muḥammad Qazvīnī, ed. ʿAlī Asghar Ḥikmat (Tehran: Chāpkhāna-yi Bānk-i Millī-i Īrān, 1323sh/1945), 93. It was supposedly also in a dream that Kāshifī received the summons from the spirit of the recently deceased Naqshbandi Sufi master Saʿd al-Dīn Kāshgharī to come to Herat in 860/1456. See Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Kāshifī, al-Risāla al-ʿaliyya fī l-aḥādīth al-nabaviyya, ed. Sayyid Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥaddith (Tehran: Bungāh-i Tarjuma va Nashr-i Kitāb, 1344sh/1965), 1. Might this unnamed “inspirer” also be Qāsim-i Anvār? For his biography, see Jāmī, Nafaḥāt al-uns, 590–593 (although Jāmīs’s account plays down his attachment to the Safavid order); ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, 6; Dawlatshāh b. ʿAāʾ al-Dawla Bakhtīshāh al-Ghāzī al-Samarqandī, Tadhkirat al-shuʿarāʾ, ed. Edward G. Browne (reprint ed., Tehran: Intishārāt-i Asāṭīr, 1382sh/2003), 346–352 (although the latter part of the account is actually devoted to the Timurid prince Bāysunghur Mīrzā); and Khvāndamīr, Ḥabīb al-siyar, 4:10–11. For the date Qāsim-i Anvār came to Herat, see Jāmī, Nafaḥāt al-uns, 592 (who provides it on the basis of his writings). The more or less standard accounts of the incident are to be found in Roger M. Savory, “A 15th Century Ṣafavid Propagandist at Harāt,” in American Oriental Society, Middle West Branch, Semi-Centennial Volume: A Collection of Original Essays, ed. Denis Sinor (Bloom-

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The reasons for his expulsion are still not entirely clear, as the connection with the Ḥurūfiyya turned out to be only circumstantial, but his charismatic spiritual appeal and associations with controversial intellectuals and practitioners of the occult sciences posed a threat to Shāhrukh’s political authority. This threat appears to have been that Qāsim-i Anvār, like Ibn Turka, chief ideologue of what Melvin-Koushki has termed an occultist millenarian universalism, espoused the model of a “saint-philosopher-king” that was at odds with Shāhrukh’s more traditional Sunnizing program.93 Jean Aubin considered Qāsim-i Anvār a crypto-Ismaʿili and noted his lettrist connections with the circle of Shāh Niʿmatallāh Valī (whose khalīfa he was), Ibn Turka (who was also persecuted after the failed attempt on Shāhrukh’s life), and Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī.94 For his part Roger Savory saw Qāsim-i Anvār as a missionary who came to Herat in order to spread Safavid propaganda from there to the rest of Khurasan.95 Pace Savory, the impression from reading the accounts about Qāsim-i Anvār in the hagiographical and historical literature is that, even if he had belonged to the Safavid network in Ardabil in his early days, he was not a pro-active missionary and he associated indifferently with Sufis of all stripes—with members of the Khalvatiyya, with Shāh Niʿmatallāh Valī, the founder of the Niʿmatallāhiyya, and with Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband, the founder of the Naqshbandiyya.96 By his own admission, he was an intellectual

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ington: Indiana University Press for the International Affairs Center, 1969), 189–190; and Beatrice Forbes Manz, Power, Politics, and Religion in Timurid Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 241–242. But see now the exhaustive and provocative study of the incident by Ilker Evrim Binbaş, “Anatomy of a Regicide Attempt: Shāhrukh, the Ḥurūfīs, and the Timurid Intellectuals in 830/1426–27,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, ser. 3, 23, no. 3 (2013): 402–405. See Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Early Modern Islamicate Empire: New Forms of Religiopolitical Legitimacy,” in The Wiley-Blackwell History of Islam, ed. Armando Salvatore, Roberto Tottoli, and Babak Rahimi (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), 353–375; and Binbaş, “Anatomy of a Regicide Attempt,” 404–405. For Shāhrukh’s Sunnizing program, see Subtelny and Khalidov, “Curriculum,” 211–214. Aubin, Matériaux, 15–18 (French text). Savory, “15th Century Ṣafavid Propagandist,” 196–197 (where he calls Jāmī’s account a “pure fabrication”). Jāmī casts doubt on Qāsim-i Anvār’s connection to Shaykh Ṣadr alDin Ardabīlī when he states that the shaykh who initiated him was actually Ṣadr al-Dīn ʿAlī Yamānī; see Jāmī, Nafaḥāt al-uns, 590. In Herat, his neighbor in the Khānaqāh-i Jadīdī was Ẓahīr al-Dīn Khalvatī; Jāmī, Nafaḥāt al-uns, 592. For his relations with Shāh Niʿmatallāh Valī, who had been expelled from Transoxania (where in 761/1360 he had established himsef at Shahr-i Sabz) by Timur, after which he came to Herat, see Aubin, Matériaux, 11–16 (French text). Shāh Niʿmatallāh Valī regarded him as his true/spiritual son ( farzand-i ḥaqīqī-i man) on account of his great piety and prodigious ability to undergo trying spiritual exercises; see ʿAbd al-Razzāq Kir-

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and a loner who sought out like-minded majdhūbān, who were divorced from worldly concerns.97 Kāshifī and most of his Timurid-era contemporaries regarded Qāsim-i Anvār as a charismatic Sufi master, inspired mystical poet, esotericist, and occultist.98 The fact that many manuscripts of his Dīvān (in which he used the pen name Qāsim or Qāsimī) date from the ninth/fifteenth century attests to his renown.99 Kāshifī cites him in several of his works, and I even venture to suggest that he adopted his own pen name, Kāshifī (“the Unveiler”), as an allusion to Kāshif al-asrār (“the Unveiler of Secrets”), the epithet by which Qāsim-i Anvār was known in the hagiographical literature.100 Dawlatshāh included a separ-

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mānī, Manāqib-i Ḥaḍrat Shāh Niʿmatullāh Valī, in Aubin, Matériaux, 65. For his meeting and association with Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshand, see Jāmī, Nafaḥāt al-uns, 592, who reports on the authority of Khvāja ʿUbaydallāh Aḥrār that Qāsim-i Anvār said that he followed the spiritual path of the Naqshbandiyya (az vay fahm mīshud ki khvudrā bar ān ṭarīqa mīdāsht). Jāmī, Nafaḥāt al-uns, 592. Jāmī reports this on the authority of ʿUbaydallāh Aḥrār, who also provides the interesting detail that, when Qāsim-i Anvār was in Rum (Anatolia), he spoke with just such an individual in Turkish (zabān-i rūmī). Qāsim-i Anvār’s Dīvān contains a few poems in a language akin to Azeri Turkish, which, had he been a Safavid propagandist, he would have used in proselytizing among the Turkmen nomads of Anatolia. But the poems, which are written in a standard mystico-erotic register, do not seem to constitute propaganda. See G.M. Meredith-Owens, “The Turkish Verses of Qāsim al-Anvār,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 25, pt. 1 (1962): 155–161. According to Jāmī, however, whose account of him in the Nafaḥāt al-uns (pp. 590–591) has been discussed by several scholars, he was an individual about whom opinions were sharply divided, chiefly on account of the people who attached themselves to him and whom Jāmī describes as engaging in licentious and antinomian behavior (dar dāʾira-yi ibāḥat va tahāvun bi-sharʿ va sunnat dākhil). Nevertheless, Jāmī absolved him of blame on the grounds that he was too preoccupied with spiritual matters to pay attention to what they were doing, and because he allowed himself to be taken advantage of on account of his generous nature (karam-dhātī). See the survey of manuscripts in British libraries by Meredith-Owens, “Turkish Verses of Qāsim al-Anvār,” 155–156. A beautiful copy of his Dīvān was made in 863/1459 for PīrBudaq Qara Qoyunlu, for which see Thomas W. Lentz and Glenn D. Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian Art and Culture in the Fifteenth Century (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery; Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 248–249, cat. no. 139; and another, apparently copied in 895/1490 by the renowned calligrapher Sulṭān-ʿAlī Mashhadī, must have belonged to the library of the Timurid ruler Sulṭān-Ḥusayn (Sackler Museum, Harvard University, no. 26.2015). For this epithet of Qāsim-i Anvār, see Alisher Navoii, Mazholisun nafois, 5; ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, 6; ʿAbd al-Razzāq Kirmānī, Manāqib-i Ḥaḍrat Shāh Niʿmatallāh Valī, in Aubin, Matériaux, 65; and ʿAbd al-Vāsiʿ Niẓāmī, Mansha’ al-inshāʾ, 167 (where it occurs in a

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ate notice on him in his anthology of poets, Tadhkirat al-shuʿarāʾ, and made the interesting observation that anyone who met him, even those who might have been ill-disposed toward him, came to believe in him so fervently that the grandees and members of the military elite of Timurid Herat became his murīds, or spiritual disciples.101 This is corroborated by Mīr ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī who, in his Majālis al-nafāʾis, which opens with Qāsim-i Anvār’s biography, states that all the Chaghatay—that is, the Timurid princes and military commanders— had been his devotees.102 So great was his respect for him that Mīr ʿAlīshīr had a building constructed in the garden of the Sufi lodge at Kharjird-i Jām where his tomb was located.103 There were compelling reasons for Kāshifī to invoke Qāsim-i Anvār’s name in the writing of his book on the occult sciences of sīmiyā and rīmiyā. First and foremost Qāsim-i Anvār was a Ḥusaynī sayyid, and the emphasis Kāshifī placed on his sayyid status is evident from the way he describes him in his introduction. Because Kāshifī was not a sayyid himself, he must have felt that he could legitimately compose a book on the subject only if he did so in the name of someone who was. Qāsim-i Anvār fit the bill perfectly. Not only was he a Ḥusaynī sayyid but he was well known as an occultist and lettrist.104 He was also a Sufi, and, according to the famous dictum of Ibn ʿArabī, “The science of letters is the science of the saints.”105 It is possible that he was regarded as the quṭb, or axis mundi, whose status as such was hidden from his contemporaries but who possessed the “divinely sanctioned power” (valāyat) that authorized the practice of the occult sciences.106 It appears that Kāshifī invoked Qāsim-i

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Timurid decree relating to his shrine). For examples of Kāshifī’s poetry, see Alisher Navoii, Mazholisun nafois, 143, and ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, 93 and 268. Dawlatshāh, Tadhkirat al-shuʿarā, 346. ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī, Majālis al-nafāʾis, 6. See Dawlatshāh, Tadhkirat al-shuʿarā, 349. In the Futuvvat-nāma-yi sulṭānī, for example, Kāshifī cites one of his poems to illustrate the meaning of the word darvīsh by means of each of the word’s constituent letters; see Kāshifī, Futuvvat-nāma-yi sulṭānī, 56–57; and Qāsim-i Anvār, Kulliyyāt, 335–336. He also cites some verses by Qāsim-i Anvār ( farmūda-yi Qāsim) in the introduction to Asrār-i qāsimī; see Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, p. 52; and ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 2, but without attribution to Qāsim-i Anvār. I have been unable to find these verses in Qāsim-i Anvār’s Kulliyyāt, except possibly for one hemistich, p. 163, line 2,713. Denis Gril, “The Science of Letters,” in Ibn ʿArabi, The Meccan Revelations: Selected Texts of al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiya, vol. 2, ed. Michel Chodkiewicz, trans. Cyrille Chodkiewicz and Denis Gril (New York: Pir Press, 2004), 123. One early Timurid-era author referred to Qāsim-i Anvār as khalīfa-yi malakūt, that is, the

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Anvār in the introduction to his Asrār-i qāsimī to serve as a kind of proxy for the composition of a book on magic, illusionism, and lettrism. I believe that, because Kāshifī went to such great lengths to portray himself as having been authorized by Qāsim-i Anvār to compose his book, the title Asrār-i qāsimī might be interpreted to mean “The secrets endorsed by Qāsim[i Anvār].” Noteworthy in this respect is the equivocal Arabic blessing following Qāsim-i Anvār’s name in the passage translated above—“May he not cease to be aided (lā zāla muʾayyadan) by God in his sanctified soul [and] favored with the gift of divine intimacy from the effulgence of His grace”—which, if vocalized differently yields a secondary, hidden reading: “May he [i.e., Qāsim-i Anvār] not cease to aid (lā zāla muʾayyidan) him who is with God [i.e., Kāshifī] by means of his sanctified spirit, and may he [i.e., Kāshifī] be favored with spiritual blessings from the effulgence of his [i.e., Qāsim-i Anvār’s] grace,” in which case Kāshifī is not invoking God’s blessing on Qāsim-i Anvār but rather calling upon Qāsim-i Anvār to assist him in the writing of his treatise.107 The allusion to Qāsim-i Anvār in the title is reinforced by a curious reference in Kāshifī’s Futuvvat-nāma-yi sulṭānī to a type of garment called qāsimī that was apparently current among some Sufi groups in his day. Its characteristic feature was a torn collar. Explaining its origins, Kāshifī says it was the cloak Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī gave his nephew (and son-in-law) Qāsim b. Ḥasan, after first tearing its collar, when he sent him onto the battlefield at Karbala where he was martyred.108 According to Kāshifī, knowledge of this garment had remained hidden “behind the veil of the Unseen” until Qāsim-i Anvār, who was looking for a trademark style of dress, was inspired by the spirit of Qāsim b. Ḥasan to adopt it. For this reason, Kāshifī says, the name of the garment—qāsimī—refers to both Imam Qāsim and Qāsim-i Anvār.109 Symbolizing mourning and martyrdom as well as

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caliph of the heavenly realm, the counterpart of Shāhrukh, the Timurid ruler, who, as his contemporary, was the temporal caliph (khalīfa-yi mulk); see Binbaş, Intellectual Networks, 270–271. Compare the introduction to Shams al-maʿārif wa-laṭāʾif al-ʿawārif, where al-Būnī states that, in order to be able to compose the work, he asks God to assist him with His inspiration and also with the inspiration of the ancients and accomplished masters of the science; see Pierre Lory, “La magie des lettres dans le Šams al-maʿārif d’al-Būnī,” Bulletin d’études orientales 39–40 (1987–1988): 98. The battle of Karbala, which took place in 61/680, is regarded by Shiʿis as the iconic locus of the martyrdom of ʿAlī’s son Ḥusayn and his family. For a reference to this episode in his Shiʿi martyrology, see Kāshifī, Rawḍat al-shuhadāʾ, 322. Kāshifī, Futuvvat-nāma-yi sulṭānī, 176; and Ḥusayn Wāʿiẓ Kāshifī Sabzawārī, The Royal Book of Spiritual Chivalry (Futūwat nāmah-yi sulṭānī), trans. Jay R. Crook (Chicago: Great Books of the Islamic World, 2000), 170, with citation of verses by Qāsim-i Anvār.

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ecstatic experience, a garment with a torn collar and a mythic imāmī provenance would have been an apt choice for a Sufi sayyid like Qāsim-i Anvār. Notwithstanding the explanation outlined above, the title Asrār-i qāsimī might also contain a nod to Abū l-Qāsim al-Sīmāwī, the Arabic author of the ʿUyūn al-ḥaqāʾiq, whom Kāshifī respectfully titles ḥakīm (sage) and whose book was one of the sources for his Persian translation.110 It is impossible to know for certain, but it is precisely these kinds of enigmatic allusions, based on puns and equivoques, that were so beloved of esotericists like Kāshifī, who relished layering meaning upon hidden meaning.

4

ʿAlī Ṣafī’s Safavid Connection

Kāshifī died in 910/1504–1505, well before the Safavid takeover of Herat in 916/1510. Judging by the relatively few manuscript copies that have survived, his Asrār-i qāsimī did not enjoy wide circulation. It is possible, though, that it may have been kept under wraps, so to speak, for reasons of secrecy, as Kāshifī himself had insisted. However, when Durmish Khān Shāmlū, the Qizilbash commander who had been appointed governor of Khurasan, came to Herat at the end of 927/1521,111 Kāshifī’s son, ʿAlī Ṣafī, an occultist in his own right, introduced him to his father’s work.112 Durmish Khān ordered him to write a simplified version of the work because, according to ʿAlī Ṣafī himself, it was too difficult to understand, for two reasons. First, it had been written in a special cipher (bi-qalam-i khāṣṣ) to protect its contents from “the ignorant.” In this connection, ʿAlī Ṣafī offers up an invaluable detail when he says that this special cipher had been an invention of his father’s (mukhtaraʿ-i īshānast) and known as “Kāshifī’s cipher” (qalam-i Kāshifī).113 Second, it often mentioned ingredi-

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Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12568, p. 5. Durmish Khān had been sent to Herat at the beginning of 928/the end of 1521 as the Safavid governor of Khurasan to rule in the name of Shāh Ismāʿīl’s son, Sām Mīrzā, whose guardian he had been appointed. Sām Mīrzā himself did not arrive in Herat until the summer of 928/1522. For Durmish Khān and his appointment to Khurasan, see Khvāndamīr, Ḥabīb al-siyar, 4:586–587; and Roger Savory, Iran under the Safavids (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 41 and 48. Although we do not know the details of how ʿAlī Ṣafī came to Durmish Khān’s attention, he probably offered him his services as a practitioner of the occult sciences that would stand the Qizilbash commander in good stead in his pursuit of power. ʿAlī Ṣafī, Tuḥfa-yi khānī, MS, Majlis, 12575/2, p. 273; and ʿAlī Ṣafī, Tuḥfa-yi khānī, MS, Majlis, 1065/5, pp. 176–177. For Kāshifī’s reference to the fact that he used a special cipher in his Asrār-i qāsimī, see above.

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ents and potions (ajzā, adviya) that could not be found in Khurasan or Iraq or anywhere for that matter, making it impossible to follow the instructions for completing certain operations.114 ʿAlī Ṣafī says that he composed this simplified version, which he titled Tuḥfa-yi khānī, in 928/1522 or 929/1522–1523, and dedicated it to Durmish Khān, to whose name the title “A gift for the Khān” alludes.115 It is possibly to Durmish Khān Shāmlū’s time in Herat that the growth in popular interest in the occult sciences during the Safavid period, especially the talismanic sciences, may be dated, and in this ʿAlī Ṣafī appears to have played an important role. He also wrote Ḥirz al-amān min fitan al-zamān (“The amulet of protection from the vicissitudes of fate”), which Melvin-Koushki believes must have drawn heavily on Kāshifī’s lost al-Tuḥfa al-ʿaliyya fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf and which he has characterized as reflecting the “canonization of the broader lettrist tradition” because it took into account the works of such prominent lettrists as Sayyid Ḥusayn Akhlāṭī and his disciple Ibn Turka on the talismanic efficacy of verses of the Qurʾan, the Divine Names, the so-called isolated letters (muqaṭṭaʿāt), and the properties of letters (khawāṣṣ al-ḥurūf ).116 Like Kāshifī’s Asrār-i qāsimī, ʿAlī Ṣafī’s Ḥirz al-amān refers to the “benefits” to be derived from the occult sciences, a claim voiced frequently in works by other occultist practitioners.117 But, unlike his father, who perhaps hoped his work would benefit individuals of a more Sufi persuasion, ʿAlī Ṣafī is explicit about just whom the occult sciences can benefit the most: the powerful holders of high offices (arbāb-i jāh va maknat; aṣḥāb-i manṣab va ḥashmat) and members of the royal households of rulers and deputies at the courts of sovereigns (muqarrabān-i dargāh-i salāṭīn va nāyibān-i bārgāh-i khavāqīn).118

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ʿAlī Ṣafī, Tuḥfa-yi khānī, MS, Majlis, 12575/2, pp. 273–274, and ʿAlī Ṣafī, Tuḥfa-yi khānī, MS, Majlis, 1065/5, pp. 179–180. Some of these included the dried blood of such mythical animals as the one called Ṭalamūs by the Greeks, which is described as being one of the basic ingredients in operations of sīmiyā! ʿAlī Ṣafī, Tuḥfa-yi khānī, MS, Majlis, 12575/2, pp. 273–274, and ʿAlī Ṣafī, Tuḥfa-yi khānī, MS, Majlis, 1065/5, pp. 176–177 and 184. The Bodleian MS of Tuḥfa-yi khānī (MS. Pers. e. 57, which, like the other two manuscripts used in this study dates from the eleventh/seventeenth century), also gives the date 929/1522–1523. For an older description of the work, which calls it an “abridgment” and gives it a slightly later date of composition, see Storey, Persian Literature, vol. 2, pt. 3, p. 460. For a survey of the contents, see Melvin-Koushki, “Quest for a Universal Science,” 272–280; for a description of the work, see Storey, Persian Literature, vol. 2, pt. 3, p. 474. Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, p. 54 (ʿumūm-i favāyid va shumūl-i ʿavāyid); and ʿAlī Ṣafī, Tuḥfa-yi khānī, MS, Majlis, 12575/2, p. 274. ʿAlī Ṣafī, Ḥirz al-amān, MS, Majlis, 15708, p. 45. On this and similar works, see, e.g., Matthew

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The Safavid Interpolation

Despite its limited circulation in Timurid Khurasan during his lifetime, Kāshifī’s Asrār-i qāsimī enjoyed a long afterlife. There are no extant manuscript copies dating from the Timurid period and only one copy appears to be from the tenth/sixteenth century; virtually all surviving manuscript copies date from the eleventh/seventeenth century and later.119 Asrār-i qāsimī apparently became very popular during the high Safavid period, but here a problem arises. Some of these manuscript copies are considerably longer than others. A cursory examination of their contents reveals that, in some, Kāshifī’s work constitutes only the first part of a greatly expanded text, which is represented, generally speaking, by the nineteenth-century Bombay lithograph editions.120 Whereas Kāshifī stated in his introduction that he intended to treat only the sciences of sīmiyā and rīmiyā in two maqṣads (chapters),121 the expanded version comprises five maqṣads, the additional three being devoted to those occult sciences that Kāshifī’s original did not cover, namely, līmiyā, hīmiyā, and kīmiyā. In order to account for the treatment of all five sciences, the interpolated version states that it was Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā Suhravardī

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Melvin-Koushki, “How to Rule the World: Occult-Scientific Manuals of the Early Modern Persian Cosmopolis,” Journal of Persianate Studies 11, no. 2 (2018): 140–154. There are fifty-one copies in Iranian libraries. The earliest dated copy is 1087/1676; see Dirāyatī, Fihristvāra, 1:787–789. All references to the Safavid interpolation in this article are to the following lith. ed., which I have referred to as ps.-Kāshifī: Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed., Bombay: Fatḥ al-Karīm Press, 1302/1885 (147 pages), with the place of distribution given as Tehran. Kāshifī’s original text is largely preserved (with some omissions) in the lith. ed., ending on page 80, which corresponds to p. 167 of Majlis MS 12559/2; and p. 68 of Majlis MS 12568. I wish to thank my research assistant Sepideh Najmzadeh for helping to compare these two manuscript copies with the Bombay lith. ed. Another printing of the same Bombay lith. ed. of 1302/1885 is 151 pages long, because it was numbered incorrectly at the beginning. Other Bombay lith. editions are dated 1889 and 1910. A lith. ed. dated 1867 and titled Kashf al-kashshāf-i Asrār-i qāsimī (Tehran, Majlis, 09–00371), is shorter and appears incomplete. A manuscript copy of ps.-Kāshifī in the Cambridge University Library, dating from the mid-thirteenth/nineteenth century, is 172 folios long; see Edward G. Browne, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Oriental MSS. Belonging to the Late E.G. Browne, ed. Reynold A. Nicholson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 200–201 (MS Q. 3). Another manuscript copy of ps.-Kāshifī in Tashkent, also dating from the nineteenth century, runs to 155 folios; see A.P. Kaiumov et al., Katalog fonda Instituta rukopisei, 2 vols. (Tashkent: Akademiia Nauk Uzbekskoi SSR, Institut Rukopisei im. Kh. S. Suleimanova, 1988–1989), vol. 2, no. 869 (MS 2621/I) (although the description is incorrect and even misleading). Thus, in Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12559/2, p. 55, and Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, MS, Majlis, 12568, p. 6.

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(d. 587/1191), the renowned master of Illuminationist philosophy—and not the two sources Kāshifī himself mentions, al-Sīmāwī and al-Maghribī—who translated the books on all five occult sciences from Greek into Arabic, which Kāshifī then supposedly translated into Persian.122 While there is no basis for this statement in Kāshifī’s original introduction, it reflects the reputation that the Neoplatonizing Suhravardī acquired as a “Hermetic thinker,”123 as well as a magus who practiced letter magic and even conjuring.124 The third and longest maqṣad on līmiyā, or the science of talismans, constitutes the bulk of the interpolated version.125 It represents a separate treatise, Ḥall al-mushkilāt (“The resolution of difficulties”), which someone who styles himself “this humble pretender” (īn dāʿī), says he translated (tarjuma namūda) (without specifying the language from which he translated it). He describes the contents of this treatise as “the occult sciences (ʿulūm-i gharība), numerology (aʿdād), letter divination ( jafr), and incantations (nīranjāt),” consisting of “selections from the masters of this art,” organized into two faṣls, each of which is divided into four nawʿs, each nawʿ further being divided into four qisms.126

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Ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 4. In the introduction to his Ḥikmat al-ishrāq, Suhravardī refers to Hermes as “the father of the sages” (wālid al-ḥukamāʾ); see Suhrawardī, The Philosophy of Illumination, ed. and trans. John Walbridge and Hossein Ziai (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1999), 2 (Arabic text and English translation). For Suhravardī as a Hermeticist, see Kevin van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 223–226 (according to van Bladel, Suhravardī was probably not really familiar with actual Hermetica). The majmūʿa (composite manuscript) Majlis, 12575/4, pp. 311ff., contains a translation of an Arabic treatise on ʿilm-i ḥurūf ascribed to Suhravardī. Jāmī relates an anecdote in the Nafaḥāt al-uns (pp. 584–588) about Suhravardī performing an act of conjuring whereby he made his arm appear to become dislocated from his shoulder in order to rid himself of a Turkmen shepherd who wanted more money for a sheep Suhravardī and his companions had purchased from him. When the Turkmen, who had grabbed Suhravardī’s arm to prevent him from leaving, saw the dislocated arm in his hand, he took fright, dropped it on the ground, and fled. Suhravardī then stooped down to pick up a mandīl, a type of long white handkerchief, which he had conjured to appear like his severed arm. Ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 80–134. A discussion of the last two maqṣads on hīmiyā and kīmiyā, which are short, is beyond the scope of the present study, but they too deserve closer scrutiny. In the introduction to the fourth maqṣad on hīmiyā (astral magic), the interpolator warns that, until one becomes an accomplished master, one should not undertake the operations described therein, as they pose a danger to one’s life (bīm-i khaṭar-i jānast). For this reason, he states that he will restrict himself to presenting the science in a summary fashion (ikhtiṣāran) in eight faṣls; ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 134–135. Ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 80.

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The first faṣl, or subsection, focuses on the main clients or targets, as the case may be, of various talismanic operations: rulers and members of the power elite. It contains descriptions of talismans for controlling the hearts and minds (taskhīr-i qulūb) of rulers, helping them achieve success in various endeavors, such as the conquest of fortresses, and protecting others from their wrath. The second faṣl addresses the needs of a wider audience and is devoted to talismans for inciting passionate love, protecting a person from his enemies, and turning one person against another in favor of oneself (a particularly popular subsection), and a host of other nefarious and less nefarious purposes.127 The treatise Ḥall al-mushkilāt is described later in the maqṣad as a book (kitāb) by Shaykh Bahāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad (d. 1030/1621), the eminent theologian, jurist, and philosopher of Shāh ʿAbbās’s reign, which consisted mainly of the talismanic operations attributed to the Indian sage Ṭumṭum-i Hindī.128 In fact, a Persian text with the title Intikhāb-i Ḥall al-mushkilāt (“Selections from The resolution of difficulties”) also contains a description of some of the talismanic operations (aʿmāl) of Shaykh Bahāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad.129 It appears to be identical in part with the third maqṣad.130 Additionally, a treatise also titled Ḥall al-mushkilāt refers to a translation done, presumably from Arabic into Persian, of Ṭumṭum-i Hindī’s work on talismans by a certain Abū l-Maḥāsin Muḥammad b. Saʿd b. Muḥammad al-Nakhjuvānī, known as Ibn Sāvajī, a scribe and translator of the late Ilkhanid period (fl. c. 730/1330).131 This translation, 127 128 129

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The final section of faṣl 2 describes the specific properties of individual letters of the Arabic alphabet, according to “the sage,” that is, Ṭumṭum-i Hindī. Ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 98. See Dirāyatī, Fihristgān, 13:368. In the introduction, the operations are described as having been taken from Shaykh Ṣafī al-Dīn Isḥāq al-Ardabīlī (d. 735/1334), the eponymous founder of the Safavid Sufi order. My thanks to Abolfazl Moshri for securing a digital copy of the manuscript (Majlis 1178/2, undated but apparently twelfth/eighteenth century). A certain “Mawlānā Akhvund” (unidentified) is mentioned in the maqṣad as having copied down some of Shaykh Bahāʾ al-Dīn’s operations in his own book, also titled Ḥall al-mushkilāt, one of which he apparently recorded entirely in the “Greek cipher” (qalami yūnānī); see ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 93. For the “Greek cipher,” which was used as late as Qajar times, see C. Edmund Bosworth, “Codes,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, fig. 78. This Mawlānā Akhvund worked closely with the interpolator and the interpolator’s teacher and is elsewhere called Akhvund Mullā Ḥusayn; for references to him, see ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed., (Bombay, 1302/1885), 97 (where he is called “the late”), 98, and 107. Storey, Persian Literature, vol. 2, pt. 3, pp. 461–462, no. 809 (although Storey incorrectly dates Ibn Sāvajī to the Safavid period). For Ibn Sāvajī as a translator from Arabic into Persian, with dates of manuscripts he copied, see Dirāyatī, Fihristvāra, 4:1,102 (as translator of al-Durr al-manthūr on the hadith of ʿAlī); 9:535 (as translator of al-Iṣṭakhrī’s al-Masālik wal-mamālik); and 10:1,076 (as translator of Vaṣiyyat ʿAlī). Ibn Sāvajī was active in Azerbaijan

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which has been published in lithograph editions, also appears to be identical with the Ḥall al-mushkilāt of the third maqṣad.132 These are rewritings of a treatise on talismans, with a promising title, ascribed to the legendary Indian sage known as Ḥakīm Ṭumṭum-i Hindī, whose pseudepigraphical works on astrology, letter divination, and talismans had circulated widely in the Islamic world since at least the fourth/tenth century.133 The “humble pretender” (dāʿī) mentioned at the beginning of the maqṣad, who claims to have translated the treatise, may well be Ibn Sāvajī who, in the early eighth/fourteenth century, must have translated a treatise on talismanic operations by Ṭumṭum-i Hindī, to which others added the operations of later masters, including those of the aforementioned Shaykh Bahāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad. The third maqṣad is the most interesting historically because it contains numerous references to identifiable Safavid political and religious figures. These references are not anachronisms that cast doubt on Kāshifī’s authorship of the Asrār-i qāsimī, as some scholars have maintained, because they do not belong to Kāshifī’s original work134 but to the Safavid interpolation. They include references to the Safavid shahs Ismāʿīl I (r. 907–930/1501–1524), Tahmāsp I (r. 930–984/1524–1576), and ʿAbbās I (r. 995–1038/1587–1629), as well as to Safavid military commanders such as Allāh Vīrdī Khān (d. 1022/1613), ʿAlī Qulī Khān Shāmlū (d. 1034/1624–1625), and Murshid Qulī Khān Ustajlū (d. 1042– 1043/1632), who had talismans fashioned for them for various purposes by such occultist luminaries as Mīr Ghiyāth al-Dīn Manṣūr al-Dashtakī Shīrāzī

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during the time of Shaykh Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ardabīlī, whose operations served as a basis for Shaykh Bahāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad’s Ḥall al-mushkilāt (see above). Kitāb Ḥall al-mushkilāt az Ḥakīm-i rabbānī Ṭumṭum-i Hindī dar jafr va ṭilismāt va nīranjāt, lith. ed., Bombay, 1306/1888 (with an appendix attributed to Suhravardī); and Kitāb Ḥall al-mushkilāt, lith. ed., [Bombay], 1328/1910. In his introduction, Ibn Sāvajī suggests, rather confusingly, that his master (ustād-i amjadam) was Ṭumṭum-i Hindī (sic), whose treatise Ḥall al-mushkilāt was based on the writings of both ancient and contemporary masters, together with his own experientially verified operations, which others then encouraged Ibn Sāvajī to translate. I believe the text (which is perhaps garbled) should read to say that his master—who may have been Shaykh Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ardabīlī—assembled the writings of Ṭumṭum-i Hindī, which Ibn Sāvajī then translated into Persian. For Ṭumṭum-i Hindī, whose dates are unknown and who was probably a mythical figure like Hermes Trismegistus, see Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften, 298–299. Thus, for example, Browne, Descriptive Catalogue of the Oriental MSS., 200–201. Although it may seem trivial, one of the tests of Kāshifī’s authorship of Asrār-i qāsimī is the fact that, in his introduction to the work, he mentions Rūmī and his son Sulṭān-Valad as poets who frequently used the metaphor of alchemy (kīmiyā). For Kāshifī’s admiration for Rūmī and frequent citation from his works, see Lloyd Ridgeon, “Naqshbandī Admirers of Rūmī in the Late Timurid Period,” Mawlana Rumi Review 3 (2012): 156–163.

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(d. 949/1542),135 Maḥmūd Dihdār Shīrāzī (fl. 984/1576),136 Shaykh ʿAlī Minshār ʿĀmilī (d. 984/1576),137 and Shaykh Bahāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad (d. 1030/1621),138 among others.139 Interpolations of works on the occult sciences are not without precedent in the Islamicate tradition. Noah Gardiner has demonstrated conclusively that the influential grimoire (textbook on magic) Shams al-maʿārif al-kubrā by the North African lettrist Aḥmad b. ʿAlī al-Būnī (d. c. 622/1225), is largely the product of anonymous compilers who, in the early eleventh/seventeenth century, added to the core of Būnī’s work titled Shams al-maʿārif wa-laṭāʾif alʿawārif.140 Just as Asrār-i qāsimī contains references to historical personages and events from the tenth/sixteenth and eleventh/seventeenth centuries that could not possibly have been recorded by Kāshifī himself, so too does Shams al-maʿārif al-kubrā contain numerous anachronisms. The reasons for such interpolations are not difficult to divine. In a climate of enhanced interest in the occult sciences, attributing authorship to an acknowledged occult master like al-Būnī lent cachet to the interpolated work. In the

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Ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 81, 86, 88, and 93. Philosopher, astronomer, and occultist active under shahs Ismāʿīl and Tahmāsp and son of the Shirazi philosopher Sayyid Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Dashtakī. For him see Reza Pourjavady, Philosophy in Early Safavid Iran: Najm al-Dīn Maḥmūd al-Nayrīzī and His Writings (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 24–32. Ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 81. Believed to have been the teacher of Shaykh Bahāʾī in the occult sciences and a prolific author on lettrism (ʿilm-i ḥurūf ); his pen name was ʿIyānī, and his father Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Khafrī (d. 942/ 1535) was an astronomer, mathematician, and occultist. See Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Safavid Twelver Lettrism between Sunnism and Shiʿism, Mysticism and Science: Rajab al-Bursī vs. Maḥmūd Dihdār,” in “Shiʿi Intellectual History: The State of the Art and New Perspectives,” ed. Ahab Bdaiwi and Sajjad Rizvi, special issue of Global Intellectual History (forthcoming); and Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Maḥmūd Dehdār Širāzi,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica. Ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 83. Shaykh Bahāʾī’s father-in-law and shaykh al-Islām of Isfahan under Shāh Tahmāsp. For him, see Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah ʿAbbas the Great (Tārīḵ-e ʿĀlamārā-ye ʿAbbāsī), trans. Roger M. Savory, 2 vols. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1978), 1:245; and Rula Jurdi Abisaab, Converting Persia: Religion and Power in the Safavid Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 60. Ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), e.g., 84–87, 108. For him, see below. Others include Mawlānā ʿAbd al-Laṭīf Gīlānī, Mawlānā Aḥmad Lārī, and Mawlānā Mīrzā Jān Kāshgharī, for whom see ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 82, 84, 85, 87, and 90. See Noah Gardiner, “Forbidden Knowledge? Notes on the Production, Transmission, and Reception of the Major Works of Aḥmad al-Būnī,” Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 12 (2012): 101–102 and 123–129; and Saif, “From Ġāyat al-ḥakīm to Šams al-maʿārif,” 333–334. For the work, see Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften, 390–391.

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case of Asrār-i qāsimī, there was an additional consideration: the interpolated version capitalized on Kāshifī’s reputation as an occultist who wrote not in Arabic but in Persian. In the notice on him in the Shiʿi biographical dictionary Majālis al-muʾminīn, Qāḍī Nūrallāh Shushtarī (d. 1019/1610–1611) characterized him as being expert in the occult sciences (ʿulūm-i gharība), noting that he was a veritable repository of knowledge about jafr (letter divination), taksīr (the construction of magic squares and talismans),141 and sīmiyā (illusionism).142

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Dating and Authorship of the Safavid Interpolation

As most of the references in the third maqṣad date to the reign of Shāh ʿAbbās I, the interpolator must have been writing during the last decades of the tenth/ sixteenth century or early decades of the eleventh/seventeenth century. Moreover, Shaykh Bahāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad, known as Shaykh Bahāʾī, figures prominently among the authorities engaged in talismanic operations.143 A scion of the famous ʿĀmilī family of Shiʿi clerics, Shaykh Bahāʾī was closely associated with the court of Shāh ʿAbbās, eventually becoming shaykh al-Islām of the Safavid capital, Isfahan, in 1008/1600. Besides numerous works on Shiʿi jurisprudence, Qurʾan exegesis, and Shiʿi ritual, he was a mathematician, astronomer, Sufi, and occultist who wrote on logogriphs, letter magic, and letter divination.144 There are many examples in the third maqṣad of operations he authorized or performed himself.

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Strictly speaking, taksīr al-ḥurūf means adding the numerical values of a letter as it is spelled out, yielding a higher value; see Tewfik Canaan, “The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans,” in Magic and Divination in Early Islam, ed. Emilie Savage-Smith (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate/Variorum, 2004), 162. In this case, however, I am citing the definition in Melvin-Koushki, “Quest for a Universal Science,” 255 n. 308, who translates from Ḥājjī Khalīfa’s Kashf al-ẓunūn (2:1475): “[The practitioner] unjoins the letters of one of the divine names and intersperses them with the letters of the word(s) designating his goal in a single line, then, performing an operation known to initiates, rearranges the order of the letters on two lines. This is repeated until the first line is in order, and from it is taken the names of the angels and the supplications used to address them. The practitioner then continues these supplications until the goal is achieved.” Qāḍī Sayyid Nūrallāh Shūshtarī, Majālis al-muʾminīn, 2 vols. in 1 (Tehran: Kitābfurūshī-i Islāmiyya, 1375sh/1956), 1:547–548. In his groundbreaking article on the Asrār-i qāsimī, Pierre Lory identified him with Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband, the eponymous founder of the Naqshbandiyya, but this identification must be corrected; Lory, “Kashifi’s Asrār-i Qāsimī,” 537. Lory also took Kāshifī to be the author of the interpolated Safavid version. See the biographical notice on him in Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah ʿAbbas the

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For instance, when Shāh ʿAbbās came to the throne in Qazvin (in 995/1587), he asked Shaykh Bahāʾī for a talisman to strengthen his rule and protect him from his enemies. The talismanic operation, called ʿamal-i shams (the talisman of the sun), was to be performed at the time of the sun’s exaltation. It involved distributing the sum of the numerical values of the letters of Qurʾan sūra 91, which begins “Wa-l-shams wa-ḍuḥāhā” (“By the sun and its splendor”), in a 5 × 5 magic square inscribed on a gold tablet (lawḥ) that was then bound to the shah’s right arm.145 The instructions were for the shah to face the sun at dawn before the morning prayer, and recite the Qurʾan sūra until the sun rose, at which time he was to gaze at the tablet. This astrological talisman, which was believed to harness the power of the sun, was credited with ensuring the success of Shāh ʿAbbās’s reign and helped other members of the Safavid elite, notably the commander Allāh Vīrdī Khān, achieve and maintain power.146 The interpolator states that Shaykh Bahāʾī had explained certain operations to him and to his late teacher, whom he mentions frequently in connection with talismans he fashioned for members of the power elite but whom he never names.147 Some of these operations were drawn from the “experientially verified” repertoire of lettrist masters such as al-Būnī, Ḥusayn Akhlāṭī, and Ṭumṭum-i Hindī.148 Shaykh Bahāʾī valued highly the talismanic operations of Ṭumṭum-i Hindī, as the following passage, which also involves our interpolator, indicates: Shaykh Bahāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad performed the operations of the seven planets (aʿmāl-i haft kawkab) himself and would not share them with anyone.149 One day the shah produced a manuscript written in the shaykh’s

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Great, 1:247–249. For the date of his death, see Iskandar Beg Turkmān, Tārīkh-i ʿālamārā-yi ʿabbāsī, ed. Īraj Afshār, 2 vols. (reprint ed., Tehran: Amīr Kabīr, 1350sh/1971), 2:967. The talisman seal of the sun was usually a 6 × 6 magic square; see Canaan, “Decipherment of Arabic Talismans,” 165. For talismans worn as armlets (bāzū-band), see Emilie SavageSmith, “Amulets and Related Talismanic Objects,” in Science, Tools & Magic, Pt. 1, Body and Spirit, Mapping the Universe, ed. Francis Maddison and Emilie Savage-Smith (Oxford: Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1997), 144; and Živa Vesel, “Talismans from the Iranian World: A Millenary Tradition,” in The Art and Material Culture of Iranian Shiʿism: Iconography and Religious Devotion in Shiʿi Islam, ed. Pedram Khosronejad (London: I.B. Tauris in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation, 2012), 262. Ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 107–108. Ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), e.g., 84, 86, 93. For example, ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 83, 96, and 98–99. For these types of astrological talismans, see Canaan, “Decipherment of Arabic Talismans,” 165.

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own hand and handed it to this lowly wretch (īn khāksār), asking me to transcribe (naql) it. I transcribed the operations of the seven planets [for him] from that manuscript. I heard from the shaykh himself (az zabān-i shaykh) that, of all the operations of past and current masters, there will never be (nakhvāhad būd) a better operation in the world than the operations [of the seven planets] of Ḥakīm-i Ṭumṭum.150 One of the most “beneficial” operations from the point of view of courtiers and other members of the power elite would undoubtedly have been the talisman intended to preserve a person from the king’s wrath, ascribed to Sayyid Ḥusayn Akhlāṭī. The description of this talismanic operation and the particular circumstances in which it was applied, highlights the roles of Shaykh Bahāʾī, the interpolator, and the interpolator’s teacher in saving the lives of people condemned to death by the shah. As in the previous passage, it demonstrates the Safavid shah’s belief in the efficacy of their talismans: If a king becomes so angry with a person that the person risks being executed, he should distribute this sum (ʿadad)151 in a gold 4 × 4 [magic square] (murabbaʿ) at an auspicious hour (sāʿat-i saʿīd) and give some sweetmeats [to the poor] as charity. At that very same hour, the shah’s wrath will turn to favor and mercy. My own late master (ustādam maghfūr) saved many individuals from execution and imprisonment thanks to this [talismanic] tablet (lawḥ). The late (ghufrān-panāh) Shaykh Bahāʾ alDīn Muḥammad—may his secret be sanctified—fashioned one for Āqā ʿInāyat,152 who [as a result] was preserved from the shah’s wrath till the end of his days. This powerful seal (īn muhr-i muʿaẓẓam) is one of the divine secrets (az asrār-i ilāhī). It must be closely guarded because it has been experientially verified (az mujarrabāt) by past masters (ustādan-i mutaqaddimīn). On many occasions, [I], the most insignificant of God’s slaves (ʿaqall-i

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Ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 101–102. The description of these operations follows. The sum referred to here is described in the previous subsection (maqṣad 3, faṣl 1, nawʿ 2, qism 1, p. 82). It is the sum of the numerical values of the talismanic formula: “From the evil of bad fate and from the evil of every creature (min sharr qaḍāʾ al-sū’ wa-min sharr kull dābba) You (anta) ‘grasp its forelock. Verily my Lord is on a straight path’ (ākhidhun bi-nāṣiyatihā innā rabbī ʿalā ṣirāṭin mustaqīmin).” Although the text states that the entire formula is Qurʾanic, in fact only the second part is (= the last part of Q 11:56). Unidentified.

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ʿibād Allāh),153 have saved [many of] God’s slaves from the wrath of rulers and kings. [By way of example]: In Kashan, when Mawlāna Mīrzā Jān [Kāshgharī]154 was ordered by the shah to be hanged in the town square, the noose unraveled three times. The mawlānā laughed, saying “Since I know this [occult] science (ʿilm), no one can kill me.” When the shah learned what he had said, he relented. He summoned the mawlānā and said, “We pardon you for your crime. But you must give me the [talismanic] invocation (duʿā) that you possess.” He gave it to the shah, and, when it was opened, it turned out to be that very same tablet (lawḥ). Another [example]: When Muḥammad Beg Māklū155 was ordered by the shah to be beheaded, my late master (ustād-i maghfūram) had that talismanic tablet (lawḥ) in his turban. He took it out and gave it to Muḥammad Beg. Three times the sword struck Muḥammad Beg’s neck without harming a single hair on his head. The shah was amazed and asked how such a cutting sword could be so ineffective. [Muḥammad Beg] took out the 4×4 magic square (murabbaʿ) and gave it to the shah. The shah [then] ordered my late master (ustād-i marḥūm) to fashion one just like it for him also, so that he could keep it on his person. This operation (ʿamal) is from Master Sayyid Ḥusayn Akhlāṭī and has been verified many times. It should be kept hidden from oppressors, the unworthy, and the ignorant. The possessor should keep it on his person [especially] during war and in battle. He should gaze at the 4 × 4 magic square (murabbaʿ) at an auspicious hour (sāʿat-i saʿīd), when the moon is free of bad omens, because it is one of the most amazing experientially verified [talismans] (az mujarrabāt-i ʿajāʾibāt).156 The cryptic reference above to “the most insignificant of God’s slaves” is resolved in a later passage in the third maqṣad, where the interpolator reveals his identity: he is none other than Jalāl al-Dīn Munajjim Yazdī, Shāh ʿAbbās’s court astrologer. After referring to himself as “the most insignificant of God’s slaves”

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For the identification of the interpolator, see below. Unidentified. He is mentioned in ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 82, as having fashioned a talisman for Mīrzā Muḥammad, the vizier of Isfahan, which enabled him to hold on to the post for eighteen years, until the talisman was stolen from him in the baths, as a result of which he lost his position. The individual could not be identified. Ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), maqṣad 3, faṣl 1, nawʿ 2 (“On preserving oneself from the wrath of kings”), qism 2, pp. 83–84.

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(ʿaqall-i ʿibād Allāh), he gives his name in the form Jalāl Munajjim Bāshī, munajjim bāshī being his official title as chief astrologer.157 “The most insignificant of God’s slaves” is not an epithet that would have been applied to anyone other than oneself. Safavid historians customarily prefaced his name with loftiersounding epithets such as ʿumdat al-munajjimīn (“Pillar of the astrologers”).158 In the same passage he also refers to himself as “this lowly wretch” (īn khāksār).159 Such abject expressions of humility were the customary way authors of medieval Islamicate works referred to themselves. Jalāl Munajjim would have been a natural candidate for interpolator. As a rule, the fashioning of talismans, which involved letter and number magic and the construction of magic squares, took astrological considerations into account so that a given operation could be performed when cosmic forces exerted maximum influence;160 moreover, the construction of magic squares demanded sophisticated computational skills, such as those possessed by an astronomer/astrologer.161 Besides his work on astrology, Tuḥfat al-munajjimīn (“The gift of the astrologers”), he is known to have written a work on the occult science of geomancy (raml).162 The passage in which he identifies himself provides instructions for the talismanic operation (ʿamal) known as “binding 157 158

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Ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 94. For example, Muḥammad Mufīd Mustawfī Bāfqī, Jāmiʿ al-mufīdī, vol. 3, ed. Īraj Afshār (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Kitābfurūshī-i Asadī, 1340sh/1961), 473; and Iskandar Beg Turkmān, Tārīkh-i ʿālamārā-yi ʿabbāsī, 2:611. Ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 94–95 (thus also pp. 84 and 101). Elsewhere (pp. 84, 95, and 101) he refers to himself simply as “this slave” (banda), that is, “I”. See the comments on this point by Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah, 3:166. For the role of the astrologer, especially at royal courts, see George Saliba, “The Role of the Astrologer in Medieval Islamic Society,” in Magic and Divination in Early Islam, ed. Emilie Savage-Smith (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate/Variorum, 2004), 353 ff. (although with no mention of the use of astrology in the talismanic arts!). For magic squares, which involved complex mathematical calculations, see Jacques Sesiano, “Quadratus Mirabilis,” in The Enterprise of Science in Islam: New Perspectives, ed. Jan P. Hogendijk and Abdelhamid I. Sabra (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 199ff.; and Bink Hallum’s chapter in this volume. The connection between mathematics, astronomy, and lettrism has been forcefully argued by Melvin-Koushki, who regards it as the key to understanding early modern Persian intellectual history, perhaps akin to appreciating the sources of the Renaissance and the scientific revolution in Western intellectual history; Melvin-Koushki, “Quest for a Universal Science,” 440–450; Melvin-Koushki, “Powers of One.” See Storey, Persian Literature, vol. 2, pt. 3, p. 481, no. 849; Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Persianate Geomancy from Ṭūsī to the Millennium: A Preliminary Survey,” in Occult Sciences in Pre-Modern Islamic Cultures, ed. Nader El-Bizri and Eva Orthmann (Beirut: OrientInstitut Beirut, 2018), 171.

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the tongue” (ʿaqd al-lisān).163 It called for a person to sit with his back to the qibla (the direction of prayer to Mecca) and place a small amount of wax in his mouth. The operation was to be performed during the last two or three days of the month, known as taḥta al-shuʿāʿ, when the moon had waned, a period reckoned to be astrologically inauspicious but beneficial for the purposes of the operation. It is described as having been experientially verified (az mujarrabāt) by Sayyid Ḥusayn Akhlāṭī. The passage merits translation in full as, in addition to revealing his identity, it highlights Jalāl Munajjim’s relationship to Shaykh Bahāʾī and his circle. There was a person who was extremely vile and said many evil things to the shah [Shāh ʿAbbās] about godly people, accusing them of falsehoods and slandering them. The shah said, “Tomorrow that man must state what he has said about such-and-such a person in the royal court of justice in the presence of the plaintiff, after which he will be punished accordingly.” [I], the most insignificant of God’s slaves (ʿaqall-i ʿibād Allāh), Jalāl Munajjim Bāshī, was sitting in attendance on the late Shaykh Bahāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad at the Shrine of the Immaculate One [Imam ʿAlī Riḍā, the eighth Shiʿi Imam, in Mashhad].164 The person who had been slandered was a very decent man, and the notables (aʿyān) gathered there all testified to the late [Shaykh Bahāʾī] that he was innocent of those accusations and that he was a decent man, upright and God-fearing.165 The servitors (bandagān) of Shaykh [Bahāʾī] said to [me], this lowly wretch (īn khāksār) [Jalāl Munajjim], “Fetch pen and ink because it is necessary to ward off [the evil of] that corrupt man from this slave of God [i.e., the innocent person] in a manner he deserves.” [The shaykh] said:

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Ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), maqṣad 3, faṣl 2, nawʿ 2, qism 2, pp. 94–95. Shāh ʿAbbās’s devotion to ʿAlī Riḍā, the eighth Shiʿi Imam, found expression in thirteen recorded visits to his shrine at Mashhad; see Charles Melville, “Shah ʿAbbas and the Pilgrimage to Mashhad,” in Safavid Persia: The History and Politics of an Islamic Society, ed. Charles Melville (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 197. In fact, the shah adopted the sobriquet “the dog of ʿAlī’s threshold” (kalb-i āstān-i ʿAlī); see, e.g., Jalāl al-Dīn Munajjim [Yazdī], Tārīkh-i ʿabbāsī yā Rūz-nāma-yi Mullā Jalāl, ed. Sayfallāh Vaḥīdniyā (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Vaḥīd, 1366sh/1987), 238. For an explicit statement of the favored status accorded ʿAlī Riḍā (often referred to as imām-i thāmin-i ḍāmin, “the eighth Imam who acts as a surety”) over the other “Immaculate Imams,” see Iskandar Beg Turkmān, Tārīkh-i ʿālamārā-yi ʿabbāsī, 2:754. Unfortunately, neither the name of the slanderer nor that of the man he slandered is mentioned in the text.

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“Write down the ‘quiet letters’ (ḥurūf-i ṣavāmit).166 [Now] write down the name of that person together with that of his mother.”167 After adding the numerical values of the quiet letters to the numerical values of that person’s [name] together with that of his mother, [the shaykh] added that sum to [the number] 2624.168 He drew a 3 × 3 magic square on dark blue paper and distributed the sum in it.169 They [the shaykh’s servitors] said to that individual who had been wronged, “Bury this [talisman] in a dark room and set a heavy stone on top of it.” That person performed the operation as prescribed. The next day, the shah held his assembly. When that evil person was called on to repeat what he had said about this man, no matter how many times they asked him to speak, it was as if he had been rendered mute, just like a dumb animal, and he was unable to say anything about that innocent man. The shah ordered that evil person’s tongue to be cut out, while the individual who had been wronged was delivered [from him]. This operation (ʿamal) has remained for [me] [Jalāl Munajjim], lowly wretch (khāksār) that I am, as a remembrance of that great man of the age [Shaykh Bahāʾī].170 Jalāl Munajjim was in the service of Shāh ʿAbbās from 994/1586 to 1028/1619,171 and it is undoubtedly to one of the occasions when Shāh ʿAbbās visited the shrine of Imām ʿAlī Riḍā in Mashhad that the aforementioned passage relates. Thanks to Charles Melville’s meticulous study of the chronology of Shāh

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The ṣāmita (quiet) letters are the ones without dots (as opposed to the nāṭiqa, or speaking, letters, that have dots); they were believed to be efficacious in getting rid of pain and trouble. See Canaan, “Decipherment of Arabic Talismans,” 156. But the meaning of the Arabic root of the word (to be silent, to hold one’s tongue) must also be intended, as the goal of the operation was to prevent a person from speaking. This was a talismanic practice of long standing; Canaan, “Decipherment of Arabic Talismans,” 152. This number represents the sum of the numerical values of the letters of an apposite verse of the Qurʾan. The verse is unfortunately not specified, but in many other instances in this maqṣad on talismans, both the Qurʾan verse and its sum are given; e.g., ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), e.g., 85, 89. That is, each of the rows, columns, and two main diagonals in the magic square had to add up to the same number. Ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 94–95. Jalāl al-Dīn Munajjim, Tārīkh-i ʿabbāsī, 12 (editor’s introduction); and Sholeh A. Quinn, Historical Writing during the Reign of Shah ʿAbbas: Ideology, Imitation, and Legitimacy in Safavid Chronicles (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000), 21–22.

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ʿAbbās’s visits to the shrine, it is possible to narrow down the possibilities.172 According to the Safavid sources, most notably Jalāl Munajjim’s own chronicle of Shāh ʿAbbās’s reign, Tārīkh-i ʿabbāsī yā Rūz-nāma-yi Mullā Jalāl, the most likely occasion was during the shah’s visit to the shrine in Rabīʿ I, 1011/August– September 1602 (on his return from the failed campaign against the Uzbeks at Balkh), at which time he stayed at the shrine for approximately two weeks. Not only was Jalāl Munajjim present, but so too were Shaykh Bahāʾī and the shah’s courtiers (aʿyān).173 Another possible occasion was the previous year, 1010/1601–1602, when Jalāl Munajjim, who was famously charged with measuring the distance the shah traversed each day from Isfahan, accompanied him on his pilgrimage.174 Shāh ʿAbbās wintered at the shrine on that occasion, so his stay was not brief, and his courtiers would have been in attendance. Although the sources do not mention Shaykh Bahāʾī’s presence, it is likely that, given the historic significance of the shah’s pilgrimage, which he performed on foot in order to fulfill a vow, and the length of the shah’s stay, the shaykh, who was a frequent visitor to the shrine (and was later buried there), may well have been present.175 There are other possibilities, but again, the shaykh’s presence is not specifically mentioned.176 172 173

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Melville, “Shah ʿAbbas and the Pilgrimage to Mashhad,” 191–229. Jalāl al-Dīn Munajjim, Tārīkh-i ʿabbāsī, 232; and Melville, “Shah ʿAbbas and the Pilgrimage to Mashhad,” 197. The description in Faḍlī Beg Khūzānī’s Afḍal al-tavārīkh of the Safavid campaign against the Uzbeks in 1011 provides a fascinating glimpse of the extraordinary occult powers that Shaykh Bahāʾī was believed to possess: When an effigy, apparently fashioned out of paper, appeared on horseback in the Qizilbash camp and was causing great consternation among the soldiers, the astrologers and Sufi divines who were present agreed that it was the product of an operation of the occult science of sīmiyā (ʿamal-i sīmiyā). It is unclear who conjured up this frightening illusion that eluded capture by the soldiers and kept darting around the camp until it finally disappeared, but Faḍlī Beg states that had Shaykh Bahāʾī been present (he was probably waiting for Shāh ʿAbbās to arrive at the Mashhad shrine), he would have dispelled the apparition in an instant simply by raising his index finger!—see Fazli Beg Khuzani Isfahani, A Chronicle of the Reign of Shah ʿAbbas, ed. Kioumars Ghereghlou, with an introduction by Charles Melville, 2 vols. ([Cambridge]: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2015), 1:322. My thanks to Charles Melville for drawing my attention to this telling, albeit cryptic, passage. Jalāl al-Dīn Munajjim, Tārīkh-i ʿabbāsī, 206–208; Iskandar Beg Turkmān, Tārīkh-i ʿālamārāyi ʿabbāsī, 2:610–612, and Melville, “Shah ʿAbbas and the Pilgrimage to Mashhad,” 197. The shah’s pilgrimage began in Jumādā I, 1010/November 1601. There is a rare reference in ps.-Kāshifī to the date 1010/1601 in connection with a talismanic arm band (bāzū-band) that the shaykh fashioned for the shah, which supposedly ensured his success in various military endeavors, including the conquest of Tabriz several years later, but there is no mention of this taking place at the Mashhad shrine, so perhaps it took place earlier that year; ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 85. For example, in 1008/1599–1600, when the shah was on his way to Marv and stayed at the

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The passage translated above is recounted by Jalāl Munajjim in the first person, while Shaykh Bahāʾī is referred to as “the late” (ghufrān-panāh, i.e., he who has taken refuge in divine forgiveness).177 But the shaykh died in 1030/1621, whereas Jalāl Munajjim is believed to have died earlier, in 1029/1619–1620.178 The problem of chronology cannot easily be resolved, although the date of Jalāl Munajjim’s death may serve as a terminus ante quem for the core of the interpolation. Perhaps the scribe of a manuscript copied after Jalāl Munajjim’s death added the posthumous title to the shaykh’s name out of respect, while preserving Jalāl Munajjim’s account in the first person. In other parts of the maqṣad, Jalāl Munajjim is referred to in the third person (usually as Mullā Jalāl Munajjim), suggesting that someone else was writing about him.179 Who that anonymous scribe or interpolator may have been cannot be gleaned from the text, but the accretion of secret knowledge based on the “experientially verified” operations of past masters and their contemporary emulators would have been in keeping with the way occult texts were compiled, rewritten, and transmitted over the centuries in the medieval Islamicate world.

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shrine for sixty-five days; see Jalāl al-Dīn Munajjim, Tārīkh-i ʿabbāsī, 194–195; and Melville, “Shah ʿAbbas and the Pilgrimage to Mashhad,” 197. He is also mentioned as being deceased on an earlier occasion; ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 93 (quddisa sirruhu). Jalāl al-Dīn Munajjim, Tārīkh-i ʿabbāsī, 12 (editor’s introduction). In his Zubdat al-tavārīkh, his son, Kamāl b. Jalāl, gives the date of his death as 1029/1620—my thanks to Charles Melville for the reference; he cites manuscript Royal Asiatic Society, Codrington 56, fol. 76r. There is no mention of the date of his death in Quinn, Historical Writing, 21–22; or in Sholeh Quinn and Charles Melville, “Safavid Historiography,” in Persian Historiography, ed. Charles Melville (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 251–252. This is perhaps not surprising, as Iskandar Beg’s Tārīkh-i ʿālamārā-yi ʿabbāsī, the main history of Shah ʿAbbās’s reign, which was completed in 1038/1629, not only does not give the date of his death but also has little to say about him. For example, ps.-Kāshifī, Asrār-i qāsimī, lith. ed. (Bombay, 1302/1885), 103. This is not, however, proof that he was not the writer, as, even in his own chronicle, Tārīkh-i ʿabbāsī, Jalāl Munajjim refers to himself in the third person; see Jalāl al-Dīn Munajjim, Tārīkh-i ʿabbāsī, 194. However, if someone else were writing about him after his death, one would have expected the customary posthumous epithets and benedictions, which is not the case. Perhaps as court astrologer he did not command the same respect the Sufi Shaykh Bahāʾī did in the eyes of later practitioners of the talismanic arts.

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Conclusion

Although Kāshifī did not live into the Safavid period—he died before the advent of the Safavids to Herat in 916/1510—and despite the fact that all indications point to his not being a Shiʿi, he was adopted wholesale by Safavid culture that espoused and vigorously promoted Twelver Shiʿism as a religio-political ideology. His Qurʾan commentary Mavāhib-i ʿaliyya remained enormously popular, thanks to its esoteric yet accessible and non-confessional bent. Even his Rawḍat al-shuhadāʾ, which became the basis of the Shiʿi rituals commemorating the martyrdom of Ḥusayn, is more ʿAlid in tone than Shiʿi in doctrine. “Ahl al-Baytism” (veneration of the family of ʿAlī) was not only part of the preSafavid Sunnism of eastern Iran, it was assumed of practitioners of the occult sciences, and it was the “universalism” of the occult sciences that facilitated the transmission of Kāshifī’s Asrār-i qāsimī into the Safavid period, not any crypto-Shiʿi aspect of his writings per se. This universalist, non-confessional perspective renders the problem of Kāshifī’s confessional orientation a nonissue, as Sunnis and Shiʿis alike viewed the Imams as privileged repositories of occult knowledge and based their operations on the numerical values of the letters of Qurʾan verses, the mysterious isolated letters called muqaṭṭaʿāt, and the Divine Names. The Safavid interpolation of Kāshifī’s Asrār-i qāsimī, particularly the third maqṣad, with its descriptions of talismanic operations executed for Safavid shahs and Qizilbash amirs by eminent Shiʿi religious scholars and Sufi divines, provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes perspective on the exercise of political power in Iran that is rarely, if ever, offered up by the official Safavid chronicles. Even Jalāl Munajjim’s own chronicle of Shāh ʿAbbās’s reign says nothing on the subject. At the same time, many of the political figures and contexts can be identified in the Safavid historical sources. This “secret history” of the Safavid period brings into sharp relief the great esteem in which the occult sciences were held during the rule of the Shiʿi Safavid dynasty, thanks in large part to the original contributions of Timurid-era Sunni occultists like the Kāshifīs, father and son.

Bibliography Primary Sources ʿAlī [Ṣafī] b. Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ-i Kāshifī, Fakhr al-Dīn. Ḥirz al-amān min fitan al-zamān. MS, Tehran, Kitābkhāna-yi Majlis-i Shūrā-yi Islāmī, 15708. ʿAlī [Ṣafī] b. Ḥusayn Vāʿiẓ-i Kāshifī, Fakhr al-Dīn. Rashaḥāt-i ʿayn al-ḥayāt. Edited by ʿAlī

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part 2 Occult Technologies: From Instruction to Action

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chapter 8

The Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya and Medieval Islamic Occult Sciences Jean-Charles Coulon

Sharāsīm (or Ishrāsīm) al-Hindiyya, is, in Arabic occult literature, the putative author of a treatise on astral magic considered essential reading for anyone interested in the occult sciences. Little is known about the author or her treatise. Few treatises of astral magic have been the subjects of academic editions, and the present article is intended as the preamble to a critical edition and translation of this text. Insofar as Sharāsīm is known only as the author of a text, and as this text is the main source of information on her, I will first introduce the manuscripts that have come down to us. They are the basis of the edition of the text and hence of our knowledge of it. I will then present the author, from other sources that mention her and from the details scattered throughout her treatise. Finally, I will present the text itself, its structure, and its issues in relation to the history of the occult sciences in Arabic texts.

1

Which Manuscripts Survive?

I have so far been able to locate seven manuscripts of the Book of Sharāsīm the Indian. Two are kept in Istanbul (one each in the Hacı Beşir Ağa and Hamidiye collections), one in Cambridge, three others at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and one at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. The manuscripts Hacı Beşir Ağa 659 and Hamidiye 189 of Istanbul are both large and complex collections, of which the work of interest here is only one part. 1.1 Istanbul, Hamidiye 189 The manuscript Hamidiye 189 is a composite collection, in naskhī script, a summary description of which can be found in the catalog of the Hamidiye collection (Hamidiyee Kütüphanesi, 1882–1883). The text attributed to Sharāsīm (spelled Isrāsīm) is found in folios 268b to 302a. A table of contents combining Arabic and Persian is found in fol. 1a–b, whose first title is illegible. The other titles in this collection are the Mujarrabāt (Empirica) by Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, d. 428/1037); Ibn Sīnā’s epistle on medicine

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(Risālat ʿAlī b. Sīnā madhkūr fī ʿilm ṭibb); the “Versified Epistle on the Opening of the Treasures” by al-Ḥākim bi-amr Allāh (Risāla manẓūma Ḥākim bi-amr Allāh fī fatḥ al-kunūz);1 “The Luminescent Glow” (al-Lumʿa al-nūrāniyya) by al-Būnī2 (d. 622/1225 or 630/1232); an epistle by al-Murtaḍā ʿAlī; the “Majestic Epistle on the Science of the Letter” (Risāla jalīla tashtamilu ʿalā ʿilm al-ḥarf ); the “Epistle of Human Joy in Ancient Pearls” (Risālat al-bahja al-insiyya fī l-farāʾid al-asniyya); the “Majestic Epistle on the Science of the Properties of Herbs” (Risāla jalīla fī ʿilm khawāṣṣ al-aʿshāb); a text “On the Properties of Animals and Plants” ( fī khawāṣṣ al-ḥayawānāt wa-l-nabātāt); the Kitāb al-Sirr al-maṣūn wal-jawhar al-maknūn (“Book of the Protected Secret and the Hidden Gem”);3 an epistle on the 3×3 magic square attributed to al-Ghazālī (khātam muthallath lilimām al-Ghazālī);4 an epistle by Turkī (read Turka?) on inheritances (Risālat Turkī fī l-waṣāyā); an epistle by Sābūr al-Hindī on “the letters and the recipes” ( fī l-ḥurūf wa-l-fawāʾid); the Risāla ḥāfiyya aflāṭūniyya fī istikhrāj asmāʾ (“The hidden Platonic Epistle on the Derivation of Names”); an astrological poem in rajaz meter entitled Risālat urjūza falakiyya; the “Epistle of the Arranged Necklace on Letters and Sciences” (Risālat al-ʿiqd al-manẓūm fī l-ḥurūf wa-l-ʿulūm) by Ibn ʿArabī; the “Epistle of the Keys of Treasures on the Science of Letters” (Risālat mafātīḥ al-kunūz fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf ); the “The Mystery on the Science of Letters” by Plato (Khāfiya fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf ); the Khāfiya by Qusṭā b. Lūqā; the “The Epistle of Isrāsīm [sic] the Wise” (Risālat Isrāsīm al-ḥakīma); and the “Epistle Gathering the Writings of Peoples and their Tested Sciences” (Risāla tashtamilu ʿalā aqlām al-qawm wa-ʿulūmi-him al-mujarrabāt). Unfortunately, we have little evidence to provide an accurate dating for this manuscript. However, an owner’s mark at fol. 302a of Jumādā II 28, 1057/July 31, 1647 makes it the oldest manuscript containing a complete version of the text that interests us. 1 This text is found on fols. 64b–74a. It is a text identified with an urjūza (a poem composed in the rajaz meter) in a strip of text and that can be compared to the text of the manuscript Hacı Beşir Ağa 659. 2 This text is found on fols. 74b–81a. An edition of this text (which does not take into account this manuscript) can be found in Jean-Charles Coulon, “La magie islamique et le corpus bunianum au Moyen Âge” (PhD diss. Université Paris IV–Sorbonne, 2013). 3 This treatise is wrongly attributed to al-Ghazālī, as Ḥājjī Khalīfa says: “The Book of the Protected Secret and the Hidden Gem (al-Sirr al-maṣūn wa-l-jawhar al-maknūn) is known as The Seal (al-Khātam) of al-Ghazālī and is called The Well-Arranged Pearls (al-Durr al-naẓīm). He excerpted it from the jafr. Its incipit is: ‘Praise be to God who shines on the breast of certainty by the covenant of the covenant, etc.’ Al-Biqāʿī said: ‘It has been subtly slipped into the works of al-Ghazālī as [certain authors] held that it should be considered as one of his works’” (Ḥājjī Khalīfa, Kashf, vol. 2, col. 989). 4 See Hallum’s chapter in this volume on magic squares in the works of al-Ghazālī.

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From a formal point of view, the manuscript is particularly well executed and has all the features of a deluxe manuscript: the text begins with a bandeau surmounted by a multicolored frontispiece (golden, blue, red, green). The text, executed in black and red ink, is separated from a wide margin by a golden border. The margins of the text of Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya contain few annotations. In other pages, the texts of the margins are by the hand of the same copyist, and also surrounded by borders, which indicates that they are not annotations by owners made after the initial copying but texts added during the copying itself. They were probably already present in the model that served for the copy. 1.2 Istanbul, Hacı Beşir Ağa 659 The manuscript Hacı Beşir Ağa 659 is a composite compendium in oriental script (taʿlīq) that can be found in the Beşir Ağa collection catalog.5 The text attributed to Sharāsīm (spelled Isrāsīm) is found in fols. 104b to 145b. The contents of the collection have an occult dimension. They include: – an anonymous “Book Containing Hidden Things and Treasures Collected from the Books of Past Sages and Contemporary Philosophers” (hādhā kitāb yaḥtawī ʿalā baʿḍ al-khabāyā wa-l-maṭālib jumiʿat min kutub al-ḥukamāʾ almāḍiyyīn wa-l-falāsifa al-mutaʾakhkhirīn; fols. 1b–15a);6 – an anonymous “Chapter of a Conjuration that is ‘The Universal Invocation’”7 (bāb ʿazīma wa-hiya l-qasam al-jāmiʿ; fols. 15b–16a); – a table compiling “the names of some medicinal herbs in the language of the ancient sages” (hādhihi asmāʾ baʿḍ al-ʿaqāqīr ʿalā lisān al-ḥukamāʾ almutaqaddimīn; fol. 16b); – an anonymous astrological poem in rajaz meter (urjūza falakiyya; fols. 16b– 40b); – an anonymous treatise titled al-Zahr al-fāʾiḥ wa-l-nūr al-lāʾiḥ (“The Fragrant Flower and the Bright Light”; fols. 41b–61a) on the secrets of letters (asrār alḥurūf ), which is usually attributed to Plato; – tables on divine letters or names (fols. 61b–62a);

5 Defter-i Kütüphane-i Beşir Ağa (Istanbul: Matbaa-i Amire, 1303/1885–1886), 54. 6 This text is found in MS Hamidiye 189. It is also anonymous, but there is a title in a marginal annotation: urjūzat al-Ḥākim bi-amr Allāh. 7 The “universal invocation” (al-qasam al-jāmiʿ) is the usual title of a formula frequently used in magical recipes (Sébastien Moreau and Cécile Bonmariage, Le cercle des lettres de l’alphabet: un traité pratique de magie des lettres attribué à Hermès [Leiden: Brill, 2017], 30), and whose content may vary somewhat from one treatise to another. One finds, for example, a version in the Dāʾirat al-aḥruf alʾabjadiyya (“The circle of the letters of the alphabet”) attributed to Hermes (Moreau and Bonmariage, Le cerle des lettres, 70–75).

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– a list of the fifty-three “sciences of letters” (ʿulūm al-ḥurūf ; fol. 62b); – an anonymous collection of invocations (sg. duʿāʾ; fols. 63a–65b); – the Kitāb al-ʿiqd al-manẓūm fī khawāṣṣ al-ḥurūf (“Book of the Arranged Necklace on the Properties of the Letters”) by Ibn ʿArabī (fols. 66a–78a; the text and the author are not identified in the text itself),8 with a colophon dated Jumādā I 21, 1117/September 10, 1705; – the Kitāb Tashnīf al-asmāʿ fī taʿrīf al-ibdāʿ (“The Book of the Ear Pendants of the Auditions on the Knowledge of the Creation”) also by Ibn ʿArabī (named on a title page, fol. 79a, and in the body of the text, fol. 88a; fols. 79b–95b), this title is actually a variant of the treatise Uṣūl al-ʿuqūd (“The Foundations of Necklaces”), that we find also in the forms Uṣūl al-ʿuqūd fī l-zāʾirja (“The Foundations of Necklaces on the Zāʾirja”) or Kitāb al-Zāʾirja (Yahia 1964, 2:519, no. 808), with a colophon dated from 25 Jumādā I 1117/14 September 1705, from the hand of a copyist calling himself Muḥammad (fol. 95b); – the Kitāb Kunūz al-muʿazzimīn fī asrār al-ḥurūf wa-istiʿmāli-hā fī l-umūr wal-ḥājāt (“The Book of Treasures of the Conjurers: The Secrets of Letters and their Use for Business and Necessities”) attributed to Aristotle (named on a title page, fol. 96a), with a colophon dated from Sunday 10 Jumādā II 1117/29 September 1705; – the Kitāb Sarāsīm al-Hindiyya (fols. 104b–145b); – an anonymous and untitled treatise on alphabets (fols. 146b–158b);9 – a “section” ( faṣl min) from the Kitāb al-Siyāsa fī aḥkām al-riʾāsa (“Book of Politics Concerning the Rules of the Government”) also attributed to Aristotle (fols. 151b–152a; copied in the margin);10 – an anonymous and untitled treatise, whose content is specified in the opening lines: “Here are martial ruses coming from the control of fires and smoke and others, coming from the time of the sages Bāryūfā, Aristotle, and others” (“fa-hādhihi makāyid ḥarbiyya min taslīṭ al-nīrān wa-l-dakhākhīn waghayrihi min ʿahd al-ḥukamāʾ Bāryūfā wa-Arisṭāṭālīs wa-ghayri-him”; fols. 159b–162b); – an anonymous collection of recipes ( fawāʾid; fols. 162b–168b). To the two colophons of the treatises of Ibn ʿArabī of 21 Jumādā I 1117/10 September 1705 and 25 Jumādā I 1117/14 September 1705, must be added a marginal colophon of 16 Jumādā I 1117/5 September 1705 (fol. 62b). We can therefore assume that the entire copy dates from the year 1117/1705–1706.

8 9 10

I have not found this title in Osman Yahia’s Histoire et classification de l’œuvre d’Ibn ʿArabī. This treatise may be close to that of fols. 296a–301b. This treatise is found also on the margin of fol. 296a of MS Hamidiye 189.

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The comparison of manuscripts Hacı Beşir Ağa 659 and Hamidiye 189 leaves no doubt that the two are linked, either sharing a common model, or one serving as a model for the other (in which case the elements of dating tend to indicate that Hamidiye 189 was the model). Indeed, many texts are common to both manuscripts, and such a compilation, containing otherwise little-known texts in two manuscripts, cannot be a coincidence. 1.3 Cambridge, University Library, Or. 25 The manuscript of the Cambridge University Library is obviously the latest of those that survive. It contains only the text attributed to Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya, which is complete. The title page contains a description: “Book of Ishrāsīm alHindiyya on the science of the properties of the stars, the secrets of nature and the subjugation of its forces to the one who knows the secret, the [mystical] power and the wonderful subjugations of sīmiyāʾ” (Kitāb Ishrāsīm al-Hindiyya fī ʿilm khawāṣṣ al-kawākib wa-asrār al-ṭabīʿa wa-taskhīr quwā-hā li-man yaʿrifu al-sirr wa-l-taṣarruf wa-l-taskhīrāt al-sīmāwiyya al-ʿajība). This same title page contains the shelf mark “Or. 25” and the owner’s mark “Naaman Feb. 5. 1901.” J.J. Naaman (1893–1914) was a London antique dealer specializing in the Middle East. It has a colophon with a clear date: “This book was completed in the year one thousand two hundred and eighty-five AH— the best of prayers and the purest greetings be upon its owner—in the month of Rajab, the tenth day, year 1285 [October 27, 1868]” (“tamma hādhā l-kitāb fī sanat al-alf wa-miʾatayn wa-khams wa-thamānīn hijriyya ʿalā ṣāḥibi-hā afḍal alṣalāt wa-azkā l-taḥiyyāt fī shahr rajab yawm al-ʿāshir minhu sanat 1285”; fol. 55b). The manuscript contains several marginal notes. Some are probably by the copyist himself, adding either a term omitted in the body of the text or a correction to the text.11 On the other hand, we also find annotations where an individual (in another hand than that of the copyist) wanted to bring a few passages to the fore with an elongated qif (‘stop,’ without diacritic dots) used as a notabilia12 in the margin.13 Some of these qif s are accompanied by details 11 12

13

Fols. 20a, 20b, 27b, 32b, 33a, 46b, 50a, 54b. Qif (stop) is often used in the margins of a manuscript as a notabilia in order to draw the reader’s attention to a part of the text of the manuscript. See Adam Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts: A Vademecum for Readers (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2009), 168–169. Fols. 16a, 17b, 18a (twice, once with a note), 18b, 20a, 21a (three times, twice with notes), 21b (once, with a note), 23a, 23b (three times), 24b, 25a (twice, once with a note), 25b (twice), 27b (twice), 29b, 30a, 31a (twice), 31b (twice, once with a note), 32a (twice, both with notes), 32b (three times), 33a, 33b, 39b, 40b, 41a, 41b (once, with a note elsewhere in the margin), 42a (once, with a note), 42b (twice, both with notes), 43b (once, with a note), 44a (twice, both with a note), 44b (three times), 45a (twice, both with a note), [49] 45b (five times, all

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about the text or content that mattered to this reader. Thus, in a recipe where the reader is instructed to use the horn of an iyyal, a note specifies that “iyyal is the ram of the mountains” (iyyal huwa al-kabsh al-jabalī). This annotator left no fewer than seventy-eight qif s over forty-two pages, of which forty are accompanied by a short note providing details about the text. 1.4 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 2634 The manuscript BnF Arabe 2634 belonged to the old Bibliothèque Royale and has its old shelf mark, Ar. 1012, written on the title page. Like many of the manuscripts of the BnF, the first guard-leaf provides information on the number of folios it contains, and a date: “Volume de 57 Feuillets. 12 Octobre 1875.” On the following folio, a second, older shelf mark is given: Arab. 1195. Another shelf mark, scratched afterwards, is inscribed: Arab. 1196. As manuscripts Arabe 2634 and Arabe 2635 contain the same text, it is possible that they were easily confused, if their older numbering followed the same order in the collection. The back of this sheet contains, like many manuscripts of the BnF, a note in Latin by Barthélémi d’Herbelot (1625–1695), one of the founding figures of Orientalism and author of the Bibliothèque orientale, ou Dictionnaire universel contenant généralement tout ce qui regarde la connaissance des peuples de l’Orient, a bibliographic collection largely drawn from Ḥājjī Khalīfa’s Kashf al-ẓunūn, which d’Herbelot requested a copy for his own use.14 The note describes the work as follows: 1012 Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya fī ʿilm al-sīmiyāʾ Indian doctrine on the efficiency and virtue of the names and letters. A book of magic by the application of which spirits and demons are invoked to perform wonderful and unusual things by first memorizing the names of the 23 demons and then learning the preparation for their invocation.15

14

15

with a note), 46a (seven times, five with a note), 46b (five times, all with a note), 47a (three times, all with notes), 47b (once, with a note), 48a (once, with a note), 49a (once, with a note), 49b, 50a (twice, both with notes), 53b, 54a (twice). Sylvette Larzul, “Herbelot,” in Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française, ed. François Pouillon (Paris: Institut d’ Études de l’ Islam et des Sociétés du Monde Musulman and Karthala, 2008), 488–489. I would like to thank Jean-Patrice Boudet and Julien Véronèse for their help in the transcription and translation of this leaflet. The transcription of the Latin text is as follows: 1012 Schera Sim al hendiah fi elm al simiah

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The same page contains an owner’s mark by a certain Sulaymān b. ʿAbd alLaṭīf (tamallaka hādhā l-kitāb al-ʿabd al-faqīr ilā Llāh taʿālā Sulaymān b. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf ʿufiya ʿanhu). On this title page are also two recipes (sg. fāʾida) written by another hand, one against fleas (al-barāghīth), the other against bedbugs (al-baqq). The copy is executed in an inconsistent naskhī. No border separates the text from the margins, which contain some notes on some folios. The last page contains a long invocation in the margins. 1.5 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 2635 BnF Arabe 2635 has a clear connection to the previous manuscript. In both cases, the beginning is abrupt: the text begins with a series of magical names immediately after the basmala, without the usual eulogies (ḥamdala). A comparison of the two manuscripts leaves no doubt that the manuscript Arabe 2635 was copied from Arabe 2634. The beginning of the text clearly indicates that the model of Arabe 2634 was acephalous. The handwriting is much easier to read, and marginal notes structure the text and help the reader to understand better the organization of the book. It dates from 1679, as stated in a colophon: “[this manuscript] was completed on Thursday, sixteen of July (tammūz) in the city of Paris, the year 1679” (nujiza fī yawm al-khamīs sādis ʿashr shahr tammūz fī madīnat Pārīs sanat alf wa-sitt-miʾa wa-tisʿa wa-sabʿīn, p. 170). The manuscript was copied by Buṭrus b. Diʾb al-Ḥalabī,16 also known as Pierre Dipy, a Syrian by birth but naturalized as a French subject in 1688, who was professor of Arabic and Syriac at the Collège Royal and secretaryinterpreter to the king. He was close to the curator of the Bibliothèque Royale, where he examined the Oriental books and manuscripts, of which he drew up a catalog in 1677. The manuscript is paginated but not foliated, which corresponds to the modern practice that developed in the early days of printing and which is mainly observed among Christian copyists of the modern era.17

16

17

Indorum doctrina circa litterarum et nominum efficaciam et virtutem. Liber magicus cuius ope[re] spiritus et demones invocantur ad mira et insolita patranda nomina 23 dæmonum præmittuntur quæ memoriter discenda sunt, deinde præparatio ad illorum invocationem adhibenda docetur. I would like to thank Francis Richard, who, thanks to his extensive experience of the BnF manuscripts, immediately identified this handwriting during my presentation at the congress of the GIS “Moyen Orient et Mondes Musulmans,” although the name of the copyist is not mentioned in the manuscript. This is the case, for example, in the manuscripts copied by Jean-Georges Varsi, some of

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The title page contains an ex libris: “From the library of Eusèbe Renaudot which was bequeathed to the monastery of Saint Germain des Prés in the year of Our Lord 1720” (Ex Bibliotheca V. Cl. Eusebii Renaudot quam Monasterio sancti Germani a Pratis legavit anno Domini 1720). The library of the Abbey of Saint Germain des Prés was entrusted to the Bibliothèque Nationale when the properties of the clergy were nationalized. Eusèbe Renaudot was a priest who became a member of the French Academy in 1688 and of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Medals in 1691. In addition to Biblical Aramaic, he knew Arabic, Coptic, and Syriac. His library reflects this diversity, and his Kitāb Sharāsīm was therefore probably copied from manuscript Arabe 2634 before being preserved in the Bibliothèque Royale. The same title page has the old siglum “Suppl. ar. No. 1095” and the stamp of the Bibliothèque Nationale (and not of the Bibliothèque Royale): the manuscript probably joined the Bibliothèque Nationale during the nationalization of clerical property. It is also the reason that, unlike Arabe 2634, it has no Latin note written by Barthélémi d’Herbelot. We might ask ourselves why a Christian priest would have been interested in a text of astral magic attributed to an Indian woman, especially since the text itself does not seem to have been particularly well known, except among persons interested in the occult sciences. Eusèbe Renaudot was interested in the relations between India, China, and the Muslim world, as evidenced by his collection of Arabic translations entitled Anciennes relations des Indes et de la Chine de deux voyageurs mahométans. In addition, the “Affair of the Poisons” happened during this epoch in France, and poisons are a theme developed in Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya. 1.6 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 2595 The manuscript of the BnF Arabe 2595 is peculiar compared to the others; indeed, it does not include the title of Sharāsīm’s work. On the contrary, according to the title page and the beginning of the introduction (fol. 2b), the first text of the manuscript (fols. 1b–58b) should be the Kitāb ʿUyūn al-ḥaqāʾiq min/fī18 kull mā yuḥmalu min ʿilm al-ṭarāʾiq (“The Book of True Sources about Everything Known about Pathways”).19 The title page attributes the work to al-Jīlī and not, as one might expect, to the alchemist Abū l-Qāsim Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-ʿIrāqī al-Sīmāwī (fl. seventh/thirteenth century). It is thus under this title that

18 19

which are currently preserved at BULAC (Bibliothèque Universitaire des Langues et Civilisations) in Paris. Min on the title page, fī at fol. 2b. On this text, see Maria Subtelny’s chapter in this volume.

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this part of the manuscript is cataloged.20 On the other hand, there is no doubt that the end of this introduction replicates that of Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya, whose table of contents is also identical (fol. 2b), such as the rest of the ten discourses of Sharāsīm. The manuscript is a collection of 154 leaflets containing a selection of treatises on sīmiyāʾ (for this term, see below). Thus, after the text of Sharāsīm/al-Jīlī, we will find a Kitāb Ṭumṭum attributed to Ṭumṭum al-Hindī (fol. 59a–b), a Kitāb Muṣḥaf al-qamar (“The Book of the Codex of the Moon”) attributed to Anūdāṭīsh (fol. 89a), an anonymous Kitāb Sīmiyāʾ al-jady (“The Book of the Sīmiyāʾ of the Kid”) (fol. 104b), a Kitāb Muṣḥaf zuḥal (“The Book of the Codex of Saturn”) also attributed to Anūdāṭīsh (fol. 113b), a Sirr al-ḥikam wa-jawāmiʿ al-kilam (“The Secret of Judgments and the Compilation of the Sentences”) attributed to al-Būnī (fols. 117b–118a), a treatise of conjuring and natural magic (fol. 136b) and, finally, a treatise attributed to Aristotle (fol. 148b). The manuscript contains a colophon dated 1041/1631–1632. The whole collection is, in fact dedicated, to sīmiyāʾ, which is probably what guided the choice of texts copied. We will return to this matter below. 1.7 Dublin, Chester Beatty Library, 4353 The manuscript Chester Beatty Library 4353 is mentioned by Manfred Ullmann in his Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam.21 Arthur J. Arberry cataloged the first part of this collection under the title Kitāb Ashrāsīm fī lṭilasmāt.22 This manuscript therefore includes first the treatise attributed to Sharāsīm (fols. 1b–18b), followed by a compilation of extracts from the ʿUyūn al-ḥaqāʾiq wa-īḍāḥ al-ṭarāʾiq by Abū l-Qāsim Aḥmad b. Muḥammad al-ʿIrāqī al-Sīmāwī (fols. 19a–38b), and ends with an erotic treatise by Jalāl al-Dīn Abū l-Najīb ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Naṣr b. ʿAbdallāh al-Shīrāzī al-Tabrīzī titled al-Īḍāḥ fī asrār al-nikāḥ (fols. 42b–64a), obviously copied from an acephalous model (the text starts with Chapter 3, immediately following the basmala). The title page summarizes these three titles. None of these texts has a dated colophon. On the other hand, some annotations are dated, providing us with a terminus ante quem for the copying of the manuscript. On the title page, we find the owner’s mark of a certain Muḥammad b. Sinān dated 1060/1650. Another mark (appar-

20 21 22

William MacGuckin, Baron de Slane, Catalogue des manuscrits arabes (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1883–1895), 469. Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1972), 382. Arthur J. Arberry, The Chester Beatty Library: A Handlist of the Arabic Manuscripts (Dublin: Hodges, Figis, 1962), 5:110.

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ently a reading certificate, given the formula ʿalā ʿayn al-faqīr …), of which the first verb does not appear, is of a certain Ismaʿīl known as (al-shahīr) Fadāʾī and is dated Rabīʿ I 1008/September–October 1599. Many other owner’s marks and reading certificates are found in the last pages of the manuscript but are not dated. The manuscript itself does not present the text in its entirety but only a selection made by the copyist. We may infer this from the introduction: the basmala formula is followed by the end of the complete introduction found in the Istanbul and Cambridge manuscripts introduced above. The agency of the copyist in the (re)composition of the text for this manuscript is strongly implied when, in the introduction, just after the sentence in which Sharāsīm indicates that her work assembles ten discourses, we find the following sentence, peculiar to this manuscript: “The copyist [of this manuscript] did not intend to transcribe the book of [Sharāsīm] as a whole and verbatim but limited himself in this book to all that is well expressed and easy to do from each discourse.”23 Examination of the text reinforces this assertion: the sections are not always complete, and some are even radically abridged. The composition of this collection suggests another line of inquiry: the second part contains the ʿUyūn al-ḥaqāʾiq. As we have seen, it is this title that wrongly introduces the book of Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya in the BnF manuscript Arabe 2595. The two texts therefore seem to have a particular link. These seven manuscripts are heterogeneous and reflect a complex textual tradition. Some of these manuscripts (those of the BnF in particular) do not include the text of Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya in its entirety, and one manuscript even includes an abridged version, which should be edited separately, as the interventions of the copyist on the text are important. The full-text versions are nevertheless essential to understand what it is about. The introduction then presents the mysterious character of Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya.

23

Arabic text: ‫وليس لكاتبه غرض في نقل كتابها جميعه بحروفه بل اقتصر على كل ما حسن قوله وسهل‬ .‫فعله من كل مقالة او صنعه في هذه الـكراسة‬ (I thank Muriel Roiland and Ismail Warscheid for helping me to read this passage, as the erasure of the ink on the manuscript had made it difficult to interpret.)

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Who was Sharāsīm the Indian?

The Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya is presented as a dialog between Sharāsīm and her master. The relationship between these characters has two meanings: on one hand, her master is socially dominant, Sharāsīm being his client and indebted to him; on the other hand, Sharāsīm tries to save him from the grip of a Persian who has enchanted him with magic tricks, and she aims to present the natural laws by which he performs his “miracles.” The presentation of the text as a dialog between a master and his disciple is common in this kind of treatise: this is the case, for example, in the Sirr al-asrār (“The Secret of Secrets”), which is a dialog between Aristotle and Alexander the Great,24 and in the Kitāb alUstūṭās—to which we will return—in which Aristotle conveys the teachings of Hermes. In these examples, however, we can see that the identity of the protagonists is important: they are well known characters and major authorities. In the case of Sharāsīm, the lack of information about her, in history or in legend, contrasts with the importance of her book, which is emphasized by later authors who mention it or quote from it. 2.1 A Mysterious Name The spellings Ishrāsīm and Sharāsīm are both attested, as are, more rarely, Sarāsīm and Isrāsīm. We can compare Sharāsīm with the term sarāsīma, attested in Persian: Francis Joseph Steingass translates it as “astonished,” “confounded,” or “insane.”25 This could well be the origin of the name of this character. Dozy reports the terms sharsama, shirsām, sarsām, sharsām, and sharāsim as referring to “frenzy” (with the derivative musharsam, “frenzied”),26 and considers it as the Arabic form of Persian sarsām (with the derivative musarsam).27 Ḥājjī Khalīfa spells the name “Isrāsim al-Hindī” in his Kashf al-ẓunūn and gives no information but the title of the book.28 The change from feminine to masculine is observed occasionally, but the feminine is much more common.

24

25 26 27 28

On this text, see Mario Grignaschi, “Remarques sur la formation et l’interprétation du Sirr al-asrār,” in Pseudo-Aristotle: The Secret of secrets, Sources and Influences, ed. William Francis Ryan and Charles Bernard Schmitt (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1982), 3–33; Mario Grignaschi, “L’origine et les métamorphoses du Sirr al-ʾasrâr,” Archives d’ histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen-Âge 43 (1976): 7–112. Francis Joseph Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary, 5th ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited, 1963), 668. Reinhart Pieter Anne Dozy, Supplément aux dictionnaires arabes, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill; Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1967), 1:744. Dozy, Supplément, 1:648. Ḥājjī Khalīfa Kashf, 5:40, no. 9823.

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The introduction of Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya has another element: “It is said that her name was Ruqiyā ….” This name does not help us to identify further Sharāsīm in the chronicles, but is useful in clarifying a passage from Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya that begins “Ruqiyā said …” (qālat Ruqiyā, fol. 325a)—without wāw—while the majority of discourses begin with “Sharāsīm said” (qālat Sharāsīm): this mysterious Ruqiyā is thus actually Sharāsīm. Here again, this name must be related to ruqya (prophylactic incantation), corresponding to a practice directly related to sīmiyāʾ. The stem Rūqiyā can also be found as part of the name of an angel: one of the seven angels corresponding to the seven days of the week in the Shams al-maʿārif (“The Sun of Knowledge”) attributed to al-Būnī (d. 622/1225 or 630/1232) is called Rūqiyāʾīl.29 The latter may also correspond to the Rūfiyāʾīl mentioned in Maslama al-Qurṭubī’s Ghāyat al-ḥakīm (“The Goal of the Sage”), since qāf and fāʾ are easily confused in manuscripts.30 Rūqyaʾel is attested in treatises of Jewish magic.31 At this stage, we cannot make a link between Rūqiyā as a surname for Sharāsīm and as a stem for an angelic theophoric name, but this calls for mention. There are no other mentions of Sharāsīm as Rūqiyā. 2.2 Hārūn al-Rashīd’s Maidservant? The identity of Sharāsīm the Indian is a problem. We know almost nothing about her, and perhaps she never existed. The text of her book begins by describing Sharāsīm as the “freedwoman (mawlāt) of Abū l-ʿAbbās, a client of the commander of the believers (mawlā amīr al-muʾminīn),”32 thus suggesting that Sharāsīm was in the service of a close relative of an unnamed caliph. Manfred Ullmann, one of the few European scholars to have written about Sharāsīm, claimed that she was “the maidservant (odalisque) of Hārūn al-Rashīd. Her name, profession and her origins are fiction” (“[Sharāsīm] der Odaliske des Hārūn ar-Rashīd. Ihr Name, Beruf und ihre Herkunft sind Fiktion”).33 It must be from the alchemist ʿIzz al-Dīn Aydamir al-Jildakī (fl. ninth/fourteenth century) that Manfred Ullmann took the information associating our

29 30 31

32

33

Coulon, La magie islamique, 1:862, 889, 908, 910, 917. Al-Qurṭubī, Ghāya, 205. Moïse Schwab, Vocabulaire de l’ angélologie (Paris: Klincksieck, 1897; Milan: Archè, 1989), 358; Hans Alexander Winkler, Siegel und Charaktere in der muhammedanischen Zauberei (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1930), 109. Mawlā amīr al-muʾminīn was an honorary title bestowed by the caliph on governors, generals, or dignitaries of non-Arab origin. The qualifier mawlā refers to a freed former slave and therefore someone of non-Arab origin, who is a client of his former master. Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften, 382.

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Indian woman with the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (r. 170–193/786–809). In his Kitāb Durrat al-ghawwāṣ wa-kanz al-ikhtiṣāṣ fī maʿrifat al-khawāṣṣ (“The Book of the Pearl of the Diver and the Treasure of the Specification of the Knowledge of the Properties”), al-Jildakī mentions the book of Sharāsīm the Indian in a bibliographical section devoted to the most important works on sīmiyāʾ.34 Here Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya is called a servant of Hārūn al-Rashīd ( jāriyat Hārūn al-Rashīd). The appearance of the caliph of the Thousand and One Nights in the story of Sharāsīm is undoubtedly legendary. No historical information supports this assumption, but the figure of Hārūn al-Rashīd is present in Arabic magical literature, often as the victim of women’s spells. In this regard, a famous talisman, called ḥirz Marjāna (“Marjāna’s talisman”) or ḥirz al-ghāsila (“the washerwoman’s talisman”), tells how a sultan—often identified as the caliph Hārūn alRashīd—was madly in love with an ugly black maid ( jāriya) called Marjāna. When she died, the preparation of her corpse was entrusted to a washerwoman who discovered in the hair of the deceased maidservant a small talisman. She picked up the talisman and put it on her own head. When the sovereign came to say farewell to his beloved, he did not recognize her and found the corpse monstrously ugly. He then fell madly in love with the servant who was preparing the body and married her.35 A similar anecdote circulated about a certain Khāliṣa, who, according to some sources, was a servant ( jāriya) of Hārūn al-Rashīd. She had been insulted in a verse by the poet Abū Nuwās (d. between 198/813 and 200/815).36 In his Shumūs al-anwār (“The Suns of Light”), Ibn al-Ḥājj al-Tilimsānī37 (d. 930/1524) tells the story of this “black and ugly” maid (sawdāʾ qabīḥat al-ṣūra wa-l-manẓar) with whom Hārūn al-Rashīd was desperately in love because of a talisman, which was discovered by the maid in charge of the preparation of her body for her funeral.38 The talisman was therefore known as the ḥijāb al-jāriya

34

35

36 37 38

Jildakī, Durra, Arabe 2340, fol. 8a, Arabe 6683, fol. 3a–3b. On al-Jildakī, see Nicholas G. Harris, “In Search of ʿIzz al-Dīn Aydamir al-Jildakī, Mamlūk Alchemist,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 531–556. On the ḥirz Marǧāna, see Jean-Charles Coulon, “La figure de Hārūn al-Rašīd dans la tradition magique islamique,” in Savants, amants, poètes et fous. Séances offertes à Katia Zakharia, ed. Catherine Pinon. (Beirut and Damascus: Ifpo, 2019), 183–188. Al-Hamadhānī, Maqāmāt, 173; al-Bīrūnī, Jamāhir, 58–59. For this author, not to be confused with the lawyer of the same name, see Jean-Charles Coulon, La magie en terre d’ islam au Moyen Âge (Paris: CTHS, 2017), 238–241. Al-Tilimsānī, Shumūs, 80–81.

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(“the servant’s talisman”).39 The stories about Marjāna and Khāliṣa are obviously variants of the same story. Is it possible that Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya was identified by some with Marjāna/Khāliṣa? There is no evidence to support that assumption, but the hypothesis deserves to be explored, especially because, as an Indian, Sharāsīm would be identified as a black servant (mawlāt or jāriya).40 2.3 The Importance of Sharāsīm in Medieval Arabic Texts Mysterious as she may be, Sharāsīm was considered as an important source in the occult sciences. One source of information about Sharāsīm and her teachings is the texts that mention her or quote her book. Although she is known only from this book, she is mentioned as an authority in several other works, and we may thus observe what the authors drew from the book. One of the earliest mentions of this Indian woman is in al-Mukhtār fī kashf al-asrār (“The Selected Pieces on the Unveiling of Secrets”), written by the Damascene dervish and alchemist al-Jawbarī between 629/1232 and 646/1248– 1249 at the request of the Arṭuqid ruler al-Malik al-Masʿūd (r. 619–629/1222– 1232). Al-Jawbarī seems also to have written a (lost) treatise on occult sciences, al-Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm fī ʿilm al-rūḥāniyya wa-ṣināʿat al-tanjīm (“The Right Way in the Science of Spiritual [Forces] and the Art of Astrology”). Al-Mukhtār, on the other hand, is a treatise aimed at thwarting cheating and scams, but it mentions in its introduction al-Jawbarī’s mastery of the occult sciences, listing all the authors he claims to have read. Sharāsīm is therefore mentioned alongside several authors whom al-Jawbarī presents as the ancient sages from whom he drew his knowledge of the occult sciences: Were it not for the fear of lengthening [our work] and widening the circle, I would have mentioned all the names of the books, I would have quoted each book, what it introduces and what is specific to it, but I have set myself to summarize. Then I read the books of the ancient sages (al-ḥukamāʾ al-mutaqaddimīn), such as Ṭumṭum the philosopher, Sharaf, Balīnās (Apollonius of Tyana), Daʿmiyūs, Lādhin,41 Arisṭū, Isṭakhr

39 40

41

On the ḥiǧāb al-ǧāriya and the story of Ḫāliṣa, see Coulon, “La figure de Hārūn al-Rašīd dans la tradition magique islamique,” 188–192. Indians are considered in medieval Arabic historiography as a “black” people (al-sūdān), the term sūdān encompassing the peoples of both sub-Saharan Africa and India. See, e.g., al-Jāḥiẓ, Fakhr. “Lādin” according to Michael Jan de Goeje (“Ǧaubarî’s ‘entdeckte Geheimnisse,’”Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 20 (1866): 484–510).

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(Ishtar?),42 Plato (Aflāṭūn), Māriya (Mary the Jewess),43 Sharāsīm, Sīrā, Kankah, Arāsṭū, Aristotle (Arisṭūṭālīs), Hurmuzān,44 Ṣaṣah,45 Ibn Tamīm, and others like them among the great scholars (al-ʿulamāʾ al-kibār) and the guardians of the temples (aṣḥāb al-hayākil) whom I will not name for fear of lengthening [my work].46 Some of these authors, such as Ṭumṭum, Kankah, and Ṣaṣah, are Indian. On the other hand, they are presented as ancient sages, connecting Sharāsīm to authors of the distant past and contradicting the idea that she lived at the time of the Abbasid caliphs. The “relation name” (nisba) “al-Hindiyya” does not appear either, leaving her gender ambiguous. In the next century, al-Jildakī mentions this book among the authorities on sīmiyāʾ.47 The book of Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya is also mentioned in the encyclopedia of occult sciences titled Shams al-āfāq fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-awfāq (“Sun of the Horizons of the Science of Letters and Magic Squares”) by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī (d. 858/1454). In the introduction to this work, the author lists the books that should be consulted on the subject, among which is the book Kitāb Sharāshim al-Hindī.48 The works mentioned in this list are mostly by Greek, Indian, or Mesopotamian authors, most of whom are reputed to have lived in antiquity: ps.-Aristotle’s Kitāb al-Ushūṭās, Kitāb al-Hādīṭūsh, Kitāb alMalāṭīs, and Kitāb Iṣṭamākhīs (on these treatises, see below), the works attributed to such writers as Ṭumṭum al-Hindī, Ṣaṣah al-Hindī, Kankah al-Hindī, and Tankalūshā (Teucros) al-Bābilī. This is a long list of bibliographic references,

42

43

44 45

46 47 48

Ishtar was a major Mesopotamian deity. She was the deity of love and war, and her name designated the planet Venus in Akkadian; Tzvi Abusch, “Ishtar,” in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, ed. Bob Becking, Pieter W. van der Horst, and Karel van der Toorn (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), 848–856. In the alchemical writings translated from Greek into Arabic, Mary the Jewess is associated with Zosimos. As an interlocutor to Zosimos and given the dialogical role that Mary plays, she may well figure as a model or archetype for Sharāsīm, another female occult authority presented as a foreign religious outsider. About Mary the Jewess, see Fuat Sezgin’s Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, and the Arabic alchemical treatises by Zosimos edited by Theodor Abt and Salwa Fuad in the Corpus alchemicum Arabicum series. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for this information. This is probably al-Hurmuzān b. al-Kurdul mentioned in Ibn al-Nadīm’s Fihrist. Ṣaṣah al-Hindī was an Indian who had written a book of astral magic at the court of one of the first Abbasids. He would have been the contemporary of an Abū Muḥammad alAhwāzī (GAS, 7:94–95). Al-Jawbarī, Mukhtār, 82. Al-Jildakī, Durra, Arabe 2340, fol. 8a, Arabe 6683, fol. 3a–3b. Al-Bisṭāmī, Shams, Add 7494, fol. 5b; Gardiner, “Occultist Encyclopedism,” 37 n. 223.

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but the fact that Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya is mentioned (with a male nisba) among these references indicates that she was thought to belong to this category of authors. One of the major texts which used Sharāsīm’s work as a source is al-ʿIrāqī’s ʿUyūn al-ḥaqāʾiq. We have already seen that some manuscripts linked these two texts—manuscript BnF Arabe 2595, which contains the Kitāb Sharāsīm alHindiyya (although the title page refers to it as the ʿUyūn al-ḥaqāʾiq attributed to al-Jīlī), and manuscript Chester Beatty Library 4353, which contains both short texts. In some manuscripts of the ʿUyūn al-ḥaqāʾiq Sharāsīm is indeed mentioned, and it is not yet possible to determine whether this mention was already in the first manuscripts and was then erased in some others, or if it was a later addition.49 Careful examination of the two texts shows that they share several characteristics. The tables of contents have several elements in common: for example, the third chapter of ʿUyūn al-ḥaqāʾiq is, like the second section of the third speech of Kitāb Sharāsīm, dedicated to fumigations. A comparison shows shared recipes: for example, the second recipe in this section of Kitāb Sharāsīm is identical to the first in this chapter of the ʿUyūn.50 We will return to this recipe, which draws on a source earlier than our two texts. The next chapter in both books is on “putrefactions” (taʿfīn). A detailed comparison of the two works would go well beyond the scope of this preliminary study, but it seems clear that al-ʿIrāqī knew the Kitāb Sharāsīm or some of its sources. There is also a mention of Sharāsīm as authority on physiognomony ( firāsa) in the Kitāb al-Siyāsa fī ʿilm al-firāsa (“The Book of Politics of the Science of Physiognomy”) by Muḥammad b. Abī Ṭālib al-Anṣārī (d. 737/1336–1337): The signs of the lines of the hand (al-ʿalāmāt bi-l-asārīr fī l-akuff ) that are [a part] of physiognomy attributed to Ṭumṭum, Tankalūshā, and the scholars of India such as Sharāshim al-Hindiyya and those who follow them.51

49

50 51

Liana Saif reports this mention (“The Cows and the Bees: Arabic Sources and Parallels for Pseudo-Plato’s Liber Vaccae [Kitāb al-Nawāmīs],” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 79 [2016]: 18) in the manuscripts Princeton, Garrett 544 H, fol. 31b and Dublin, Chester Beatty Library, ELS 1723, fol. 19a. In the Princeton manuscript, however, we clearly find Isrāyil al-Hindī and not Ishrāsīm. It may be a misinterpretation by the copyist and Ishrāsīm remains the most probable and relevant author, whose name is the closest. Sharāsīm Kitāb, fol. 329b; see ʿIrāqī, ʿUyūn, fol. 22a. Al-Anṣārī, Siyāsa, fol. 38b. We thank Liana Saif for reporting this reference. I translate it here following manuscript Arabe 2759 of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The colophon indicates that the copy was completed on 15 Rabīʿ II 1075/5 November 1664 from the hand of Yūsuf al-Ṣāliḥ b. Umar al-Maqarrī (al-Muqriʾ?). Arabic text:

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Here again, her name is associated with Ṭumṭum al-Hindī. In this text, Sharāsīm is also associated with the ancient authorities. In contrast, Tankalūshā (Teucros) is an ancient Mesopotamian author. Aḥmad b. ʿIwaḍ al-Maghribī, in his treatise on the medicinal and esoteric properties of stones titled Qaṭf al-azhār fī khaṣāʾiṣ al-maʿādin wa-l-aḥjār wanatāʾij al-maʿārif wa-l-asrār (“The Picking of Flowers on the Properties of Minerals and Stones and the Results of Knowledge and Secrets”), repeatedly mentions Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya. Thus, he refers to her in his discussion of yellow amber (ḥajar kahrabā): Isrāsīm al-Hindiyya said, “He who takes yellow amber as an amulet (kharaza)52 [using] the name of the one he desires and loves and the name of [that person’s] mother, then hangs it on his arm and presents himself to that person, [the latter] will have sympathy for him on the spot.”53 There is another mention, concerning marcasite (ḥajar al-marqashītā): Isrāsīm al-Hindiyya recounted a strange secret, which is that, if one takes marcasite to set in a ring, on which one engraves the figure of the fish (samaka) that is called “the swallow” (al-khuṭṭāf ) (sic) under the legs of which is a scorpion, and places in the setting a fish’s eye, a swallow or peacock (ṭāwūs) feather, and a leaf of basil (bādrūj)54 and activates ( yaʿmalu) a seal, every beast will submit to him who wears [this ring]. God knows best.55

‫اعلم العلامات بالاسار ير في الاكف وهو من علم الفراسة منسو با الى طمطم وتنكلوشا وعلما الهند‬ .‫مثل شراشم ]كذا[ الهندية ومن يليهم‬ 52

53

The term kharaza refers to precious stones and more generally stones strung on a cord (Albin de Biberstein Kazimirski, Dictionnaire arabe-français (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1860), 1:557). Al-Maghribī, Qaṭf, fol. 55a. Arabic text:

‫وقالت اسراسيم الهندية من أخذ بحجر الـكهر با خرزة على اسم من ير يد و يحب واسم امه ثم يعلق على‬ .‫عضده و يستقبله به فانه يتعطف عليه من ساعته‬ 54 55

This is a Persian term well known in Arabic pharmacopoeia (Ibn al-Bayṭār, Simples, 1:186– 187, no. 223). Al-Maghribī, Qaṭf, fol. 61b., Arabic text:

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This passage is found, with a few minor variations, in the third section of the third discourse of the Book of Sharāsīm the Indian. 2.4

The Date of the Composition of the Book of Sharāsīm: Some Hypotheses The name of Sharāsīm and her status as a servant of Hārūn al-Rashīd belongs to legend, making it necessary to identify the era in which the book attributed to her could have been composed. There are a few elements that permit hypotheses that limit the possible timespan. First of all, the earliest mention of Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya as an occult authority is that of al-Jawbarī in his work written between 629/1232 and 646/1248– 1249. As Sharāsīm is known only from her book, this implies that the book is earlier than al-Jawbarī’s work. We have found no earlier manuscript that would push back the terminus post quem. Several elements in the book itself make it possible to date the composition within the written production of its time. Indeed, just after the last section on cryptographic alphabets, Sharāsīm writes, “Men have used the alphabet of the fifty-one ‘introductions’ known [under the title] of The Brethren’s Epistles (Rasāʾil al-ikhwān), which appeared at that time, and with which they wrote a great deal.” These Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, were, in their earliest versions, fifty-one, and not fifty-two as in their present form. These epistles were composed in the fourth/tenth century. Conceived as an encyclopedia, the last epistle is devoted to magic. The epistles exercised a great influence, particularly on Maslama al-Qurṭubī (d. 353/964), the author of Ghāyat al-ḥakīm, a famous treatise on astral magic composed between 343/954 and 348/959.56 However, while Ghāyat al-ḥakīm mentions many of the sources and authorities from which the author drew his knowledge, he never refers to Sharāsīm. Likewise, Ibn al-Nadīm (d. 385/995 or 388/998) does not mention Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya in his bibliographic work al-Fihrist (“The Repertory”), despite devoting an entire section to magic. Is it possible that the book of Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya had not yet been composed, or should we assume that it had not yet established itself as an essential treatise of magic for the study of occult sciences?

‫وقالت اشراسيم الهندية سر غر يب وهو ان يوخذ المرقشيتا تعمل فص ينقش عليه صورة سمكة تسمى‬ ‫الخطاف وتحت رجليها عقر بة وعمل تحت الفص عين سمكة ور يشة خطاف او طاووس وورقة‬ .‫بادروج و يعمل خاتم من لبسه خصعت لهكل دابة والله اعلم‬ 56

On the influence of the Ikhwān on the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm, see Saif’s chapter in this volume, pp. 189–194.

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The conclusion of the Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya contains other elements that enable us to assess the importance of this text. Indeed, responding to the praise of her master, Sharāsīm answered, “Yes, O my master, the best (alfāḍil) is Aristotle (Arisṭū); he composed a book to which he did not give a name, but after his time it was named Arsūmāmandarūs, whose meaning is the ‘Medium Ashnūṭās’ (al-Ashnūṭās al-awsaṭ) because he composed a ‘Great Ashnūṭās’ (Ashnūṭās kabīr) and a ‘Small Ashnūṭās’ (Ashnūṭās ṣaghīr), both of which are known among his books. This medium[-sized book] is an amazing thing, in which he describes the twenty-eight mansions of the Moon.” This book entitled Ashnūṭās is certainly that also known as al-Ustūṭās (only the dots on the sīn and tāʾ would differentiate these two names). I have been unable to find the origin of the name Arsūmāmandarūs. This book is preserved in manuscript BnF Arabe 2577. In fact, the text introduces itself as the transcription by Aristotle (al-mutarjim li-hādhā l-kitāb, f. 11a) of the teachings of Hermes. This treatise is also one of the sources of certain passages of the epistle of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ on magic, especially the passage on the lunar mansions.57 The Kitāb alUstūṭās also contains a description of the twenty-eight lunar mansions.58 There is no correspondence between the details of the two texts, but, without a critical edition of Kitāb al-Ustūṭās, it is difficult to know which version of this text might have been used as a source by the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ. Both texts, however, refer to Hermes’ al-Kitāb al-makhzūn (“The Guarded Book”). The Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya is thus later than the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, the Kitāb al-Usṭūṭās, attributed to Aristotle, and the Kitāb al-Nawāmīs, attributed to Plato, all of which are mentioned in the text. On the other hand, the idea that this book had been sought by a particular shaykh to make copies, as indicated in the conclusion, suggests that the Kitāb al-Usṭūṭās had not yet been widely disseminated. The mysterious name Arsūmāmandarūs is a title that does not seem to have been known, contrary to the famous title Kitāb al-Usṭūṭās. This would thus support the hypothesis that the Kitāb Sharāsīm alHindiyya was composed at a time when the Kitāb al-Usṭūṭās did not yet have a firmly established reputation. All of these elements suggest that the work was written at the end of the fourth/tenth century at the earliest and in the sixth/twelfth century at the latest.

57 58

Ikhwān Rasāʾil, ed. Dār Ṣādir, 4:428–443; Liana Saif, “Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ’s Religious Reform and Magic: Beyond the Ismaʿili Hypothesis,” Journal of Islamic Studies 29 (2018): 30. Usṭūṭās, fols. 24a–34a.

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The Book of Sharāsīm: A Treatise on Sīmiyāʾ

3.1 Sharāsīm’s Sīmiyāʾ The Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya presents itself as a treatise about sīmiyāʾ, a term found in the title itself. After the development of the Corpus Bunianum, the term sīmiyāʾ takes on the meaning of “science of letters and magic squares” (ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-awfāq), a definition given by Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406). However, as Coulon demonstrates,59 this late definition is not appropriate for the whole Middle Ages and does not account for the complex history of this term.60 Thus, at the end of the introduction, Sharāsīm’s treatise devotes a short passage to the definition of sīmiyāʾ: Isrāsīm said, “This science is the science of sīmiyāʾ, which is widely known among people and whose meaning is: ‘secret of Nature’ (sirr al-ṭabīʿa).” It is said that its meaning is ‘secret of wisdom’ (sirr al-ḥikma). We say [also]: ‘enchantment of reason’ (siḥr al-ʿaql). It is said [on the contrary] that alsīmiyāʾ is the name of a woman who lived in the first times and who rose to the level of all the wisdom of the first sages. She found a book in which this science [was recorded]. She isolated herself with [this book]. It is said [again] ‘the science of sīmiyāʾ.’ It is said [on the contrary] that it (sīmiyāʾ) was [the name of] a magician (rajul sāḥir) among the magicians of India.61 The identification of sīmiyāʾ with a historical personnage is unlikely, but it is interesting that the first of these two interpretations identifies sīmiyāʾ with a woman. This recalls a story in which Eve had a monstrous daughter called ʿAnāq, who stole from her mother during her sleep the names that Adam had entrusted to her to protect herself. She used these names to perform magic.62 This is, of course, not the same character, but these two stories show a certain willingness to place a woman at the origin of magic, unlike the etiological accounts inspired by the verse of Hārūt and Mārūt in the Qurʾan (2:102). 59 60

61 62

Coulon, La magie islamique, 1:1048. See also Coulon, La magie; Liana Saif, “From Ġāyat al-ḥakīm to Šams al-maʿārif : Ways of Knowing and Paths of Power in Medieval Islam,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 297–345, and the chapters by Noah Gardiner, Maria Subtelny, and Matthew Melvin-Koushki in this volume. See appendix 1. Jean-Charles Coulon, “ʿAnāq bt. Ādam, the Islamic Story of the Very First Witch. Gender and the Origins of Evil Magic,” Hawwa, 17 (2019), 135–167.

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The other definitions, such as “secret of Nature” (sirr al-ṭabīʿa), “secret of wisdom” (sirr al-ḥikma), and “enchantment of reason” (siḥr al-ʿaql) echo the definition of sīmiyāʾ given by Maslama al-Qurṭubī. Indeed, Maslama al-Qurṭubī, in his Rutbat al-ḥakīm (“The Rank of the Sage”), devoted to alchemy (al-kīmiyāʾ), and his Ghāyat al-ḥakīm (“The Goal of the Sage”), devoted to magic (siḥr), refers to sīmiyāʾ as the ultimate science of the sages. He conceived these two treatises as the final two stages of the training of the sage, containing the two sciences that complete his formation. Sīmiyāʾ, from the Greek sēmeion (“sign”), was built on the same pattern as kīmiyāʾ. In his Rutbat al-ḥakīm, Maslama al-Qurṭubī states that: There are the natural secrets, which the ancients (al-awāʾil) called secrets. These are the results of these aforementioned sciences, and these are the two results. The ancients called the first alchemy (kīmiyāʾ), and the second sīmiyāʾ. Both are useful sciences of the ancients. He who does not master them is not a sage until he has mastered them. If he masters only one, then he is half a sage. Both have in common subtlety (al-laṭāfa), but alchemy is the knowledge of terrestrial spirits and the deduction of their subtleties to benefit from them. The second, called sīmiyāʾ, is the repetition [of formulas] (al-tarjīʿ), talismans (al-ṭilasm), seals (al-sijilmūs), the science of celestial spirits, and the descent of their forces to gain from them benefits.63 This passage shows the parallelism between kīmiyāʾ and sīmiyāʾ. The first deals with “terrestrial spirits,” the second with “celestial spirits.” According to this passage, talismans (sg. ṭilasm) proceed from sīmiyāʾ. The link with the definition of Sharāsīm is obvious: sīmiyāʾ is a “science of wisdom,” in the sense that its mastery allows one to call oneself a sage. We also see that the two sciences are 63

Al-Qurṭubī, Rutba, fol. 6a–6b; French trans. in Coulon, La magie islamique, 1:311–312. Arabic text:

‫فاعلم ذلك وتبينّ ه ووجد ]كذا[ بالأسرار الطبيعية التي سم ّوها الأوائل أسرار هي نتائج هذه العلوم‬ ‫ب[ المذكورة وهي نتيجتان أحدهما ]كذا[ تسميت الأوائل كيمياء والثانية سيمياء وهما علم‬٦‫]ص‬ ‫الأوائل المنتفع بها ]كذا[ ومن لم يحكمها فليس بحكيم حت ّى يحكمها فإن أحكم واحد منها فهو نصف‬ ‫حكيم وهما يشتركان في اللطافة لـكّن الـكيمياء هي معرفة الأرواح الأرضية وإخراج لطائفها للانتفاع‬ ‫بها والثانية المسمّى بسيمياء وهو الترجيع والطلسم والسجلموس علم الأرواح العلو ية واستنزال قواها‬ .‫للانتفاع بها‬

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associated with the “ancients” (al-awāʾil), and this is undoubtedly one reason that Sharāsīm is quoted among ancient writers, even though her book was obviously composed later, including in the forged narratives concerning her identity, for example, as a servant of Hārūn al-Rashīd. Maslama al-Qurṭubī went back further, in the end of his “first discourse,” in the definition of sīmiyāʾ: We have presented to you the prolegomena of this art, which will suffice for you, to the exclusion of other things, even if our goal was to organize its knowledge (tartīb ʿilmi-hā) for those who ask for it (li-ṭullābi-hā) and to ignore the second result called sīmiyāʾ. The latter is that which ancients (al-awāʾil) called secrets of Nature, sciences, results, spiritual and divine forces, and this confirms that. One of the two outcomes64 is included entirely in the other, because the one who wants to rise to what is called alchemy (kīmiyāʾ) cannot do so without the mastery of the second, as we have already mentioned. It is said that its term is higher than the second degree (al-rutba), despite what we have mentioned, and is a nobler in science. They applied the name “wisdom and highest philosophy” (al-ḥikma wa-l-falsafa al-aʿlā) only to the one who had the perfect mastery of this art, which is the secret of Nature in truth because the second [result], called “talismans” (ṭilasmāt), fully includes it, as the science of alchemy requires knowledge of the spheres, their modus operandi (kayfiyyati-hi), and the natures of the stars. It is the foundation and ladder (al-aṣl wa-l-sullam) of the science of philosophy. If so, the principle of the science of talismans is one of the instruments of the [alchemical] art, just as the rest is one of the sciences of which we have previously mentioned the organization. We dedicate our book exclusively to the discourse of [alchemical] art without talismans. We have therefore discussed this subject first, although it is the most sublime of secrets and of results. We have shown you how all of [that] is organized.65

64 65

“Outcomes,” natījatayn, is the term used to refer to the two sciences: magic and alchemy. Al-Qurṭubī, Rutba, fols. 9b–10a; French trans. in Coulon, La magie islamique, 1:312–313. Arabic text:

‫أ[ ترتيب علمها‬١٠ ‫وإذ قد قّدمنا لك من مقّدمات هذه الصنعة ما يغنيك عن غيرها وكان غرضنا ]ص‬ ‫لطل ّابها والأضراب عن النتيجة الثانية المسمّا ]كذا[ سيمياء فهذه التي سم ّتها الأوائل أسرار الطبيعة‬ ‫ن‬ ّ ‫وعلوم ونتائج وروحاني ّة وإلاهي ّة وما يتأكّد ذلك وأحدها بين النتيجتين داخلة في جملة الأخرى لأ‬ ‫من أراد ارتقاء الواحدة التي تسمّوا كيمياء لا بّد له من الارتياض في الثانية على ما تقّدم ذكره قالوا‬

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This second passage also defines sīmiyāʾ as the “secrets of Nature,” which also corresponds to one of the definitions of Sharāsīm. Talismans are again one of the means of action of this science. In both cases, kīmiyāʾ and sīmiyāʾ are the “two results,” one of which is the subject of each treatise. In the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm, the treatise he devotes to the “second result,” Maslama al-Qurṭubī curiously uses the term sīmiyāʾ only once, indicating that sīmiyāʾ is the “result” (natīja) with which this work deals.66 However, he provides another definition of this “result”: Know that this result is that which is expressed by [the term] “magic” (bi-l-siḥr). The reality of magic (al-siḥr) in the absolute is all that which bewitches the intelligences and [all] the words and operations that souls obey in the sense of wonder, submission, obedience, and approval. It is [also] that whose apprehension is difficult for reason, whose causes are veiled to the fool. Thus, it is a divine force (quwwa ilāhiyya) [resulting from] antecedent causes, established to apprehend it. It is a science abstruse to comprehend. In fact, it is also a practical part (ʿamalī) because its object is a spirit in a spirit: this is the case of nīranj and illusion (altakhyīl), as well as the object of the talisman (al-ṭilasm), which is a spirit in a body, and the object of alchemy, also a body in a body. In short, magic (al-siḥr) is that whose cause is hidden from the intelligence of the greatest number and whose discovery (istinbāṭuhu) is difficult.67 We find in this new definition of the second result one of the definitions of Sharāsīm, namely the “enchantment of reason” (siḥr al-ʿaql). The definition of sīmiyāʾ in astral-magic treatises, however, varies from text to text. For example, in the manuscript BnF Arabe 2595, which contains a copy ‫حّده أرفع من الثانية على ما تقّدم ذكره بالرتبة وأشرف في العلم وقد كانوا لا يطلقون اسم الحكمة‬ ‫ن الثانية التي تسمّوا طلسمات‬ ّ ‫والفلسفة إلّا على من أحكم هذه الصنعة التي هي سرّ الطبيعة بالحقيقة لأ‬ ‫ن علم الـكيمياء مجتاج إلى معرفة الفلك وكيفيتّ ه وطبائع النجوم وهذا هو‬ ّ ‫داخلة في جملة هذه لأ‬ ‫الأصل والسل ّم إلى علم الفلاسفة وإذا كان ذلك كذلك فعلم الطلسم أّوله من آلات الصنعةكغيره‬ ‫من العلوم الذي ]كذا ّ[ ذكرناها بترتيبها قبل هذا ونحن نفرد كتابنا هذا بالكلام على علم الصنعة دون‬ ‫الطلسمات إذ قّدمنا القول على أّنها أعظم الأسرار وأعظم النتائج وقد قّدمنا لك كيف ترتيب ذلك‬ .‫وقد بان فيه الكلام على إثباتها ضرورة ونجعل ذلك آخر المقالة الأولى من الكتاب‬ 66 67

Add to this occurrence the use of a derived term when Maslama al-Qurṭubī elsewhere refers to “sīmiyāʾ operations” (al-aʿmāl al-sīmiyāʾiyya); see al-Qurṭubī Ghāya, 348. Al-Qurṭubī Ghāya, 6–7; French trans. in Coulon, La magie islamique, 1:314–315.

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of Kitāb Sharāsīm among a collection of works dealing with sīmiyāʾ, the Muṣḥaf al-qamar attributed to the Babylonian author Anūdhāṭīs (or Abū Dhāṭīs) indicates that there are two branches of sīmiyāʾ: one is “spiritual” (rūḥānī) and the other is “terrestrial” (arḍī), but it goes further, stating that the “spiritual” sīmiyāʾ is of two kinds, “angelic” (malakī) and “astral” (kawkabī) (fol. 89b). Such precision indicates that sīmiyāʾ does not represent a particular science in itself but a set of practices, still poorly delimited. Note that the title page of the text mentions hīmiyāʾ and not sīmiyāʾ. This is an error, because the text deals only with sīmiyāʾ (the term hīmiyāʾ is also well attested from the eighth/fourteenth century; see below). It is in the seventh/thirteenth century that we begin to observe a shift in meaning toward that imposed in the ninth/fifteenth century, namely that of a “science of letters.” Al-Būnī, in his authentic works, does not employ the term sīmiyāʾ, but the term is used during the development of the Corpus Bunianum to designate this knowledge. Already in the seventh/thirteenth century, for example, al-Jawbarī, gives the following definition: As for the degree which is below this one, it is the degree of the shaykhs who are masters in spiritual exercises (aṣḥāb al-riyāḍa), in the science of sīmiyāʾ, in operations with the sacred names which, when one uses them to present a request to God, He hears and, when one uses them to invoke Him, He answers him, as was the case with ʿAbādān, Buhlūl, Ḥajā, Shaykh Qadīm, Shaykh Abū l-ʿAbbās, Shaykh Yāsīn, and others whom I have not named for fear of lengthening [my remarks].68 These characters are not identified and may be local shaykhs, with the exception of Buhlūl, known by the nickname “the madman of Kufa,” who lived in the time of Hārūn al-Rashīd. In any case, al-Jawbarī knew Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya, but, according to him, sīmiyāʾ is a science associated with Sufi shaykhs. Al-Būnī can himself be considered a master in “spiritual exercises” (riyāḍa), as he himself wrote a treatise on this subject. This definition of sīmiyāʾ is found in the works of several of his contemporaries, such as one of al-Būnī’s masters, al-Ḥarālī (d. 638/1240), who, in his exegesis of the verse of Hārūt and Mārūt (Q 2:102) on the teaching of magic (siḥr), reconciles the idea that sīmiyāʾ is magic (siḥr) with the idea that it is a science related to the knowledge of the Qurʾān:

68

Al-Jawbarī, Mukhtār, 97–98.

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Al-Ḥarālī said, “There is in [these terms] the indication of a very high and noble degree (rutba) of science, coming from the degree that diverted them from the trap of magic (al-siḥr), because this degree leads to the renunciation of the knowledge of that which is wrong and makes one desire to obtain that which is good. There is good news for this community if they accept this science that teaches names. The beneficial effects of the Qurʾān will be for them an immersion into the science of sīmiyāʾ, which is a part (bāb) of magic (al-siḥr). It is possible that this is part of that which was revealed to the two angels. [The Prophet]—God’s prayer and salvation be upon him—said, ‘Whoever learns of astrology learns of a branch of magic, and every time we immerse ourselves in astrology we are sinking into magic.’”69 The shift of sīmiyāʾ from its meaning at the time of Ghāyat al-ḥakīm to a new one as a science of letters, divine names, or magic squares (as a numerological expression of Arabic letters) is also to be seen in Ibn ʿArabī’s Futūḥāt al-makkiyya (“The Meccan Revelations”). For Ibn ʿArabī, on the one hand, “what characterizes the attributes of ‘the station of symbols’ is the science attached to the properties of numbers, names—which are the words—and letters: on this subject, there is the science of sīmiyāʾ,”70 but, on the other hand, it is also the “science of the properties of plants, stones, names, and letters.”71 The meaning that Ibn ʿArabī gives to sīmiyāʾ is thus ambiguous. He assimilates the natural sciences of properties (khawāṣṣ; of plants and stones) to those of the occult properties of language. According to him, the science of letters (and therefore sīmiyāʾ) is “the science of the saints” (ʿilm al-awliyāʾ).72 In addition to these definitions of sīmiyāʾ are those that were offered by lesser-known authors in the eighth/fourteenth century. The qāḍī Azammūr ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Saʿīd al-Ṣanhājī (d. 795/1392), in his Kanz al-asrār wa-lawāqiḥ al-afkār (“The Treasure of Secrets and Fertile Ideas”), lists nine disciplines that are unrelated to magic (siḥr) but are often confused with it: sīmiyāʾ, hīmiyāʾ, [the science of] talismans (al-ṭilasmāt), magic squares (al-awfāq), the properties of the soul (al-khawāṣṣ al-nafsiyya), realities (al-ḥaqāʾiq), prophylactic incantations (al-ruqā), conjurations (al-ʿazāʾim), and enslavements [of angels,

69 70 71 72

Al-Ḥarālī, Turāth, 244–245. Ibn ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, 3:144. Ibn ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, 4:233. Ibn ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, 3:204; Denis Gril, “La science des lettres,” in Les Illuminations de La Mecque, ed. Michel Chodkiewicz (Paris: Sindbad, 1988), 406.

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jinn, and demons] (al-istikhdāmāt).73 The term hīmiyāʾ, although rare, is found in other writers, such as Ḥusayn Wāʿiẓ al-Kāshifī (d. 910/1504–1505) who, in his Asrār-i qāsimī, evokes, beside kīmiyāʾ and sīmiyāʾ, hīmiyāʾ as the branch of magic using the influence of the stars, rīmiyāʾ as the equivalent of the science of properties, and līmiyāʾ, designating the talismanic art.74 Probably at the same time, we find the apocryphal Kanz al-ʿulūm wa-l-durr al-manẓūm fī ḥaqāʾiq ʿilm al-sharīʿa wa-daqāʾiq ʿilm al-ṭabīʿa (“The Treasure of Science and the Well Arranged Pearls on the Realities of Science of the Divine Law and the Subtleties of the Science of Nature”) attributed to Ibn Tūmart (d. 524/1130). Anachronisms that do not fit the time of Ibn Tūmart75 indicate that the treatise was probably written instead between the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries.76 It is a scientific treatise, which proposes another definition of sīmiyāʾ: Sīmiyāʾ is an expression for the composition of a name, or of two, three, or four names, from letters that are brought together and in which God has deposited the secret of His sublime name, the most sublime and contained in the four natures.77 Here, sīmiyāʾ is defined as a science of letters and names, but its definition is undoubtedly inspired by the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm, in that it distinguishes scholarly and practical aspects: Sīmiyāʾ has a theoretical part and an operative part. They are only effective together when they come from a pure heart, free from doubt and unbelief (shirk), linked to spiritual essences and the use of pure and holy names of God. This will not work for a perverted heart, O my God! Is it not what

73

74

75

76 77

Belkacem Daouadi, “Édition, traduction en français et commentaire de “Kanz al-asrâr walawâqiẖ (sic) al-afkâr” Le trésor des secrets et des idées fécondes du Qâdhî Azmûr al-Shahîr bi al-S̱anhâjî (m. en 795/1392)” (PhD diss., Université de Lyon 3, 2006), 582, 588; Coulon, La magie islamique, 1:606–608. Pierre Lory, “Kashifi’s Asrār-i Qāsimī and Timurid Magic,” Iranian Studies 36, no. 4 (2003): 531–541. For a more comprehensive study of Kāshifī’s Persian grimoire, see Maria Subtelny’s chapter in this volume. Georges Vajda, “Une synthèse peu connue de la révélation et de la philosophie: Le Kanz al-ʿulūm de Muḥammad b. ʿAlī Ibn Tūmart al-Andalusī,” Mélanges Louis Massignon (Damascus, 1956–1957), 3:359–374. Jaime Coullaut Cordero, “La sīmiyāʾ en al-Andalus.” El Futuro del Pasado 1 (2010): 455; on the treatise, see also a synthesis in Coulon, La magie islamique, 1:641–644. Ps.-Ibn Tūmart, Kanz, 173; trans. in Coulon, La magie islamique, 1:643.

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God wants? He is powerful and majestic!—everything is by His will and power; He is omnipotent in all things. Know that the theoretical part and the operative part in this art will sometimes be by the mention [of the divine names] (bi-l-dhikr), sometimes by the drawing and the observation [of the stars] (bi-l-rasm wa-l-raṣd).78 The definition of sīmiyāʾ as a “science of magical letters and squares,” which was merely a reprehensible form of magic practiced by Sufi circles, became important in the writings of Lisān al-Dīn b. al-Khaṭīb (d. 776/1375) and even more so his disciple Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406). Ibn al-Khaṭīb thus condemned sīmiyāʾ as “that which ruined many.”79 According to him, the master in this path thinks that, performing his dhikr (zikr) and being in this state, the names of God whose manifestations are [among] the spiritual representations that are the angels and who are the spirits of the spheres and the stars, who are the inhabitants of the higher world and the first inhabitants of heaven, actually are the intermediaries of God for every action, in all things and all creatures, in all that happens in the world by His permission and His wisdom. By their descent His wisdom embraces absolutely all the worlds and reaches that which is beneath the earth. Their foundations are the letters, and their nature is communicated in these achievements of [divine] names.80 The “descent” of a spiritual essence (rūḥāniyya, here identified with an angel) from a planet into a material body is the definition of a talisman in the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm; Ibn Khaldūn goes further in associating the talismanic art with sīmiyāʾ. Indeed, Ibn Khaldūn says: [This science] is today called sīmiyāʾ, whose subject was transposed [from the science] of talismans to [its current meaning] in the terminology (iṣtilāḥ) of the people of power (ahl al-taṣarruf ) among the Sufis. It is a general [term] used to [designate] the specific. This science came to the community after the arrival of Islam, when the extremist Sufis (al-ghulāt min al-mutaṣawwifa) appeared, with their inclination for the lifting of the veil of the senses, their disruption [of the natural order of things], the

78 79 80

Ps.-Ibn Tūmart, Kanz, 174; trans. in Coulon, La magie islamique, 1:644. Ibn al-Khaṭīb, Rawḍat, 328. Ibn al-Khaṭīb; French trans. in Coulon, La magie islamique, 1:624.

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powers of the world of elements, the compilation of books and technical terms, and their assertions that existence and its hierarchy proceed from the One.81 Sīmiyāʾ is thus associated with Sufis. In other parts of the Muqaddima, Ibn Khaldūn makes sīmiyāʾ a synonym for the “science of letters and magic squares.” This is the definition that seems to have been predominant in the eighth/fourteenth-ninth/fifteenth centuries. Even though the definition of sīmiyāʾ as the “science of letters” seems to be the most widespread from the eighth-ninth/fourteenth-fifteenth centuries, we continue to find broader definitions. For example, in the supplement to the Tadhkirat ūlī l-albāb (“Memorandum for Men of Intelligence”) of Dāwūd alAnṭākī (d. 1008/1599), the anonymous editor explores the “spiritual medicine” (ṭibb rūḥānī), a term which, from the time al-Būnī, referred to medicine based on the occult properties of such things as letters, names, and numbers. In this chapter, he refers to sīmiyāʾ: Sīmiyāʾ: this is a propaedeutic science (bāḥith) comprising many sciences, which contains thirty divisions (bāb), the most famous of which is the science of laws (ʿilm al-nawāmīs) and the method of its operations, then sacrifices (al-maḥārīq), then fumigations (al-tadkhīnāt), putrefactions (altaʿāfīn), soporifics (al-marāqīd), disappearances (al-ikhfāʾāt) and other things that have been introduced into this science. Does it require medicine or not? It appears that it is necessary, because the basis of its [various] parts comes from simples and compounds of medicine. There is no problem in mentioning here a little benefit so that this part is not without some profit. This is mentioned in the Kitāb al-Ishārāt wa-l-maqālāt fī ʿilm al-sīmiyāʾ (“The Book of Clues and Speeches in the Science of Sīmiyāʾ”), because no one can fully understand it or interpret it correctly except the one whom the truth has chosen, and who desires to be among the practitioners of sīmiyāʾ and operations.82 The next sections of the supplement of the Tadhkira continue to discuss the various disciplines mentioned. A comparison shows that the inspiration for the anonymous disciple of Dāwūd al-Anṭākī is clearly al-ʿIrāqī’s ʿUyūn al-ḥaqāʾiq. This later definition shows that the term sīmiyāʾ still retained this fluidity and

81 82

Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddima, 3:137–138; trans. in Coulon, La magie islamique, 1:637. Al-Anṭākī, Tadhkira, 3:84; trans. in Coulon, La magie islamique, 1:599.

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imprecision in its definition. This last definition of sīmiyāʾ and the disciplines it encompasses is similar to the program of the Book of Sharāsīm. The treatise of Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya consists of ten “discourses” (maqāla), whose table of contents, as outlined in the introduction, can be summarized as follows: 1) the spiritual essence (rūḥāniyya) of the seven planets and their enslavement (istikhdāmi-hā); 2) the properties of the figures (al-ashkāl) and Indian and Arabic letters; 3) fumigations (al-dakhan) and compound mixtures (al-akhlāṭ al-murakkaba); 4) putrefactions (taʿfīnāt); 5) balms (adhān); 6) stones (aḥjār), the drugs (ʿaqāqīr), and the body parts of animals (aʿḍāʾ ḥayawānāt); 7) color change (taghayyur al-alwān) and transmutation (qalb al-ʿiyān); 8) threats (al-tarhībāt), the submission [of spirits] (al-taslīṭāt), and various other operations; 9) narcotics (mukhaddirāt83), soporifics (munawwimāt), and rendering them ineffective (ḥalli-hā); 10) the cryptographic alphabets of the ancients. Sharāsīm’s sīmiyāʾ is thus in the tradition of astral magic, talismanic arts, and the science of properties. It is now necessary to understand the place of this treatise by comparing it to other similar productions of the time in order to try to identify some of its sources. 3.2 Sharāsīm’s Sources The Book of Sharāsīm is presented as a summary of the knowledge of ancient sages, as clearly expressed at the beginning of the fourth discourse: Ishrāsīm said, “I did not add anything about which the scholars did not agree, and which they did not mention in transmitting their books. To whatever they did not repeat in their books, I did not devote a single sentence. Thus, I restricted myself to that which [they themselves] had [already] been restricted. He who looks at my book, may he keep it in his hand and preserve it. It is an inexhaustible treasure, a sublime science, and the secret of the sages. May he preserve my legacy (waṣiyyatī) for himself. It is the legacy of the sincere and solicitous counselor (al-nāṣiḥ

83

The term mukhaddir in the sense of “narcotic” seems rare but is attested in Ellious Bocthor’s Dictionnaire français-arabe; see Dozy, Supplément, 1:353.

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al-shafūq). If it were not [for] the purpose I mentioned, I would not have said a word about what I have described. Understand [this]!”84 The book is thus the culmination of a long tradition. That Sharāsīm retained only what the sages had repeated means that the knowledge gathered in this book is supposed to have been confirmed and tested by the various sages and therefore is not knowledge coming from a single work whose reliability is doubtful. The book presents itself as a legacy that Sharāsīm leaves to posterity as a counselor (nāṣiḥ), the latter term referring to the idea that she was close to an influential person, the “master” with whom she engages in dialog throughout the book. The Kitāb Sharāsīm mentions many of its sources, and other sources of inspiration can be guessed at. One of the first sources is mentioned in the second discourse, devoted to the properties of letters and numbers (called “Indian letters”): The second discourse is about the properties of Indian and Arabic figures and letters and the strange things (al-gharāʾib) that they make appear by their effects (taʾthīr). Isrāsīm [sic] said, “The sages have said that all Arabic letters have a nature (ṭabʿ) and a property (khāṣṣiyya). Thus, their set is composed of the four natures. They are twenty-eight letters: seven hot, seven cold, seven wet, and seven dry. Alif is hot, bāʾ is cold, jīm is wet, dāl is dry, hāʾ is hot, wāw is cold, zāy is wet, ḥāʾ is dry, ṭāʾ is hot, yāʾ is cold, kāf is wet, lām is dry, mīm is hot, nūn is cold, sīn is wet, ʿayn is dry, fāʾ is hot, ṣād is cold, qāf is wet, rāʾ is dry, shīn is hot, tāʾ is cold, thāʾ is wet, khāʾ is dry, dhāl is hot, ḍād is cold, ẓāʾ is wet, ghayn is dry. This is the opinion of one group (qawm) [of interpreters]. Certain others say, “On the contrary, [the letters] correspond to the natures of the twenty-eight mansions of the Moon.” An[other] group says: “On the contrary, the first seven [letters] are hot, the second [heptad] is cold, the third is wet, and the fourth is dry.” The first [speech] is the most appropriate (al-alyaq), the second is similar, [but] I do not know the reality of the third. When [someone] knows the natures

84

Sharāsīm, Kitāb, fol. 332b., Arabic text:

‫ لم أدع شيئ ًا مماّ ات ّفق عليه العلماء وتداولتهكتبهم إلّا ذكرته وما لم يتكر ّر في كتبهم لم أذكره‬:‫قالت إشراسيم‬ ‫ وكذلك اقتصرت على ما اقتصروا عليه فمن وقع لهكتابي فليمسكه بيده و يحفظه فهو كنز‬.‫جملة واحدة‬ ‫لا ينفد وعلم عظيم وسرّ الحكماء وليحفظ وصيتي له فهي وصي ّة الناصح الشفوق ولولا الغرض الذي‬ .‫ذكرته لم أفصح بكلمة واحدة مماّ ذكرته فافهم‬

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of the letters and the natures of the [lunar] mansions, let him know that the aromatic plants (al-ʿaqāqīr) and the fumigations (al-bakhūr) also have natures, among which is the hot, cold, wet, and dry.”85 This chapter, which claims to be the teaching of the sages, no doubt owes much to the “balance theory” of the corpus attributed to Jābir b. Ḥayyān (second/ eighth century). This corpus was written in three successive phases: first by a school of alchemists close to Jabir b. Ḥayyān in the second half of the second/ eighth century, whose corpus was later enriched during the period of rediscovery and translation of ancient works in Baghdad in the third/ninth century, before undergoing significant development in the fourth/tenth century.86 In the texts of Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya and the Kitāb al-Mawāzīn al-ṣaghīr (“The Small Book of Balances”) of the Jābirian corpus,87 there is a correspondence in the distribution of letters according to their nature, with the exception of that the dry and wet letters must be interchanged. The second system mentioned by Sharāsīm, associating letters with lunar mansions, is found in alBūnī’s (d. 622/1225 or 630/1232) Laṭāʾif al-ishārāt in a passage88 taken up in

85

Sharāsīm, Kitāb, fols. 322b–323a. Arabic text: .‫ص الأشكال والحروف الهندية والعر بية وما يظهر من تأثير ذلك من الغرائب‬ ّ ‫المقالة الثانية في خوا‬

‫ن كل ّا من الأحرف العر بية له طبع وخاصية إذ جميعها مركب من‬ ّ ‫ قالت الحكماء إ‬:‫قالت اسراسيم‬ .‫ سبعة حارة وسبعة باردة وسبعة رطبة وسبعة يابسة‬:‫الطبائع الأر بع وهي ثمانية وعشرون حرفا‬

‫فالألف حارة والباء باردة والجيم رطبة والدال يابسة والهاء حارة والواو باردة والزاي رطبة والحاء‬ ‫يابسة والطاء حارة والياء باردة والكاف رطبة واللام يابسة والميم حارة والنون باردة والنون باردة‬ ‫والسين رطبة والعين يابسة والفاء حارة والصاد باردة والقاف رطبة والراء يابسة والشين حارة والتاء‬ .‫ هذا قول قوم‬.‫باردة والثاء رطبة والخاء يابسة والذال حارة والضاد بادرة والظاء رطبة والغين يابس‬

‫ بل السبعة الأولى حارة‬:‫ وقال قوم‬.‫ بل هم على طباع منازل القمر الثمانية والعشرون‬:‫وقال آخرون‬ ‫ والقول الأّول هو الأليق والثاني أشبه ولم أقف في القول‬.‫والثانية باردة والثالثة رطبة والرابعة يابسة‬ ‫ن للعقاقير والبخور‬ ّ ‫ فإذا علم طبائع الحروف وطبائع المنازل فليعلم أ‬.‫أ[ على حقيقته‬٣٢٣ ‫الثالث ]ص‬ .‫طبائع أيضا منه الحار والبارد ومنه الرطب ومنه اليابس‬ 86 87 88

Pierre Lory, Alchimie et mystique en terre d’ Islam (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 22. Marcellin Berthelot, La chimie au Moyen Âge, vol. 3, L’alchimie arabe (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1893), 126 (Arabic text), 158 (translation). Al-Būnī, Laṭāʾif al-ishārāt, MS Paris, BnF, Arabe 2657, fol. 17b–19a; Coulon, La magie islamique, 4:86–88.

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the later Shams al-maʿārif attributed to him.89 Such correspondences are not found in the passages on the lunar mansions of the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ or the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm by Maslama al-Qurṭubī, so it is difficult to identify the source to which the author of the Kitāb Sharāsīm refers. After the description of the Arabic letters, the Book of Sharāsīm deals with the use of “Indian letters,” that is to say numbers. Among the properties of numbers, a paragraph explains a use of the 3×3 magic square: Among the properties [of Indian letters], there is the figure whose number is fifteen no matter in which direction it is read. When it is engraved on the ceiling of a house, childbirth will not be difficult. Likewise, if you write it on the four pillars of the house and write it on a ram’s parchment and hang it on the woman’s right thigh, it makes all [childbirth] easier. The one who engraves it on the setting of a ring while the ascendant is in Cancer and the Moon in Cancer in conjunction with Venus, calamities will not reach him who carries [this seal]. Here is this figure.90 This description and use of the 3×3 magic square corresponds exactly to the occurrences found in the same era.91 An early occurrence of the use of the 3 × 3 magic square in an Arabic source is found in the medical treatise Kitāb Firdaws al-ḥikma (“Book of the Paradise of Wisdom”) composed around 235/850 by ʿAlī b. Sahl al-Ṭabarī (fl. third/ninth century): My father wrote about a wonderful thing that facilitates delivery: take two pieces of a jug or a new jar and draw a form like the one [that I will describe], and write numbers in such a way that, if you count in length, in width, or [diagonally] from one corner to another, [the sum] will be fifteen. Write around it two verses of the Psalms, and bring them to the woman so that she may see what is written on it. Then place them under 89 90

Coulon, La magie islamique, 2:33–42. Sharāsīm, Kitāb, fol. 323b. Arabic text:

‫ي موضع قرئ فإن ّه إذا نقش في سقف‬ ّ ‫ومن خاصيتها الشكل الذي يكون عدده خمسة عشر من أ‬ ‫بيت لم يتعس ّر الولادة على مطلقة وكذلك إن كتبت في أر بعة أركان البيت الأر بع وإن كتبت في جلد‬ ‫ص خاتم والطالع‬ ّ ‫ ومن نقشه في ف‬.‫ل عسير‬ ّ ‫أ[ الأيمن لتيسير ك‬٣٢٤ ‫كبش وعل ّق على فخذ المرآة ]ص‬ .‫السرطان والقمر في السرطان مت ّصل بالزهرة ومن لبسه هانت عليه الشدائد وهذه صورته‬ 91

On the history of magic squares in the Islamicate world and beyond, see Hallum’s chapter in this volume.

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her feet. It is prescribed that you take a little clay from a swallow’s nest and [crush] it into a grape-based ointment (duhn rāziqī) and anoint her pubis and lumbar spine. [It is necessary] to cut a root of coriander by tearing it up, to take sweat [of the woman in labor], and to attach it to the thigh of [this] woman. Here is the figure: two, seven, four, then seven, five, three, then six, one, eight. As for the two verses of the Psalms of David, they are written around it, in Syriac, and their interpretation is: “I go out of prison by myself—no dike, no height [will prevent me]—may Your will give me hope, certainly You are sufficient.” It has many other [properties].92 The magic square is written as a figure (shakl), the sum of whose numbers equals fifteen diagonally, horizontally, and vertically, which corresponds to the description in the Book of Sharāsīm. It is likewise used for a woman in labor, and one must attach a root of coriander to the woman’s thigh, just as it is necessary to suspend the magic square to the thigh of the pregnant woman in the Book of Sharāsīm. This magic square also appears in the above-mentioned Kitāb al-Mawāzīn al-ṣaghīr attributed to Jābir b. Ḥayyān: Here is a figure divided into three compartments, lengthwise and breadthwise. [figure] Each row of boxes equals the number 15 in all directions. Apollonius assures us that it is a magic array of nine squares. If you draw this figure on two cloths that have never been touched by water and you place them under the feet of a woman who has difficulty giving birth, the birth will take place immediately.93 This description is unlikely to have inspired Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya, but the use is likewise intended to facilitate childbirth, just as in the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, edited by al-Bustānī: A similar approach is adopted by the makers of talismans in preparing [naṣab] them on the basis of their knowledge of the nature and properties of things, their correspondences, how they are structured, and the relationships underlying their composition. An example of this is the [magic] nine-slot square which eases childbirth when the nine numbers

92 93

Al-Ṭabarī, Firdaws, 280–281. Berthelot, La chimie 118 (Arabic text), 150–151 (translation).

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are entered in the ninth month of pregnancy at the ninth hour of labour. The lord of the ascendant will be in the ninth [house], or the lord of the ninth [house] will be in the ascendant, or the moon will be in the ninth [house], or applying to [muttaṣil] a heavenly body in the ninth [house] from it, and similarly with other ninefold things.94 This usage is found in the fifth epistle, devoted to music. The magic square is designated by the expression al-shakl al-mutassaʿ, not al-muthallath, as a result of the development of the vocabulary for magic squares, with reference not to the number of digits distributed in the table but to the number of boxes on each side. This use, again to facilitate childbirth, has a more pronounced astrological dimension. Note the brief mention of this magic square in the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm: “The number fifteen in the three boxes of the magic square is [beneficial] for difficulty in childbirth” (wa-l-khamsat ʿashr min al-ʿadad fī thalāthat buyūt al-wafq li-ʿusr al-wilāda).95 In this last mention, the term “magic square” (wafq) appears rather than “figure” (shakl), but it is still the number fifteen that defines it.96 We may deduce that the Book of Sharāsīm the Indian should be assigned to this period when the 3×3 magic square was used in magic but whose more complex numerological speculations found especially in the Corpus Bunianum were not yet developed and widespread. After some considerations on numbers, the treatise of Sharāsīm quotes an authority: Isrāsīm said, “The properties of Indian letters are numerous. Kanakana al-Hindī has long disputed them in his book that he composed on the properties of Indian letters and the secret of the purpose of this art. Whoever devotes himself to it will see wonders.”97

94 95 96 97

Owen Wright’s translation. Ikhwān, Music, 161–162 (Arabic text) and 159 (trans.); trans. based on al-Bustānī’s edition in Coulon, La magie, 138. Al-Qurṭubī, Ghāya, 400. On the same magic square and its properties, see Bink Hallum’s chapter in this volume. Sharāsīm Kitāb, fol. 324a. Arabic text:

‫ وخواص الحروف الهنديةكثيرة وقد أطنب فيها كنكنة الهندي في كتابه الذي وضعه‬:‫قالت اسراسيم‬ .‫ص الحروف الهندية وهو غاية في فنه فمن وقع له رأى العجب‬ ّ ‫في خوا‬

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“Kanakana al-Hindī” is probably a distortion of the name Kankah al-Hindī, the name of an Indian scholar famous yet about him little is known.98 According to David Pingree, Kankah was “[the] favorite symbol used by intellectuals of the Islamic tradition to indicate the partial dependence of some of their sciences upon Sanskrit sources,”99 adding that “most of the legends concerning Kankah … can be explained as confusions between Kankah and the several manifestations of Hermes in this convoluted story of Abū Maʿshar and, of course, confusion between the role given to him by Abū Maʿshar in the remote origination of al-Zīj al-Sindhind and the more sober story preserved by the astrologer Ibn al-Ādamī [at the turn of the third/ninth-fourth/tenth centuries] concerning the Indian delegation from Sind to the court of alManṣūr.”100 The historical existence of this character remains questionable. Kankah’s works are best known through citations in other authors, whether bibliographic lists or reproductions of excerpts in other treatises. In his Fihrist, Ibn al-Nadīm lists his known works, all dealing with astrology: Kitāb al-Namūdār fī l-aʿmār (“The Book of the Namūdār101 for the Ages”), Kitāb Asrār almawālīd (“The Book of the Secrets of Nativities”), Kitāb al-Qirānāt al-kabīr (“The Great Book of Conjunctions”) and Kitāb al-Qirānāt al-ṣaghīr (“The Small Book of Conjunctions”).102 These are also the titles introduced later by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa (d. 668/1270) in his ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbāʾ (“The Sources of Information about the Generations of Physicians”), to which he adds a “Book on Medicine” (Kitāb fī l-ṭibb)103 and Ibn al-Qifṭī (d. 646/1248) in his Kitāb Ikhbār al-ʿulamāʾ bi-akhbār al-ḥukamāʾ (“The Storybook on Scholars with the Anecdotes of the Sages”).104 These well known works do not deal with numerology. On the other hand, in the domain of magic, some knowledge of numbers was attributed also to Kankah. Notably, the astrologer Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī, in his Maqāla fī l-aʿdād al-mutaḥābba (“Discourse on Amicable Numbers”), attributes to Kankah the discovery of “amicable numbers” (alaʿdād al-mutaḥābba), that is to say, numbers the sum of whose aliquot parts is equal.105 The most famous pair is 220 and 284. However, this attribution 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105

For a synthesis, see Coulon, La magie, 106–108. David Pingree, From Astral Omens to Astrology from Babylon to Bīkāner (Rome: Instituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 1997), 51. David Pingree, From Astral Omens to Astrology, 54. Namūdār is a technique for finding the position of the planets to establish the nativity of a person whose date of birth is unknown. Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, 330; The Fihrist, 2:644. Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, ʿUyūn, 32. Ibn al-Qifṭī, Ikhbār, 265–267. Oliver Kahl and Zeina Matar, “A Treatise on the Amicable Numbers 220 and 284 Attributed

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to Kankah is found also in the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm of Maslama al-Qurṭubī,106 in which Kankah al-Hindī is portrayed as an ancient Egyptian king. We can thus see why this Indian astrologer is presented in Kitāb Sharāsīm as an authority on the use of numbers. Another important cited work is the Kitāb al-Nawāmīs (“The Book of Laws”), attributed to Plato, mentioned at the beginning of the third discourse: The third discourse, on the wonders of fumigations and compound mixtures and the wonders that appear through the effects of these. This is the purpose of the one who has no real will (man lā himma lahu) nor excitement for the hidden secret, as I described in the first discourse and showed in the second. This is called “the laws” (al-nawāmīs), and Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq translated it (tarjama) from the books of Plato and others. [This is the book] on which most people of this age rely because of its lack of difficulty and its ease. It is reliable, unless one is led astray by ignorance of the names of the drugs, as each [may] have many similar ones and because of those who oppose the commentators and make them obscure by glossing each thing as being what it is not. I describe what is possible to describe by selection and choice. In this discourse, there are three wonderful sections and strange talismans: – the first section is about strange operations and wonderful talismans; – the second section is on the description of wicks and fumigations; – the third section is about the other operations whose description will come if God—let him be exalted!—wills it.107

106 107

to Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī,” Journal of Semitic Studies 35, no. 2 (1990): 235. Thābit b. Qurra, on the contrary, attributes to Nicomachus the description of the method of their determination without having demonstrated it, and to Euclid the demonstration of this method in his Elements (Christian Houzel and Roshdi Rashed, “Théorie des nombres amiables,” in Thābit ibn Qurra: Science and Philosophy in Ninth-Century Baghdad, ed. Roshdi Rashed [Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009], 90–91). Al-Qurṭubī, Ghāya, 278. Sharāsīm, Kitāb, fol. 325b. Arabic text:

‫كبة وما يظهر من تأثير ذلك من العجائب هذا القول هو‬ ّ ‫المقالة الثالثة في عجائب الدخن والأخلاط المر‬ ‫مقصود من لا هم ّة له والانتهاض إلى السرّ الخفّي وهو الذي ذكرته في المقالة الأولى وأشرت إليه في المقالة‬ ‫ وقد سموا ذلك النواميس وترجم ذلك حنين بن إسحق من كتب افلاطون وغيره وهو معتد أكثر‬.‫الثانية‬ ‫الناس في هذا الزمان لقلةّ توغره وسهولته وهو صحيح غير أن خطأ من يجطئ فيه للجهل بأسماء العقاقير‬ ‫الواحد له أشباهكثير ]كذا[ وأيضا من عسر المفس ّر ين و يكبسهم لـكونهم يفس ّرون الشيء غيرما هو به‬

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The Kitāb al-Nawāmīs attributed to Plato, not to be confused with the philosophical work of the same title, is a treatise of apocryphal magic known in the Latin tradition as Liber vaccae (“The Book of the Cow”) because of a recipe for the artificial generation from a cow.108 The term nawāmīs thus ended up designating natural magic recipes attributed to Plato or claiming continuity with his works. Here, therefore, are talismans (sg. ṭilasm), wicks (sg. fatīla) and fumigations (sg. dukhna) that are mainly associated with these nawāmīs, and not the “putrefactions” (sg. taʿfīn) of the fourth discourse, which are often associated with Plato in other texts. The influence of the Kitāb al-Nawāmīs of ps.-Plato on the Kitāb Sharāsīm is observable in this section on fumigations. The manuscript BnF Arabe 2577 includes a few leaves of a text that appears to be an excerpt from the Kitāb alNawāmīs, in which we find several recipes for fumigations. The first two recipes (fols. 104a–105a) are found in the second section of the Kitāb Sharāsīm’s third discourse, devoted to fumigations (fol. 329b). This comparison is limited: there are only three recipes in the manuscript BnF Arabe 2577 and twenty-four in the Kitāb Sharāsīm, so a critical edition of Kitāb al-Nawāmīs would be needed to make a more substantial assessment of the contribution of this major book of the Arabic occult tradition. The manuscript Arabe BnF 2577 is a collection that also contains the Kitāb al-Usṭūṭās, which is associated with the Book of Sharāsīm in the introduction, as we have seen, highlighting the possible link between these texts. Finally, the last discourse, on cryptographic alphabets, must be compared to the well known Shawq al-mustahām fī maʿrifat rumūz al-aqlām (“The Desire of the Distraught: The Knowledge of the Symbols of the Alphabets”) attributed to Ibn Waḥshiyya.109 This apocryphal treatise lists cryptographic alphabets allegedly used by the ancient sages to pass on their knowledge. It is probably an Egyptian text wrongly attributed to Ibn Waḥshiyya.110 The tenth discourse ‫وأنا أذكر من ذلك ما يحسن ذكره على التحري والاختيار وهذه المقالة فيها ثلاثة فصول عجيبة وطلسمات‬ :‫غر يبة‬

،‫– الفصل الأّول في أعمال غر يبة وطلسمات عجيبة‬ ،‫– الفصل الثاني في ذكر الفتل والدخن‬ 108

109 110

.‫– الفصل الثالث في أعمال آخر يأتي ذكرها إن شاء الله تعالى‬ On this treatise, see the edition ps.-Plato Aneguemis, and Saif, “The cows,” and for the Latin tradition, Maaike Van der Lugt, “ ‘Abominable Mixtures’: The Liber vaccae in the Medieval West, or the Dangers and Attractions of Natural Magic,” Traditio 64 (2009): 229–277. Ibn Waḥshiyya, Ancient Alphabets; Ibn Waḥshiyya, Shawq. Toufic Fahd, “Sur une collection d’ alphabets antiques réunis par Ibn Waḥshiyya,” Col-

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of Sharāsīm deals with this same subject. Fewer alphabets are presented, but there are similarities. Not all of the alphabets are identical from one manuscript to another, but some are clearly identifiable with those of Shawq al-mustahām, such as the alphabet of the barābī (that is, ancient Egyptian temples), the rīḥānī alphabet, and the Qalfaṭīr alphabet (also known as the Filaqṭīr).

4

Conclusion

The Book of Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya has been almost totally ignored in research, but the manuscripts that survive, as well as the mentions of this text in the writings of medieval Arabic occult science, indicate that it had a special place and authority in the Arabic magical tradition. The enigmatic figure of the probably legendary Sharāsīm shows how difficult it was for this tradition to present itself as an ancient and legitimate science: she is either presented as one of the great sages of antiquity or as a slave of Hārūn al-Rashīd, like the slaves of whose charms he was a victim. The text itself makes her the freedwoman of an Arab shaykh fascinated by her knowledge of the natural sciences who saves him from the influence of a magician. She remains a benevolent figure. The text claims to be a summary of the knowledge of the ancients, but it refers primarily to texts and authorities from the third/ninth century, such as the Nawāmīs attributed to Plato, or to the work of Kankah al-Hindī. Sharāsīm’s work also corresponds to a stage of Arabic occult thought in which the term sīmiyāʾ was used but for which it is difficult to offer a precise definition. Too few texts of this period and of this tradition have received scholarly editions on the basis of a corpus of satisfactory manuscripts. The work of editing and translating these texts is necessary to deepen our knowledge and understanding of the Islamic occult sciences of this time.

loque du XXIXe congrès international des orientalistes: Le déchiffrement des écritures et des langues, ed. Jean Leclant, 105–119 (Paris: l’ Asiathèque, 1975); Coulon, La magie, 127–133; Isabel Toral-Niehoff and Annette Sundermeyer, “Going Egyptian in Medieval Arabic Culture: The Long-Desired Fulfilled Knowledge of Occult Alphabets by ps.-Ibn Waḥshiyya,” in The Occult Sciences in Pre-Modern Islamic Cultures, ed. Nader El-Bizri and Eva Orthmann (Beirut: Orient-Institut Beirut, 2018), 249–264.

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‫‪Appendix 1: Introduction of Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya‬‬ ‫)‪Base manuscript: Istanbul, Hamidiye 189 (A‬‬ ‫‪Compared to Istanbul, Ḥāčī Beşir Āġā 659 (B) and Cambridge, University Lib‬‬‫)‪rary, Or. 25 (C‬‬ ‫بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم • وصل ّى‪ a‬الله على سي ّدنا محم ّد وآله‪ b‬وسل ّم‪.‬‬ ‫نبتدي بعون الله تعالى بنسخ كتاب اسراسيم‪ c‬الهندي ّة مولاة أبي العباّ س مولى أمير‪ d‬المؤمنين‪.‬‬ ‫ب والهندسة وسائر‬ ‫وكانت اسراسيم‪ e‬هذه فاضلة أهل زمانها في علم الفلك وأسرار الطبيعة والط ّ‬ ‫العلوم القديمة وأوتيت على أهل عصرها ما لم يبلغه أحد من أهل الحكمة‪ .‬وقيل كان اسمها روقيا‪،‬‬ ‫وكانت باحثة عن كتب الحكمة طالبة لها‪ .‬فظفرت بمصحف من مصاحف الأوائل منسوب إلى‬ ‫خبلها‪ ،f‬وهو لابن شيث بن آدم—⟩عليه السلام⟨‪—g‬كما ذكر راو فيه غرائب علم الفلك‪.‬‬ ‫وكان السبب في وضع‪ h‬هذا الكتاب رجل من أبناء فارس حضر إلى مولاها وصنع‪ i‬له عجائب ًا أفتنه‬ ‫ن الذي صنعه هو الحّق‪ .‬فلماّ رأت اسراسيم‪ j‬اهتمام‬ ‫بها وأخذ بمجامع قلبه ومال إليه بكليتّ ه وظّن أ ّ‬ ‫ي‪ ،‬فأشار إليها‬ ‫مولاها به وانصبابه إليه‪ ،‬حضرت إليه مسل ّمة عليه‪ ،‬وأخذت في حديث الرجل الفارس ّ‬ ‫أن ّه فاضل وقته وأن ّه لا يقدر على ما لم يقدر عليه أحد وذكر لها‪ k‬من أمره ما رآه منه‪ .‬فقالت له يا‬ ‫ن هذا علم موضوع وتدبير مصنوع‪ ،‬واستنبطه الأوائل من روحاني ّة الـكواكب ومن أسرار‬ ‫مولاي إ ّ‬ ‫ح‬ ‫ص الجواهر‪ .‬وليس هذا علم نبو ّة ولا وحي‪ ،‬ولـكّن به يتبي ّن الحّق من الباطل و يص ّ‬ ‫الطبيعة ومن خوا ّ‬ ‫صدق الصادق من مخرقة المخروق والناموس الإلهّي أمر لا يقفه‪ l‬أحد على سرّه وليس هذا بحيلة ولا‬ ‫صه الله—سبحانه وتعالى‪—m‬من اختاره وأراده في أهله والنبو ّة‬ ‫تدبير‪ ،‬ولا يتقّدمه علم بل هو علم يخت ّ‬

‫‪gC:‬‬

‫حنبلما ‪fC:‬‬

‫]ص ‪mB: add.‬‬

‫اشراسيم ‪eC:‬‬ ‫يقف ‪lB:‬‬

‫الأمير ]كذا[ ‪d C:‬‬

‫وذكر لها ‪٢] add.‬أ[ ‪k C:‬‬

‫اشراسيم ‪c C:‬‬ ‫اشراسيم ‪j C:‬‬

‫وصحبه ‪b B: add.‬‬ ‫وضع ‪i C:‬‬

‫تعالى ‪aC: add.‬‬

‫له عجائب ًا ‪h C: add.‬‬

‫‪om.‬‬

‫‪١٠٥‬أ[ وتعالى ]كذا[‬

the kitāb sharāsīm al-hindiyya

357

In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful—may God bless our Lord Muḥammad, his family, and his Companions. We begin with God’s help—may He be exalted!—the copy of the book of Isrāsīm al-Hindiyya, freedwoman (mawlāt) of Abū l-ʿAbbās, client of the commander of the faithful (mawlā amīr al-muʾminīn). This Isrāsīm was the most learned person of her time in astrology (ʿilm al-falak), the secrets of Nature (asrār al-ṭabīʿa), medicine (al-ṭibb), geometry (al-handasa), and the rest of ancient sciences. She brought to the people of her day what no one among the sages (ahl al-ḥikma) had attained. It is said that her name was Rūqiyā and that she searched for the books of wisdom (bāḥitha ʿan kutub al-ḥikma) and investigated them (ṭāliba la-hā). She obtained one of the ancient codices (min maṣāḥif al-awāʾil) related to her mind/madness (mansūb ilā khabali-hā?), which was [a book] from Shīth b. Ādam—peace be upon him—as an informant mentioned, it contains astrological prodigies (ghārāʾib ʿilm al-falak). The cause of the composition of this book was a man from among the Persians (rajul min abnāʾ Fāris) who was present with the master [of Isrāsīm]. He showed him wonders (ʿajāʾib) by which he confounded him (aftanahu bi-hā), he took hold of his whole heart (akhadha bi-majāmiʿ qalbi-hi), and [the master] totally loved him (māla ilayhi bi-kulliyyati-hi) and thought that he who had done it was the Truth (al-ḥaqq, i.e., God). When Isrāsīm saw his master’s interest and affection for him, she presented herself to him, saluting him. She began to discuss the case of the Persian, and he showed her that he was the best of his time but that he could not do what no other could do. [The master] described to [Isrāsīm] what he had seen of [him]. She said to him, “O my master, it is an established science and a manufactured power (tadbīr maṣnūʿ). The ancients drew it from the spiritual essence of planets, the secrets of nature and the properties of precious stones. This science is not a prophecy (nubuwwa) nor a divine inspiration (waḥy), but it is by [this science] that the truth (al-ḥaqq) is distinguished from the false (albāṭil) and that the belief of the truth is authenticated [with respect to] trickery (makhraqat al-makhrūq). The Divine Law (al-nāmūs al-ilāhī) is something that no one can hold secret. [This] is not cunning (bi-ḥīla) or discernment (tadbīr). No science has preceded it. On the contrary, it is a science that God—glory to

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‫هي الز بدة التي تمخضها الأكوار والأدوار فتخرج إلى الوجود في الوقت التي توجبه حكمة البارئ—‬ ‫سبحانه وتعالى—لحاجة العالم إلى ذلك‪ a‬وهذا ]‪٣١٩‬أ[ الذي رأيت‪ b‬منشاه من روحاني ّة الـكواكب‬ ‫ل على هذا وقد يظهر في العالم من‬ ‫وتأثير‪ c‬أحكام الفلك وليس هذا زمان‪ d‬نبّي صادق وأين القرآن الدا ّ‬ ‫وقف على هذه الأسرار واقتضته فيظهر أعمال ًا عجيبة جًّدا ⟩لـكن ليس بنبو ّة ولا وحي ًا ولا أمر عالم‬ ‫ي على المنسوب‬ ‫وظهور هذا الرجل بعد⟨‪ e‬انقضاء دور عطارد وهو بعد انقضاء ‪ ٧٠٠‬من الدور المحمّد ّ‬ ‫إليه أفضل الصلوة والسلام ولا يقدح هذا الرجل في الملةّ ولا تعم دعوته بل الملةّ باقية والدولة‪ f‬لبني‬ ‫العباّ س عّم النبي—عليه السلام—ولا يقدح هذا الرجل في الملةّ مستقرة ثابتة ولبني آل مروان—‬ ‫صة‪ g‬من الأرض يوم ذلك بعد أمور وهذا الظاهر من بلاد السند خروجه إلى‬ ‫عليهما السلام—ح ّ‬ ‫بلاد خراسان دعوته يجتمع‪ h‬إليه غير ذوي‪ i‬التحصيل من الفرس والديلم وأجلاف العرب ليس‬ ‫بأمر‪ j‬ر ب ّانيّ ولـكن‪ k‬تلبيس وناموس ومخرقة ولقد قلت لك ذلك يا مولاي لتكو ّن على طمانينة‪ l‬ولا‬ ‫تركن إلى مثل هذا المخارق فقال لها‪ m‬مولاها يا سراسيم‪ n‬لقد فرجت عني هما وأزلت عني غم ًا لما أثق‬ ‫به من رائك وحسن بصيرتك ودينك ومعرفتك وأين أجد‪ o‬علم ذلك قالت أدل دليل قول الله—‬ ‫ل⟨‪—p‬أخبار ًا عن سحرة فرعون سحروا أعين‪ q‬الناس فأخبر أن ّه سحر للأعين‪ .‬فقال صدقت ثم ّ‬ ‫⟩عّز وج ّ‬ ‫ذكرت له أصول ًا فلسفي ّة وأسرار ًا طبيعي ّة وأخبرته خبر المصحف الذي وقع لها فركن لقولها واطمأنت‬ ‫ن اسراسيم‪ r‬مالت إلى خزانة كتبها التي جمعتها من أرض الصين‬ ‫ي ثم ّ إ ّ‬ ‫به نفسه ورفض أمر الفارس ّ‬ ‫صلت هذا الكتاب من عّدة مصاحف‪ s‬رومي ّة و يوناني ّة وهندي ّة ومن‬ ‫والهند وأرض مصر إلى أن ح ّ‬

‫‪eC: in the margin, followed by‬‬

‫رمان ‪d C:‬‬

‫وتأثيرات ‪c C:‬‬

‫سرايت ]كذا[ ‪b C:‬‬

‫دلك ]كذا[ ‪aC:‬‬

‫‪ kC:‬أمر ‪ jC:‬ذوا ‪ iC:‬ىجتمع ‪ hA:‬حضة ‪٢] g C:‬ب[ ‪ in the body of page f C:‬بعد ‪, with‬صح‬ ‫مكتوب في الهامش ]ص ‪ pB:‬علمك ‪ o C: add.‬شراسيم ‪ n C:‬يا ‪ m C: add.‬طمانية ‪ l C:‬وليس‬ ‫مصاحف ‪٣] add.‬أ[ ‪ s C:‬اشراسيم ‪ r C:‬عين ‪١٠٥ q C:‬ب[‬

the kitāb sharāsīm al-hindiyya

359

Him, may He be exalted!—reserve for the one whom He chooses and whom He wants among his own, and whose prophecy is the cream that the cycles and the circles churn, and that comes out at the moment that makes necessary the Wisdom of the Creator (ḥikmat al-Bāriʾ)—glory to Him, may He be exalted!—for the need that the world has. This is what I saw produced (munshāʾuhu) from the spiritual essence of the stars and the influence of judicial astrology (taʾthīr aḥkām al-falak). This is not the time of a sincere prophet, and where is the Qurʾān that shows this? Certainly, in the world there is one who knows these secrets. They make it necessary. [Then, this individual] brings forth very wonderful operations, but it is not by prophecy, [divine] inspiration, or cosmic command (amr ʿālam). The appearance of this man [takes place] after the end of the cycle of Mercury (baʿda inqiḍāʾ dawr ʿUṭārid), and it takes place after the end of 700 [years] of the Muḥammadian cycle (wa-huwa baʿda inqiḍāʾ 700 min al-dawr al-muḥammadī)—the best of prayers and salvation be upon the one from which his name is drawn [i.e., Muḥammad]. This man does not say evil of religion (al-milla), and his preaching (daʿwatuhu) is not universal; on the contrary, religion is eternal (bāqiya) and power (al-dawla) is in Banū lʿAbbās, [descendants of] the uncle of the Prophet, peace be upon him. This man does not speak evil of religion [that is] stable and sure. The Marwānids (Banū Āl Marwān)—peace be upon them—have a portion of the earth that day after [certain] events. This [man] who appears comes from Sindh, his appearance (khurūjuhu) is in Khurasan, his preaching (daʿwatuhu) attracts to him those who do not have knowledge (ghayr dhawī l-taḥṣīl) among the Persians and the Daylamites and the fools of the Arabs. It is not by the command of the Lord (bi-amr rabbānī) but by illusion (talbīs), [natural] law (nāmūs) and trickery (makhraqa). I have just told you that, O my master, so that you are at peace and do not depend on things like these trickery.” Her master said to her, “O Isrāsīm, you have dispelled my preoccupation and put an end to the sadness I had when I have trusted him [i.e., the Persian], thanks to your opinion, your good clairvoyance, your religion and your knowledge. Where can I find the knowledge of [all] that?” She said, “The argument of the word of God—He is mighty and majestic!—shows anecdotes (akhbār) about Pharaoh’s magicians who bewitched the eyes of men. He informs us that it is a spell (siḥr) for the eyes.” He said, “You speak truly.” Then she described the philosophical foundations and natural secrets. She informed him about the history of the codex (al-muṣḥaf ) that had come to her. He trusted her words, his soul calmed down and he refuted the Persian affair. She looked through the library (khizāna) of the books she had collected [from] the land of China, India, and the land of Egypt until she found [what she needed to compose] this book from a multitude of Byzantine (rūmiyya), Greek

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‫ل ملةّ وما استخرجه المفس ّرون للـكتب القديمة إلى أن كمل‬ ‫كتب أصحاب الحيل والنواميس من ك ّ‬ ‫لها على ما اختارت وأتت على‪ a‬مقالاته السبع‪ .‬قالت اسراسيم‪ :‬فلماّ أتممت هذا الكتاب وأحضرته إلى‬ ‫ل عقل‬ ‫ل القوم المخرقّ ين على ك ّ‬ ‫بين يدي مولاي فأطلعته عليه فأعجب إعجاباً كثير ًا وعلم كيف قد أض ّ‬ ‫فاسد‪ .‬وقال من لا علم له لا دين له والجهل يوقع صاحبه في المهالك‪ .‬قالت اسراسيم‪ b:‬ولقد كشفت‬ ‫في هذا الكتاب أسرار الحكماء التي رمزوها وستروها وفرقوا في كتبهم وهو علم خطير ]‪٣١٩‬ب[ عظيم‬ ‫ل الزائل المنتقل‬ ‫الخطر فمن وقع له فليعرف موقعه و يتحّقق خطره ولا يعزه‪ c‬أمر دنياه فإن الدنيا كالظ ّ‬ ‫والآخرة هي الحزا‪ d‬الباقي وليعلم أن ّه إن صان علمه صان نفسه وأن تعرض به الأمور المهلـكة هلك ولا‬ ‫يغني عنه علمه شيء وإي ّاه والتمو يه على الخلق والقدح في الشر يعة واتهام نفسه أغتنا عاجل الدنيا وليعلم‬ ‫إن ّما وضعوا العلماء هذا العلم لذوي العقول والمعرفة ليفرقوا به بين الحّق والباطل‪ e‬وجعلوه للتلاميذ‪f‬‬ ‫ذر يع‪ g‬لمعرفة الحّق كما وضعوا علوم ًا آخر‪ h‬يعرف بها الحّق من الباطل وهذا الكتاب يحتوي على عشرة‬ ‫ل مقالة قائمة بنفسها‪.‬‬ ‫مقالات ك ّ‬ ‫المقالة الأولى في ذكر روحاني ّة الـكواكب السبعة واستخدامها ⟩إلى أن⟨‪ i‬يتحد بمن أراد ذلك و يمتزج‬ ‫صيتّ ها‪.‬‬ ‫بطباعه أن يفعل بخا ّ‬ ‫ص الأشكال والحروف الهندي ّة والعر بي ّة وما يظهر من ذلك من الغرائب‪.‬‬ ‫المقالة الثانية في خوا ّ‬ ‫كبة وما يظهر من ذلك من الغرائب‪.‬‬ ‫المقالة الثالثة في عجائب الدخن والأخلاط المر ّ‬ ‫المقالة الرابعة في ذكر تعفينات عجيبة وما يظهر من التأثير‪ j‬البليغ‪.‬‬

‫‪fC:‬‬

‫]ص ‪١٠٦‬أ[ والباطل ]كذا[ ‪e B: add.‬‬

‫الجز ‪; C:‬الجزا ‪d B:‬‬ ‫الىأثير ‪j A:‬‬

‫يغره ‪c C:‬‬

‫المان ‪i C:‬‬

‫اشراسيم ‪b C:‬‬

‫‪h C: om.‬‬

‫ما ‪aC: add.‬‬

‫ذر يعة ‪g C:‬‬

‫]‪٣‬ب[‬

the kitāb sharāsīm al-hindiyya

361

( yūnāniyya), and Indian (hindiyya) codices, from the books of the masters of [magic] tricks and laws (aṣḥāb al-ḥiyal wa-l-nawāmīs) of each religion, and from that which the commentators (al-mufassirūn) had drawn from ancient books until she had completed what she had set herself to do, and she made seven discourses. Isrāsīm said, “When I finished this book and presented it to my master, I read it to him, and he marveled greatly and he knew how the robbers (al-qawm almukharriqīn [sic]) mislead any [individual through] corrupt reason (kull ʿaql fāsid). He said: ‘He who has no knowledge has no religion, ignorance places the ignorant in the [places of] perdition.’” Isrāsīm said: “I revealed in this book the secrets of the sages which they encrypted (ramazū), veiled (satarū) and showed in their books. It is a major science (khaṭīr), with sublime thought (ʿaẓīm al-khaṭr). He to whom [this science] is necessary, he must know his place and be sure of his thought, and his affairs here below must not be important. [The world] here below is like a transient shadow; the Hereafter is the remaining part [i.e., eternal]. Let him know that, if he protects his knowledge, he protects his soul; and [know that] it happens that with [this science] perishable things perish and that knowledge [of this science] will not serve him [against death]. Let him beware of the deception (al-tamwīh) against creation (ʿalā l-khalq), slander (al-qadḥ) in the divine law and the accusation of his soul. Here below, we are destroyed. Let it be known that scholars recorded this knowledge for the intelligent and the learned so that, thanks to it, they may distinguish between the true and the false (al-ḥaqq wa-l-bāṭil) and put it into practice. For the discipline is a means of arriving at the knowledge of the true (maʿrifat al-ḥaqq), as [the scholars] made the sciences as another [means to] distinguish between the true and the false.” This book contains ten discourses, each of which can stand independently (qāʾima bi-nafsi-hi). The first discourse is on the description of the spiritual essences (rūḥāniyya) of the seven planets and their enslavement (istikhdāmi-hā), so that they are united with the one who desires it and mingle with his nature in order to act with the property [of the planet]. The second discourse is on the properties of figures (al-ashkāl) and Indian and Arabic letters and the wonders that appear from them. The third discourse is about the wonders of fumigations (al-dakhan) and compound mixtures (al-akhlāṭ al-murakkaba) and the wonders that emerge from them. The fourth discourse is about describing the wonderful putrefactions (taʿfīnāt) and the immense influence that appears from them.

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‫المقالة الخامسة في ذكر أدهان مستخرجة لها أفعال عجيبة وتأثيرات غر يبة‪.‬‬ ‫المقالة السادسة في ذكر أحجار وعقاقير وأعضاء حيوانات تفعل‪ a‬العجب العجيب‪.‬‬ ‫المقالة السابعة في ذكر تغي ّر الألوان والأشياء وقلب العيان‪.‬‬ ‫المقالة الثامنة في ذكر تدهينات وتسليطات وأعمال عجيبة جّدا ً‪.‬‬ ‫المقالة التاسعة في ذكر مخدرات ومنومات وحل ّها‪.‬‬ ‫المقالة العاشرة في ذكر‪ b‬أقلام رموزها عظيمة رمزوا بها كتبهم وستروها بها حتى يحصل لمن علمها‪c‬‬ ‫الاّطلاع على ما يقع له من ذلك‪.‬‬ ‫قالت اسراسيم‪⟩ :‬هذا العلم⟨‪ d‬هو علم السيمياء الذي سار ذكره بين الناس‪ ،‬ومعناه‪ e‬سرّ الطبيعة‪.‬‬ ‫وقيل‪ :‬معناه سرّ الحكمة‪ .‬وقيل‪ :‬سحر العقل‪ .‬وقيل‪ :‬بل السيمياء اسم امرأة كانت في الزمن الأّول‪،‬‬ ‫طلعة على جميع حكم الأّولين‪ ،‬وإّنها وجدت كتاباً فيه هذا العلم فانفردت به وسار عنها‪ .‬فقيل‪:‬‬ ‫وكانت م ّ‬ ‫ل حال فعليك أّيها الناظر بصون نفسك‬ ‫علم السيمياء‪ .‬وقيل‪ :‬بل هو رجل ساحر من سحرة الهند‪ .‬وعلى ك ّ‬ ‫قبل صون عملك وصون علمك‪ f‬قبل صون نفسك وأقبل النصح‪ .‬و بالله التوفيق‪.‬‬

‫عملك ‪fC:‬‬

‫]ص ‪١٠٦‬أ[ ‪e B:‬‬

‫‪d C: om.‬‬

‫عملها ‪c C:‬‬

‫في ذكر ‪٤] add.‬أ[ ‪b C:‬‬

‫نفعل ‪aB:‬‬

the kitāb sharāsīm al-hindiyya

363

The fifth discourse is about the description of the balms (adhān) from which one extracts marvelous actions and strange effects. The sixth discourse is about the description of the stones (aḥjār), drugs (ʿaqāqīr), and body parts of animals (aʿḍāʾ ḥayawānāt) that do wonders. The seventh discourse is about describing the changes of color and objects (taghayyur al-alwān wa-l-ashyāʾ) and transmutation (qalb al-ʿiyān). The eighth discourse is about the description of threats (al-tarhībāt), the submission [of spirits] (al-taslīṭāt), and [other] very wonderful operations. The ninth discourse is about the description of narcotics (mukhaddirāt111), sleeping pills (munawwimāt), and rendering them ineffective (ḥalli-hā). The tenth discourse is about the description of alphabets with sublime symbols with which [sages] encrypt their books and veil them so that the reading (al-ittilāʿ) of what is there is possible only for him who knows [these symbols]. Isrāsīm said: “This science is the science of sīmiyāʾ, which is widely known among people and whose meaning is: ‘the secret of Nature’ (sirr al-ṭabīʿa). It is said [also] that its meaning is ‘thee secret of wisdom’ (sirr al-ḥikma). It is said [also]: ‘the bewitchment of reason’ (siḥr al-ʿaql). It is said [on the contrary] that al-sīmiyāʾ is the name of a woman who lived at the first times and who was raised to all the wisdoms of the first [sages]. She found a book in which [was recorded] this science. She isolated herself with [this book]. It is said [again] ‘the science of sīmiyāʾ.’ It is said [on the contrary] that it is a magician (rajul sāḥir) among the magicians of India.” In any case, take care, O reader, to protect your soul before protecting your operation and protect your science before protecting your soul. Accept this counselor! In God alone does success abide.

111

On the term mukhaddir, see n. 81 above.

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‫‪Appendix 2: Conclusion of Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya‬‬ ‫)‪Base manuscript: Istanbul, Hamidiye 189 (A‬‬ ‫)‪Compared to Istanbul, Ḥāčī Beşir Āġā 659 (B) and Paris, BnF, Arabe 2595 (D‬‬ ‫‪The conclusion in manuscript Arabe 2595 contains an important paragraph‬‬ ‫‪that is not found in the two manuscripts of Istanbul, here it is reproduced‬‬ ‫)‪in double brackets ⟦…⟧. Manuscript Cambridge, University Library, Or. 25 (C‬‬ ‫‪does not contain this conclusion.‬‬ ‫قالت إشراشيم‪] a‬كذا[‪ :‬والأقاليم‪ b‬والأقلام‪⟩ c‬كثيرة أكثر من أن تحصي‪ d‬وقد ذكرت الأقلام⟨‪ e‬التي‪f‬‬ ‫⟩رمزوا بها⟨‪ g‬أهل هذه العلوم كتبهم‪ h‬وقد استعمل‪ i‬الناس قلم الأحد‪ j‬وخمسين مدخل‪ k‬المعروفة‬ ‫برسائل الإخوان‪ l‬التي‪ m‬ظهرت في هذا الزمان ⟩وكتبوا ]ص ‪٢٩٣‬أ[ بهكثير ًا⟨‪n.‬‬ ‫قالت إشراشيم‪] o‬كذا[‪ :‬فلماّ أتممت هذا الكتاب على الغرض الذي ⟩ات ّفق لي والفضل⟨‪ p‬تحر ّكت‬ ‫إليه‪ .‬قال لي مولاي‪ q‬أحسنت يا إشراسيم‪ r‬فيما ⟩بينّ ت وقصدت⟨‪ s‬فهل ⟩فيما ذكرت ِه من رواية⟨‪ t‬من‬ ‫ن الفاضل أرسطوا‪ x‬وضع‬ ‫ت‪ w‬نعم يا سي ّدي إ ّ‬ ‫علم لهذا‪ u‬الشأن غير هذا من غير الطرق التي‪ v‬ذكرتِها‪ .‬قل ُ‬ ‫كتاباً ولم يسمه وأسماه‪ y‬من بعده أرسومامندروس‪ z‬ومعناه الاشنوطاس‪ aa‬الأوسط لأن ّهكان وضع‬ ‫اشتوطاس‪ bb‬أكبر واشتوطاس‪ cc‬أصغر وهما مشهوران في كتبه‪ .‬وهذا الأوسط هو‪ dd‬شيء عجيب‬ ‫ل منزلة‪ hh‬وفعلها وحروفها‪ ii‬و بخورها ⟩وصفة‬ ‫ذكر‪ ee‬فيها‪ ff‬منازل القمر الثمانية وعشر ين‪ gg‬وذكر طبع ك ّ‬ ‫روحانيتها والوقوف لها⟨‪ jj‬والعمل ⟩الذي لها⟨‪ kk‬حت ّى يّتحد بالطبع حت ّى انتهى إلى الثمانية وعشر ين منزلة‬ ‫ثم ّ ذكر دعوة جامعة لروحانيتّ ه‪ ll‬جميعها‪ mm‬وعمل مخصوص وقانون مذكور‪ .‬إذا عمُ ِل على الوجه الذي‬ ‫ذكره‪ nn‬استدعى العامل جميع ما يحتاج إليه‪ oo‬وقطع المسافة البعيدة ⟩واستجلب الشيء البعيد⟨‪pp‬‬

‫اشراسيم ‪aB, D:‬‬

‫‪ hD:‬رمزتها ‪ gD:‬الذي ‪ fD:‬في الهامش ‪ e D:‬تحصا ‪ d D:‬الأقلام ‪b D: om. c D:‬‬ ‫‪ nD: om. oD:‬الذي ‪ mD:‬إخوان الصفا ‪ l D:‬فدخل ‪ k D:‬أحد ‪ j D:‬استعملوا ‪ i D:‬في كتبهم‬ ‫‪ sD:‬شراسيم ‪; D:‬اشراشيم ‪ rB:‬سيدي ومولاي ‪]; D:‬ص ‪١٤٤‬أ[ ‪ q B:‬ات ّفقت والقصد الذي ‪ p D:‬شراسيم‬ ‫‪; D:‬ارسطو ‪ xB:‬قالت شراسيم ‪ wD:‬الذي ‪ v D:‬هذا ‪ u D:‬من رأى ما ذكرتيه ‪ t D:‬قصدت وأتيت به‬ ‫‪ ccD:‬اسبوطاس ‪ bbD:‬الاسبوطاس ‪ aa D:‬ارسوماميدروس ‪ z D:‬وسماه ‪ y D:‬ارسطوطاليس‬ ‫واسبوطاس‬ ‫‪dd D: om.‬‬ ‫]ص ‪٥٥‬ب[ ‪ee D:‬‬ ‫فيه ‪ff D:‬‬ ‫منزلة ‪ggD: add.‬‬ ‫واحدة من ‪hhD:‬‬ ‫وروحانيتها وما لها من البخورات وما لها من الأرض والجواهر والمعادن ‪ jj D:‬وما تعمل ‪ ii D:‬المنازل‬ ‫‪ ooD: add.‬ذكر ‪ nnD:‬جميعا ‪ mmD:‬لروحانياتها ‪ kk D: om. ll D:‬والحيوان وكيف الوقوف لروحانيتها‬ ‫‪ pp D: om.‬وعمل ما ير يد واّطلع على ما ير يد‬

the kitāb sharāsīm al-hindiyya

365

Ishrāsīm said, “Climates and alphabets are numerous, more numerous than you can count. I mentioned the alphabets with which the proponents of these sciences have encrypted their books. Men have used the alphabet of the fiftyone known ‘introductions’ [under the title] of The Brothers’ Epistles (Rasāʾil al-Ikhwān) which appeared at that time and with which they wrote a great deal.” Ishrāsīm said, “When I finished this book according to the agreed purpose and the quality to which I aspired, my master said to me: ‘You excel, O Ishrāsīm, in what you explain and in your purpose. Are there, in that which you described of the tradition of this science for this thing other things from other paths that you have mentioned?’ I answered, ‘Yes, O my master, the best (al-fāḍil) is Aristotle (Arisṭū), he composed a book to which he did not give a name but that was known after him as Arsūmāmandarūs, whose meaning is mediumsized Ashnūṭās (al-Ashnūṭās al-awsaṭ) because he had composed a large Ashnūṭās (Ashnūṭās kabīr) and a small Ashnūṭās (Ashnūṭās ṣaghīr), both known among his books. This medium[-sized] [book] is an amazing thing in which he described the twenty-eight mansions of the moon and the nature of each mansion, its action, its letters, its fumigations, the description of its spiritual essence, its position, its operation to unite with his nature, until he had finished the twenty-eight mansions. Then he mentioned an invocation (daʿwa) encompassing all of the spiritual essence, the specific operation, and the mentioned law (qānūn). When one operates in the way he has described, the one who does the operation (al-ʿāmil) asks for everything he needs, cuts the distance, draws

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‫ونقل الأثقال وقلب‪ a‬العيان وغير الأشخاص وأظهر الأعاجيب بسبع كلمات يتكل ّم بها في نفسه ⟩لـكّن‬ ‫بعد لزوم شرطه وات ّباع القوانين⟨‪ b.‬وهو علم يتم ّ لطالبه في عامّ واحد‪ .‬فقال لي‪ c‬سي ّدي وهل يوجد‬ ‫ذلك‪ d.‬قلت‪ e‬نعم يا سي ّدي‪ .‬وأخرجته له من خزانةكتبي مكتو باً ‪ f‬بقلم مولد بين ⟩السر يانيّ والعبرانيّ⟨‪g‬‬ ‫ل القلم فوقف عليه وعجب به‪ h‬ثم ّ إن ّه أودعه‪ i‬خزانته‪:‬‬ ‫ي وعلمتهكيف ح ّ‬ ‫والهند ّ‬ ‫]] فكان أغبط بهما فبلغ أمرهما أمير المؤمنين فأرسل رسل عدة إليه وكتبهما وسيرهما إليه فلما‬ ‫وقف عليهما وعرف ما فيهما أعدهما من أنفس الدخائر وأعز الهدايا وكتب إليه أن أحفظ بهما ولا‬ ‫تبدلهما وهذا ما كان من أمر هذا الكتاب وتم ّت المقالة العاشرة من كتاب شراسيم الهندية و بتمامها تم ّ‬ ‫الكتاب‪.‬‬ ‫قال أبو الوليد بن عمر بن ماكيس القيلاري‪ :‬كنت كثير ًا مما أطلب هذا العلم وأبعث عنه بقرطبة‬ ‫في بعض أسفاري إذ رأيت رجل ًا من العجم وعليه سيمة الفضيلة فتقر ّبت إليه وتعرفّ ت به إلى أن‬ ‫حصلت بيننا صلة وصداقة ومؤانسة فخلوت به يوم الأي ّام وتحّدثنا وتؤانسنا وجر ينا في العلوم مجري‬ ‫ذكر الصنعة فرأيته أعلم الناس بأحوالها ثم ّ الطب‪ j‬ثم ّ النجوم ثم ّ علوم الأوائل كل ّها وانتهى السؤال إلى‬ ‫هذا العلم فحدث فيه بأنواع الأعاجيب واطلعني على بعض الأشياء من علمه وذلك أن ّه أظهر فاكهة‬ ‫حسنة في غير أوانها ثم ّ أن ّه أظهر لي ثلاثة من الحيوان لم تكن بأرض المغرب ثم ّ قال لي من حال ما‬ ‫ن الرجل المطلوب فلزمته مّدة من الزمان وأنا أرى منه العجب وكان يسعي‬ ‫أعلمه وأتحّققه فعلمت أ ّ‬ ‫في التجارة فلماّ كان بعض الأي ّام قال لي إن ّي عازم على السفر في هذه المر ّة ولولا إ يمان أخذت على‬ ‫فيما أنا فيه لا أفدتك ما تر يد ولـكن إن كان لك هم ّة فتوجّه إلى أرض مصر[[‬

‫‪fD:‬‬

‫فقلت ‪eD:‬‬

‫‪dD: om.‬‬

‫]ص ‪٥٦‬ب[ ‪jD:‬‬

‫‪c D: om.‬‬ ‫أودعها ‪i D:‬‬

‫ولـكن لها شروط تلزمها وقوانين يستعملها ‪b D:‬‬ ‫منه ‪h D:‬‬

‫وتغير ‪aD:‬‬

‫العبراني والسر ياني ]ص ‪٥٦‬أ[ والعر بي ‪g D:‬‬

‫‪om.‬‬

the kitāb sharāsīm al-hindiyya

367

in that which is distant, moves that which is heavy, transmutes, changes people, makes wonders appear by seven words that he pronounces to himself, but after observing the conditions [related to it] and having followed the law (ittibāʿ alqawānīn). It is a science that can be mastered in one year by the one who asks for it.’ My master said to me, ‘Does [this book] exist?’ I answered, ‘Yes, O my master!’ And I took it out for him from the library of my books, written in an alphabet which drew upon Syriac, Hebrew, and Indian. I taught him how to decipher this alphabet. He studied it and was seized with admiration. Then he put it in his library. ⟦He had ardently desired them. The story of these two [books] reached the emir of the believers. [The latter] sent him many emissaries, so he copied both [books] and sent them to him. When he became acquainted with them and learned what they contained, he considered them to be the most precious of treasures and the most important of gifts. He wrote to him to preserve them and not to exchange them. So that is what happened to this book.” The tenth discourse of the Book of Sharāsīm the Indian is completely finished. The book is finished. Abū l-Walīd b. ʿUmar b. Mākīs al-Qīlārī said, “I was very much seeking this science while I was in Córdoba, looking for some of my books ( fī baʿḍ asfārī). Then I saw a stranger (rajulan min al-ʿajam) who had the mark of virtue (ʿalayhi sīmat al-faḍīla). I approached him and sought to know him until there developed between us a bond (ṣila), a friendship (ṣadāqa), and a familiarity (muʾānasa). I withdrew with him one day, and we spoke and discussed, talking about the sciences, we came to talking about the [alchemical] art (al-ṣanʿa). I saw that he was the most learned of men on the requirements [of the art], then of medicine (al-ṭibb), then of astrology (al-nujūm), then of all the sciences of the ancients (ʿulūm al-awāʾil). The interrogation ended with this science. He spoke about [this science and its] categories of wonders. He read me something [about] his knowledge (min ʿilmi-hi). Thus, he brought forth a delicious fruit ( fākiha ḥasana) outside its season, then he made three animals that are not found in the west (bi-arḍ al-maghrib) appear to me. Then he told me spontaneously what I knew and what I knew for certain. So I knew it was the man I was looking for. I accompanied him everywhere for a while, seeing wonders. He worked in trade. One day, he told me to take a trip at that time, and that ‘if you do not have faith in me in what I practice, I will not give you what you want. If you have the ambition, go to Egypt.’⟧

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‫⟩وقال لرجل اقصد مصر⟨‪ a.‬فإذا وصلت ⟩إليها فاطلب بلدة⟨‪ b‬بلدة ]كذا[ يقال لها أسيوط وامض‪c‬‬ ‫إليها ⟩واسأل عن⟨‪ d‬صالح بن رشيد التميمي‪ .‬فإذا لقيته‪ e‬فاقره ⟩عني السلام⟨‪ f‬وقل له احفظ الوصايا‬ ‫السبع واطلب منهكتاب إشراسيم‪ g‬الهندي ّة وكتاب ارسومامندروس‪ h‬فانقلهما منه‪ i‬وقابلهما عليه واعمل‬ ‫بما فيهما تصل إلى ما تر يد‪.‬‬ ‫قال أبو الوليد فأقمت معه أي ّام ًا وودعته‪ j‬وسافرت ووصلت إلى‪ k‬أرض مصر وأتيت‪ l‬أسيوط‬ ‫ت عن الرجل فدلوني‪⟩ m‬عليه في مسجد⟨‪ n‬في جبلها فمضيت‪ o‬إليه ⟩وسل ّمت عليه فردّ على‬ ‫وسأل ُ‬ ‫حب بي‪ .‬وقال لي كيف فلان وكيف حاله يعني صاحبي الذي أرسلني إليه فأخبرته‬ ‫السلام⟨‪ p‬ور ّ‬ ‫]ص ‪٢٩٣‬ب[ بخـبره وسفره‪ q.‬فقال إن ّه‪ r‬لقي ⟩عّدة من سفن⟨‪ s‬الروم في ⟩طر يق قونيا⟨‪ t‬ودخل إلى‬ ‫ت منه ما سمعت‪ v‬ما أمكنني‪ w‬أتكل ّم فسكت‪ x.‬فقال ⟩لي قل⟨‪ y‬الأمارة التي‪z‬‬ ‫بلاده‪ u‬سالم ًا‪ .‬فلماّ سمع ُ‬ ‫ت له الأمارة‪⟩ .‬قال لي تطلب⟨‪ aa‬الكتابين‪ .‬قلت‪ bb‬نعم‪ .‬فقال‪ cc‬إن ّه وثق بعقلك‪ dd‬ولـكّن‬ ‫قالها لك فقل ُ‬ ‫ل كتاب منهما‪ ff‬قد ستروه بسبعة أقلام ⟩صيانة وشفقة عليهم⟨‪ gg‬وأنا قد‬ ‫كيف ⟩لك سبيل⟨‪ ee‬وك ّ‬ ‫ألزمت نفسي ⟩من مّدة⟨‪ hh‬ثلاثة أعوامّ لا أتكل ّم في هذا الباب‪ ii‬بكلمة واحدة‪ .‬فقلت يا سي ّدي أر يد‪jj‬‬ ‫الكتابين ⟩أنقشهما حكاية⟨‪ kk‬واجتهد‪ ll‬في تفسيرهما أن قدرت فأخرج لي خر يطة من آدم وأخرج منها‬ ‫كتابين مجلدين مكتو بين في جلد‪ mm‬ظبي مفصلات‪⟩ nn‬بالذهب واللازورد والزنجفر⟨‪ oo‬بأحسن‪pp‬‬ ‫ل مكان فيها‪ qq‬مقصود‪ rr‬مكتوب بقلم ففعلت‪ ss‬الكتابين‪ tt‬وقابلتهما‪ uu‬عليه‬ ‫ما يكون من الخطوط وك ّ‬ ‫ت‪ ww‬لا‪ .‬فقال‪ xx‬لو‪ yy‬أخذ عليك عهدًا ⟩أخذته عليك ولـكن⟨‪zz‬‬ ‫ثم ّ قال لي‪ vv‬أخذ عليك عهدًا‪ .‬قل ُ‬ ‫ن الله ⟩سبحانه وتعالى⟨‪ aaa‬معك كيف ما كنت‪ bbb‬فإن ّك‪⟩ ccc‬موجود بجمع الأنفاس‬ ‫امض واعلم أ ّ‬

‫‪gD:‬‬

‫السلام عني ‪fD:‬‬

‫أتيته ‪eD:‬‬

‫وأرسل إلى ‪d D:‬‬

‫فامض ‪c D:‬‬

‫‪b D: om.‬‬

‫‪aD: om.‬‬

‫ثم ّ ودعته ‪] jD:‬ص ‪٥٧‬أ[ ‪ iD:‬ارسوماميدروس ‪; D:‬ارسوما ]ص ‪١٤٤‬ب[ مندروس ‪ h B:‬شراسيم‬ ‫‪ pD:‬فوصلت ‪ oD:‬على مسجد ‪ nD:‬فدلني ‪ m D:‬ووصلت إلى ‪ k D: om. l D:‬وسافر ثم ّ ظهرت‬ ‫‪ uD:‬طر يقه قو يه وسلمه الله تعالى ‪ tD:‬شّدة من سفر ‪ s D:‬لي ‪ r D:‬ومتى كان سفره ‪ q D:‬وسلم علي‬ ‫‪ bbD:‬فقال قد طلب ‪ aaD:‬الذي ‪ zD:‬قل لي ‪ x D: om. y D:‬أن ‪ w D: add.‬سألت ‪ v D: add.‬بلده‬ ‫‪ iiD:‬منه ‪ ffD: om. ggD: om. hhD:‬السبيل إلى ذلك ‪ ee D:‬ورأيك ‪ ddD: add.‬قال ‪ cc D:‬فقلت‬ ‫‪ ooD:‬مفصلة ‪ nnD:‬رّق ‪ mmD:‬واجتهدت ‪ ll D: add.‬أنقلهما ‪] kk D:‬ص ‪٥٧‬ب[ ‪ jj D:‬الكتاب‬ ‫‪ uuD:‬منه ‪ ttD: add.‬فنقلت ‪ rr D: om. ssD:‬فيه الفصل ‪ qq D:‬أحسن ‪ pp D:‬بذهب ولازورد‬ ‫‪ aaaD:‬إلا أخذته ثم قال لي ‪ zzD:‬كان ‪ yy D: add.‬قال ‪ xx D:‬فقلت ‪ vv D: om. ww D:‬وقابلت‬ ‫وإن ّك ‪ ccc D:‬توجهت ‪om. bbb D:‬‬

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369

[…]112 When you get there, ask [the way to] a land called Assiut (Asyūṭ) and go there. Ask [to see] Ṣāliḥ b. Rashīd al-Tamīmī. When you meet him, greet him on my behalf. Say to him, ‘Preserve the seven wills (al-waṣāyā l-sabʿ)’ and ask for the Book of Isrāsīm the Indian and the Book of Arsūmāmandarūs, copy them ( fa-nqul-huma), collate them (qābil-humā) and perform operations with their contents: you’ll get what you want.’” Abū l-Walīd said: “I stayed with him for some days, then I left him, I went on a journey and I arrived in the land of Egypt and went to Asyūṭ. I questioned [the inhabitants] about the man [in question] and they took me to him in the mosque on the mountain. I came to him and greeted him. He returned my greeting and invited me to put myself at ease. He said to me, ‘How is so-and-so?’ That is, my master (ṣāḥibī) who sent me to him. I informed him of the news and his trip. He said he had encountered many Byzantine ships on the Konia route and entered his country safe and sound. When I heard what he said, I could not speak and I fell silent. He said to me, ‘Tell me the token (al-imāra) that he gave you.’ I told him the token. He [then] said, ‘You are asking for the two books.’ I answered, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘He trusts your intelligence, but how can you have a way [to read them]? Both books were veiled with seven alphabets to protect and preserve them. I have undertaken for three years not to say a single word about it.’ I said, ‘O master, I want both books. I will transcribe the story and make the effort to produce a commentary if I am able.’ He took out a leather bag, from which he took two volumes written on gazelle skin, made of gold, lapis lazuli, and minium in the most beautiful possible script. In every part of [these books] was a (different) objective written in a (different) alphabet. I copied both books and collated them. Then he said to me, ‘He has made a covenant (ʿahd) with you.’ I replied, ‘No.’ He [then] said: ‘If he had made a covenant with you, then I would have [made a contract with] him too. However, continue and know that God—glory to Him and may He be exalted!—is with you as you are,

112

The Istanbul manuscripts have here, “He said to a man: ‘Go to Egypt’” But the sentence here is less clear than that of the more complete text of the BnF.

‫‪370‬‬

‫‪coulon‬‬

‫والخطرات وإن ّك ميت⟨‪ a‬ثم ّ أن ّه‪ b‬ودعني فلم أزل أبحث وأطوف وأسأل‪ c‬أهل الخـبرة مّدة ⟩ثمان‬ ‫سنين⟨‪ d‬إلى أن كشفت المستور‪ e‬منهما‪ f‬وحصل لي ما حصل‪.‬‬ ‫⟩⟩وهذا ما انتهى إلينا من كتاب شراسيم الهندية على التمام والـكمال‪.‬‬ ‫ل حال وصل ّى الله على سي ّدنا ⟩محم ّد النبي الأم ّي وعلى آله وصحبه وسل ّم تسليم ًا‬ ‫والحمد لله على ك ّ‬ ‫كبير ًا⟨‪h.⟨⟨g‬‬

‫‪eD:‬‬

‫ثمانين سنة ‪dD:‬‬

‫وأفتش على ‪c D:‬‬

‫‪b D: om.‬‬

‫مؤاخذ بالأنفاس واللحظات والخطوات ‪aD:‬‬

‫وكانت العاقبة إلى خير وسلامة‪ .‬تم ّ الكتاب بأسره بعون ‪ gB: illegible (cut off) h D:‬منها ‪ f D:‬السطور‬ ‫الله تعالى و يسره واسأل الله تعالى صلاحا بذلك وتوفيفا للقول والعمل بمنه وكرمه إنه على ما يشاء قدير والصلاة‬ ‫]ص ‪٥٨‬أ[ والسلام على أشرف المرسلين محم ّد وآله وصحبه وسل ّم‪ .‬تم ّ الكتاب والله أعلم بالصواب‪.‬‬

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certainly, you shall exist by the gathering of breaths and thoughts and [then] you are dead.’ Then he left me alone. I continued to search, to investigate [the subject], to interrogate the scholars (ahl al-khibra) [for] an eight-year period, until I [managed to] uncover what was hidden (al-mastūr) in these two [works]. This is what happened to me.” This is what came to us from the Book of Sharāsīm the Indian complete and in full. Praise be to God in every situation, and may the blessing and the great salvation of God be upon our lord Muḥammad the prophet of the Gentiles, on his people and his Companions.

fol. 337a

‫المقالة السادسة في ذكر أحجار‬

‫وعقاقير وأعضاء حيوانات‬

fol. 335a

fol. 332b

fol. 325b

‫المقالة الخامسة في ذكر أدهان‬

‫عجيبة‬

‫المقالة الرابعة في ذكر تعفينات‬

‫كبة‬ ّ ‫والأخلاط المر‬

‫المقالة الثالثة في عجائب الدخن‬

‫والحروف الهندي ّة والعر بي ّة‬

‫ص الأشكال‬ ّ ‫المقالة الثانية في خوا‬

fol. 322b

fol. 319b

‫المقالة الأولى في ذكر روحاني ّة‬

‫الـكواكب السبعة واستخدامها‬

fol. 318b

Introduction

Istanbul, Hamidiye 189

fol. 133a

fol. 130a

fol. 126a

fol. 115a

fol. 110b

fol. 106b

fol. 104b

Istanbul, Hacı Beşir Ağa 659

fol. 43b

f. 39a (non-rubricated)

fol. 33b (non-rubricated)

fol. 17a

fol. 10b

fol. 4a

fol. 1b

Cambridge, University Library, Or. 25

Appendix 3: Manuscripts’ Tables of Contents

[?]

[?]

fol. 27b

fol. 13b

fol. 6b

fol. 1b (acephalous)

–

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 2634

[?]

[?]

p. 84

p. 38

p. 17

p. 1 (acephalous)

–

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 2635

fol. 36b

fol. 33b

fol. 27a

fol. 14a

fol. 8a

fol. 3a

fol. 1b (partial)

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 2595

fol. 14a

fol. 12b

fol. 12a

fol. 6b

fol. 2a

fol. 2a

fol. 1b

Chester Beatty Library, 4353

372 coulon

‫وستروها بها‬

‫رموزها عظيمة رمزوا بها كتبهم‬

‫المقالة العاشرة في ذكر أقلام‬

‫ومنومات وحل ّها‬

‫المقالة التاسعة في ذكر مخدرات‬

‫وتسليطات‬

‫المقالة الثامنة في ذكر تدهينات‬

‫والأشياء وقلب العيان‬

‫المقالة السابعة في ذكر تغي ّر الألوان‬

(cont.)

fol. 342a

fol. 342a

fol. 340b

fol. 338b

Istanbul, Hamidiye 189

fol. 141a

fol. 140b

fol. 139a

fol. 135b

Istanbul, Hacı Beşir Ağa 659

fol. 54a

fol. 54a

fol. 51b

fol. 47a

Cambridge, University Library, Or. 25

[fol. 49a ?]

fol. 45a

fol. 40a

[?]

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 2634

[p. 146 ?]

p. 134

p. 119

[?]

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 2635

fol. 46b

fol. 43a

fol. 41a

fol. 40a

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 2595

fol. 16b

f. 15b

[?]

fol. 15a

Chester Beatty Library, 4353

the kitāb sharāsīm al-hindiyya

373

374

coulon

Acknowledgements The study of this text was the subject of several presentations: July 9, 2015, at the workshop “La magie et les sciences occultes dans le monde islamique” of the congress of the GIS “Moyen Orient et Mondes Musulmans” held in Paris; January 7, 2016 at the symposium “Islamic Occultism in Theory and Practice” organized by Liana Saif, Francesca Leoni, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, and Farouk Yahya at the University of Oxford and the Ashmolean Museum; March 11, 2016 at the seminar “Recherches en histoire des textes scientifiques et magiques au Moyen Âge” organized by Jean-Patrice Boudet within the “Sciences du Quadrivium” Center at the IRHT (Orléans); and on March 21, 2017 in the cycle of workshops “La magie dans l’Orient juif, chrétien et musulman: recherches en cours et études de cas” held in Paris. At each of these presentations, I had access to new manuscripts that allowed me to refine my knowledge of this text and to update this ongoing research whose ultimate goal will be the publication of the critical edition and the translation of this text. Thus, a version of this study, entitled “Le mystérieux Livre de Šarāsīm l’ Indienne (Kitāb Šarāsīm alHindiyya) sur la sīmiyāʾ” will appear in my forthcoming edited volume Magie et sciences occultes dans le monde islamique (Marseille, Diacritiques Éditions, 2020). I thank Teymour Morel and Liana Saif for their invaluable help in gathering and discovering manuscripts. It was also Liana Saif who discovered that the contents of the BnF manuscript Arabe 2595, cataloged under the title of ʿUyūn al-ḥaqāʾiq, contained, in reality, the Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya which concerns us here. I am also particularly grateful to Korshi Dosoo for reading this paper and polishing its style and for his comments and remarks. All errors are my own.

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Gardiner, Noah. “The Occultist Encyclopedism of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī.” Mamlūk Studies Review 20 (2017): 3–38. Grignaschi, Mario. “L’origine et les métamorphoses du ‘Sirr al-ʾasrâr’.” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen-Âge 43 (1976): 7–112. Grignaschi, Mario. “Remarques sur la formation et l’interprétation du Sirr al-asrār.” In Pseudo-Aristotle: The Secret of secrets, Sources and influences, edited by William Francis Ryan and Charles Bernard Schmitt, 3–33. London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1982. Gril, Denis. “La science des lettres.” In Les illuminations de la Mecque, edited by Michel Chodkiewicz, 385–487. Paris: Sindbad, 1988. Hämeen-Anttila, Jaakko. “Ibn Waḥshiyya and Magic.” Anaquel de Estudios Arabes 10 (1999): 39–48. Hämeen-Anttila, Jaakko. The Last Pagans of Iraq. Ibn Waḥshiyya and His Nabatean Agriculture. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Hamidiyee Kütüphanesi’nde Mahfuz Bulunan Kütüb-i Mevcudenin Defteri. Istanbul, 1300/1882–1883. Harris, Nicholas G. “In Search of ʿIzz al-Dīn Aydamir al-Jildakī, Mamlūk Alchemist.” In “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” edited by Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner. Special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 531–556. Houzel, Christian, and Roshdi Rashed. “Théorie des nombres amiables.” In Thābit ibn Qurra: Science and Philosophy in Ninth-Century Baghdad, edited by Roshdi Rashed. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. Kahl, Oliver, and Zeina Matar. “A Treatise on the Amicable Numbers 220 and 284 Attributed to Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī.” Journal of Semitic Studies 35, no. 2 (1990): 233–243. Kazimirski, Albin de Biberstein. Dictionnaire arabe-français. Paris: Maisonneuve, 1860. Kraus, Paul. Jābir ibn Ḥayyān. Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam, edited by Fuat Sezgin, 2 vols. Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut FRANÇAIS d’Archéologie Orientale, 1942–1943; reproduced Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1986. Larzul, Sylvette. “Herbelot.” In Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française, edited by François Pouillon, 488–489. Paris: Institut d’Études de l’Islam et des Sociétés du Monde Musulman and Karthala, 2008. Levey, Martin. Medieval Arabic Toxicology: The Book on Poisons of Ibn Waḥshīya and Its Relation to Early Indian and Greek Texts. Philadelphia: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 1966. Lory, Pierre. Alchimie et mystique en terre d’Islam. Paris: Gallimard, 2003. Lory, Pierre. “Kashifi’s Asrār-i Qāsimī and Timurid Magic.” Iranian Studies 36, no. 4 (2003): 531–541. Lory, Pierre. La science des lettres en islam. Paris: Éditions Dervy, 2004. MacGuckin, William, Baron de Slane. Catalogue des manuscrits arabes. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1883–1895.

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Moureau, Sébastien, and Cécile Bonmariage. Le cercle des lettres de l’alphabet: un traité pratique de magie des lettres attribué à Hermès. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Pingree, David. From Astral Omens to Astrology from Babylon to Bīkāner. Rome: Instituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 1997. Saif, Liana. “The Cows and the Bees: Arabic Sources and Parallels for Pseudo-Plato’s Liber vaccae (Kitāb al-Nawāmīs).” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 79 (2016): 1–47. Saif, Liana. “From Ġāyat al-ḥakīm to Šams al-maʿārif : Ways of Knowing and Paths of Power in Medieval Islam.” In “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” edited by Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner. Special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 297–345. Saif, Liana. “Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ’s Religious Reform and Magic: Beyond the Ismaʿili Hypothesis.” Journal of Islamic Studies 29 (2018): 1–36. Schwab, Moïse. Vocabulaire de l’angélologie. Paris: Klincksieck, 1897; reprint Milan, Archè, 1989. Sezgin, Fuat. Geschichte der arabischen Schrifttums. 15 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1967–2010. Steingass, Francis Joseph. A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary. 5th edition. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited, 1963. Toral-Niehoff, Isabel, and Annette Sundermeyer. “Going Egyptian in Medieval Arabic Culture: The Long-Desired Fulfilled Knowledge of Occult Alphabets by Pseudo-Ibn Waḥshiyya.” In The Occult Sciences in Pre-Modern Islamic Cultures, edited by Nader El-Bizri and Eva Orthmann, 249–264. Beirut: Orient-Institut Beirut, 2018. Ullmann, Manfred. Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam. Leiden: Brill, 1972. Vajda, Georges. “Une synthèse peu connue de la révélation et de la philosophie: Le Kanz al-ʿulūm de Muḥammad b. ʿAlī Ibn Tūmart al-Andalusī.” Mélanges Louis Massignon, vol. 3, 359–374. Damascus, 1956–1957. Van der Lugt, Maaike. “‘Abominable Mixtures’: The Liber vaccae in the Medieval West, or the Dangers and Attractions of Natural Magic.” Traditio 64 (2009): 229–277. Winkler, Hans Alexander. Siegel und Charaktere in der muhammedanischen Zauberei. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1930. Yahia, Osman. Histoire et classification de l’œuvre d’Ibn ʿArabī: étude critique. 2 vols. Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, 1964.

chapter 9

Toward a Neopythagorean Historiography: Kemālpaşazāde’s (d. 1534) Lettrist Call for the Conquest of Cairo and the Development of Ottoman Occult-Scientific Imperialism Matthew Melvin-Koushki

The occult sciences, recent research has shown, were central to the construction of Ottoman imperial ideology and political-military strategy from the late ninth/fifteenth century until the mid-tenth/sixteenth, and their prestige persisted long thereafter.1 Bāyezīd II (r. 886–918/1481–1512) initiated this turn with his devotion to astrology; he institutionalized the science at the Ottoman court to an extent unprecedented and perhaps unparalleled elsewhere in the early modern West.2 But it is only with the astonishing conquests of his son Yavuz Selīm (r. 918–926/1512–1520)—seemingly magical in their rapidity—that we

1 See, in particular, Cornell Fleischer, “Ancient Wisdom and New Sciences: Prophecies at the Ottoman Court in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries,” in Falnama: Book of Omens, ed. Massoumeh Farhad and Serpil Bağcı (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009): 232–243; Cornell Fleischer, “Shadow of Shadows: Prophecy in Politics in 1530s Istanbul,” in Identity and Identity Formation in the Ottoman World: A Volume of Essays in Honor of Norman Itzkowitz, ed. Baki Tezcan and Karl K. Barbir (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 51–62. On the persistence of a prototypically Timurid (and, by extension, Ottoman) mode of imperial occultism in the Persianate world even through the turn of the twentieth century, see Matthew MelvinKoushki and James Pickett, “Mobilizing Magic: Occultism in Central Asia and the Continuity of High Persianate Culture under Russian Rule,” Studia Islamica 111, no. 2 (2016): 231–284. 2 See Ahmet Tunç Şen, “Astrology in the Service of the Empire: Knowledge, Prognostication, and Politics at the Ottoman Court” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2016); Ahmet Tunç Şen, “Reading the Stars at the Ottoman Court: Bāyezīd II (r. 886/1481–918/1512) and His Celestial Interests,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 557–608. For intellectualand cultural-historical purposes, I define “the West” as the half of Afro-Eurasia west of South India, incorporating the Arabic, Persian, and Latin cosmopolises, that vast realm where the Hellenic-Abrahamic synthesis reigned supreme and philosophy was pursued in simultaneously mathematical and linguistic terms (Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Taḥqīq vs. Taqlīd in the Renaissances of Western Early Modernity,”Philological Encounters 3, no. 1 (2018): 193–249). To the extent other regions were later incorporated into these cosmopolises, moreover, they too may be considered Western.

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can begin to speak of an Ottoman Empire, and the beginnings of Ottoman imperial universalism. Like his father Bāyezīd and more glorious son Ḳānūnī Süleymān (r. 926–974/1520–1566), Selīm would seem to have been an important patron of the occult sciences to this end. Yet he has been little studied as such. Nevertheless, surviving archival evidence suggests that Selīm too relied on court occultists (astrologers, lettrists, geomancers) for political and military intelligence during his career of conquest and took seriously their ideological formulations in panegyric; this includes in the first place his campaigns against the Safavids at the Battle of Chaldiran in 920/1514 and against the Mamluk Sultanate in 922/1516–1517. With his conclusive, epochal triumphs, which vaulted the Ottoman state to the status of an Islamicate and Mediterranean superpower, Ottoman imperial ideology became increasingly aggressively millenarian and apocalyptic in tenor—as well as occult-scientific. Due to endemic scholarly occultophobia, however, this basic feature of early Ottoman imperialism has long been elided in the historiography, apart from the work of a few specialists in the last two decades; as a consequence, most of the great mass of relevant occult-scientific texts produced by Ottoman court elites have yet to be studied, much less published in modern editions. This is a problem that continues to cripple the study of Islamicate and especially Persianate early modernity as a whole: the intellectual and social history of Arabo-Persian occult sciences like astrology, alchemy, lettrism, and geomancy—utterly mainstream in the elite scholarly discourses of the post-Mongol Persian cosmopolis, including the Ottoman sphere—remains almost entirely unwritten. Not one monograph on any of these major components and drivers of Western early modernity has been published to date.3 This, of course, is in extreme contrast to scholarship on the early modern Far West, which is to say Latinate Europe, where the same sciences, particularly astrology and kabbalah, have been taken incomparably more seriously by historians of science and historians of empire

3 While several such studies are forthcoming, at the time of writing they remain primarily in the form of unpublished dissertations produced in the last seven years. See, e.g., Şen, “Astrology in the Service”; Tuna Artun, “Hearts of Gold and Silver: Production of Alchemical Knowledge in the Early Modern Ottoman World” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2013); Nicholas G. Harris, “Better Religion through Chemistry: Aydemir al-Jildakī and Alchemy under the Mamluks” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2020); Noah D. Gardiner, “Esotericism in a Manuscript Culture: Aḥmad al-Būnī and His Readers through the Mamlūk Period” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2014); Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “The Quest for a Universal Science: The Occult Philosophy of Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Turka Iṣfahānī (1369–1432) and Intellectual Millenarianism in Early Timurid Iran” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2012); Fien De Block, “(Re)drawing the Lines: The Science of the Stars in the Late Fifteenth Century Sultanate of Cairo” (PhD diss., Ghent University, 2020).

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alike—for occult science becomes a reasonable pursuit worthy of chronicling only when done by Latin Christians. Multiple studies apiece have thus been devoted to or frequently treat of early modern Christian sovereigns, like Rudolf II (r. 1576–1612), Holy Roman Emperor, and Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725), Europeanizer of Russia, precisely in their status as occult philosopher-kings,4 but none to Selīm’s equally openly occult-scientific construction of the Ottoman Empire as New Byzantium. Indeed, the first scholarly monograph on Selīm in a West European language was published only in 2017, and it nowhere notes the Ottoman conqueror’s personal reliance on occult scientists for both ideological and military-strategic purposes.5 Such a blatant double standard, purely Enlightened colonialist-orientalist in origin, is designed to mystify, to Otherize, to de-Westernize the Mediterranean empire that is the Ottoman, to say nothing of its competitor Persianate imperial polities to the east.6 That our picture of Ottoman occult-scientific imperial culture is necessarily still hazy and impressionistic as a result further reinforces in turn the historiographically perverting impression, entirely illusory, of a strict early modern East-West, Islamdom-Christendom divide. While this impression is being ably combated on many fronts, particularly by historians committed to Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s connected histories approach to the study of the millenarian imperialism common to the early modern Afro-Eurasian ecumene as a whole,7 the occult science front remains firmly in the control of hostile historiographical forces dedicated to the mystification and orientalization of Islam. But the remedy is a simple one, if strenuous: let us to the Arabo-PersoTurkish sources.8 This article is a modest offering in this philological vein. 4 See, e.g., Peter Marshall, The Magic Circle of Rudolf II: Alchemy and Astrology in Renaissance Prague (New York: Walker, 2009); Robert Collis, The Petrine Instauration: Religion, Esotericism and Science at the Court of Peter the Great, 1689–1725 (Leiden: Brill, 2012). This spate of scholarship was initiated by Frances Yates (d. 1981), particularly in her Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Pimlico, 1975). 5 H. Erdem Çipa, The Making of Selim: Succession, Legitimacy, and Memory in the Early Modern Ottoman World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). This otherwise excellent study, which rightly presents Selīm as quintessential early modern Eurasian ruler, touches in passing on only a few of the occult-scientific aspects (astrological, lettrist, oneiromantic) of the various ideological (re)constructions of Selīm’s royal persona after his death. 6 On this problem, see Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “(De)colonizing Early Modern Occult Philosophy,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 12, no. 1 (2017): 98–112. 7 An approach first announced in Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 735–762; see also Cornell Fleischer, “A Mediterranean Apocalypse: Prophecies of Empire in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61 (2018): 18–90. 8 See my call for a return to radical cosmic philology in Melvin-Koushki, “Taḥqīq vs. Taqlīd.”

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Given how thickly occult-scientific texts populate the surviving Ottoman archive, however, we are fairly spoiled for choice. I therefore invoke as representative example a short Turkish treatise ostensibly penned by Kemālpaşazāde Aḥmed (d. 940/1534) in late 1516 or early 1517, wherein the famed Ottoman scholar and soon-to-be imperial Chief Jurisconsult (shaykh al-islām) urges Selīm to conquer Cairo—a feat his dread patron promptly achieved (in February 1517), with major ramifications for early modern Western history. Indeed, later sources suggest that it was precisely his ideological support for Selīm during the Ottoman invasion of the Mamluk Sultanate, in which he participated, that earned our scholar his exalted imperial appointment in Istanbul several years later.9 Significantly, however, Kemālpaşazāde’s argument therein is exclusively lettrist: he analyzes Q 21:105—For We have written in the Psalms, after the Remembrance: My righteous servants shall inherit the land—to scientifically prove the Ottoman sovereign’s conquest of the Mamluk capital to be cosmically inevitable. Despite the fame of its author, this curious yet likely authentic little work, titled simply Fetḥ-i Mıṣır ḥaḳḳında īmā ve işārāt (“Allusions as to the Conquest of Egypt”) and preserved in at least two late manuscripts,10 has been ignored in the scholarship to date. The sole exception is a brief 1990 study with modern Latin transcription by Mustafa Kılıç, which first brought it to light; but that study, symptomatically, wholly abstracts the treatise from its intellectual and ideological context.11 (Cornell Fleischer’s brief citation of the same treatise provides a corrective.12) True, it is easily disappeared into Kemālpaşazāde’s vast

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Kemālpaşazāde likewise provided crucial legal support for Selīm’s offensive against the Safavids at the Battle of Chaldiran, penning to this end a treatise, Risāla fī Takfīr al-rawāfiḍ (“On declaring the rejectionists [i.e., Shiʿis] unbelievers”), that rules war against Shah Ismāʿīl to be not a collective but an individual legal obligation ( farḍ ʿayn) (V.L. Ménage, “Kemāl Pas̲h̲a-Zāde,”Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.; see Nihal Atsız, “Kemalpaşaoğlu’nun Eserleri I,” Şarkiyat Mecmuası 6 (1966): 71–112, esp. 109–110, no. 84). In recognition of his ideological support for this and the Syria campaign, Selīm had already promoted him to the prestigious post of chief military judge (ḳāḍīʿasker) of Anadolu in late 1516. It should be noted, however, that Kemālpaşazāde was not elevated to the position of şeyḫülislam until 1524, and demoted from his military judgeship in the meantime (my thanks to Ahmet Tunç Şen for this observation). Istanbul, Süleymaniye MS Esad Efendi 3729/2, fols. 136a–137b; Konya, MS Mevlana Müzesi 2315/2, fols. 71b–72b. In the latter majmūʿa, Kemālpaşazāde’s treatise occurs between the poet Fażlī’s (d. 1563) Gül u bülbül (“Rose and nightingale”) (fols. 2b–70a) and a collection of his own fatwas (fols. 73a–99b). Mustafa Kılıç, “İbn-i Kemal’in Mısır Fethine Dair Bir Risale-i Acibesi,” Diyanet Dergisi 26 (1990): 111–120. Fleischer, “Seer to the Sultan: Haydar-i Remmal and Sultan Süleyman,” in Cultural Hori-

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oeuvre, the majority of which is not occult-scientific in tenor; yet it offers a window onto not just one Ottoman scholar’s individual occultist “dabblings” but rather the development of Ottoman, and by extension early modern Islamicate, universalist imperial ideology as a whole, and that at a critical, transformative juncture in Western history. I do not here propose to situate Kemālpaşazāde’s treatise in the broader history of lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf ), a science I have treated of elsewhere at length in relation to post-Mongol history of science and history of empire;13 I will merely adumbrate, as a prompt to specialists, the immediate textual and theoretical context in which it may most productively be read. Suffice it to say that in the early modern Persianate context lettrism emerged as the primary expression of Islamic Neopythagoreanism—precisely as kabbalah, the Arabic science’s coeval Hebrew twin, was being embraced as the same by Jewish and Christian scholars in the Renaissance Latinate: world as (Arabic/Hebrew) text.14 This study thus but provides further philological corroboration of the framework for the study of early modern Ottoman occult-scientific, millenarian, and apocalyptic imperialism constructed by Cornell Fleischer and İhsan Fazlıoğlu and their students.15 More specifically, it serves to complement Ahmet Tunç Şen’s work on Ottoman astrology in general and Kemālpaşazāde in particular, to whom was also attributed, probably correctly, a treatise on talismans and astral magic, likewise calculated to serve Ottoman imperial ends,16 and our

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zons: A Festschrift in Honor of Talat S. Halman, ed. Jayne L. Warner, 2 vols. (Istanbul and Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 1:290–299, esp. 295. See, e.g., Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Powers of One: The Mathematicalization of the Occult Sciences in the High Persianate Tradition,” Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 5, no. 1 (2017): 127–199; Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Imperial Talismanic Love: Ibn Turka’s Debate of Feast and Fight (1426) as Philosophical Romance and Lettrist Mirror for Timurid Princes,” Der Islam 96, no. 1 (2019): 42–86; Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Early Modern Islamicate Empire: New Forms of Religiopolitical Legitimacy,” in The Wiley-Blackwell History of Islam, ed. Armando Salvatore, Roberto Tottoli, and Babak Rahimi (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), 353–375. See, e.g., Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “The New Brethren of Purity: Ibn Turka and the Renaissance of Neopythagoreanism in Early Modern Iran,” in Companion to the Reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism, ed. Aurélien Robert, Irene Caiazzo, and Constantin Macris, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming); Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “World as (Arabic) Text: Mīr Dāmād and the Neopythagoreanization of Philosophy in Safavid Iran,” Studia Islamica 114, no. 3 (2019): 378–431. See, e.g., Fleischer, “Ancient Wisdom”; Fazlıoğlu, “İlk Dönem Osmanlı İlim ve Kültür Hayatında İhvanu’s-Safâ ve Abdurrahman Bistâmî,”Dîvân: İlmî Araştırmalar 1 (1996): 229–240. This treatise is studied and contextualized in A. Tunç Şen, “Practicing Astral Magic in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Istanbul: A Treatise on Talismans Attributed to Ibn Kemāl (d. 1534),” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 12, no. 1 (2017): 66–88.

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study of Selīm’s reliance on astrology, lettrism, and geomancy in the runup to the Battle of Chaldiran and its immediate aftermath.17 It also extends Noah Gardiner’s equally pivotal studies of thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Mamluk Cairo as emergent occult-scientific capital of the Islamicate world.18 To their findings I add my own on intellectual-ideological developments between Mamluk, Timurid, and Aqquyunlu spheres during the transformative ninth/fifteenth century—precisely the source, I argue, of Ottoman lettrist imperialism, first developed in the early tenth/sixteenth century in the immediate wake of Selīm’s victory at Chaldiran and conquest of Syria and Egypt, of which Kemālpaşazāde is among the earliest exponents.19 More broadly, this study stands as counterpoint and control for the study of those cognate—if less successful— early modern forms of Christian kabbalist scientific imperialism developed slightly to the west, emblematized by the ardent Welsh Neopythagoreanizer John Dee’s (d. 1609) status as occultist-cartographer to Queen Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) and coiner of the term “Brytish Impire.”20

1

Kemālpaşazāde’s Lettrist Argument

The lettrist argument advanced by our Ottoman scholar-ideologue in this short treatise is admirably pellucid and straightforward, and easily summarized. For the text itself, I refer the reader to Kılıç’s (highly idiosyncratic) transcription of that preserved in MS Mevlana Müzesi 2315, the work of a later copyist, who opens, in encomium: “That sultan of scholars and lord of worthies, the late Kemālpaşazāde, produced the following remarkable (ʿacīb) treatise on the conquest of Egypt.”

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Şen and Melvin-Koushki, “Divining Chaldiran: Ottoman Deployments of Astrology, Lettrism and Geomancy in the Ottoman-Safavid Conflict,” forthcoming. See, e.g., Gardiner, “Esotericism”; Gardiner, “The Occultist Encyclopedism of ʿAbd alRaḥmān al-Bisṭāmī,” Mamlūk Studies Review 20 (2017): 3–38, and his forthcoming monograph Occult Cairo. I summarize my findings to date in two forthcoming monographs: Occult Philosophers and Philosopher Kings in Early Modern Iran: The Life and Legacy of Ibn Turka, Timurid Lettrist, and The Occult Science of Empire in Aqquyunlu-Safavid Iran: Two Shirazi Lettrists and Their Manuals of Magic. See, e.g., John Dee, The Limits of the British Empire, ed. Ken MacMillan (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004); Håkan Håkansson, Seeing the Word: John Dee and Renaissance Occultism (Lund: Lunds Universitet, 2001); Yates, Astraea. For a comparative study of early modern Western (Islamo-Christianate) occult-scientific imperialisms, see Melvin-Koushki, The Occult Science of Empire.

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Again, the treatise consists wholly of an analysis of Q 21:105: For We have written in the Psalms, after the Remembrance: My righteous servants shall inherit the land. Even on the face of it, this quranic promise has a clear imperialist thrust and had long been interpreted and invoked as such, but it is entirely vague as to historical timing: any self-identified Muslim sovereign was free to lay claim to it, and many did over the centuries. How best, then, to make one’s imperial claim to a quranic promise exclusive, in the teeth of rival claimants? By means of lettrist analysis, whereby the Quran itself may be mathematicized, and hence rehistoricized. It is a basic principle of letter divination ( jafr), from the Comprehensive Prognosticon (al-Jafr wa-l-jāmiʿa) of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 40/661) onward, that the quranic muqaṭṭaʿāt21 are the richest possible source of data about past, present, and future events, especially political events, to the end of time; but this principle could be and was easily extended to the Quran as a whole, and indeed to any word or name of relevance, such as those of the political actors involved.22 As with the famous Sūrat al-Rūm prophecy, on which more below, temporally vague quranic statements may thus be revealed to encode the precise dates on and places in which, and by precisely whose agency, they may be expected to historically manifest. A basic facility with lettrist operations, such as ḥisāb al-jummal and taksīr (cf. Hebrew gematria and temurah), could therefore be an especially attractive skill in a scholar in search of royal patronage. In penning this short treatise, then, Kemālpaşazāde showed himself to be one such scholar; and Selīm rewarded him more than amply for his mastery of this mathematical-quranic science. Our soon-to-be Ottoman şeyḫülislam boldly opens with a summary of his lettrist findings: The cited holy verse constitutes a sublime and subtle allusion to the fact that the lands of Egypt will, in the wintertime of two years past 9[20], easily pass from the hands of the slave faction controlling the aforementioned region into the control of the governors of free men, who will eradicate them. That victorious army’s leader will be of the house of ʿOs̱mān and they hence are called Ottomans; and the glorious sultan who will lead them in the conquest of the aforesaid region will be called Selīm.

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That is, the mysterious separated letters that open 29 quranic suras; the second, Sūrat alBaqara, for instance, opens with ALM. They have no parallel in the other Abrahamic scriptures and immediately lend themselves to—even require, according to some exegetes— lettrist analysis. See Melvin-Koushki, “The Quest,” 171–172, 285–290.

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The balance of the treatise consists of a series of ten points in which the following operative elements of the verse are identified and analyzed (here bolded): ﴾َ‫حون‬ ُ ِ ‫صل‬ ّٰ َ ‫ى ٱل‬ َ ِ‫ض يرَ ِثُه َا عِب َاد‬ َ ‫ن ٱْلَأْر‬ ّ َ ‫كت َب ْن َا ف ِى ٱل َز ّبوُ رِ م ِۢن بـَـعْدِ ٱلذ ِّك ْر ِ َأ‬ َ ‫﴿و َلقَ َْد‬ wa-la-qad = 140 = Salīm al-zabūr = zamharīr B=2 1)

2)

3)

4)

dhikr = 920 al-arḍ = miṣr ʿibādī = ʿ[Uthmān] bādī

That this event will take place sometime after the Hijrī year 920 [1514– 1515CE] is indicated by the phrase after the Remembrance (min baʿd aldhikr)—for dhikr equals 920. That this event will take place two years after the Hijrī year 920, that is, in 922 [1516–1517CE], is indicated by the preposition baʿd, here broken into its elements, B (= 2) and ʿad[d], together meaning “the count of two,” that is added to the 920 of dhikr. That this event will take place in winter is indicated by the phrase in the Psalms ( fī l-zabūr), for fī is likewise a temporal particle, while al-zabūr comprises seven letters (with the L doubled), the same value as its initial letter Z—which therefore governs the timing of this event. In this case, it refers to the term zamharīr, the bitter cold of winter, which is referred to in common usage as the “forty days” (eyyām-ı ʿerbaʿīn). It is thus apparent that the battle in question will occur toward the end of the forty days of winter. That the site of this event will be Egypt is indicated by the fact that in the holy, uncreated Quran (kelām-ı ḳadīm) the term the land (al-arḍ), when used with the definite particle, usually refers to Egypt, as the following ten verses show, all treating of the Israelites under Pharaoh and their exodus: And We bequeathed upon the people that were abased in all the east and the west of the land We had blessed (Q 7:137); Yet We desired to be gracious to those that were abased in the land, and to make them leaders, and to make them the inheritors (Q 28:5); And to establish them in the land, and to show Pharaoh and Haman, and their hosts, what they were dreading from them (Q 28:6); O my people, enter the Holy Land which God has prescribed for you, and turn not back in your traces, to turn about losers (Q 5:21); ‘Wilt thou leave Moses and his people to work corruption in the land …?’ (Q 7:127); ‘Set me over the land’s storehouses …’ (Q 12:55); So We established Joseph in the land (Q 12:56); Now Pharaoh had exalted himself

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in the land and had divided its inhabitants into sects (Q 28:4); ‘Never will I quit this land …’ (Q 12:80); ‘Thou only desirest to be a tyrant in the land …’ (Q 28:19).23 5) The fifth indication as to the invasion (khurūj) will only become evident through an explanation of the eighth below. 6) That the conquest will happen easily and quickly is indicated by the verb shall inherit ( yarithu), implying a lack of struggle and great wealth as spoils. 7) The verse likewise concerns the removal of the aforementioned realm from the control of the slaves (i.e., mamlūks), indicating that that faction and their heirs will be subjugated and perish where they stand, and this at the hand of free men, their natural masters—for God’s servants (as denoted by the pronoun My) are no slaves.24 8) This has already been explained.25 9) That the victorious army will be led by a scion of ʿOs̱mān is indicated by the word My servants (ʿibādī), which is parsable as ʿ + BADY, with the initial ʿ referring to ʿOs̱mān and the BADY here reading bādī, which is to say manifest (ẓāhir). 10) That the scion of ʿOs̱mān who will manifest to lead the victorious army in question must be Selīm is indicated by the intensifying particle cluster opening the verse, wa-la-qad (WLQD), equivalent to 140—the same value as the name Selīm (SLYM). Thus analyzed, the verse is now revealed to read: Selīm—We have decreed that two [years] after 920 [1514–1515], in the winter, this [son of ] ʿOs̱mān shall manifest leading an army of righteous, free men and easily take Egypt. And so it came to pass: In the winter of 922 (January–February 1517), upon Kemālpaşazāde’s lettrist prompting, Selīm did indeed manifest with his army and easily take Egypt. (As it happened, the decisive Battle of Raydāniyya was

23 24

25

Trans. Arberry. As Kılıç notes (“İbn-i Kemal’in,” 115 n. 3, 118–119), Kemālpaşazāde rather identifies this term with Syria in his tafsir. On a similar Aqquyunlu critique of Mamluk slave origins see Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “The Delicate Art of Aggression: Uzun Hasan’s Fathnama to Qaytbay of 1469,”Iranian Studies 44, no. 2 (2011): 193–214, esp. 196. Point eight was not, in fact, explained in point five as promised, suggesting an error on the part of the copyist, or perhaps Kılıç, whose transcription is rather unreliable.

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fought on 29 Dhū l-Ḥijja 922/23 January 1517, the last day of the Islamic lunar year—one day later, and Kemālpaşazāde’s calculation as given in the treatise would have been invalidated.) Selīm’s quranic claim, unlike his Muslim opponents’, is therefore encoded mathematically in the very structure of the cosmos and hence historically ineluctable.26 To be sure, the document recording Kemālpaşazāde’s coup is brief and preserved, to my knowledge, in only two later copies and thus of questionable authenticity. Yet it accords with the scholar’s known occult-scientific proclivities,27 and the episode it records soon gained fame in scholarly circles as a classic instance of quranic prognostication in the support of empire; such factors suggest it to be at base authentic. But even if originally inauthentic, it is indicative of an early-tenth/sixteenth-century Ottoman ethos: within a century the same episode was circulating under his name even in Ottoman Arabia. It is cited, most notably, by the Maghribi Sufi-scholar and traveler Abū Sālim ʿAbd Allāh al-ʿAyyāshī (d. 1090/1679) in his celebrated Riḥla (“Travelogue”), an exceptionally rich account of his sojourn in Cairo, Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem between the years 1661–1663, whence it became a standard component of Kemālpaşazāde’s biography.28 Two centuries later, Shihāb al-Dīn Maḥmūd al-Alūsī (d. 1270/1854), Hanafi mufti of Baghdad, notes in his tafsīr on this verse Kemālpaşazāde’s amazingly (gharīb) accurate prognostication for Selīm as being a well-known story (qiṣṣa shahīra), though he personally dismisses it as mere chance;29 another century on, our Ottoman scholar’s entry as a historically preeminent Hanafi jurist in the legal history al-Fikr al-sāmī fī taʾrīkh al-fiqh al-islāmī (“High Intellection: On the History of Islamic Jurisprudence”) of Muḥammad al-Ḥajwī al-Thaʿālibī al-Fāsī (d. 1376/1956), reformist minister of justice in French-protectorate Morocco, consists solely of this episode in al-ʿAyyāshī’s telling.30 Significantly for our purposes here, moreover, the latter occurs in the context of the traveling scholar’s unusually long discussion of his interactions with one Shaykh Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad Ibn al-Tāj, chief timekeeper

26

27 28 29 30

And yet, had Selīm not been persuaded with legal and lettrist arguments, would he actually have invaded Egypt? On a similar instance of the tension between free will and predestination in Ottoman lettrist historiography, see Noah Gardiner’s Chapter 6 in this volume. See below. Al-ʿAyyāshī, al-Riḥla al-ʿAyyāshiyya, ed. Saʿīd al-Fāḍilī and Sulaymān al-Qurashī, 2 vols. (Abu Dhabi: Dār al-Suwaydī, 2006), 2:30–32. Al-Alūsī, Rūḥ al-maʿānī fī tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿaẓīm wa-l-sabʿ al-mathānī, 30 vols. (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 1970?), 17:104. Al-Ḥajwī, Kitāb al-Fikr al-sāmī fī taʾrīkh al-fiqh al-islāmī, 4 vols. (Rabat: Maṭbaʿat Idārat alMaʿārif, 1345–1349/1927–31), 4:23–24, no. 550. This and the previous two sources are cited by Kılıç.

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(muwaqqit) at the sanctuary in Medina; like many of his profession, Ibn alTāj was renowned for his skill in the mathematical sciences, including in the first place astrology, lettrism and various other methods of prognostication— sciences evidently still esteemed by Ottoman political elites of the later eleventh/seventeenth century no less than by those of the early tenth/sixteenth.31 I translate it in full: Another example of the same principle, to wit, that the holy Quran comprises within it information about everything [that has been, is or will ever be], including disasters and other major events, was related to me by my current subject, Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad Ibn al-Tāj, as follows: The king of Anatolia (malik bilād al-Rūm), Sultan Salīm, one of the [great] kings of the day, was the first among them to invade Egypt and wrest it from the hand of Sultan al-Ghawrī, this in the year 923 [1517]. His motivation in so doing was the fact that, having just conquered Syria, he desired to extend his conquests to Iraq, for it was the homeland and residence of his Turkmen forebears. [Salīm] accordingly decamped from Istanbul, his capital, but when he arrived with his forces to Syria, he was unable to provision them adequately due to the great rise in prices in that region; he therefore required provisioning from Egypt and wrote to alGhawrī to that effect, requesting to be provisioned from his realm. But when Shah [Ismāʿīl], the king of Persian Iraq at that time, heard of Sultan Salīm’s mobilization, he wrote to al-Ghawrī, his ally, asking that he deflect and impede [Salīm] to the extent possible. This request found al-Ghawrī already furious at Sultan Salīm for taking Syria and fearing that he intended to extend his domain to Egypt. (At the time, Egypt was the center of the Islamic world, ruled by its most poweful kings, for the Abbasid caliphate had been transferred there in the wake of the Mon-

31

Al-ʿAyyāshī, al-Riḥla, 2:11: tamahhara fī ʿilm al-ḥisāb wa-l-tawqīt wa-l-tanjīm wa-nfarada fī tilka l-aqṭār bi-maʿrifat ʿilm al-sīmiyāʾ wa-l-zayārij wa-l-ḥidthān bi-ṭuruq mutaʿaddida, fa-nāla bi-dhālika wajāhatan ʿind al-umarāʾ wa-arbāb al-manāṣib. As al-ʿAyyāshī relates, however, he was frustrated in his attempts to learn the science of jafr at Ibn al-Tāj’s hand, and expresses his frustration with a critique of lettrism more generally. That this Maghribi scholar-Sufi references Ibn Khaldūn’s own critique to this end, drawing on both the Muqaddima and Shifāʾ al-sāʾil, while also allowing for the legitimacy of the science when done by saints, is significant in this context. But despite his reservations, he attempts to present evidence in its support impartially, drawing on Ibn ʿArabī and al-Būnī in particular, as the science’s two greatest authorities, and including the anecdote about Kemālpaşazāde translated below. For this long section on Ibn al-Tāj, featuring primarily lettrist material, see al-ʿAyyāshī, 2:11–61.

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gol catastrophe.) Thus, when Sultan Salīm requested provisioning of alGhawrī, the latter thought it but a pretext [for invasion], given the timing, and not due to inflation [in Syria]; he therefore declined, offering weak excuses. Salīm accordingly divined his intent to prevent him from passing through to Iraq—and now set his sights on the conquest not of Iraq but of Egypt. To this end, he sought the counsel of the scholars in his retinue, explaining to them his grounds [for attack]: al-Ghawrī had refused him provisioning from Egypt despite his need for it. But they were unanimous: “It is not licit for you to attack him, for he is sovereign in his own realm, has been fully cooperative with your demands [in the past], and has made no declaration of war; how then could it be licit to attack him in his own realm without cause?” Among those scholars assembled, however, was the penetrating (almuḥaqqiq) Ibn Kamāl Bāshā, the most junior of them. He addressed [the sultan]: “Commander, it is indeed licit for you to attack him, for it is in the Book of God that you shall enter Egypt this very year.” [The sultan] replied, “How could that be so?” Said [Ibn Kamāl], “I will not [now] issue a fatwa in the presence of these most esteemed leading scholars of Islam but ask that you delay the matter for a week, until they have had time to contemplate it further. For God Most High has said: We have neglected nothing in the Book (Q 6:38)—how then could such a notable event as this not be in the Book of God Most High, which contains the exposition of all things?” Salīm therefore declared to the assembled: “I am delaying the matter for a week, that you might search out the meaning of what he said.” But they remonstrated: “Commander, our answer in a week will be the same as our answer now!” Ibn Kamāl, however, insisted that the delay was necessary. (His purpose in this—though God only knows—was to demonstrate to the king his [scholarly] superiority, his ability to grasp immediately what other [scholars] were unable to even upon reflection; for had he explained himself immediately, they might have claimed that anyone could grasp the matter if given time to reflect.) Having delayed the matter for a week, Salīm reassembled them once it had passed and again asked them [their legal opinion], and [as promised] they replied, “Our verdict then is our verdict now.” But said Ibn Kamāl: “Commander, they have most certainly read in the glorious Book of God that you shall enter Egypt with your army this very year, although they have not understood this fact.” [The assembled scholars] replied, “And where is that?” He answered, “In the Most High’s statement For We have written in the Psalms, after the Remembrance: My righteous servants shall

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inherit the land.” They laughed at this, saying, “What does this have to do with the matter?” [Ibn Kamāl proceeded to expound]: “The Most High’s statement for (wa-la-qad) is equivalent to [the name] Salīm by way of gematria (ḥisāb al-jummal)—both equal 140. Thus the statement [as a whole] means Salīm—We have written in the Psalms that after [the year] 920 he shall inherit the land. For the Psalms (al-dhikr) equals, minus the definite article, that number. And the land here refers, according to many exegetes, to Egypt, while the righteous servants of this era are your troops, inasmuch as there are none more upright among the armies of the Muslims in all the regions of the world, this due to their upholding the sunna of jihad and their conquest of the larger part of the Christian domains. They are committed to the way of the sunna and jamāʿa more than any other [Muslim] army, whether those of Iraq, whose creed is corrupt, as is that of most of Yemen and India, or those of the Maghrib, whose resolve to uphold the standards of Islam has become weak, or those of Egypt, whom worldly concerns have overmastered.” [Ibn Kamāl] continued in this vein at length, and Sultan Salīm was greatly pleased with his exposition. The other jurists, however, while granting the ingenuity and subtlety of his interpretation, nevertheless rejoined: “This still does not suffice to permit an attack on [a ruler] who has not rebelled or declared war against any Muslims. Even if the quranic allusion does suggest that this will take place, there must still be a proper basis on which to issue a legal opinion.” Said Ibn Kamāl, “Commander, this too may be readily found. Simply send a message to Sultan al-Ghawrī as follows: ‘When I arrived in this region I was unable to accomplish what I had here intended, so I have purposed rather to make for the Hijaz to perform the rite of pilgrimage. But I have no route nor means of provisioning except through your realm; I therefore desire that you grant me permission to pass through your realm and provision therein.’ There is no doubt but that he will forbid and debar you from passing through his realm— and if he debars you from performing the pilgrimage, it becomes licit for you to attack him and declare war.” Thereupon the [assembled] jurists expressed their support (istaḥsana) for his [ingenious] opinion on the matter (for their legal school is replete with such casuistry, and the embrace of such [dubious] methods is for them a universal law).32 Sultan Salīm therefore wrote to al-Ghawrī in this

32

I.e., the Hanafi. This snide aside reflects al-ʿAyyāshī’s Malikism.

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wise, who replied in hostile fashion [as predicted]: he strongly declared his refusal, promising that [Salīm] shall not drink even a cupful from the Nile unless it be over the backs of his slain, and other such threats. This but strengthened Sultan Salīm’s resolve to attack Egypt, and he began the necessary preparations. Thus did [Salīm’s] conquest of that realm take place, whereby he erased the claim of al-Ghawrī to Egypt, and slaughtered most of her scholars and worthies and many of her officials, including even the Abbasid caliph himself. But God’s command is doom decreed (Q 33:38). Ibn Kamāl’s standing [with the sultan] rose greatly as a consequence, who thereupon offered him his choice of imperial appointments (al-wilāya); he chose the muftiship (al-fatwā) [of Istanbul], which he was granted, and excelled therein, greatly promoting scholarship and elevating scholars. (May God accept his [labors], amen.)33 A curious and memorable anecdote indeed—like the thousand similar such scattered throughout early modern Arabo-Perso-Turkish chronicles, biographical dictionaries and other works, and similarly substantiated by uncounted surviving lettrist treatises by scholars famed, like Kemālpaşazāde, or forgotten. Regardless of the authenticity of this particular treatise, it thus accurately reflects an ethos in which the strategic application of occult science was considered an excellent means of securing patronage and climbing the imperial hierarchy. But how precisely does it testify to an Ottoman intellectualideological seachange in the early sixteenth century, to the inception of an Ottoman lettrist imperialism?

2

The New Brethren in Cairo, Occult-Scientific Capital of the Persian Cosmopolis

Due to the persistent eurocentrism and arabocentrism of Islamic history as a field, the Ottoman Empire has been far better studied than its rival Persianate empires to the east, Safavid, Uzbek and Mughal (this despite the fact that the last far outstripped it in population and wealth), and the profound depend33

Note the rather confused timeline portrayed in al-ʿAyyāshī’s telling: Qānṣūh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501–1516) died of stroke during the Battle of Marj Dābiq in August 1516, and so was hardly on hand in Cairo to angrily refuse Selīm’s request for passage through Egypt to the Hijaz later that year. The details of Kemālpaşazāde’s explication are likewise dropped, including his analysis of the words baʿd, al-zabūr, yarithu and ʿibādī.

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ence of early Ottoman imperialism and intellectual culture alike on specifically Timurid-Aqquyunlu models is still all too rarely acknowledged. Considerably more attention has been paid to its Sunnizing self-definition in opposition to Safavid messianic Shiʿi ideology on the one hand and its absorption of Mamluk Arabic high literary culture—with Selīm’s conquest of the Sultanate—on the other; Ottoman elite culture, while remaining heavily Persianate, was indeed thenceforth gradually arabicized to a certain extent, and increasingly mediterraneanized, as it were, the state’s expansionist martial vigor trained more on West Europe after Chaldiran. In particular, it inherited Mamluk encyclopedism, as well as a book culture that for sheer volume and variety dwarfed its Renaissance Latin cognate to the northwest.34 What is routinely forgotten, however, is that the Mamluk Cairo and Damascus Selīm conquered in the early sixteenth century had themselves been crucial nodes of the Persianate world since the thirteenth: these cities were the vectors by which peculiarly Maghribi intellectual-ideological developments— including in the first place lettrism itself—became hegemonic throughout the post-Mongol persophone east. This basic point, little noted by Mamlukists and hence Ottomanists, has long been appreciated by historians of Sufism, who have tracked the epochal eastward transmission of the (heavily lettrist) thought of Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) in particular.35 But the still dominant religionist, Corbinian tendency in that field to a) disappear occultism into Sufism and b) depoliticize both, has meant that such a remarkable and robust phenomenon as Persianate occult-scientific imperialism, including its Ottoman subset, must magically vanish from historiographical purview. Yet it is precisely that cultural construct, I argue, that serves most strikingly to distinguish post-Mongol Islamicate political theory and practice from pre-Mongol precedent, that helps mark the advent of a Western early modernity.36 We postmodern historians of early modern Islamdom must therefore calm our colonialist mania for drawing borders, for rupture, by focusing rather on

34

35

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For references see Melvin-Koushki, “Taḥqīq vs. Taqlīd”; Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Of Islamic Grammatology: Ibn Turka’s Lettrist Metaphysics of Light,” al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 24 (2016): 42–113. Hailed Doctor Maximus (al-shaykh al-akbar) by his admirers and Doctor infidelissimus (al-shaykh al-akfar) by his detractors, Ibn ʿArabī’s strictly monist, Neoplatonic-quranic mystical philosophy pervades post-Mongol Islamicate intellectual history; it constitutes the primary counterweight to mainstream Peripatetic-Illuminationist philosophy and was definitively synthesized with the same in the ninth/fifteenth century by thinkers like Ibn Turka, the preeminent Ibn ʿArabian lettrist (on whom see below). Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Taḥqīq vs. Taqlīd”; Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Imperial Talismanic Love”; Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Early Modern Islamicate Empire.”

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the astonishing continuities—cosmological, cultural, intellectual, imperial, occultist—that made the vast Persianate world, and indeed the early modern Islamo-Christianate world more broadly, an organic civilizational whole.37 And these continuities were sustained, naturally, by the free circulation of scholars and texts between politically competitive polities, especially via magnetic cosmopolises like Cairo—where the peculiarly western Arabic science of letters was first sanctified, de-esotericized, adabized, Neopythagoreanized, and imperialized.38 These processes culminated in the Mamluk capital in the late eighth/fourteenth century, and specifically with a circle of Neopythagoreanizing scholaroccultists—the self-styled New Brethren of Purity—attached to al-Malik alẒāhir Barqūq’s (r. 784–791, 792–801/1382–1389, 1390–1399) court.39 As new research is showing, this “Manifest King” would seem to have been among the first to actively experiment with the occult-scientific modes of sovereignty that would thenceforth be such a distinctive feature of political theory and

37

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See Richard Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Garth Fowden, Before and after Muḥammad: The First Millennium Refocused (Princeton, 2014). On ambiguity, contradiction and continuity as ruling principles in Islamicate societies see Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Thomas Bauer, Die Kultur der Ambiguität (Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2011). For an explanation of these terms, see Melvin-Koushki and Pickett, “Mobilizing Magic,” 248–253. On the sanctification of the occult sciences generally, see Liana Saif, “From Ġāyat al-ḥakīm to Šams al-maʿārif : Ways of Knowing and Paths of Power in Medieval Islam,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 297–345; on the deesotericization of lettrism in particular, see Gardiner, “Esotericism”; on the Neopythagoreanization of the same see Melvin-Koushki, “Powers of One”; Melvin-Koushki, “The New Brethren of Purity.”; Melvin-Koushki, “World as (Arabic) Text.” On the free circulation of scholars and texts throughout the early modern Persian cosmopolis, see, e.g., Christopher Markiewicz, The Crisis of Kingship in Late Medieval Islam: Persian Emigres and the Making of Ottoman Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Mana Kia, Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020). This handle is in reference to the original Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ) of fourth/ tenth-century Iraq, a shadowy group of scholar-bureaucrats whose encyclopedic Epistles represent the definitive expression of Islamic occultist Neopythagoreanism in the medieval period. On their decidedly nonshadowy ninth/fifteenth-century heirs, similarly ardent Neopythagoreanizing occultists but unlike them famed scholars and ideologues of empire, see Fleischer, “Ancient Wisdom”; Fazlıoğlu, “İlk Dönem Osmanlı İlim”; İlker Evrim Binbaş, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī and the Islamicate Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 3–15; Melvin-Koushki, “The Quest,” 16–19; Melvin-Koushki, “The New Brethren of Purity.”

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practice in the post-Mongol Persianate world, although no coherent platform was achieved before his death; Barqūq’s reign, like those of certain Ilkhanid rivals several decades before, may thus be seen as a trial run for the much bolder occultist imperial platforms developed for Timurid, Aqquyunlu, Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman dynasts over the next three centuries.40 Barqūq’s personal collection of occult-scientific books and evidently eager patronage of the Brethren aside, perhaps the most telling index of this watershed ideological shift is Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406) himself: that the puritanical and reactionary jurist-historian devoted a full eleven percent of his now-celebrated Muqaddima (“Prolegomena”) to anti-occultist polemic—declaring (in the final recension prepared for Barqūq) even lettrism to be mere sorcery and hence illegal, meriting capital punishment—testifies precisely to the ascendancy of occultism at his Mamluk patron’s court.41 The Brethren were not, however, themselves Mamluk scholars but Timurid and Ottoman, drawn to Cairo as the intellectual—and especially occult-scientific—capital of Islamdom of that era. The pivot of this highly mobile network of scholar-occultists, the original “Lettrist International,”42 was one Sayyid Ḥusayn Akhlāṭī (d. 799/1397); this Tabrizi Kurdish lettrist-alchemist became personal physician to Barqūq and teacher in Cairo to the most influential imperial occultists of the early ninth/fifteenth century, who were, in turn, responsible for the new models of lettrist imperialism here in view. Most notably, Akhlāṭī combined in himself the two primary strains of Western sanctified 40

41

42

On Ilkhanid ideological experimentation see, e.g., Jonathan Z. Brack, “Mediating Sacred Kingship: Conversion and Sovereignty in Mongol Iran” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2016); on the more explicitly occult-scientific platforms of their Persianate successors, see Melvin-Koushki, “Early Modern Islamicate Empire.” Noah Gardiner, Ibn Khaldūn versus the Occultists at Barqūq’s Court: The Critique of Lettrism in al-Muqaddimah (Berlin: EB Verlag, 2020); Gardiner, “Occultist Encyclopedism”; Gardiner; “Esotericism,” 317–319; Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “In Defense of Geomancy: Šaraf al-Dīn Yazdī Rebuts Ibn Ḫaldūn’s Critique of the Occult Sciences,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 346–403. In current Europeanist scholarship, the term “lettrism” (unlike its sister science kabbalah) is associated almost exclusively with the modern French surrealist movement of the same name, founded in Paris in the mid-1940s by Isidore Isou (d. 2007), a schismatic branch of which termed itself the Lettrist International. While an important aspect of fourteenth/twentieth-century French avant-garde culture, lettrism as a mainstream Western (Islamo-Judeo-Christianate) phenomenon, like its sister science kabbalah, is of far greater historical significance and influence than is implied by its modern, very limited reception in France. Terminologically, moreover, “lettrist” translates precisely the frequent self-designation of the practitioners of this science as ḥarfīs or ahl al-ḥarf and is thus both a first-order and a second-order term.

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lettrism as consolidated in Egypt by the fourteenth century: lettrist theory, associated with Ibn ʿArabī, Andalusi Doctor Maximus, and lettrist praxis, associated with the Ifriqiyan Sufi-mage Aḥmad al-Būnī (d. btw. 622–630/1225–1233). Akhlāṭī’s own surviving works, however, are exclusively in a practical, Būnian vein and feature no explicit imperialist agenda. It would be left to his greatest Timurid student and deputy (khalīfa) in the east, Ibn Turka of Isfahan (d. 835/ 1432), to systematize fully Ibn ʿArabian lettrism, unprecedentedly in service to a series of Timurid sovereigns.43 Similarly, Būnian lettrism would be exhaustively consolidated for the benefit of their Ottoman rivals by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī (d. 858/1454), Antiochene associate of Akhlāṭī’s student and Ottoman khalīfa Shaykh Badr al-Dīn (Bedreddīn) of Simavna (executed 823/1420), himself the infamous Ibn ʿArabianizing ideologue behind what came to be known as the most successful rebellion in early Ottoman history.44 Where Ibn Turka’s lettrist oeuvre is philosophically rigorously systematizing and presents its science as a new millenarian physics-metaphysics trumping Peripatetic-

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On Ibn Turka as occult philosopher and metaphysical revolutionary, see Melvin-Koushki, “The Quest”; Melvin-Koushki, “Ibn Turka,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed. On the development of Būnian lettrism and its afterlives, see Gardiner, “Esotericism.” While Shaykh Badr al-Dīn has attracted a measure of scholarly attention in recent decades (see most recently Ahmet Y. Ocak, Osmanlı Toplumunda Zındıklar ve Mülhıdler (15.–17. Yüzyıllar), 4th ed. (Istanbul: Türkiye Ekonomik ve Toplumsal Tarih Vakfı, 2013), 159–235)— certainly far more than any other member of the New Brethren of Purity—the strongly Ibn ʿArabian tenor of the millenarian-utopian project put forward in his famed Wāridāt (“Inspirations”) has yet to be adequately appreciated or read in tandem with the writings of his close colleague Ibn Turka in a similar vein. But the latter—and, following him, Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī—expressly imperializes Ibn ʿArabī’s tawḥīd for the benefit of their Timurid patrons; Badr al-Dīn rather wielded it to subvert or challenge still tenuous Ottoman imperial claims. A representative passage, here commenting on Q 20:105–107 (They will question you concerning the mountains. Say: “My Lord will scatter them as ashes; then He will leave them a level hollow wherein you shall see no crookedness nor any curving”) (MS Izmir 304, fol. 24a; MS Haci Mahmud Efendi 2574, fol. 15a; cf. Binbaş, Intellectual Networks, 122–132— this passage is translated entirely incorrectly at 129): This may be taken as referring to the manifestation of Essence (al-dhāt) and the propagation of Oneness (al-tawḥīd) at the end of time; then shall rule belong [solely] to the One Essence (al-dhāt al-wāḥid) wherein is no crookedness (ʿiwaj), and its dominion will remove the mountains that are the Attributes ( jibāl al-ṣifāt). The master of this age (ṣāḥib hādhā l-zamān = Mahdi) will be a site of manifestation of absolute Oneness and will call all humanity thereto; he shall not be inclined to hide it, thereby deviating (iʿwijāj) [from perfect balance] but shall rather prepare hearts and [all] sites of manifestation for the Attributes to receive the rulings of the Essence, called God (Allāh) and the All-Merciful (al-Raḥmān). He shall manifest the rulings of the Essence and shall occult those of the Attributes, and no longer shall [the latter’s] effects be besought as once they were.

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Illuminationist philosophy and Sufi theory both, al-Bisṭāmī’s is traditionist, apocalypticist, Sufi-friendly and encyclopedic, which is to say quintessentially Mamluk. Ibn ʿArabian-Būnian lettrism thus diverged in the city that first imperially fostered it, Cairo, with Ibn Turkian lettrist theory becoming dominant in scholarly-courtly discourse to the east and Bisṭāmian lettrist praxis to the north during the course of the fifteenth century; but with Selīm’s conquest of that city in 1517—and Kemālpaşazāde’s lettrist urging to that end—the two currents reconverged. Famously, in taking Damascus a few months prior, Selīm had declared Ibn ʿArabī the patron saint of the Ottoman Empire, pointedly fulfilling the Greatest Master’s putative prophecy: “When the S (i.e., Selīm) enters the Sh (i.e., Shām, Damascus) shall the tomb of Muḥyī l-Dīn be found.”45 This prophecy was enshrined in the pseudepigraphal al-Shajara al-nuʿmāniyya fī l-dawla al-ʿUthmāniyya (“The Crimson Tree: On Ottoman Glory”), a cryptic jafrī text probably produced by a member of al-Bisṭāmī’s circle in the mid- to late ninth/fifteenth century, together with commentary ascribed to Ibn ʿArabī’s protégé Ṣadr alDīn Qūnavī (d. 673/1274), which accurately predicted Selīm’s conquest of the Mamluk sultanate in the early tenth/sixteenth. On this basis, it proclaims the Ottoman Empire midwife of the eschaton, the last world empire in history.46 The Crimson Tree accordingly became a crucial prop to the Ottoman occultscientific, universalist imperialism developed under Süleymān. Similarly, as Fleischer has shown, al-Bisṭāmī’s Miftāḥ al-jafr al-jāmiʿ (“Key to the Comprehensive Prognosticon”) came to function as urtext for the fashioning of the Ottoman Lawgiver as last world emperor during the expansive first decades of his rule and was even adopted as a dynastic handbook, with portable copies proliferating at court.47 Early modern Ottoman universalist imperialism is, in short, largely illegible absent an intellectual-historical understanding of Ibn ʿArabian-Būnian lettrism as developed between the Mamluk, Timurid, and Ottoman realms during the

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Ps.-Ibn ʿArabī, al-Shajara al-nuʿmāniyya fī l-dawla al-ʿUthmāniyya, ed. ʿĀṣim Ibrāhīm alKayyālī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2011), 30. See Denis Gril, “L’énigme de la Šaǧara al-nuʿmāniyya fī l-dawla al-ʿuthmāniyya, attribuée à Ibn ʿArabī,” in Les traditions apocalyptiques au tournant de la chute de Constantiople, ed. Benjamin Lellouch and Stéphane Yerasimos (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 133–152; Fleischer, “Ancient Wisdom,” 239. That this is an Ikhwānī text, or was meant to be perceived as such, would seem to be confirmed by its opening address: iʿlam ayyuhā l-akh al-ṣafī wa-l-khill al-wafī (“Know, pure brother and faithful friend …”). Fleischer, “Ancient Wisdom,” 238–239; Fleischer, “A Mediterranean Apocalypse,” 24, 44–47.

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eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries. History of empire requires history of science. That Ibn ʿArabī in particular has been studied almost exclusively within a history of Sufism—that is, history of religion—framework thus constitutes a major historiographical stumblingblock; this epochal imperialization of Ibn ʿArabian science is thereby obscured. Historians of Sufism, to be sure, have shown Ibn ʿArabī’s Neoplatonic doctrine of spiritual governance—a cosmically hierarchical system culminating in a single Pole (quṭb), one per generation, the supreme human being and axis mundi—to have had major implications for the development of post-Mongol Islamicate political theory, including its Ottoman subset; early modern Muslim sovereigns accordingly jockeyed for the specifically Ibn ʿArabian titles quṭb al-aqṭāb (“Pole of Poles”) and alinsān al-kāmil (“the Perfect Man”) as a primary expression of their universalist ambitions.48 But specialists have not yet appreciated the full extent to which the Greatest Master was transformed into the ultimate ideologue of early modern universalist imperialism—precisely in his reception, from Ibn Turka forward, as chiefest authority on lettrism in Islamic history (with alBūnī and after Imams ʿAlī and Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq). For universal empire requires a universal science to back it: Ibn ʿArabian tawḥīd, the “science of making One,” recast by the New Brethren in strictly lettrist-imperialist and Neopythagoreanmathematizing terms.49 Here Kemālpaşazāde’s status as a major interpreter, defender, and routinizer of Ibn ʿArabī takes on a new salience: this is the immediate sociopolitical and epistemological context in which his lettrist treatise—calling, like the The Crimson Tree and al-Bisṭāmī’s Key, for the conquest precisely of Cairo— must be understood.50 Pithy, assured, and punchy, it signals Ibn ʿArabī’s 48

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See, e.g., Michel Chodkiewicz, “The Esoteric Foundations of Political Legitimacy in Ibn ʿArabi,” in Muhyiddin Ibn ʿArabi: A Commemorative Volume, ed. Stephen Hirtenstein and Michael Tiernan (Shaftesbury: Element, 1993), 190–198; Adam Sabra, “The Cosmic State: Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Political Theology,” unpublished paper (2015); Aziz Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian and Pagan Polities (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001), 198–200; cf. Vincent J. Cornell, Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998). Cf. Melvin-Koushki, “Early Modern Islamicate Empire”; Gregory A. Lipton, Rethinking Ibn ‘Arabi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). The term tawḥīd (absolute monotheism) is often broadly equated with Islam as such. On lettrism’s new early modern status as universal science, see Melvin-Koushki, “The Quest”; for comparison with Latin European developments, particularly the quest to realize the millenarian Catholic religio-imperial dictum unum ovile et unus pastor (“one sheepfold and one shepherd”), see Melvin-Koushki, The Occult Science of Empire. On Kemālpaşazāde as key defender of Ibn ʿArabī, see Ahmed Zildzic, “Friend and Foe:

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imperialization in an Ottoman mode, made possible by Selīm’s conquest of Damascus in fulfillment of a ninth/fifteenth-century Bisṭāmian lettrist prophecy.

3

Mamluk-Timurid-Aqquyunlu Neopythagorean Historiography Ottomanized

The problem our treatise presents the modern materialist researcher is thus less a philological than a cosmological one: it testifies to a worldview in which occult science demonstrably and experimentally works, to a theory of history that is explicitly Neopythagorean, wherein letter-number figures as key to the control—especially imperial—of time and space. Can we speak, then, of the rise of a Neopythagorean historiography? I believe we must: this text, and much of early modern Persianate imperialscholarly culture by extension, otherwise remains illegible. For the same Neopythagorean-occultist cosmology that underlies Kemālpaşazāde’s brief lettrist treatise for Selīm animates precisely some of the most admired and influential Perso-Turkish imperial histories of the ninth/fifteenth and tenth/sixteenth centuries. This includes our scholar-ideologue’s own landmark Tevārīḫ-i āl-i ʿOs̱mān (“Annals of the Ottoman House”), the first Turkish history of the Ottoman dynasty to accord with the contemporary high Persian model, both stylistically pellucid and thoroughly comfortable with Ibn ʿArabian philosophy and occult science alike.51 This new tradition of Persian Neopythagorean-occultist historiography was inaugurated, not surprisingly, by another member of the New Brethren, Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī (d. 858/1454), Ibn Turka’s student and friend, and fellow disciple

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The Early Ottoman Reception of Ibn ʿArabī” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2012); Tim Winter, “Ibn Kemāl (d. 940/1534) on Ibn ʿArabī’s Hagiology,” in Sufism and Theology, ed. Ayman Shihadeh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 137–157. More generally, see Alexander D. Knysh, Ibn ʿArabi in the Later Islamic Tradition: The Making of a Polemical Image in Medieval Islam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Knysh notes (p. 4) that Kemālpaşazāda, in his role as imperial chief jurisconsult, was responsible for issuing the first ban on the public defamation of Ibn ʿArabī in the Ottoman domains. Markiewicz, The Crisis, 92–93; Şen, “Practicing Astral Magic,” 85–86. On the New Brethren as the leading Arabic and Persian prose stylists of the early ninth/fifteenth century, and lettrism as natural theoretical basis for the ornate literary and visual cultures peculiar to Persianate early modernity, see Melvin-Koushki, “Of Islamic Grammatology,” 76, 78– 80.

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of Akhlāṭī in Cairo. Lettrist, litterateur, and mathematician, Yazdī achieved his greatest fame as dynastic historian to the Timurids; his Ẓafarnāma, an ornate Persian history of Temür (r. 771–807/1370–1405) completed in 839/1436, was much imitated for centuries thereafter throughout the Persianate world.52 What has not yet been noted by specialists, however, is the fact that Yazdī’s Book of Conquest is predicated on a new, expressly occult-philosophical theory of history, wherein lettrism and conjunction astrology serve not as sources for mere rhetorical embellishment but rather as macrohistorical analytical framework, indispensable tools for penetrating the phenomenal surface of historical events to get at their cosmic meaning, for cracking the code of cyclical time.53 In other words: Yazdī here makes history an (occult) science. Utterly without Islamicate and broader Western precedent, such a daring move should be seen as part of a larger Arabo-Persian scholarly trend during the ninth/fifteenth and tenth/sixteenth centuries toward reformulating history as a proper and rigorous science, even as supreme among the literary sciences, as Christopher Markiewicz has now shown.54 It is no accident that this new impetus to theorize imperial historiography coincided with the great burgeoning of occultism and Neopythagoreanism at the hands of the New Brethren, three of whom—al-Bisṭāmī, Ibn Turka, and Yazdī—stand as some of the most influential imperial ideologues, Ottoman and Timurid respectively, of the ninth/fifteenth century; and Yazdī and al-Bisṭāmī were the first to apply Ikhwānī doctrine to the science of history.55 This Yazdī did, I have elsewhere argued, in direct rebuttal of Ibn Khaldūn’s ‘science of civilization’ (ʿilm al-ʿumrān), predicated on a simplistic theory of dynastic cycling, which superficially resembles Yazdī’s own cyclical theory of 52

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Yazdī also began four other chronicles, including a Muqaddima, Fatḥ-nāma-yi ṣāḥibqirānī, Fatḥ-nāma-yi humāyūn, and the Second Maqāla, none of which he finished and whose shifting ideological strategies reflect the displacement of Temür’s dispensation with that of his son Shāhrukh (Binbaş, Intellectual Networks, 199–250). Melvin-Koushki, “In Defense of Geomancy” and “Imperial Talismanic Love.” Markiewicz, “History as Science: The Fifteenth-Century Debate in Arabic and Persian,” Journal of Early Modern History 21 (2017): 216–240. Cf. Giambattista Vico’s (d. 1744) historiographical marriage of philology and philosophy in his New Science. The original Brethren of Purity of fourth/tenth-century Iraq similarly formulated a Neopythagorean, cyclical theory of history heavily astrological in tenor; but, unlike their ninth/ fifteenth-century heirs, they left lettrism to the Sufis and operated in strict anonymity— that is to say, they certainly did not serve as imperial lettrist historians in the manner of Yazdī and al-Bisṭāmī. On the latter’s even more thoroughgoingly lettrist world history, Naẓm al-sulūk fī musāmarat al-mulūk (“Regulation of Conduct: On the Edification of Kings”), which is as anti-Timurid as Yazdī’s is pro-, see Noah Gardiner’s Chapter 6 in the present volume.

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history. (It must again be emphasized that both historians were members of Barqūq’s court in Cairo.) But where the latter deploys lettrism and astrology within a monist-Ibn ʿArabian framework to trace the deeper patterns of cosmic time, robustly theorizing imperial transcendence as a necessary historical expression of the One, the strictly dualist leveling theory proposed by his Tunisian colleague and rival, a rabid anti-occultist, rather condemns dynasts to be forever ground under by the cycling of history between two sociological poles. Ibn Khaldūn simply moralizes, imprisoning political actors in the binaries of time and the strictures of Shariʿa; he offers in return only the humble rewards that accrue through the strict enforcement of piety on an always erring society. But Yazdī promises to historically empower and spiritually perfect—to divinize—its royal patrons by means of Ibn ʿArabian occult science. Not only can the future be read by the aspiring (occult) philosopher-king: it can also be rewritten.56 The latter prospect could not but be far more attractive than the former to the ambitious millennial sovereigns of the post-Mongol era.57 Ibn Khaldūn’s depressing, stridently anti-millenarian, anti-Ibn ʿArabian, and anti-occultist “science of civilization’” was thus roundly ignored by scholars until the middle of the more sedate eleventh/seventeenth century, when Ottoman historians first began to cite it in support of their own theories of dynastic cycling.58 Even the Mamluk historian Taqī l-Dīn al-Maqrīzī (d. 845/1442), Ibn Khaldūn’s student and sole defender and an enthusiastic occultist nevertheless, sought to combine his mentor’s model with the Yazdian.59 56

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Melvin-Koushki, “In Defense of Geomancy.” Cf. Ibn Turka’s Munāẓara-yi bazm u razm (“Debate of Feast and Fight”), written in 1426 for the Timurid prince and calligrapher Bāysunghur b. Shāhrukh (d. 1434), which similarly argues for Timurid imperial transcendence in explicitly lettrist terms; it is studied and translated in Melvin-Koushki, “Imperial Talismanic Love.” On the category of millennial sovereignty in the Timurid-Mughal context, see A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Cornell Fleischer, “Royal Authority, Dynastic Cyclism, and ‘Ibn Khaldûnism’ in Ottoman Letters,” Journal of Asian and African Studies 18, nos. 3–4 (1983): 198–220, esp. 199. On Ibn Khaldūn’s opposition to Ibn ʿArabī as a primary cause for his irrelevance to early modern Islamicate and especially Persianate scholarly culture, see James Winston Morris, “An Arab Machiavelli? Rhetoric, Philosophy and Politics in Ibn Khaldun’s Critique of Sufism,” Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 8 (2009): 242–291. As Robert Irwin summarizes al-Maqrīzī’s historiographical project (“Al-Maqrīzī and Ibn Khaldūn, Historians of the Unseen,” Mamlūk Studies Review 7, no. 2 (2003): 217–230, esp. 230): “History was at the core of his oeuvre, but occult and eschatological concerns were at the core of his history.” See also Nasser Rabbat, “Was al-Maqrīzī’s Khiṭaṭ a Khaldūnian History?” Der Islam 89, no. 2 (2012): 118–140.

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But the precedent Yazdī set was irreducibly Timurid. Most notably, he is responsible for the definitive Timuridization of the astrological title Lord of Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān)—by means of lettrist argument.60 That is to say, Yazdī is the first historian in the Arabo-Persian tradition to construct a dual astrological-lettrist platform in support of his patrons’ imperial legitimacy, whereby the analysis of a dynast’s horoscope must be paired with the lettrist analysis of names and events, especially as they relate to quranic passages, and particularly the sura-initial muqaṭṭaʿāt. (Ibn Turka, demonstrating the imperial utility of his science in Suʾl al-mulūk (“Query of Kings”), prognosticated, accurately as it happened, that the Timurid state would endure for the entirety of the ninth Islamic century on the basis of Shāhrukh b. Temür’s (r. 811–850/1409– 1447) name alone.61) Thus Temür, in Yazdī’s deep reading of history, is not only supreme Muslim Lord of Conjunction, preordained world conqueror, and second Alexander; he is also an epoch-making historical manifestation of both the coincidentia oppositorum (majmaʿ al-aḍdād)—primary principle of Ibn Turka’s lettrist metaphysics—and the quranic ALM.62 Any effective challenge to this new, scientific Timurid vocabulary of sovereignty would therefore require the counterdeployment of astrological and lettrist arguments; and that challenge was first raised—albeit more eclectically—by scholar-ideologues serving the rival Aqquyunlu Empire. These include, in the first place, Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī (d. 908/1502), famed Shirazi philosopher and Ibn Turkian lettrist,63 and two of his students, court secretaryhistorians in the Aqquyunlu chancery: Fażl Allāh Khunjī Iṣfahānī (d. 927/1521) and Idrīs Bidlīsī (d. 926/1520). (Both men, significantly, had sojourned in Cairo.) As an opening salvo, Davānī sought to sidestep and undercut Yazdī’s lettrist arguments in the Ẓafarnāma by seizing upon the opening verses of Sūrat alRūm (“The Byzantines,” Q 30:1–5),64 the only explicit political prediction in the Quran, to prove Uzun Ḥasan’s (r. 861–882/1457–1478) cosmic superiority to

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Binbaş, Intellectual Networks, 255; Melvin-Koushki, “In Defense of Geomancy.” Melvin-Koushki, “The Quest,” 254, 527. Yazdī, Ẓafarnāma, ed. Saʿīd Mīr-Muḥammad Ṣādiq and ʿAbd al-Ḥusayn Navāʾī, 2 vols. (Tehran: Mīrās̱-i Maktūb, 1387sh/2008), 1:236–238, 404–405, 2:1295; these passages are translated in Melvin-Koushki, “In Defense of Geomancy,” 388–391. On the ALM see n. 21 above. On Davānī as lettrist, see Melvin-Koushki, “The Quest,” 247–261; Melvin-Koushki, The Occult Science of Empire. ALM. The Byzantines (al-Rūm) have been vanquished in the nearer part of the land, and, after their vanquishing, they shall vanquish in a few years. God’s is the Command before and after, and on that day the believers shall rejoice in God’s help. God helps whomsoever He will; He is the Almighty, the All-compassionate.

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Temür, and hence the historical inevitability of Aqquyunlu imperial supremacy within Islamdom; this became the linchpin of Aqquyunlu ideology as expressed in diplomatic correspondence and historiography thenceforward. In particular, Khunjī’s Tārīkh-i ʿālam-ārā-yi amīnī (“Aminian World-Adorning History”), an ornate Persian history of the dynasty expressly on the model of Yazdī’s, adds to Davānī’s lettrist counterargument others of a similarly occultscientific tenor, as well as innovative legal arguments in support of the Aqquyunlu dynasts’ status as messianic centenary Renewers (sg. mujaddid), a venerable title Yazdī had likewise helped politicize and Timuridize.65 Historical circumstance, however, soon disqualified these arguments, occult-scientific or otherwise; the Aqquyunlu empire self-destructed during the last decade of the late ninth-early tenth/fifteenth century through civil war, and with the Safavid conquest in 1501–1502 of Tabriz, the Aqquyunlu imperial capital, Khunjī and Bidlīsī chose self-exile rather than serve the new and unpredictable Qizilbāsh regime.66 As consummate court scholar-ideologues and exponents of High Persianate culture, they readily found royal patronage elsewhere—Khunjī to the northeast, at the Uzbek court, Bidlīsī to the northwest, at the Ottoman. Khunjī became the leading light first of Shïbani Khan’s (r. 906–918/1500–1512) and then ʿUbayd Allāh Khan’s (r. 940–946/1534–1539) retinue, from which vantage point he passionately pleaded with all Sunni patrons within reach of his eloquent pen—pinning his final, frustrated hopes on Selīm—to cleanse his beloved Iran of the Safavid Shiʿi plague; Bidlīsī was commissioned by Bāyezīd II himself, that great institutionalizer of astrology, to write the first comprehensive Persian history of the Ottoman dynasty, the Hasht bihisht (“Eight Paradises”). Like Yazdī’s Book of Conquest and Khunjī’s Aminian World-Adorner before it, Bidlīsī’s Eight Paradises, completed in 912/1506, is a gorgeous and highly complex work of historiography that focuses on the “cosmically ordained and universally applicable signs of Ottoman superiority,” drawing upon “a wide array of astrological, mystical, philosophical, and occult doctrines and [freely mixing] ideas from these varied traditions to create a compelling and universalizing conception of kingship.”67 To this end, for example, it ontologically

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John E. Woods, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire, rev. ed. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999), 102–106, 145; Melvin-Koushki, “The Delicate Art.” See Woods, The Aqquyunlu, ch. 6. As Markiewicz notes, however, Bidlīsī was less doctrinaire and more pragmatic than his fervently anti-Safavid colleague Khunjī, and, even as late as 1511, still “entertained the possibility of a full reconciliation with Shah Ismāʿīl” (The Crisis, 73). Markiewicz, The Crisis, 234, 240. The latter quotation refers in Markiewicz’s study rather

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equates—in unmistakably Neopythagorean fashion—Bāyezīd with the eighth and highest celestial sphere, where the totality of existents first take shape. And that Ottoman sovereign, not Temür, is the greatest Lord of Conjunction of the last age—a point easily proved by an analysis of Bāyezīd’s horoscope.68 Bidlīsī also pointedly retools Davānī’s and Khunjī’s lettrist argument for Ottoman purposes: the Sūrat al-Rūm prophecy, he shows at length, cannot refer to Uzun Ḥasan’s defeat of the Timurid Abū Saʿīd (r. 855–873/1451–1469) at the Battle of Muş in 1467 but rather to Fātiḥ Meḥmed’s (r. 848–850, 855–886/1444– 1446, 1451–1481) victory over Uzun Ḥasan at Otlukbeli in 877/1473.69 In this, significantly, he would appear to be following the precedent of Mollā Lüṭfī (d. 900/1494), Kemālpaşazāde’s teacher, who did the same in his Arabic encyclopedia of the linguistic sciences, al-Maṭālib al-ilāhiyya fī mawḍūʿāt al-ʿulūm al-lughawiyya.70

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to the unprecedented eclecticness of the Timurid model, here exemplified by Yazdī and emulated by Khunjī and Bidlīsī. Bidlīsī, Hasht bihisht, Süleymaniye MS Nuruosmaniye 3209, fols. 497b, 498b; Markiewicz, The Crisis, 267; Şen, “Reading the Stars.” Bidlīsī, Hasht bihisht, Süleymaniye MS Nuruosmaniye 3209, fol. 470b; Melvin-Koushki, “The Delicate Art”; 211–212; Markiewicz, The Crisis, 183–184. On whom see Taşköprīzāde, al-Shaqāʾiq, 248–251, no. 214; Winter, “Ibn Kemāl,” 142. Mollā Lüṭfī’s encyclopedia has been published as Dil Bilimlerinin Sınıflandırılması, ed. Şükran Fazlıoğlu (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2012); my thanks to Tunç Şen for this reference. I translate the relevant passage for its salience here as the earliest known Ottoman lettrist interpretation of the Sūrat al-Rūm prophecy (edition 101–104): As for the statement “its benefit is beholding the secrets of the Quran”: Among the secrets of His Speech that God Most High gave me to know is the following. When alḤasan the Tall advanced on Tokat, my hometown, I was at that time librarian to the supreme sultan and conquerer of Constantinople, Sultan Meḥmed Ghāzī (God rest him in peace at his sublime threshold), and it grieved me sorely. But in the face of this attack God inspired me to reassure [the sultan with His promise] God shall help you mightily (Q 48:3). He further inspired me to calculate the gematrical value of the letters of this verse in the abjad system, and, when I did so, I found it to be the same as the coming year [i.e., 878 (1473–1474CE)]. I accordingly informed the supreme sultan that he should attack that tyrant next year, and all happened as I predicted. I composed a couplet in Persian [to mark the event], as follows: Routed is the army of Uzun Ḥasan at the indomitable hand of our shah. I predicted the date of this by saying, “O Shah, God shall help you with a mighty help!” I presented myself to his eminence during the days of conquest, and he honored me with favors beyond counting. For also among [the verse’s] rare properties is the fact that it was addressed to Muḥammad (peace be upon him)—and our sultan’s name is that of the Prophet, as though he too were the addressee of this declaration. Likewise, I was inspired to interpret His saying ALM. The Byzantines have been

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The Hasht bihisht, in short, represents a masterful and polemical Ottomanization of the Timurid-Aqquyunlu tradition of Neopythagorean-occultist historiography for the benefit of his rival patron.71 By way of his teacher Davānī, Bidlīsī was doubtlessly well acquainted with the monist, lettrist-astrological theory of history developed in Cairo a century prior by the New Brethren of Purity and aggressively and effectively utilized in support first of Timurid universalist claims and then of Aqquyunlu counterclaims. That this bold Persian masterwork became, in turn, the model for the new, more ornate mode of Ottoman historiography in Turkish that became standard thereafter is therefore of the highest salience in the present context: for Kemālpaşazāde’s Tevārīḫ-i āl-i ʿOs̱mān, first presented at court in 916/1510 and completed by 932/1526, is the first Turkish history of the Ottoman dynasty to be patterned on Bidlīsī’s Persian offering of 912/1506 (explicitly and concurrently commissioned by Bāyezīd as such)—and so inherited the latter’s cosmic and occult-scientific orientation, if only in part.72 There is a further smoking Ikhwānī gun, one of more immediate Ottoman manufacture. In his autobiographical Durrat tāj al-rasāʾil (“Pearl in the Diadem of Tractates”), al-Bisṭāmī himself, preeminent source of Ottoman imperial lettrism, proposes a startlingly new classification for the discipline of history (ʿilm al-akhbār wa-l-siyar): he moves it from the traditional (naqlī) sciences—

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vanquished in the nearer part of the land; and after their vanquishing they shall vanquish in a few years (Q 30:1–4) [as follows]: the nearer part of the land (adnā l-arḍ) means the last of the phrase’s letters according to logogriph methodology (ṭarīqat altaʿmiya) [i.e., ḍ], and by that letter is meant its name, that is, ḍād, whose value is 805 [1402 CE]—precisely the year [New] Byzantium (Rūm) was vanquished by Tamerlane, who attacked Sultan Yıldırım Khān Bāyezīd at the beginning of Muḥarram of ’05. I then calculated the word a few (biḍʿ), adding the name of b (bā = 3) to that of ḍ (= 805) and its [final letter] ʿ (= 70), also equivalent to the year of the vanquishing of that tyrant. Thereupon I informed [the sultan] of this glad tiding before its realization, and he pledged me the most munificent of favors, and fulfilled his pledge when matters turned out [as I had said]. A further subtle indication of this verse is the fact that this tyrant attacked a contingent of our victorious army in the nearer part of the land, according to its literal sense [i.e., the Jazira], a week before his total rout; the verse thus refers to that [related] event as well. Unsurprisingly, the same strategy was likewise Safavidized: witness Siyāqī Niẓām’s (d. 1603) Futūḥāt-i humāyūn (“Imperial conquests”), a Persian history whose introduction mounts precisely a lettrist defense of Shah ʿAbbās the Great’s (r. 1587–1629) imperial legitimacy (Sholeh A. Quinn, Historical Writing during the Reign of Shah ‘Abbas: Ideology, Imitation, and Legitimacy in Safavid Chronicles (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000), 46–53). Markiewicz, The Crisis, 232–234; Şen, “Practicing Astral Magic,” 85–86; Şen, “Reading the Stars.”

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where every other Arabic and Persian encyclopedist had classed it to date—to the rational (ʿaqlī) sciences, and specifically the applied mathematical sciences. Equally tellingly, he there allies history with the occult sciences of bibliomancy (ʿilm al-faʾl), magic and amuletry (ʿilm al-siḥr wa-l-ʿazāʾim), and alchemy and engineering (ʿilm al-kīmiyāʾ wa-l-ḥiyal), on the one hand, and the linguistic sciences of prosody (ʿilm al-ʿarūḍ), lexicography (ʿilm al-lugha), grammar (ʿilm al-naḥw), and writing (ʿilm al-kitāba), on the other, as well as economics (ʿilm al-bayʿ wa-l-shirā).73 To thus “mathematicalize” history, to suggest its object as linguistic construct in high lettrist fashion, is to argue for the discipline’s status as applied Neopythagorean-occult science.74 Kemālpaşazāde, following Yazdī, Khunjī, and Bidlīsī, was among those persuaded by this revolutionary Bisṭāmian-Ibn Turkian argument; he too pursued history as science. And here we have come full circle: any intellectual history of TurkoPersianate imperial lettrist historiography must always come back to Cairo, its birthplace—a fact of which Kemālpaşazāde and his patron Selīm were clearly aware. Having witnessed and strongly encouraged Selīm’s seizing upon Ibn ʿArabī as Ottoman patron saint with the conquest of Damascus, moreover, it is not suprising that our ambitious scholar-ideologue thought it most appropriate to push too for the conquest of Cairo in purely Ibn ʿArabian—that is to say lettrist—terms.75 The short treatise he may have produced to this end, substantiating an episode that still lives on in popular and scholarly memory, is thus an ephemeral offering whose significance far outstrips its lack of readership: for it fostered in Selīm the lettrist consciousness that was to pervade Ottoman imperial ideology for some four decades thereafter. Nor was Kemālpaşazāde, following Bidlīsī, the only Ottoman scholarideologue to adopt this strategy in a bid to win Selīm’s patronage. A similarly ephemeral offering was made to the Ottoman conqueror by Kemālpaşazāde’s 73

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MS Nuruosmaniye 4905, fol. 20b; my thanks to Cornell Fleischer for this reference. Suggestively, Taşköprīzāde (d. 1561) too classes the various historiographical sciences with the linguistic sciences, though not with any occult sciences and certainly not under the rubric of applied mathematics, despite his clear reliance on Ibn Turka and al-Bisṭāmī both; see n. 86 below. Al-Bisṭāmī’s startling move epitomizes a longer process peculiar to Persian scholarly culture, whereby encyclopedists, from Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1209) onward, increasingly shifted various occult sciences (particularly astrology, lettrism, and geomancy) from the natural to the mathematical sciences in classifications of the sciences (sg. taṣnīf alʿulūm)—the surest index of the renaissance of Neopythagoreanism here in view. This process is traced and its implications for history of science explored in Melvin-Koushki, “Powers of One.” As noted, Kemālpaşazāde is responsible for issuing the first Ottoman fatwa, on Selīm’s orders, in defense of Ibn ʿArabī (Zildzic, “Friend and Foe,” 116–119, 133–142).

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colleague Aḥmed Paşa b. Ḫıżır Beğ (d. 927/1521), mufti of Bursa,76 only a year or two prior, in the form of a letter of congratulation (tehniyetnāme) celebrating Selīm’s crushing of the Safavids at Chaldiran. Preserved as MS Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Arşivi E. 4796 and also written in a heavily Persianizing Turkish, this letter develops an image of the Ottoman conqueror as messianic AlexandrianSolomonic-Jamshidian sovereign and ultimate Lord of Conjunction—indeed “a magic-ringed Solomon upholding the world” (cihānbān-ı Süleymān-negīn)— likewise on a strictly occult-scientific (lettrist and oneiromantic) basis.77 Crucially, Müfti Aḥmed Paşa too takes a page from Bidlīsī and Mollā Lüṭfī, reanalyzing the Sūrat al-Rūm prophecy to show it to refer rather to Chaldiran—the genesis of Ottoman claims to universal empire. As he exclaims in closing: This manifest conquest (bu fetḥ-i mübīn) … shall abide until the Day of Judgment as proof of [the possibility of] achieving universal conquests ( fütūḥāt-ı külliyye) and realizing ambitions that are total (mürādāt-ı cümliyye)!78

4

Kemālpaşazāde, Imperialist Neopythagorean Historian

Such, then, is the intellectual-ideological context in which Kemālpaşazāde’s lettrist episode is to be read; it is not odd or aberrant with respect to his larger scholarly project, a mental lapse, or mere act of mercenary bootlicking, but speaks to its prolific and influential author’s subscription to a Neopythagorean cosmology wherein occult science is simply that—science.79 Thus his deploy76

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See Taşköprīzāde Aḥmed, al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya fī ʿulamāʾ al-dawla al-ʿUthmāniyya, ed. Sayyid Muḥammad Ṭabāṭabāʾī Bihbahānī (Tehran: Kitābkhāna, Mūza u Markaz-i Asnād, Majlis-i Shūrā-yi Islāmī, 1389sh/2010): 161–162, no. 137. Cf. Kemālpaşazāde’s entry in this work at 331–333, no. 307. Cf. ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Lakhmī al-Ishbīlī al-Maghribī al-Dimashqī’s (d. after 1517) panegyrical introduction to his al-Durr al-muṣān fī sīrat al-muẓaffar Salīm Khān (“The Preserved Pearl: On the Career of the Victorious King Selīm”), wherein the Sevillan Maliki jurist, in a bid for Ottoman patronage, similarly deploys lettrist and oneiromantic arguments to valorize Selīm’s conquest of Egypt (Stephen Conermann, “Ibn Ṭūlūn (d. 955/1548), Life and Works,” in Conermann, Mamlukica: Studies on the History and Society of the Mamluk Period (Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2013), 213–236: 225–228). This letter is studied and translated in Şen and Melvin-Koushki, “Divining Chaldiran.” On the standard Arabo-Persian classification of the occult sciences as natural and mathematical sciences—and their progressive mathematicalization in post-Mongol Persianate scholarship in tandem with the Neopythagorean renaissance here in view—see MelvinKoushki, “Powers of One.”

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ment of the same in his seminal Annals of the Ottoman House; thus the proastrology stance evinced by his collected fatwas;80 thus his authorship of an important plague treatise featuring letter-magical defenses and remedies,81 as well as a short tract on the divine names;82 thus his (probable) authorship of a work on talismans and astral-lettrist magic;83 and thus his commitment to Ibn ʿArabī, father of early modern lettrist theory, both philosophically and imperially. This is not to suggest that Kemālpaşazāde be approached as primarily an occultist: the bulk of his scholarly production was in fields unrelated or adjacent, particularly jurisprudence, theology, and Arabic linguistics (for all that the last also suggests a lettrist sensibility). The same principle applies to those of his colleagues who too made forays into one or more of the occult sciences as a matter of course, such as Müfti Aḥmed Paşa or Kemālpaşazāde’s own teacher Mollā Lüṭfī—a student of famed Timurid-Ottoman astronomer ʿAlī Qūshchī (d. 879/1474) in the mathematical sciences—who wrote two treatises on Neopythagorean geometry and the letters of the Arabic alphabet, respectively, and who, as noted, was responsible for first applying the Sūrat al-Rūm prophecy to the 1473 Ottoman-Aqquyunlu battle at Otlukbeli.84 (Significantly, 80 81

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Şen, “Practicing Astral Magic,” 86. Nükhet Varlık, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 233. Specifically, Kemālpaşazāde’s Risāla fī l-Ṭāʿūn has two chapters, the first on using quranic verses and divine names to ward off plague, the second on using animals, plants, and minerals for the same purpose (Süleymaniye, MS Aşir Efendi 430/36, fols. 159b–160a). Risāla fī Taḥqīq tawqīfiyyāt asmāʾ Allāh taʿālā; see Nihal Atsız, “Kemalpaşaoğlu’nun Eserleri II,” Şarkiyat Mecmuası 7 (1972): 83–135, esp. 89–90, no. 108; Brockelmann, GALS, 2:670, no. 2.76. Şen, “Practicing Astral Magic.” See n. 69 above. An edition and French translation of the first work, Risālat Taḍʿīf almadhbaḥ (“On the Doubling of the Altar/Cube”), was published as La duplication de l’autel (Platon et le problème de Delos), ed. Şerefettin Yaltkaya, trans. and introduced Abdulhak Adnan and Henry Corbin (Paris: de Boccard, 1940). As the latter note (6, 25), this treatise indique un moment de la longue carrière parcourue par les motifs platoniciens, ou plutôt des tous les motifs dont Platon était considéré comme le prophète, combinés avec l’ arithmologie néo-pythagoricienne, dans le monde culturel de langue arabe, lequel recueillit l’ héritage des savants grecs …. [O]n notera essentiellement le rôle central reconnu à Pythagore …, condisciple des élèves de Salomon et à qui est attribuée finalement la dignité de prophète. That Bāyezīd II’s library included a copy of this Neopythagorean-occultist treatise is thus telling indeed; for the list of titles in ʿAṭūfī’s (d. 1541) 1502 Ottoman palace-library catalog (Hungarian National Library, MS Török fol. 59), recording some 7,200 titles in 5,700 volumes, see Treasures of Knowledge: An Inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3– 1503/4), ed. Gülru Necipoğlu, Cemal Kafadar, and Cornell H. Fleischer, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill,

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the first treatise, relying on al-Bisṭāmī and al-Būnī, presents talismanic magic squares and divine names magic as having indispensable medical, architectural, and imperial applications.85) This pattern is common to early modern Persianate—and early modern Western—scholarly culture as a whole; while only a minority (some two to fifteen percent) of scholars achieved fame as professional occultists, few indeed were the luminaries who did not write at least a few tracts in the field of occultism or pepper their more vaunted works with occult-scientific references.86 But to ignore such works and passages as peripheral to their authors’ “true” concerns is to retroject modern materialistscientistic cosmology onto the decidedly nonmaterialist, panpsychist cosmology of our early modern actors—and hence to wreak vivisecting colonialist violence on and obliterate precisely such categories as Neopythagorean historiography, without which post-Mongol Islamicate imperialism in general and early Ottoman imperialism in particular cannot be fully understood.87

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2019). As for Mollā Lüṭfī’s short treatise on the letters, a copy is preserved as MS Leiden 235 (Brockelmann, GAL, 2/235, no. 5.9). On Qūshchī as a member of Ibn Turka’s scholarly network and fellow Neopythagoreanizer, see Melvin-Koushki, “Powers of One.” Mollā Lüṭfī, La duplication, 16–23. Melvin-Koushki and Pickett, “Mobilizing Magic,” 263–264. The mainstream status of occultism in early tenth/sixteenth-century Ottoman scholarly circles in particular is exemplified by Taşköprīzāde’s Miftāḥ al-saʿāda wa-miṣbāḥ al-siyāda (“Key to Felicity and Lamp to Mastery”), completed in 1541, a culmination of the Mamluk-Ottoman Arabic encyclopedic tradition and primary model for subsequent Ottoman encyclopedias, including most prominently the Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī l-kutub wa-l-funūn (“Removing Uncertainty as to the Titles of Books and Disciplines”) of Ḥājjī Khalīfa (d. 1657); it mounts an especially robust defense of the occult sciences as a subset of the natural sciences on the one hand and the quranic sciences on the other. Crucially, Taşköprüzāde here imports Ibn Turka’s signature tashkīk al-ḥarf scheme to epistemologically structure his encyclopedia as a whole. Melvin-Koushki, “Powers of One,” 173–179, and “Of Islamic Grammatology,” 89–91. The same lettrist commitment is on full display in his seminal plague treatise, on which see Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Taşköprīzāde on the (Occult) Science of Plague Prevention and Cure,” Nazariyat 16, no. 2 (2020), forthcoming. The eclecticism with which such occultist-Neopythagorean content is often deployed by scholars of the period must, however, be acknowledged (my thanks to Cornell Fleischer and Christopher Markiewicz for this observation). This is, nevertheless, evidence precisely for the routinization and naturalization of Neopythagorean cosmology in the early modern period—a process similarly enshrined in the Arabo-Persianate burgeoning of what may be called “muʿammā (riddle) culture,” itself a form of naturalized lettrist Neopythagoreanism, which testifies to a broader social consciousness that the world is de- and reconstructably semantic (Melvin-Koushki, “Of Islamic Grammatology,” 78–79). Equally importantly, the scholarly architects of this consciousness (and indeed the built environment by extension: cf. the Taj Mahal) were often explicit about their panpsychism; the same cosmology, from Pythagoras to the present, has historically driven Western occult-

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Let us therefore cease feting the narrowly materialist-dualist sociology of Ibn Khaldūn, that patron saint of European colonialism: for it was expressly developed to destroy his Timurid rival Yazdī’s new occult-monist science of history, in which aim it failed utterly for four centuries. If our historiography of Western early modernity is not similarly to fail, we must take more seriously the Neopythagorean-occultist cosmology that, radiating from Cairo, swept the Persianate world during the ninth/fifteenth century and provided theoretical justification for and materially furthered the greatest empires and scientificscholarly endeavors of the tenth/sixteenth and eleventh/seventeenth. This includes, in the first place, the watershed mathematical turn in Arabic astronomy, as pursued by the members of the Timurid sultan-scientist Ulugh Beg’s (r. 811–853/1409–1449) Samarkand Observatory in the early ninth/fifteenth century, celebrated by historians of science as possible precedent for the Copernican revolution in Latinate Europe (and hence the equally explicitly Neopythagorean-occultist cosmologizing of Kepler and Newton), as well as the florescence of Safavid antiquarian-perennialist philosophy in the tenth/sixteenth and eleventh/seventeenth.88 (Again, that Kemālpaşazāde was the student of Qūshchī’s student Mollā Lüṭfī is highly suggestive.) For ideas and ideologies have material consequences: they possess the ability to reshape landscapes just as surely as military technologies or tax regimes, as plague or climate change. Far from being embarrassingly irrational but minor gushings that may be safely ignored by the modern historian, then, it is precisely ephemeral documents like Kemālpaşazāde’s lettrist call for the conquest of Cairo that provide us directest access to the realtime, material effects of that cosmology at a crucial moment in Ottoman, Islamicate, and Western history; we must begin to prize them as such.

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Conclusion

Both militarily and magically, Selīm’s short but watershed reign, quintessentially early modern in its expansionism and experimentalism, was a period of creative flux; it represents a pivotal moment in the development of Ottoman millenarian, apocalyptic, and especially occult-scientific imperialist discourse, already incipient under his father, Bāyezīd, and fully articulated by his son

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scientific theory and practice. It should therefore not need saying, but shockingly does, that the occult sciences cannot be read through a strictly materialist or monocultural lens without doing them considerable epistemic violence. See Melvin-Koushki, “Powers of One”; Melvin-Koushki, “World as (Arabic) Text.”

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Süleymān. It is then, moreover, that a productive political-scientific tension between astrology and lettrism first emerged. Where Bāyezīd had institutionalized astrology to a degree unprecedented and unparalleled in the IslamoChristianate West, the Ottoman court under Selīm and Süleymān would appear to have somewhat de-emphasized the science of the stars in favor of the science of the letters, whereby even astronomical-astrological data were increasingly analyzed in lettrist terms, and Ottoman imperialism definitively Ibn ʿArabianized in a Bisṭāmian mode.89 Such texts as Idrīs Bidlīsī’s chronicle, Müfti Aḥmed Paşa’s tehniyetnāme, and Kemālpaşazāde’s lettrist treatise thus record, I suggest, the genesis of this signal Ottoman ideological shift. And that shift was precipitated by Selīm’s conquest of Cairo—the urban alembic where, just over a century prior, Ibn ʿArabian-Būnian lettrism had been reformulated as a universal, imperial science by peripatetic Timurid-Ottoman scholars in service to an ambitiously experimental Mamluk sovereign, Barqūq, then carried by the same scholars back east and north and there considerably elaborated, only to return with Selīm to its birthplace fully weaponized. That Kemālpaşazāde seems to have chosen an exclusively lettrist argument to urge his royal patron to take Cairo is thus of no little significance. For the ideological and legal stakes were high: in order to sidestep the blatant illegality of invading a fellow Islamic state, our learned Ottoman jurist-historian clearly felt it strategic at this critical juncture to both emulate and challenge the Neopythagorean-occultist historiography developed by his scholarly predecessors or contemporaries al-Bisṭāmī, Ibn Turka, Yazdī, Davānī, Khunjī, and Bidlīsī, and to expressly honor its Mamluk-Cairene stemming. In other words, the Ottoman lettrist imperialism that is such a distinctive feature of the expansive and transformative Süleymānic era is a product of inner-Persianate scholarly circulation and competition between Egypt, Iran, and Anatolia, that golden intellectual-imperial triangle, over the course of the equally transformative ninth/fifteenth century; at the beginning of the tenth/sixteenth, it was consciously developed on a Mamluk-Timurid-Aqquyunlu model and Ottomanized by Bidlīsī, turncoat Aqquyunlu historian, then strategically reprised by influen-

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Şen, “Astrology in the Service,” 207–210. While astrologers continued as salaried court officials down to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the early fourteenth/twentieth century, their number and salaries decreased under Bāyezīd’s successors. On a similar fusing of astronomy/astrology with lettrism for Mughal imperial purposes—in explicit invocation of the Timurid dual astrological-lettrist platform established by Ibn Turka and Yazdī—see Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Timurid-Mughal Philosopher-Kings as SultanScientists,” in Rulers as Authors in the Islamic World: Knowledge, Authority and Legitimacy, ed. Maribel Fierro, Sonja Brentjes, and Tilman Seidensticker (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).

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tial Ottoman imperial scholar-ideologues like Kemālpaşazāde.90 At the same time, the Ottoman prophet al-Bisṭāmī’s equally explicit mathematicalization of the science of history within a lettrist framework could not but have provided further impetus. Nor was that impetus quick to dissipate. The same lettrist framework persisted as a particularly meaty bone of historiographical contention between rival Persianate imperial cultures through at least the early eleventh/seventeenth century, as proved by its adaptation by none other than the great Safavid philosopher Mīr Dāmād (d. 1041/1631), an avowed Ibn Turkian lettrist, who constructed the first specifically Twelver Shiʿi philosophy and science of history— thereby occult-scientifically disproving the Ottoman-Bisṭāmian eschatological claims of the previous century.91 Unsurprisingly, Mughal imperial ideology too appears to have remained no less lettrist during the same period.92 Kemālpaşazāde’s brief, putative lettrist treatise for Selīm thus performs, with impressive efficiency, its author’s mastery of this emergent Mamluk-TimuridAqquyunlu-Ottoman (and then Safavid-Mughal) common scholarly and historiographical culture. At the same time, it is no less representative of intellectual and cultural developments peculiar to the Mediterranean zone as an integral unit, and especially Iberia and the Maghrib: for it is there that lettrism-kabbalah was first sanctified during the sixth/twelfth and seventh/thirteenth centuries,93 whence it swept east along both shores and helped drive both the renaissance of occult-scientific Neopythagoreanism and the millenarian scientific-imperial expansionism that define mathematizing and globalizing Western early modernity. In this hybridized Persianate-Mediterranean context, in sum, Selīm the Grim too must therefore be read as an early modern Western imperial experimentalist pursuing—wildly successfully, as it turned out—a new brand of millennial, monist-univeralist sovereignty predicated on an occult-scientific understanding, a deep reading, of history and the cosmos. 90

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Cf. Kemālpaşazāde’s championing of Persian as preeminent language of scholarship and spirituality, second only to Arabic, in his Risāla fī Faḍīlat al-lisān al-fārisī ʿalā l-alsina siwā llisān al-ʿarabī (in Rasāʾil Ibn Kamāl, 2 vols. (Istanbul: Dār al-Khilāfa al-ʿIlmiyya, 1316/1898), 2:210–216). Melvin-Koushki, “World as (Arabic) Text.” Melvin-Koushki, “Timurid-Mughal Philosopher-Kings.” The “age of esotericism and its disclosure,” as Moshe Halbertal has termed this pivotal moment in Western history (Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and Its Philosophical Implications, trans. Jackie Feldman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 5); on the pan-Mediterranean relevance of this periodization, see Noah Gardiner, “Stars and Saints: The Esotericist Astrology of the Sufi Occultist Aḥmad al-Būnī,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 12, no. 1 (2017): 39–65, esp. 63–65.

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Acknowledgements My thanks to Cornell Fleischer, Ahmet Tunç Şen, Nükhet Varlık, and Christopher Markiewicz for their helpful feedback on a draft of this article and for inspiring its very theme; any errors are my own.

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Fleischer, Cornell H. “Shadow of Shadows: Prophecy in Politics in 1530s Istanbul.” In Identity and Identity Formation in the Ottoman World: A Volume of Essays in Honor of Norman Itzkowitz, edited by Baki Tezcan and Karl K. Barbir, 51–62. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007. Fleischer, Cornell H. “Ancient Wisdom and New Sciences: Prophecies at the Ottoman Court in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries.” In Falnama: Book of Omens, edited by Massoumeh Farhad and Serpil Bağcı, 232–243. London: Thames & Hudson, 2009. Fleischer, Cornell H. “A Mediterranean Apocalypse: Prophecies of Empire in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61 (2018): 18–90. Fowden, Garth. Before and after Muḥammad: The First Millennium Refocused. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Gardiner, Noah. “Esotericism in a Manuscript Culture: Aḥmad al-Būnī and His Readers through the Mamlūk Period.” PhD diss., Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, 2014. Gardiner, Noah. “Stars and Saints: The Esotericist Astrology of the Sufi Occultist Aḥmad al-Būnī.” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 12, no. 1 (2017): 39–65. Gardiner, Noah. “The Occultist Encyclopedism of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī.” Mamlūk Studies Review 20 (2017): 3–38. Gardiner, Noah. Ibn Khaldūn versus the Occultists at Barqūq’s Court: The Critique of Lettrism in al-Muqaddimah. Berlin: EB Verlag, 2020. Gardiner, Noah. Occult Cairo. Forthcoming. Gril, Denis. “L’énigme de la Šaǧara al-nuʿmāniyya fī l-dawla al-ʿuthmāniyya, attribuée à Ibn ʿArabī.” In Les traditions apocalyptiques au tournant de la chute de Constantiople, edited by Benjamin Lellouch and Stéphane Yerasimos, 133–152. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000. Håkansson, Håkan. Seeing the Word: John Dee and Renaissance Occultism. Lund: Lunds Universitet, 2001. Halbertal, Moshe. Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and Its Philosophical Implications, translated by Jackie Feldman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Harris, Nicholas G. “Better Religion through Chemistry: Aydemir al-Jildakī and Alchemy under the Mamluks.” PhD diss., Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, 2020. Irwin, Robert. “Al-Maqrīzī and Ibn Khaldūn, Historians of the Unseen.” Mamlūk Studies Review 7, no. 2 (2003): 217–230. Kia, Mana. Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. Kılıç, Mustafa. “İbn-i Kemal’in Mısır Fethine Dair Bir Risale-i Acibesi.” Diyanet Dergisi 26 (1990): 111–120. Knysh, Alexander D. Ibn ʿArabi in the Later Islamic Tradition: The Making of a Polemical Image in Medieval Islam. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

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In Rulers as Authors in the Islamic World: Knowledge, Authority and Legitimacy, edited by Maribel Fierro, Sonja Brentjes, and Tilman Seidensticker. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming. Melvin-Koushki, Matthew. “Taşköprīzāde on the (Occult) Science of Plague Prevention and Cure.” Nazariyat 16, no. 2 (2020), forthcoming. Melvin-Koushki, Matthew and James Pickett. “Mobilizing Magic: Occultism in Central Asia and the Continuity of High Persianate Culture under Russian Rule.” Studia Islamica 111, no. 2 (2016): 231–284. Ménage, V.L. “Kemāl Pas̲h̲a-Zāde.” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. Moin, A. Azfar. The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Morris, James Winston. “An Arab Machiavelli? Rhetoric, Philosophy and Politics in Ibn Khaldun’s Critique of Sufism.” Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 8 (2009): 242–291. Ocak, Ahmet Y. Osmanlı Toplumunda Zındıklar ve Mülhıdler (15.–17. Yüzyıllar). 4th ed. Istanbul: Türkiye Ekonomik ve Toplumsal Tarih Vakfı, 2013. Rabbat, Nasser. “Was al-Maqrīzī’s Khiṭaṭ a Khaldūnian History?” Der Islam 89, no. 2 (2012): 118–140. Sabra, Adam. “The Cosmic State: Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Political Theology.” Unpublished paper, 2015. Saif, Liana. “From Ġāyat al-ḥakīm to Šams al-maʿārif : Ways of Knowing and Paths of Power in Medieval Islam.” In “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” edited by Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner. Special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 297–345. Şen, A. Tunç. “Practicing Astral Magic in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Istanbul: A Treatise on Talismans Attributed to Ibn Kemāl (d. 1534).”Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 12/1 (2017): 66–88. Şen, Ahmet Tunç. “Reading the Stars at the Ottoman Court: Bāyezīd II (r. 886/1481– 918/1512) and His Celestial Interests.” In “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” edited by Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner. Special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 557–608. Şen, Ahmet Tunç. “Astrology in the Service of the Empire: Knowledge, Prognostication, and Politics at the Ottoman Court.” PhD diss., Chicago, University of Chicago, 2016. Şen, A. Tunç and Matthew Melvin-Koushki. “Divining Chaldiran: Ottoman Deployments of Astrology, Lettrism and Geomancy in the Ottoman-Safavid Conflict.” Forthcoming. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia.” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 735–762. Varlık, Nükhet. Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

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chapter 10

Power and Piety: Islamic Talismans on the Battlefield Maryam Ekhtiar and Rachel Parikh

The Islamic world is steeped in a rich history of material culture, which includes a long tradition of superbly crafted arms and armor with elaborate surface decoration. “Arms and armor” is a collective term for objects falling into three main categories: body armor, such as helmets and shields; edged weapons, such as swords and daggers; and archery and firearms.1 Edged weapons consisted of blades made of steel, watered steel (also known as Damascus steel), a combination of steel and iron, or iron. The hilts or grips were produced from a variety of materials, such as ivory, steel, iron, wood, horn, jade, and rock crystal. Armor consisted of the same materials as Islamic edged weapons and included wood, leather, and textile.2 Arms and armor were used on the battlefield as well as for ceremonial purposes, such as religious, royal, and ceremonial processions. A close examination of the materials, inscriptions, and symbols on surviving examples of Islamic arms and armor reveals that many of them are talismanic in nature. The 2016–2017 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Power and Piety: Islamic Talismans on the Battlefield, explored the content and meaning of materials, texts, and images on an array of arms and armor, from Iran and Turkey, to India and Southeast Asia and between the tenth/sixteenth and the thirteenth/nineteenth centuries. The research conducted for the exhibition brought to light recurring themes that can be found on Islamic arms and armor decorated with talismanic materials and formulas, which will be discussed in this essay, particularly through the examination of Iranian, Indian, and Turkish examples produced between the eleventh/seventeenth and thirteenth/nineteenth centuries. It is the materials and

1 David Alexander, Islamic Arms and Armor in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 2 For more on the materials of Islamic arms and armor, see James W. Allan and Brian Gilmour, Persian Steel: The Tanavoli Collection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Manouchehr Moshtagh Khorasani, Arms and Armor from Iran: The Bronze Age to the End of the Qajar Period (Tübingen: Legat 2006), 99–123; and Alexander, Islamic Arms and Armor.

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motifs that are talismanic and that together endow the arms and armor with magical properties. The essay is divided into two parts. The first, consisting of two sections, will address various aspects of the physicality of arms and armor, followed by a discussion of the importance of orientation and placement of talismanic inscriptions and motifs in activating their protective properties. We begin by calling attention to the use of specific materials, such as gemstones, in the creation of these objects and how they too can imbue these objects with protective and magical properties. We will then examine a selection of talismanic motifs and symbols that decorate the objects, notably those that refer to the prophet Solomon and the Aṣḥāb al-Kahf (“People of the Cave”), popularly known as the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, as well as imagery of Dhū l-Fiqār (ʿAlī’s bifurcated sword) and Ahl al-Bayt (“People of the House”), with an emphasis on the SunniShiʿi divide and their visual manifestation on Islamic arms and armor. The use of weapons that were thought to embody magical qualities in warfare can be traced back to the prophet Muḥammad himself and his cousin and son-in-law ʿAlī.3 According to legend, during the Battle of Uḥud against the Meccans in 3/625, Muḥammad presented a bifurcated sword to ʿAlī and proclaimed, “There is no hero but ʿAlī; there is no sword but Dhū l-Fiqār.”4 This declaration affirmed the preternatural powers of the sword, and is believed to have demonstrated them in ʿAlī’s subsequent victories, notably the Battle of the Trench in 5/627. Over time, the myth developed, resulting not only in Dhū lFiqār’s association with invincibility and victory but also its incorporation into the repertoire of Islamic talismanic vocabulary. While weapons emblazoned with verbal and visual talismanic motifs span centuries and geographic regions, most surviving examples date from between the eleventh/seventeenth and the thirteenth/nineteenth centuries and originated predominantly in Iran and Turkey. These verbal and visual motifs include, among others, the word “God” (Allāh), verses from the Qurʾan, prayers, religious phrases and symbols, and references to Muslim holy figures, such as the prophet Muḥammad and ʿAlī. As talismans are often constructed to empower and protect an individual, avert danger, and bring blessings in uncertain and perilous circumstances, it is no surprise that magical formulas and symbols are

3 Shiʿi Muslims regard him as the rightful successor to the Prophet; to Sunnis, he is the fourth Rightly Guided Caliph. 4 ‫( لا فتى الاعلی ولا سيف الا ذو الفقار‬Lā fatā illā ʿAlī wa-lā sayf illā dhū l-fiqār). For more on Dhū l-Fiqār, see David Alexander, “Dhu l-Faḳār” (PhD diss., New York University, 1984); Khorasani, Arms and Armor from Iran, 195–198; and Zeynep Yürekli, “Dhuʾl-faqār and the Ottomans,” in People of the Prophet’s House, ed. Fahmida Suleman (London: Azimuth, 2015), 163–172.

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found etched, carved, engraved, embroidered, and painted on objects used in, or associated with, war. As a result, these objects are charged with the double function of both physical and metaphysical protection.

1

Part I: Talismanic Materials and the Orientation of Protective Motifs

1.1 The Materials Before examining the talismanic motifs that adorn Islamic arms and armor, the materials that are used to embellish these objects deserve a brief mention, as they too are deemed to possess magical properties. Materials play an important part in the production of Islamic amulets, and of the way stone is used to create them is just as significant as the content engraved upon its surface.5 The symbolic connotations of precious and semi-precious stones in the Islamic world has been discussed in many sources, such as al-Bīrūnī’s (d. c. 440/1048) Kitāb al-jamāhir fī maʿrifat al-jawāhir (“Book of collections on the knowledge of precious stones”)6 and al-Tīfāshī’s (d. 651/1253) Azhār al-afkār fī jawāhir alaḥjār (“The blooms of thoughts on precious stones”).7 Both texts discuss the magical and medicinal properties of a variety of precious and semi-precious stones. Al-Bīrūnī also includes minerals and metals. The texts also indicate that these various materials all have specific uses, from poison antidote to antihemorrhagic. Some stones, as al-Bīrūnī writes, were favored by the Prophet or other holy figures. Carnelian (ʿaqīq), for example, was considered Muḥammad’s pre-

5 For amulets, see Alexander Fodor, Amulets from the Islamic World (Budapest: Eotvos Lorand University, 1990); Francis Maddison and Emilie Savage-Smith, Science, Tools and Magic: Part One: Body and Spirit, Mapping the Universe (London: Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1997), 132–147; Venetia Porter, “Amulets Inscribed with the Name of the ‘Seven Sleepers’ of Ephesus in the British Museum,” in Word of God, Art of Man: The Qurʾan and its Creative Expressions, ed. Fahmida Suleman (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007), 123–134; Christiane Gruber, “From Prayer to Protection: Amulets in the Islamic World,” in Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural, ed. Francesca Leoni (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2016), 33–51; Venetia Porter, Liana Saif, and Emilie Savage-Smith, “Medieval Islamic Amulets, Talismans, and Magic,” in A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, ed. Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu (Hoboken: WileyBlackwell, 2017), 1:521–527. 6 Abū Rayḥān Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Bīrūnī, Kitāb al-jamāhir fī maʿrifat al-jawāhir, trans. Hakim Muḥammad Said (Islamabad: Pakistan Hijra Council, 1989). 7 Aḥmad ibn Yūsuf al-Tīfāshī, Arab Roots of Gemology: Ahmad ibn Yusuf Al-Tifaschi’s Best Thoughts on the Best of Stones, trans. Samar Najm Abul Huda (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1998).

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ferred stone.8 Both al-Bīrūnī and al-Tīfāshī discuss how the “flesh red” variety was thought to stop bleeding from any part of the body, while the red or yellowred versions of carnelian, known as rutabī, were believed capable of controlling fear and anger in battle.9 Other stones were highly regarded for their protective properties in war, such as jade and jasper, both of which were thought to secure victory in combat.10 These precious and semi-precious materials made appearances on and off the battlefield. On the battlefield, these valuable materials took the form of smaller objects, such as amulets, rings, and Qurʾan cases. Off the battlefield, they could be found decorating swords and daggers carried and kept by royalty and high-ranking military officers at their encampments or used during courtly and/or religious ceremonial processions, to insure good fortune. Presentation swords and daggers adorned with these materials were commonly used, when not at war, in courtly events and processions, as demonstrated in historic paintings and manuscripts.11 The apotropaic properties of the stones in such circumstances protected the owner from other forms of danger, such as poisoning and attempted assassination. In circumstances that involved affairs of the court, on a larger scale, they were meant to protect the lofty status of an individual, especially the emperor and his reign, as well as the stability and power of the empire. A fine example of the use of stones that are

8

9 10

11

Gruber, “From Prayer to Protection,” 38. See also Francesca Leoni, ed., Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2016), 90; Živa Vesel, “Talismans from the Iranian World: A Millenary Tradition,” in The Art and Material Culture of Iranian Shiʿism: Iconography and Religious Devotion in Shiʿi Islam, ed. Pedram Khosronejad (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 265; and Sheila S. Blair, “An Amulet from Afsharid Iran,” The Journal of the Walters Art Museum 59 (2001): 85–102. Gruber, “From Prayer to Protection,” 35, and al-Tīfāshī, Arab Roots of Gemology, 222. Manuel Keene, “Jade i. Introduction,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, and Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani, “Precious and Semi-Precious Stones in Iranian Culture, Chapter I. Early Iranian Jade,” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 11 (1997): 123–173. For examples, see Lucien de Guise and Susan Stronge, Jewels without Crowns: Mughal Gems in Miniatures (Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, 2010); Maryam Ekhtiar, Priscilla Soucek, Sheila Canby, and Navina Haidar, Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011); J.M. Rogers, Empire of the Sultans: Ottoman Art from the Khalili Collection, (Geneva: Musée d’ Art et d’ Histoire 2011); Jack Ogden, Judy Rudoe, Katherine Prior, and Vivienne Becker, Beyond Extravagance: A Royal Collection of Gems and Jewels, ed. Amin Jaffer (New York: Assouline, 2013); Sheila Canby, The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp: The Persian Book of Kings (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014); Alexander, Islamic Arms and Armor, and Salam Kaoujki, Precious Indian Weapons and Other Princely Accoutrements (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2017). For discussion of arms and armor in religious processions in Iran, see Khorasani, Arms and Armor from Iran, 357–359.

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figure 10.1

Saber with scabbard and grip: Grip: India, twelfth/eighteenth century; guard and scabbard: Turkey, thirteenth/nineteenth century; blade: Iran, dated 1099/1688; decoration on blade: Turkey, thirteenth/nineteenth century. Steel, gold, copper alloy, jade, diamond, emerald, pearl. 101.0cm (overall length). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Giulia P. Morosini, in memory of her father, Giovanni P. Morosini 1923, 23.232.2a, b Image in the Public Domain

believed to have magical properties in the production of arms and armor is an Ottoman sword in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection (Figure 10.1).12 It has been claimed that the sword was made in 1293/1876 for the investiture of Sultan Murād V, even though no evidence exists to support this claim.13 Unfortunately, Murād V’s reign was short-lived (r. 1293/1876), and he suffered a nervous breakdown before the sword-girding ceremony, for which the court would have commissioned this type of saber.14 Like many late-Ottoman edged weapons, this sword is a composite: it has a twelfth/eighteenth-century Mughal jade hilt, an eleventh/seventeenth-century Persian watered steel blade, and a thirteenth/nineteenth-century Ottoman guard and scabbard. While the inscriptions on both the blade and the scabbard are protective, including invocations to God and ʿAlī, their efficacy is enhanced by the incorporation of specific and previous materials.15 Encircling the hilt is a string of small pearls (durr) which ends in a tassel of pearls formed of thirteen strands. The Qurʾan’s Sūrat al-Raḥmān (“The Merciful”) focuses on the gifts that God bestowed upon mankind, and pearls are listed as one of them and as a sign of His presence on earth.16 The inclusion of pearls on this object can thus be seen as a reference to God. Pearls are also believed to strengthen one’s heart,

12 13 14 15 16

Acc. no. 23.232.2a, b. Alexander, Islamic Arms and Armor, 176. Alexander, Islamic Arms and Armor, 176. For a full list of the inscriptions and their translations, see Alexander, Islamic Arms and Armor, 175–176. Q 55:21–22: “So which favors of your Lord would you deny? From both of them emerge pearl and coral.”

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banish fear and anguish, and stop bleeding.17 The diamonds (almās) that adorn the hilt and blade and the front of the scabbard have otherworldly significance as well. Al-Bīrūnī recounts how, according to legend, the conqueror Alexander the Great braved a valley infested by vipers to gather all the world’s diamonds, which were dropped there by eagles.18 The “stone of the eagle,” then, could be interpreted as symbolizing courage, making it an appropriate embellishment for a weapon. The sword also features emeralds (zumurrud) on the hilt and on the front of the scabbard. The green stone is widely acknowledged to have both protective and mystical properties and is considered to guard against poison and promise good luck.19 Due to its color, it is associated with life itself and with the Prophet, whose favorite color was green.20 Additionally, occultists, natural philosophers, and religious scholars all venerated the emerald as a “revealer of mysteries.” The Shiʿi theologian Muḥammad Bāqir al-Majlisī (d. 1110/1699) purported that God gave Moses emerald tablets bearing secret, otherworldly knowledge that was later passed to the Prophet and then to ʿAlī.21 The sixth Shiʿi imam, Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765), who also wrote several treatises on talismans and divination, attested that these tablets were inscribed with “all science, first and last.”22 This can be interpreted as meaning that the emerald was seen as a container significant and valuable enough to hold such profound knowledge. The emerald as the “revealer of mysteries” has a double meaning for this sword. At the top of the front of the scabbard is a large cabochon emerald on a hinged setting that, when lifted, reveals the reverse side of a gold coin of Ottoman ruler Süleymān the Magnificent (r. 926–974/1520–1566). The coin states, “Sultan Süleymān Khan, the son of Selim Shah, may his victory be glorious, minted in Miṣr, year ….”23 Coins and coin-shaped amulets were popular under the Ottomans, especially between the twelfth/eighteenth and thirteenth/nine

17 18 19 20 21 22

23

Al-Tīfāshī, Arab Roots of Gemology, 180. Al-Bīrūnī, Kitāb al-jamāhir fī maʿrifat al-jawāhir, 81. Al-Tīfāshī, Arab Roots of Gemology, 195. Alexander, Islamic Arms and Armor, 177; Henry Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis (London: Kegan Paul International, 1983), 87–88. Muḥammad Bāqir Al-Majlisī, The Life and Religion of Muḥammad. Vol. 2: Hiyat al-Qulub, trans. James L. Merrick (San Antonio: Zahara Trust, 1982), 105. See Al-Majlisi, The Life and Religion of Muḥammad, 105, and Alexander, Islamic Arms and Armor, 177. For al-Ṣādiq’s treatises on divination, see Rachel Parikh, “Persian Pomp, Indian Circumstance: The Khalili Falnama” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2014), 15, and Massumeh Farhad with Serpil Bağcı, Falnama: The Book of Omens (Washington DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 2008), 21, 31. … ‫سلطان سليمان بن سليم خان عز نصره ضرب في مصر سنة‬. Miṣr can mean either Egypt or Cairo. The date is hidden by the mounting.

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figure 10.2

Detail of the underside of the hinged emerald on the scabbard in Figure 10.1 Image in the Public Domain

teenth centuries.24 It was common to invoke great rulers and military leaders by engraving their names on arms and armor or by incorporating referential tokens, like coins, to call upon their protection, military prowess, and power. This act of veneration transforms important historical figures into metaphysical guides and symbols of good fortune for the owner of the armor or weapon, so that he may also achieve success in his military duty. The underside of the emerald is also engraved with an inscription: “God has willed” (Figure 10.2).25 Emeralds are brittle, and their many fissures can make 24

25

Gruber, “From Prayer to Protection,” 35, and Venetia Porter, Robert G. Hoyland, and Alexander Morton, Arabic and Persian Seals and Amulets in the British Museum (London: The British Museum Press, 2011), 13, 158–163. ‫ماشاء الله‬.

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cutting the stone difficult; the fact that the artisan was able to carve a calligraphic inscription into the small gem testifies to great skill.26 The incorporation of materials with occult properties (khawāṣṣ) is an important aspect of the objects examined in this essay, but some of these materials were far too valuable to adorn arms and armor intended for battle. Visual and verbal motifs are far more versatile, and, as such, were widely used as apotropaic resources on arms and armor. These formulas are predominantly religious in nature and include Qurʾanic chapters and/or verses; pious phrases; invocations dedicated to the prophet Muḥammad, ʿAlī, and members of the Prophet’s family (Ahl al-Bayt); references to other prophets; and symbols such as Dhū l-Fiqār. 1.2 The Orientation of Motifs Perhaps as important as these talismanic motifs is their placement on an object. In the Islamic world, it is generally believed that an object adorned with talismanic verbal and/or visual motifs will offer protection by direct interaction, through reading, seeing, and touching.27 Talismans that invoke religious figures, such as the Prophet, ʿAlī, and other pious figures are also intended to foster a connection between the object’s owner and the divine. The placement of talismanic motifs on arms and armor is critical to facilitating such an interaction and thus affects the construction, function, and decoration of the material. Edged weapons, such as daggers and swords, often carry such talismanic motifs. Islamic swords are traditionally long, curved sabers used on foot or on horseback. Surviving examples that bear talismanic ornamentation are predominantly Iranian and Turkish and date between the tenth/sixteenth and thirteenth/nineteenth centuries. Apotropaic inscriptions and motifs are usually found on the front of the blade, facing the outer edge.28 Such orientation is logical, considering how the sword is held and used. The weapon’s owner can

26

27

28

For methods of engraving stones, particularly on amulets and talismans, see Margaret Sax and Nigel Meeks, “Methods of Engraving,” in Arabic and Persian Seals and Amulets in the British Museum, by Venetia Porter with Robert G. Hoyland and Alexander Morton (London: British Museum Press, 2011), 185–188. Yasmine Al-Saleh, “Amulets and Talismans from the Islamic World,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, last modified November 2000, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/tali/ hd_tali.htm. This observation is based on data gathered from a personal examination of approximately sixty swords in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Wallace Collection (London), which hold many of these objects. There are exceptions to the general formula expressed here that can be found throughout the Islamic world.

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maintain a continuous connection with the talismanic inscription because it can be seen and read as the sword moves away from the body in a sweeping motion toward an opponent. It can also be read when held in an upright position, from the base of the blade to the point. In some instances, both sides of the blade feature verbal or visual decoration. If the back bears an inscription, it commonly faces the cutting edge. This is so viewers can simultaneously read inscriptions on the front and back when the sword is held upright and turned to the back. Blades can also bear medallions that contain Qurʾanic verses as well as the names of God (Allāh), the prophet Muḥammad and/or his family, ʿAlī, and the Rightly Guided Caliphs. Typically, these are found toward the base of the blade, facing the hilt, so that they remain easily visible and legible to the weapon-bearer, regardless of the sword’s orientation. Thus, no matter in what position the weapon is held by the owner, the talismanic program is constantly within sight and is readable, allowing for a sensory interaction that is essential to the efficacy of the talisman. Talismans for Islamic daggers typically have by the same configuration. With regard to armor—including arm and leg defenses, cuirasses, mail shirts, helmets, and shields—the orientation of apotropaic ornamentation is based on the proximity to the body and then, if possible, by its visibility to the user, as they interact with and protect the wearer through their close contact with the body. Surviving examples that are believed to be charged with talismanic properties are predominantly from Iran, Turkey, and India and date between the tenth/sixteenth and thirteenth/nineteenth centuries.29 The motifs cloak the body in divine protection, metaphysically reinforcing the physical barrier of iron and steel and promising safety and success. Inscriptions and motifs are commonly found in strategic places to protect vulnerable parts of the body, such as the vital organs and the face. A thirteenth/nineteenthcentury Deccan Indian helmet in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection features a distinct, eleventh/seventeenth-century face guard that is pierced with two large holes for the eyes and a triangular opening for the nose.30 In the center of the latter opening is the phrase, yā ʿAlī (“O ʿAlī”), and surrounding the edges it states, “There is no hero but ʿAlī; there is no sword but Dhū l-Fiqār. Help from God and a speedy victory.”

29

30

Christiane Gruber writes that these objects “speak clearly of an individual’s urge for physical contact with such protective objects—a corporeal intimacy that symbolically provides a secondary, armoured skin” (“From Prayer to Protection,” 35). Acc. no. 36.25.63a. See Maryam Ekhtiar and Rachel Parikh, Power and Piety: Islamic Talismans on the Battlefield (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016).

power and piety: islamic talismans on the battlefield

figure 10.3

429

Shirt of mail and plate, India, dated 1042/1632–1633. Steel, iron, gold, and leather. 81.3 × 78.8 × 101.5 cm (mounted). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Gift, 2008, 2008.245 Image in the Public Domain

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Arguably the most striking example of armor with apotropaic formulas is the mail shirt, consisting of small, interlocking rings of steel and/or iron.31 The concept and intention behind the mail shirt parallels that of its fabric counterparts, which were, in some cases, even worn underneath the armor.32 Surviving examples of mail shirts with apotropaic decoration are mostly from Iran and date between the tenth/sixteenth and twelfth/eighteenth centuries.33 The rings used for the shirt are stamped with invocations, above all Allāh, and pious names, such as those of the prophet Muḥammad, ʿAlī, or all members of the Ahl al-Bayt. The number of stamped rings varies from example to example. Although the tight, interlocking construction of the mail would have been difficult to penetrate, the inclusion of pious inscriptions was clearly intended to reinforce its protective potential through divine appeal. An example in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection is especially representative because of the relationship between the talismanic program, its orientation, and construction (Figure 10.3). The shirt was created during the reign of the Mughal emperor Shāh Jahān (r. 1037–1068/1628–58) and kept in the imperial armory.34 It is made of thick, double-riveted steel rings. Attached to the shirt are protective plates: two breast plates, two side plates, and two back plates, all of which are made of dark iron and burnished with gold leaf in two different shades. The outer surfaces of all the plates are inscribed with verses from the Qurʾan. In the center of the left side plate is the Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ (“Sincerity”): “He is God, [who is] One, God, the Eternal Refuge. He neither begets nor is born, nor is there to Him any equivalent.”35 Around the edge of this plate is Sūrat al-Kāfirūn (“The 31 32

33

34

35

For other forms of armor, see Alexander, Islamic Arms and Armor, and Bashir Mohammed, The Arts of the Muslim Knight: The Furusiyya Art Foundation Collection (Milan: Skira 2008). See Esin Atil, The Age of Süleyman the Magnificent (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1987), 196; and Maddison and Savage-Smith, Science, Tools and Magic, 117. For fabric talismanic shirts, see Leoni, Power and Protection, cat. 48; Rose Muravchik, “God is the Best Guardian: Islamic Talismanic Shirts from the Gunpowder Empires” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2014); Heather Coffey, “Between Amulet and Devotion: Islamic Miniature Books in the Lily Library,” in The Islamic Manuscript Tradition: Ten Centuries of Book Arts in Indiana University Collections, ed. Christiane Gruber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 89–91; Maddison and Savage-Smith, Science, Tools and Magic, 117–123. Alexander, Islamic Arms and Armor, 24–29, and David Alexander and Howard Ricketts, “Arms and Armour,” in Treasures of Islam, ed. Toby Falk (Bristol: Airline Editions, 1985), 306–307. Acc. no. 2008.245. See Alexander, Islamic Arms and Armor, 44. One of the three inscriptions on the inner surfaces of the breast plates states, in a decorative cartouche, that the armor was a gift of Sayf Khān in 1042/1632–1633 and that it cost 200 rupees (Khān was a high-ranking Mughal officer who served under emperors Jahāngīr and Shāh Jahān): (‫ بار )؟‬۲۶ ‫( رو پيه‬۲۰۰) ‫ قيمت‬/۱۰۴۲ ‫پيشکش سيف خان سنة‬. Q 112:1–4.

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Disbelievers”): “O disbelievers, I do not worship what you worship. Nor are you worshippers of what I worship.”36 It is followed by a series of invocations directed to God: “O Protector! O Victor! O Helper!”37 In the center of the right side plate is written: “O Compassionate One of this world and the afterlife, and Merciful One of them both.”38 Around the edge of this plate are the last three verses from the Sūrat al-Nās (“Mankind”): “From the evil of the retreating whisperer— who whispers [evil] into the breasts of mankind—from among the jinn and mankind.”39 Around the border of the left back plate is Sūrat al-Naṣr (“The Conquest”): “When the victory of God has come and the conquest, and you see the people entering the religion of God in multitudes, then exalt [Him] with praise of your Lord and ask forgiveness of Him. Indeed, He is ever-accepting of repentance.”40 The center contains the thirteenth verse of Sūrat al-Ṣaff (“The Battle Array”): “Help from God and a victory near at hand.”41 On the right back plate, beginning on the border and continuing to the center is the Sūrat al-Falaq (“Daybreak”): “I seek refuge with the Lord of Dawn, from the evil of He created; from the evil of Darkness when it settles; from the evil of the blowers in knots; and from the evil of an envier when he envies.”42 The outer surface of the breast plates bears, entwined in foliage, the āyat al-kursī (“Throne Verse”) and verses from Sūrat al-Baqara (“The Cow”). While the inclusion of these particular verses may seem random, they are all significant. It is widely believed that verses from the Qurʾan provide protection and that certain ones carry beneficial occult properties (khawāṣṣ).43 The āyat 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Q 109:1–3.

‫ ( يا حافظ يا ناصر يا معين‬yā Ḥāfiẓ yā Nāṣir yā Muʿīn). ‫ ( يا رحمن الدنيا والاخرة ورحيمهما‬yā Raḥmān al-dunyā wa-l-ākhira wa-Raḥīmahumā). Q 114:3–6. Q 110:1–3. Q 61:13. Q 113:1–5. Christiane Gruber, “A Pious Cure-All: The Ottoman Illustrated Prayer Manual in the Lilly Library,” in The Islamic Manuscript Tradition: Ten Centuries of Book Arts in Indiana University Collections, ed. Christiane Gruber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 24. These special abilities became the focus of a genre of texts known as the faḍāʾil al-Qurʾān (“The Virtues of the Qurʾan”). See Asma Asfaruddin, “The Excellencies of the Qurʾan: Textual Sacrility and the Organization of Early Islamic Society,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 122, no. 1 (2002): 1–24, and Asma Asfrauddin, “In Praise of the Word of God: Reflections of Early Religious and Social Concerns in the Fada’il al-Qurʾan Genre.” Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 4, no. 1 (2002): 27–48. Guides and manuals that highlighted the potency and magical efficacy of certain verses included, for example, Persian author ʿAbdallāh b. Muḥammad b. Ḥusayn’s Khavāṣṣ-i āyāt (1234/1818–1819). See Arthur Christensen, Xavass-i-ayat: Notices et extraits d’un manuscript persan traitant la magie des versets du Coran (Copenhagen: Høst & Søn, 1920); and Gruber, “A Pious Cure-All,” 125.

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ekhtiar and parikh

al-kursī celebrates God’s omnipotence and omnipresence, justifying its broad adoption across media, including arms and armor.44 Unsurprisingly, verses from the Sūrat al-Ṣaff and Sūrat al-Naṣr are found primarily on arms and armor, as well as on other equipment of war, such as military standards, as they invoke success and victory, particularly through God’s help.45 The Sūrat al-Kāfirūn and the Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ both speak to an allegiance to God and his singularity. The latter can also be found on a variety of objects, particularly amulets.46 Sūrat alNās and Sūrat al-Falaq are collectively known as al-muʿawwidhatayn (“The two verses of taking refuge”), as they both discuss seeking refuge in God. According to a hadith, the muʿawwidhatayn were recited by the prophet Muḥammad to break a curse that was put on him.47 Like the Sūrat al-Kāfirūn and the Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ, the muʿawwidhatayn emphasize God as the absolute and the ultimate, powerful source for help. Of the entire Qurʾan, these chapters offer the strongest protective capacity, and they therefore appear together on objects associated with battle.48 The rings that comprise the sleeves and those that go around the shirt from the neckline to the midsection (in the front this will be the bottom of the breast plates) are stamped with the asmāʾ al-ḥusnā (“the most beautiful Names of God”) (Figure 10.4). That expression appears four times in the Qurʾan and invites devotees to use them when invoking or appealing to God.49 Although the Qurʾan presents numerous names for God, which includes adjectives and attributes, it does not identify or number the ones that are “the most beautiful.” The identification and number came from the Prophet’s Companion, Abū Hurayra (d. c. 61/680), who reported that the Prophet said, “God has ninety-nine names, a hundred less one, whosoever recounts them will enter Paradise.”50 44 45 46

47

48 49

50

For a discussion on the āyat al-kursī’s talismanic properties, see E.A. Wallis Budge, Amulets and Superstitions (London: Milford, 1930), 54–55, and Leoni, Power and Protection, 57. For more on the martial context of the Qurʾan, see Coffey, “Between Amulet and Devotion.” Gruber, “From Prayer to Protection,” 43. The Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ is also one of the chapters that is recited before consulting the Fāl-nāma (“Book of omens”), a Persian divinatory text; Farhad with Bağcı, Falnama, 30, 296. Leoni, Power and Protection, 53. Tewfik Canaan, “The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans.” Berythus 4 (1937): 75; Michael W. Dols, “The Theory of Magic in Healing,” in Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society, ed. Diana E. Immisch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 269, and Porter, Hoyland, and Morton, Arabic and Persian Seals and Amulets, 132. For a prime example, see Leoni, Power and Protection, 57, fig. 31. Al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā appears in Sūrat al-Aʿrāf (“The Heights”), 7:180; Sūrat al-Isrāʾ (“The Night Journey”), 17:110; Sūrat Ṭā-Hā, 20:8; and Sūrat al-Ḥashr (“The Exile”), 59:24; Samer Akkach, “Beautiful Names of God,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed. Akkach, “Beautiful Names of God.”

power and piety: islamic talismans on the battlefield

figure 10.4

433

Detail of stamped rings of shirt of mail and plate in Figure 10.3 Image in the Public Domain

While the number of names has been established, the actual names vary in different hadiths and narrations.51 Those that appear on the mail shirt seem to follow the list created by the celebrated hadith scholar al-Tirmidhī (d. 279/892), which became accepted by Sunnis, including the Mughals, as the authoritative list.52 Each ring has been meticulously stamped with approximately five to six of God’s names. The same set of names is repeated for each column of rings from the neckline to the bottom of the breastplates. Starting in the middle of the chest area, strategically and symbolically next to the heart, is the column with the first group of names, inscribed in order and read counterclockwise: al-Raḥmān (“The Merciful”), al-Raḥīm (“The Compassionate”), alMālik (“The King”), al-Quddūs (“The Holy”), and al-Salām (“The Peace”). In the next column, on the proper left, is the next set of names: al-Muʾmīn (“The Believer”), al-Muhaymin (“The Dominant”), al-ʿAzīz (“The Powerful”), al-Jabbār

51 52

Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, al-Maqṣad al-asnā fī sharḥ asmāʾ Allāh al-ḥusnā, ed. Fadlou Shehadi (Faḍla Shaḥāda) (Beirut: Dar el-Machreq, 1982), 181–183. For the entire list, see Akkach, “Beautiful Names of God.”

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ekhtiar and parikh

(“The Almighty”), al-Mutakabbir (“The Haughty”), and al-Khāliq (“The Creator”). The list of names continues around the shirt until it concludes with the final group of names: al-Badīʿ (“The Inventor”), al-Bāqī (“The Eternal”), alWārith (“The Inheritor”), al-Rashīd (“The Leader”), and al-Ṣabr (“The Patient”). This final group of names appears right next to the first group. The organization is significant, for it symbolically demonstrates how recalling God encompasses one’s heart, representing a true commitment to, and belief in, the Islamic faith. The stamped rings can be found only on the top half of the shirt, perhaps so that the owner’s vital parts, such as heart, stomach, kidneys, are under the protection of God’s name. Cloaking the body in divine protection recalls a significant parallel with the Prophet’s own actions. According to a hadith, every evening the Prophet would lie in his bed, recite the opening verses of the last three chapters of the Qurʾan (Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ, Sūrat al-Falaq, and Sūrat al-Nās), and blow air onto his hands to transfer their blessings. He would then massage his body, from his head to his feet, to spread the blessings and cover his body in God’s protective influence.53 Notably, the verses that Muḥammad used to imbue his body with apotropaic blessings also appear on this mail shirt. The intricacies of the decoration of this mail shirt are signified by the specific talismanic verses, symbols, and references, and how they are presented. The ornamentation and the construction work together, interlocking physical and divine protection in a singular unit. With an understanding of talismanic materials and the positioning of motifs, we now turn to a detailed discussion of these talismanic motifs and symbols found on Islamic arms and armor, specifically those that refer to the prophet Solomon, the Aṣḥāb al-Kahf, and ʿAlī’s bifurcated sword, Dhū lFiqār.

2

Part II: Talismanic Motifs and Symbols

2.1 Solomon, the Aṣḥāb al-Kahf and Dhū l-Fiqār The Qurʾan refers to Solomon as a king (malik), a prophet (nabī), and a just and wise ruler elected by God. Solomon is also known for his practical wisdom and connection with supernatural forces: he is able to command the wind and communicate with birds and demons.54 Solomon was also an armorer who pos53

54

Leoni, Power and Protection, 53. See Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl al-Bukhārī, Sahih al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Meanings of Sahih al-Bukhari, Arabic-English, ed. Muḥammad Muḥsin Khān, 9 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-ʿArabiyya, 1985), 6:490, nos. 535–536, 7:430, no. 644. Q 27:18–19.

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sessed the wisdom to adjudicate disputes and was fond of horses.55 According to legend, God gave Solomon a seal in the shape of a hexagram and in the form of a signet ring, to protect him and endow him with magical powers.56 Although the date of creation of the seal is unknown, the legend of a magic ring was reportedly developed by medieval Arabic writers.57 The “seal of Solomon” quickly became revered as an emblem of sovereignty and a symbol of God’s protective powers; it was one of the most popular symbols in the Ottoman lands.58 The Seyāḥat-nāme (“Book of travels”) of Ottoman explorer Evliyā Çelebi (d. after 1096/1685) mentions that, in eleventh/seventeenth-century Istanbul, the making and selling of amulet seals was a lucrative trade and that the “seal of Solomon” was among the many verbal and visual emblems available.59 Evliyā states that the symbol was even carved onto the walls of Ottoman fortresses, reinforcing the large bricks and stones that comprised those structures.60 The “seal of Solomon” also appears on portable coin-seals and talismanic shirts. Solomonic symbols and inscriptions on arms and armor consist of Qurʾanic passages that refer to him and his seal. For example, an Ottoman saber with a pistol-shaped hilt, a straight guard, and a long, curved, steel blade in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection (Figure 10.5) bears neither a date nor the name of the weapon’s owner or maker. Instead, the blade is decorated with a gilded epigraphic program in thuluth script, which includes eleven verses from the Sūrat al-Fatḥ (“The Victory”),61 a verse from the Sūrat al-Ṣaff,62 and the popular āyat al-kursī from the Sūrat al-Baqara.63 The last long cartouche, located near the point on one side, contains a verse from the Sūrat al-Naml (“The Ant”) in thuluth script that continues on the reverse side of the blade in fine naskh script, and directly mentions Solomon:

55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63

Priscilla Soucek, “Solomon’s Throne/Solomon’s Bath: Model or Metaphor?” Ars Orientalis 23 (1993): 109–134. M. Seligsohn and Joseph Jacobs, “Seal of Solomon,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New York, 1905), 11:448. J. Walker and P. Fenton, “Sulaymān b. Dāwūd,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. Christiane Gruber, “Power and Protection: Late Ottoman Seal Designs,” Hadeeth al-Dar 38 (2012): 6. According to Gruber, it also acted as a graphic channel for securing divine dispensation. Gruber, “Power and Protection: Late Ottoman Seal Designs,” 2–6. Gruber, “Power and Protection: Late Ottoman Seal Designs,” 2–6. Acc. no. 36.25.1297. 48:7–11. Q 61:13. Q 2:255.

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figure 10.5 Saber kilij, Turkey, mid-tenth/sixteenth century. Steel, gold, iron, wood, and fish skin. 96.2cm (overall length). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of George C. Stone 1935, 36.25.1297 Image in the Public Domain

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And there were gathered together unto Solomon his armies of the jinn and humankind, and of the birds, and they were set in battle order. Allāh has spoken truly. Till, when they reached the Valley of the Ants, an ant exclaimed: O ants! Enter your dwellings lest Solomon and his armies will crush you, unperceiving. And (Solomon) smiled, laughing at her speech, and said: My Lord, arouse me to be thankful for Thy favor wherewith Thou hast favored me and my parents, and to do good that shall be pleasing unto Thee, and include me (the number of) Thy righteous slaves.64 References to Solomon continue in three additional verses from the same sura, and concern the story of the prophet and Bilqīs (Queen of Sheba): (The Queen of Sheba) said (when she received the letter): “O chieftains! Lo! There hath been thrown unto me a noble letter. Lo! It is from Solomon, and lo! It is: In the name of Allāh, the Beneficent and the Merciful. Exalt not yourself against me, but come unto me as those who surrender.”65 The profusion of inscriptions on this saber affirm God’s omnipotence and assurance of victory and salvation to believers, Solomon’s submission to God and his wisdom and power over the forces of nature and his ability to convince Sheba to surrender to his powers and submit to the belief in one God.66 Verses from Sūrat al-Naml occur rarely on Islamic arms and armor. In this case, it may have been included as a clever metaphor aligning the ruling emperor, Sultan Süleymān I, with his namesake, the great king and prophet Solomon known for his knowledge and extraordinary powers. There is a tradition of using such iconography among Muslim monarchs. Safavid, Mughal, and Deccani rulers such as Shāh Sulaymān I (r. 1077–1105/1666–1694), Akbar (r. 963– 1014/1556–1605), Jahāngīr (r. 1014–1037/1605–27), and Ibrāhīm ʿĀdilshāh II (r. 987–1038/1579–1629) used similar metaphors to lay claim to Solomon’s divinely sanctioned reign.67 64 65 66

67

Q 27:18–19. Q 27:29–31. Anthony Welch, Calligraphy and the Arts of the Muslim World (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 94–95, and Alexander, Islamic Arms and Armor, 155–157. See also Noah Gardiner, “Stars and Saints: The Esotericist Astrology of the Sufi Occultist Aḥmad al-Būnī,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 12, no. 1 (2017): 39–65. For example, both Sultan Süleymān and Shah Sulaymān referred to Solomon by including the phrase “It is from Solomon” before the bismillāh in their personal slogans. In fact, Sultan Süleymān used it in many contexts, including in the introduction to the historical manuscript the Süleymān-nāme; Alexander, Islamic Arms and Armor, 157. References to

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Sultan Süleymān’s rule is considered the height of the Ottoman Empire’s economic, military, and political power, earning him the name “Süleymān the Magnificent.” Therefore, according to David G. Alexander, “a saber fitted with one of the most exquisitely-crafted blades produced in the Islamic lands with Qurʾanic inscriptions referencing Solomon may very well be alluding to the allpowerful Ottoman Sultan who commissioned it.”68 Here, the equivalence of the names Solomon and Süleymān infuses this extraordinary saber with magical and powerful talismanic properties. The “seal of Solomon” appears widely on weapons, armor, and other objects used on and off the battlefield. These include, for example, the green banner dating to the rule of Süleymān the Magnificent, several swords, talismanic shirts, and a thirteenth/nineteenth-century patch box from the Ottoman Balkans. Although many of these works date to a few centuries after the rule of the great sultan, they demonstrate the enduring power of this talismanic symbol. A thirteenth/nineteenth-century sword,69 with a steel blade and a black jade hilt, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, bears inscriptions in square kufic script stating the profession of faith along with the āyat al-kursī, all damascened in gold on the front of the blade and with the “seal of Solomon” on the reverse side, as well as invocations to God and Sultan Süleymān on its gold guard.70 The blades of two other Ottoman thirteenth/nineteenth-century swords in the Wallace Collection, London, feature the “seal of Solomon”; the upper part of the edges of the blades of both weapons are inscribed with the names of the Seven Sleepers and their dog, Qiṭmīr.71 One of the swords also bears the statement, “There is no hero but ʿAlī; there is no sword but Dhū lFiqār” (Figure 10.6). These weapons combine three potent protective symbols. Here, the names of the Seven Sleepers refer to the sura from the Qurʾan devoted to the story of “the People of the Cave,” which has resonance and talismanic

68 69

70 71

Solomon are also found in the tomb of the Mughal emperor Akbar; see Laura E. Parodi, “Solomon, the Messenger and the Throne: Themes from a Mughal Tomb,”East and West 51, nos. 1–2 (2001): 127–142. An inscription alluding to Solomon’s throne also appears on the turban of the Deccani ruler, Ibrāhīm ʿĀdilshāh II, as seen in a painting in the David Collection, Copenhagen. For a reproduction, see Navina Haidar and Marika Sardar, Sultans of Deccan India 1500–1700: Opulence and Fantasy (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015), 93. Alexander, Islamic Arms and Armor, 157. This is a composite: the blade is possibly Iranian, the guard and the decoration on the blade are Turkish, and the jade grip is attributed to twelfth/eighteenth-century Mughal India; Alexander, Islamic Arms and Armor, 172–173. Acc. no. 36.25.1293. Acc. nos. OA 1779 and OA 1994.

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significance for both Christians and Muslims.72 The story parallels its Christian counterpart, recounting how a group of young believers and their dog were protected by God from religious persecution, took refuge in a cave, and fell asleep for three hundred solar years (309 lunar years). When they awoke, the danger had passed and they thought they had been asleep for only a day. They died shortly after being discovered and were buried in the cave, which became a site of worship. The Qurʾan reveals neither the names of the youths nor their exact number, emphasizing that the latter is only known to God and a few people.73 For Muslims, reciting the sura is thought to bring peace and protection from harm. The sura, or parts of it, is found on objects and architectural surfaces from Spain to India from the thirteenth century onward.74 The “seal of Solomon” was also a popular motif in the Ottoman-occupied Balkans. A late-thirteenth/nineteenth-century patch box in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, features a large hexagram embellished with semiprecious stones that occupies almost the entire surface.75 Patch boxes were worn on a belt and used to carry accessories required by a gunman, such as patches, spare flints, and cleaning cloths. Such patch boxes were probably produced in the same guilds that created metal amulets, charms, and seals, which would also have been emblazoned with Solomonic and other talismanic motifs. 2.2 Dhū l-Fiqār and Ahl al-Bayt Imagery Textual and visual references to the bifurcated sword Dhū l-Fiqār appear on a wide variety of objects and media, such as silk banners, tombstones, talismanic shirts and other objects, prayer books, dervish drawings, paintings, ceramics, and arms and armor in the Islamic world from the eighth/fourteenth century onward. Considered the pre-eminent Islamic sword, Dhū l-Fiqār first belonged to the prophet Muḥammad, who presented it to ʿAlī, his cousin, son-in-law and, according to Shiʿi believers, his legitimate successor, at the Battle of Uḥud in 3/625. Sunnis venerate ʿAlī as the last of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs and a key member of the house of the Prophet. The phrase dhū l-fiqār (literally “one having a spine”) is probably an allusion to the appearance of the blade of the Prophet’s sword, which is thought to have had grooves and scallops along its length and a notch at the tip that gives it a forked appearance.

72 73 74 75

Q 18:9–26. Porter, “Amulets,” 123–134. Porter, “Amulets,” 125. Acc. no. 36.25.2474.

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Saber (kilij), Turkey, thirteenth/nineteenth century. Walrus ivory, silver, gold, steel, wood, leather, cord, tassel. 86.1 cm (overall length). Wallace Collection, London, OA 1779 Photography by Cassandra Parsons © The Wallace Collection

The sword’s association with ʿAlī has remained consistent from an early date, and the extensive mythology surrounding it centers on ʿAlī’s possession of it. Both Sunnis and Shiʿis regard it as a magical emblem of victory. It also has talismanic value, as it is thought to possess extraordinary properties to empower and protect warriors on and off the battlefield, as well as naval forces at sea. Furthermore, in traditions and religious epics ʿAlī is represented as a largerthan-life, invincible hero who, with the aid of his miraculous sword, was capable of defeating the deadliest of enemies. The slogan uttered by the Prophet after observing ʿAlī’s deft handling of the sword, “There is no hero but ʿAlī, there is no sword but Dhū l-Fiqār,” epitomizes both ʿAlī’s unmatched valor and the

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power of this sword.76 Furthermore, ʿAlī’s role as an intercessor in attaining blessings and salvation cannot be overstated. He is perceived by his followers as a nearly omnipotent force with the ability to protect and to dispense order, security, and justice in the face of turmoil, strife, and danger.77 Twelver Shiʿis believe that, after ʿAlī’s death, Dhū l-Fiqār was passed down to his sons, Ḥasan and Ḥusayn, and remained in the family until the occultation of the twelfth Imam, Muḥammad al-Mahdī, in 260/874.78 Imagery evoking Dhū l-Fiqār appears more frequently, however, on objects from areas dominated by Sunni Islam, such as Turkey and parts of Southeast Asia, including the Philippines and Indonesia, rather than in predominantly Shiʿi regions such as Iran and Deccan India. Several Ottoman silk banners (sançaks) dating from the late tenth/sixteenth to the early thirteenth/nineteenth century feature an image of Dhū l-Fiqār at the center, which is usually surrounded by a constellation of medallions that contain the names Allāh and Muḥammad and those of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs. This layout is seen on an early green silk banner in the Maritime Museum in Istanbul dated to the tenth/sixteenth century and associated with Khayreddīn Barbarossa (d. 952/1546), admiral of the Ottoman navy under Sultan Süleymān.79 It bears not only an image of the Dhū l-Fiqār but also the “seal of Solomon” and the “hand of Fāṭima,” the latter known in the Ottoman world as pençe-i āl-i abā (“Palm of the family of the mantle”), referring to the Ahl al-Bayt.80 Two fine red banners in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection featuring Dhū l-Fiqār, an early example from circa 1094/1683, and a later example (Figure 10.7), dated 1225/1810–1811, include Qurʾanic verses and Allāh, Muḥammad and the names of the Rightly Guided Caliphs.81 The later example also includes the name of a Companion of the Prophet, Abū Ayyūb al-Anṣārī, who died in an unsuccessful siege of Constantinople in 54/674. In the later examples, the hilt of the Dhū l-Fiqār consists of a guard in the form of a star-shaped calligram and quillons that terminate in dragon heads, the dragon being a reference to ʿAlī.82 The bifurcated blade is covered with calli76 77

78 79 80 81 82

Jane Hathaway, “The Sword Zulfiqar in Its Ottoman Incarnation,” The Turkish Studies Association Journal 27, nos. 1–2 (2003): 4 n. 10. Kathryn Babayan, “The Cosmological Order of Things in Early Modern Iran,” in Falnama: Book of Omens, ed. Massumeh Farhad with Serpil Bağcı (Washington DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 2008), 246–255. Hathaway, “The Sword Zulfiqar in Its Ottoman Incarnation,” 4. Acc. no. 2964. Yürekli, “Dhuʾl-faqār and the Ottomans,” 163–170. Acc. nos. 11.181.1 and 1976.312. Alexander, Islamic Arms and Armor, 150–151.

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figure 10.7

Sançak banner, Turkey, probably Istanbul, dated 1235/1819– 1820. Silk metal-wrapped thread, lampas, brocaded. 294 × 217.2 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1976, 1976.312 Image in the Public Domain

graphic inscriptions, some in mirror image (muthannā). Here, the Ottomans have “Sunnified” Dhū l-Fiqār by surrounding it with medallions bearing the names of the four orthodox caliphs. A painting from the Dīvān of Maḥmūd ʿAbd al-Bāqī (932–1008/1526–1600) in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicting the entry of the Safavid prince Ḥaydar Mīrzā (d. 1004/1595) into Istanbul as a hostage, shows the Ottoman troops carrying a banner with a Dhū l-Fiqār at the center, as they march into the city (Figure 10.8).83 83

Acc. no. 45.174.5.

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figure 10.8

“Ottoman Army Entering a City.” Folio from a Dīvān of Maḥmūd ʿAbd al-Bāqī (detail), Turkey, last quarter of tenth/sixteenth century. Ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper. Page 26×16cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of George D. Pratt, 45.174.5 Image in the Public Domain

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The image of Dhū l-Fiqār also appears along with the references to Allāh and Muḥammad on the backs of a number of Ottoman talismanic shirts.84 Such shirts were worn by warriors under mail shirts and other armor. The entire surface was covered with Qurʾanic verses, prayers, talismanic charts and other signs and symbols, producing talismanic shirts intended to provide an additional layer of protection during battle. They could also be worn by ailing individuals seeking relief from illness or injury. In an example in the collection of the Topkapı Palace Museum, the names Allāh, Muḥammad, and ʿAlī are inscribed, with the tail of the last letter in ʿAlī forming the bifurcated blades of Dhū l-Fiqār.85 An Ottoman double-bladed sword in the shape of Dhū l-Fiqār in the Topkapı Palace Museum further demonstrates the extensive use of this symbol in the Ottoman context.86 Recent studies by Zeynep Yürekli and Vefa Erginbaş have explored the phenomenon of the reverence of ʿAlī and the Ahl al-Bayt in the Ottoman territories, which is represented visually through talismanic inscriptions and symbols such as Dhū l-Fiqār, the “hand of Fāṭima,” and textual references to ʿAlī’s sons, Ḥasan and Ḥusayn, on arms and armor and other militaria.87 After the creation of the Shiʿi Safavid state in 907/1501 on the eastern borders of the Ottoman Empire, a long period of militant Shiʿi-Sunni rivalry ensued, but this conflict did not result in a marked dichotomy between Ottoman Sunnism and Safavid Shiʿism, and, despite state-enforced “Sunnification,” not all segments of Ottoman society were equally affected.88 A strong attachment to the family of the prophet Muḥammad and other Shiʿi Imams persisted, particularly among members of army and the Bektāshī Sufi order, thus blurring sectarian lines. In fact, elements of the Janissary corps, the elite corps of the Ottoman infantry, had a particular devotion to ʿAlī and the Ahl al-Bayt which, as Erginbaş states, was connected to the concept of tashayyuʿ ḥasan (favorable or moderate inclination toward Shiʿism). These tendencies were also pronounced among pockets of the population who extolled the virtues of ʿAlī and the Imams without denigrating the first three caliphs, demonstrating that Ottoman Sunnism was not, in fact, as monolithic as previously thought.89 84 85 86 87

88 89

See, e.g., Hülye Tezcan, Topkapi Sarayi Műzesi: Koleksiyonundan Tilsimli Gőmlikler (Istanbul: Timas Yayinlari, 2011), cat. 21, 112–113; and cat. 17, 98–103. TSM 13/1146. For image, see Tezcan, Topkapi Sarayi Műzesi, cat. 21, 112–113. TSM 1/610. Yürekli, “Dhuʾl-faqār and the Ottomans,” 163–170; Vefa Erginbaş, “Problematizing Ottoman Sunnism: Appropriation of Islamic History and Ahl al-Baytism in Ottoman Literary and Historical Writing in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 60 (2017): 616–646. Erginbaş, “Problematizing Ottoman Sunnism,” 615. Erginbaş, “Problematizing Ottoman Sunnism,” 615.

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According to Yürekli, after signing the Treaty of Amasya in 962/1555, the Safavid ruler Shah Tahmāsp I (r. 930–984/1524–1576) officially forbade the cursing of the caliphs in Iran, signaling a new practice of representing ʿAlīd and Ahl al-Bayt imagery on Ottoman militaria. For example, the banner of Ḫayreddīn Barbarossa features Dhū l-Fiqār and an iconographic reference to Fāṭima (ʿAlī’s wife) but accompanies it with the names of the other three Rightly Guided Caliphs.90 A blue and white Iznik ceramic vessel in the shape of a mosque lamp from the mid-tenth/sixteenth century bearing the slogan “There is no hero but ʿAlī and no sword but Dhū l-Fiqār” in the Metropolitan Museum also illustrates this tendency.91 Yürekli argues that the inclusion of these motifs reflects the ambiguous position of Ottoman religious policy-makers, who, while supporting Sunni doctrine, deemed it necessary to display symbols of the Prophet’s family in public in order to prevent a Safavid monopoly over them.92 The public display and dissemination of such imagery in the Ottoman context was perhaps also a political tactic to appease the Shiʿi Sufi factions within the empire particularly among the Janissary corps and the ghāzīs (warriors for the Muslim faith) by placing them under the protection of ʿAlī and the Ahl alBayt. The famous Codex Vindobonensis, a tenth/sixteenth-century compilation of Viennese paintings of Ottoman officials, depicts Janissary troops marching in procession carrying large wooden replicas of Dhū l-Fiqār.93 The sword also appeared on amulets to protect warriors from disaster, as related by the Serbian soldier and author Konstantin Mihailović (d. c. 1501), who, in his memoirs, mentions that they carried them under their arms, especially at war, and regarded them as helpful talismans on the battlefield.94 Janissary and Bektāshī tombstones bear carved images of the magical sword and related Shiʿi imagery.95 The same attitude may have led to the practice of decorating the interior of Ottoman imperial mosques with medallions bearing the names of Ḥasan and Ḥusayn, in addition to those of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. This can be seen in the inscriptions of the Süleymaniye complex in Istanbul, the Selimiye mosque in Edirne, and later mosques built by the chief imperial architect Sinān (d. 996/1588).96 Aware of its favorable political implications, Sultan Süleymān

90 91 92 93 94 95 96

Yürekli, “Dhuʾl-faqār and the Ottomans,” 165. Acc. No. 59.69.3. Yürekli, “Dhuʾl-faqār and the Ottomans,” 171. Hathaway, “The Sword Zulfiqar in Its Ottoman Incarnation,” 7. Yürekli, “Dhuʾl-faqār and the Ottomans,” 167. Yürekli, “Dhuʾl-faqār and the Ottomans,” 167, n. 28. Yürekli, “Dhuʾl-faqār and the Ottomans,” 167.

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also reportedly visited the tomb of ʿAlī and Ḥusayn at Karbala and bestowed gifts on the shrines during one of his journeys to the region after Ottoman forces in 940/1534 conquered Iraq, including the cities of Baghdad, Najaf, and Karbala, all of which hold Shiʿi holy sites. In later centuries, Dhū l-Fiqār developed into a hallmark of Ottoman protection, armed might, and military hegemony at home and in distant lands, particularly in predominantly Sunni regions in Southeast Asia, such as the Philippines and Indonesia. Images of Dhū l-Fiqār appear on two works from Southeast Asia. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection is a thirteenth/nineteenth-century barong, a sword with an elliptical, flat, heavy, single-edged blade and an intricately carved pommel, from Southern Philippines.97 The barong bears an engraved image of Dhū l-Fiqār with Allāh engraved within its contours. It is surrounded by Arabic letters and numbers, which are associated with ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-lasmāʾ (“science of letters and names”), a cosmic language regarded as a key to the mysteries of creation that relies on divination by letters thought to heal, protect, and facilitate control over objects and events.98 A large image of Dhū l-Fiqār with Arabic magical letters between the blades, as well as a calligram in the shape of a lion, is featured on a twelfth/eighteenthcentury batik banner from Cirebon, currently in the Textile Museum, Jakarta.99 The border of the banner bears the Qurʾanic slogan “Help from God and a victory near at hand,”100 and includes a smaller image of a lion and a star, possibly the “seal of Solomon,” and magic squares. The banner (or rather, an earlier iteration of it) was reportedly used by Sunan Gunung Jati (born Syarif Hidayatullah; d. c. 978/1570), one of nine revered Sufi saints in Indonesia.101 The configuration of Dhū l-Fiqār and the magical letters is reminiscent of the one engraved on the blade of the barong from Southern Philippines discussed above. Although we are not certain about the context in which such banners were used, the later examples were carried in religious ceremonial processions or in battle, such as during the Indonesian resistance to Dutch occupation, particularly in the Aceh-Dutch War (1290–1332/1873–1914), which led to significant casualties 97 98

99

100 101

Acc. no. 36.25.888a. Porter, Saif, and Savage-Smith, “Medieval Islamic Amulets, Talismans, and Magic,” 537–541. On other deployments of lettrism, see the chapters by Noah Gardiner, Maria Subtelny, and Matthew Melvin-Koushki in this volume. Acc. no. 017; see James Bennett, Crescent Moon: Islamic Art and Civilization in Southeast Asia (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2005), 41, 285, cat. 90; and Farouk Yahya’s chapter in this volume. Q 61:13: Naṣr min Allāh wa-fatḥ qarīb. Mohd. Zahamri Nizar, “Ikonografi Zulfikar dalam Sejarah Hubungan Turki dan Nusantara,” Suhuf 4, no. 1 (2011): 125–126.

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on both sides.102 The talismanic motifs on such textiles were drawn largely from Ottoman sources and demonstrate a long history of artistic interconnections between Indonesia and the Ottoman Empire, which stemmed from the Ottoman-Portuguese rivalry in the Indian Ocean in the tenth/sixteenth century. In the last quarter of the thirteenth/nineteenth century, diplomatic relations between the two powers intensified with increasing Ottoman military involvement in the region during the Dutch Occupation.103 The motifs and inscriptions on these banners not only signal the faith and identity of the warrior who carried it but illustrate the filtering of talismanic symbols representing ʿAlī, such as Dhū l-Fiqār and the lion, into largely Sunni areas under Ottoman influence (and Persianate influences more generally) across Muslim Southeast Asia from the tenth/sixteenth century onward. As seen in these Ottoman and Southeast Asian examples, and as Jane Hathaway argues, Dhū l-Fiqār functioned as a sort of iconographic Rorschach test; that is, the image of the sword as a talismanic and spiritual symbol resonated with whatever religious or ideological tradition from which the viewer/owner came. In Ottoman domains, it spoke to recruits to military and administrative culture who were from various cultures and religious affiliations.104 By extension, in Southeast Asia Dhū l-Fiqār became a symbol of solidarity, empowerment, and Ottoman protection in times of strife and turmoil, especially during the Dutch Occupation of Indonesia. In both cases, while sometimes serving practical motives, it was perceived as a potent unifying emblem and a metaphorical shield.

3

Conclusion

The talismanic vocabulary used on Islamic arms and armor was part of a deliberate and carefully planned program designed to protect and empower the owner. Certain pious phrases, verses from the Qurʾan, and invocations and motifs that evoked religious figures were considered more efficacious than others in providing metaphysical support. The distribution and arrangement of such formulas was as crucial as the verbal or visual motifs themselves because,

102 103

104

Mohd. Zahamri, “Ikonografi Zulfikar,” 123. See also Farouk Yahya’s chapter in this volume. Fiona Kerlogue, “Islamic Talismans: The Calligraphy Batiks,” in Batik Drawn in Wax, ed. Itie van Hout (Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, 2001), 125; Mohd. Zahamri, “Ikonografi Zulfikar,” 113–126. Hathaway, “The Sword Zulfiqar in Its Ottoman Incarnation,” 12.

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in order to be effective, they had to be in positions where the owner could maintain contact with them, through touch and/or sight. The way a piece of armor was worn or the way in which a weapon was held and used thus affected the layout. As the verbal and visual apotropaic motifs on arms and armor parallel those on charms, amulets, and other objects, they also share the types of materials. The precious and semi-precious stones set into amulets were also used to create and embellish weapons, armor, and other militaria, as it was believed that they all possessed their own set of magical properties, such as protecting the bearer from poison or ensuring victory. While precious stones, such as emeralds, were too valuable to be used on the battlefield, they adorned ceremonial swords and other objects that were kept in encampments or used in royal and religious processions, protecting the owner from other threats, such as assassination attempts. A closer examination of Islamic arms and armor from the Metropolitan Museum of Art has provided important insights into the talismanic motifs and their socio-political and religious contexts in which they were used. Although certain Qurʾanic suras and prayers were universally represented on arms and armor throughout the Islamic world, the same is not true of specific symbols and visual references, which seem to have been favored in some regions more than in others. For example, the “seal of Solomon” has a rich history of talismanic use and is frequently seen on many swords and other battle-related objects from regions under Ottoman control and influence well into the thirteenth/nineteenth century, and verbal and visual references to the Seven Sleepers occur exclusively on Ottoman arms. The examination of the relationship between talismans and regions of the Islamic world has also challenged our understanding of Sunni and Shiʿi iconography, revealing that motifs were much more fluid between the two branches of Islam and did not display a rigid dichotomy. It also reflects the complex nature of the deep devotion to the Prophet’s family in both denominations. As seen in the Ottoman and Southeast Asian examples discussed above, both Shiʿis and Sunnis regarded ʿAlī and members of the Ahl al-Bayt as potent channels of intercession and a source of protection. In fact, images of Dhū l-Fiqār rarely appear on arms and armor from Shiʿi regions such as Iran and Deccan India but are ubiquitous features of Ottoman weaponry. This reflects the versatility and inclusivity of these talismanic symbols in Ottoman domains. Warriors from diverse faiths and affiliations saw a reflection of themselves, their traditions, and their allegiance to the Ottoman state in Dhū l-Fiqār. By extension warriors from faraway lands under Ottoman influence, such as Indonesia, also came to regard it as a source of protection against their enemies. In this con-

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text, Dhū l-Fiqār was considered a multivalent and potent talismanic symbol and an icon of Ottoman military might across the vast empire. This discussion has sought to demonstrate how significant talismans were in the construction, function, and decoration of arms and armor in the Islamic world, from the materials used to the types of talismans and how they were deliberately positioned on a weapon or a piece of armor. The examination of specific talismans has brought to light their socio-political, cultural, and religious significance in different regions throughout the Islamic world, from Anatolia to Southeast Asia, thus providing an understanding of their implications beyond the surface on which they are etched, engraved, embroidered, and painted. The inclusion of magical inscriptions and symbols on arms and armor, as well as other accoutrements used on and off the battlefield, was employed to protect and empower the owner, ultimately enabling a connection with the divine. But, while arms and armor conjure notions of bravery and violence, the inclusion of talismanic verbal and visual motifs also allows us to view these objects from a different perspective, one that highlights a more intimate side to war, manifesting human emotions and states such as fear, vulnerability, aspiration, and hope. Talismans were constructed to protect their owners from danger, illness, and misfortune; bestow upon them luck and blessings; give them a means of connecting with God or other holy figures for protection and guidance; and provide a sense of certainty for the future. While these traits appeal to everyone, having divine protection from harm and taming fears of the uncertain were especially desired by men at war. Arms and armor with talismanic programs provided both metaphysical power and physical protection, giving their owners a sense of otherworldly advantage on the battlefield.

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Asfaruddin, Asma. “The Excellencies of the Qurʾan: Textual Sacrility and the Organization of Early Islamic Society.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 122, no. 1 (2002): 1–24. Asfaruddin, Asma. “In Praise of the Word of God: Reflections of Early Religious and Social Concerns in the Fadaʾil al-Qurʾan Genre.” Journal of Qurʾanic Studies 4, no. 1 (2002): 27–48. Atil, Esin. The Age of Süleyman the Magnificent. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1987. Babayan, Kathryn. Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Babayan, Kathryn. “The Cosmological Order of Things in Early Modern Iran.” In Falnama: Book of Omens, edited by Massumeh Farhad with Serpil Bağcı, 246–255. Washington DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 2008. Bennett, James. Crescent Moon: Islamic Art and Civilization in Southeast Asia. Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2005. al-Bīrūnī, Abū Rayḥān Muḥammad b. Aḥmad. Kitāb al-Jamāhir fī Maʿrifat al-Jawāhir, translated by Hakim Muḥammad Said. Islamabad: Pakistan Hijra Council, 1989. Blair, Sheila S. “An Amulet from Afsharid Iran.” The Journal of the Walters Art Museum 59 (2001): 85–102. Budge, E.A. Wallis. Amulets and Superstitions. London: Milford, 1930. al-Bukhārī, Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī: The Translation of the Meanings of Sahih al-Bukhari, Arabic-English, edited by Muḥammad Muḥsin Khān. 9 vols. Beirut: Dār al-ʿArabiyya, 1985. Canaan, Tewfik. “The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans.” Berythus 4 (1937): 69–110. Canby, Sheila. The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp: The Persian Book of Kings. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014. Christensen, Arthur. Xavass-i-ayat: Notices et extraits d’un manuscript persan traitant la magie des versets du Coran. Copenhagen: Høst & Søn, 1920. Coffey, Heather. “Between Amulet and Devotion: Islamic Miniature Books in the Lily Library.” In The Islamic Manuscript Tradition: Ten Centuries of Book Arts in Indiana University Collections, edited by Christiane Gruber, 78–115. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Corbin, Henry. Cyclical Time and lsmaili Gnosis. London: Kegan Paul International, 1983. de Guise, Lucien, and Susan Stronge. Jewels without Crowns: Mughal Gems in Miniatures. Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, 2010. de Jong, Frederick. “The Iconography of Bektashiism: A Survey of Themes and Symbolism in Clerical Costume, Liturgical Objects, and Pictorial Art.” Manuscripts of the Middle East 4 (1989): 7–29. Dols, Michael W. “The Theory of Magic in Healing.” In The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society, edited by Diana E. Immisch, 261–276. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

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Ekhtiar, Maryam, Priscilla Soucek, Sheila Canby, and Navina Najat Haidar. Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011. Ekhtiar, Maryam, and Rachel Parikh. Power and Piety: Islamic Talismans on the Battlefield. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016. https://www.metmuseum .org/exhibitions/listings/2016/power‑and‑piety. Erginbaş, Vefa. “Problematizing Ottoman Sunnism: Appropriation of Islamic History and Ahl al-Baytism in Ottoman Literary and Historical Writing in the Sixteenth Century.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 60 (2017): 616–646. Farhad, Massumeh, with Serpil Bağcı. Falnama: The Book of Omens. Washington DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 2008. Fodor, Alexander. Amulets from the Islamic World. Budapest: Eotvos Lorand University, 1990. Gardiner, Noah. “Stars and Saints: The Esotericist Astrology of the Sufi Occultist Aḥmad al-Būnī.” In “Characterizing Astrology in the Pre-Modern Islamic World,” edited by Elizabeth Sartell and Shandra Lamaute. Special issue of Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 12, no. 1 (2017): 39–65. al-Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid. Al-maqṣad al-asnā fī sharḥ asmāʾ Allāh al-ḥusnā, edited by Fadlou Shehadi. Beirut: Dar el-Machreq, 1982. Gruber, Christiane. “A Pious Cure-All: The Ottoman Illustrated Prayer Manual in the Lilly Library.” In The Islamic Manuscript Tradition: Ten Centuries of Book Arts in Indiana University Collections, edited by Christiane Gruber, 117–153. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Gruber, Christiane. “When Nubuvvat Encounters Valayat: Safavid Paintings of the Prophet Mohammad’s Miʿraj, c. 1500–50.” In The Art and Material Culture of Iranian Shiʿism: Iconography and Religious Devotion in Shiʿi Islam, edited by Pedram Khosronejad, 46–73. London: I.B. Tauris, 2011. Gruber, Christiane. “Power and Protection: Late Ottoman Seal Designs.”Hadeeth al-Dar 38 (2012): 2–9. Gruber, Christiane. “From Prayer to Protection: Amulets in the Islamic World.” In Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural, edited by Francesca Leoni, 33–51. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2016. Haidar, Navina Najat, and Marika Sardar. Sultans of Deccan India 1500–1700: Opulence and Fantasy. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015. Hamès, Constant. “L’usage talismanique du Coran.” Revue de l’histoire des religions 218, no. 1 (2001): 83–95. Hamès, Constant. Coran et talismans: textes et pratiques magiques en milieu musulman. Paris: Karthala, 2007. Hathaway, Jane. “The Sword Zulfiqar in Its Ottoman Incarnation.” The Turkish Studies Association Journal 27, nos. 1–2 (2003): 1–13.

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Kaoujki, Salam. Precious Indian Weapons and Other Princely Accoutrements. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2017. Keene, Manuel. “Jade i. Introduction.” In Encyclopaedia Iranica. Kerlogue, Fiona. “Islamic Talismans: The Calligraphy Batiks.” In Batik Drawn in Wax, edited by Itie van Hout, 124–135. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, 2001. Khorasani, Manouchehr Moshtagh. Arms and Armor from Iran: The Bronze Age to the End of the Qajar Period. Tübingen: Legat, 2006. Kraus, Paul. Jabir ibn Hayyan: Contribution á l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam: Jabir et la science greque. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1986. La Rocca, Donald J. The Gods of War: Sacred Imagery and the Decoration of Arms and Armor. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996. Leoni, Francesca, ed. Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2016. Leoni, Francesca. “Sacred Words, Sacred Power: Qurʾanic and Pious Phrases as Sources of Healing and Protection.” In Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural, edited by Francesca Leoni, 53–67. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2016. Maddison, Francis, and Emilie Savage-Smith. Science, Tools and Magic: Part One: Body and Spirit, Mapping the Universe. London: Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1997. al-Majlisī, Muḥammad Bāqir. The Life and Religion of Muḥammad. Vol. 2, Hiyat alQulub, translated by James L. Merrick. San Antonio: Zahara Trust, 1982. Melikian-Chirvani, Assadullah Souren. “Precious and Semi-Precious Stones in Iranian Culture, Chapter I. Early Iranian Jade.” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 11 (1997): 123– 173. Mohamed, Bashir. The Arts of the Muslim Knight: The Furusiyya Art Foundation Collection. Milan: Skira, 2008. Mohd. Zahamri Nizar. “Ikonografi Zulfikar dalam Sejarah Hubungan Turki dan Nusantara.” Suhuf 4, no. 1 (2011): 111–141. Momen, Moojan. An Introduction to Shiʿi Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shiism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Muravchick, Rose. “God is the Best Guardian: Islamic Talismanic Shirts from the Gunpowder Empires.” PhD diss., Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, 2014. Ogden, Jack, Judy Rudoe, Katherine Prior, and Vivienne Becker. Beyond Extravagance: A Royal Collection of Gems and Jewels, edited by Amin Jaffer. New York: Assouline Publishing, 2013. Parikh, Rachel. “Persian Pomp, Indian Circumstance: The Khalili Falnama.” PhD diss., Cambridge, University of Cambridge, 2014. Parodi, Laura E. “Solomon, the Messenger and the Throne: Themes from a Mughal Tomb.” East and West 51, nos. 1–2 (2001): 127–142. Porter, Venetia. “Amulets Inscribed with the Name of the ‘Seven Sleepers’ of Ephesus in

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the British Museum.” In Word of God, Art of Man: The Qurʾan and its Creative Expressions, edited by Fahmida Suleman, 123–134. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Porter, Venetia, with Robert G. Hoyland and Alexander Morton. Arabic and Persian Seals and Amulets in the British Museum. London: British Museum Press, 2011. Porter, Venetia, Liana Saif, and Emilie Savage-Smith. “Medieval Islamic Amulets, Talismans, and Magic.” In A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, edited by Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu, 1:521–527. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017. Rogers, J.M. Empire of the Sultans: Ottoman Art from the Khalili Collection. Geneva: Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, 2011. Al-Saleh, Yasmine. “Amulets and Talismans from the Islamic World.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, New York, 2000. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/tali/ hd_tali.htm. Sax, Margaret, and Nigel Meeks. “Methods of Engraving.” In Arabic and Persian Seals and Amulets in the British Museum, by Venetia Porter, with Robert G. Hoyland and Alexander Morton, 185–188. London: British Museum Press, 2011. Seligsohn, M., and Joseph Jacobs. “Seal of Solomon.” Jewish Encyclopedia, 11:448. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1905. Shani, Raya. “The Lion Image in Safavid Miʾraj Paintings.” In A Survey of Persian Art from Prehistoric Times to Present, edited by Abbas Daneshvari, 18:265–426. Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 2015. Soucek, Priscilla P. “Solomon’s Throne/Solomon’s Bath: Model or Metaphor?” Ars Orientalis 23 (1993): 109–134. Tabbaa, Yasser, and Sabrina Mervin. Najaf, the Gate of Wisdom: History, Heritage and Significance of the Holy City of the Shiʿa. Paris: UNESCO, 2014. Tezcan, Hülye. Topkapi Sarayi Müzesi: Koleksiyonundan Tilsimli Gümlikler. Istanbul: Timas Yayinlari, 2011. al-Tīfāshī, Aḥmad ibn Yūsuf. Arab Roots of Gemology: Ahmad ibn Yusuf al-Tifaschi’s Best Thoughts on the Best of Stones, translated by Samar Najm Abul Huda. New York: Scarecrow Press, 1998. Vesel, Živa. “Talismans from the Iranian World: A Millenary Tradition.” In The Art and Material Culture of Iranian Shiʿism: Iconography and Religious Devotion in Shiʿi Islam, edited by Pedram Khosronejad, 254–275. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012. Walker, J., and P. Fenton. “Sulaymān b. Dāwūd.” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. Welch, Anthony. Calligraphy and the Arts of the Muslim World. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. Yürekli, Zeynep. “Dhuʾl-faqār and the Ottomans.” People of the Prophet’s House, edited by Fahmida Suleman, 163–172. London: Azimuth, 2015.

chapter 11

Calligrams of the Lion of ʿAlī in Southeast Asia Farouk Yahya

Calligrams, or pictorial/figurative calligraphy, are texts that have been shaped into images. They may take the form of inanimate objects or living beings and may consist of any kind of script. Since the ninth/fifteenth century, calligrams have been found in various parts of the Islamicate world, particularly in Turkey, Iran, South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, and West Africa. They remain popular today.1 Calligrams appear on various media, such as paper, textiles, metalwork, woodwork, and glass. Although some are found within a manuscript as part of a wider text, they are often in the form of detached images and appear on their own. They may be displayed publicly (as on the walls of a home, mosque, or Sufi lodge, or on items of clothing, shields, and banners) or kept private for personal appreciation or devotion (as in albums and manuscripts). They are typically composed of Arabic script. The language of the texts is predominantly Arabic, but calligrams are occasionally composed in other languages, such as Persian and Turkish. The textual components are almost always religious and mystical, comprising sacred phrases or the names of holy figures.

1 There are a few studies that focus on Islamicate calligrams specifically; among them are Chaubey Bisvesvar Nath and Thomas H. Hendley, “Calligraphy,” The Journal of Indian Art and Industry 16 (1913): 31–32 and pls. 9–13; Malik Aksel, Türklerde dinî resimler: yazı-resim (Istanbul: Elif Kitabevi, 1967); Robert Hillenbrand, “Figural Calligraphy in the Muslim World,” in Ten Poems from Hafez, by Jila Peacock (Lewes: Sylph Editions, 2006), 9–17; İrvin Cemil Schick, “The Content of Form: Islamic Calligraphy between Text and Representation,” in Sign and Design: Script as Image in Cross-Cultural Perspective (300–1600 CE), ed. Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak and Jeffrey Hamburger (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2016), 184–189 (I am grateful to Yasmine Al-Saleh for introducing me to Schick’s work). As they belong to the calligraphic arts, discussions on calligrams are also usually found among studies on calligraphy, such as Annemarie Schimmel, Islamic Calligraphy (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 11–12; Annemarie Schimmel, Calligraphy and Islamic Culture (London: I.B. Tauris, 1990), 110–113; Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 86–88, 102, 106–107; Sheila S. Blair, Islamic Calligraphy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 449–451, 506–508, 558–559; and Maryam D. Ekhtiar, How to Read Islamic Calligraphy (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018), 113–114.

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The images that are formed by these texts are varied, but certain forms are more common than others.2 They include human beings, animals (particularly birds and quadrupeds), objects (such as ships), and architectural features (such as mosques). The shapes chosen often relate in some way to the texts, but many do not. Even so, the images were not chosen randomly. They are often symbolic and reflected the beliefs and lives of the societies that produced them. The ornate and complex way in which the texts are shaped means that calligrams are often difficult to decipher.3 This enhances their esoteric qualities but raises issues of legibility and visual perception. In addition to being aesthetically appealing, calligrams can have multiple functions and embody various meanings. Their sacred nature often made them objects of popular devotion, and among Sufi orders they represent the visual embodiment of mystical doctrines.4 Their sacred and ambiguous character meant that calligrams were also employed for magical purposes. While their talismanic properties have been noted in passing by scholars,5 there have recently been efforts to bring calligrams into the study of the occult sciences, as in the catalog of Ottoman talismans in the Halûk Perk Müzesi Museum in Istanbul;6 and the exhibitions and catalogs for Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural at the

2 Calligrams are not the only type of Islamicate calligraphic art that can be used to create images. A closely related form of calligraphy is micrography (ghubār, lit. “dust”), in which texts are written in miniscule form and may be arranged to represent objects or living beings, or even further words and phrases. Often found in scrolls, they were also considered talismanic. On micrography, see Blair, Islamic Calligraphy, 451–452. Mirror writing—in which letters, words, or phrases are doubled symmetrically, with one side being a mirrored representation of the original—can also be manipulated to form images. Indeed, calligrams may themselves be mirrored (Figures 11.10, 11.11). On mirror writing, see Ekhtiar, How to Read, 111. 3 The texts may begin in the figure’s head (as noted in Blair, Islamic Calligraphy, 559), or start from the right-hand side of the image and then move in the direction of writing for Arabic script (right to left). 4 This is an important facet of the use of calligrams in the Islamicate world, but, because the focus of this chapter is on the occult sciences, space does not permit such a discussion. For calligrams in Sufism and popular devotion, see, e.g., Frederick de Jong, “The Iconography of Bektashiism: A Survey of Themes and Symbolism in Clerical Costume, Liturgical Objects and Pictorial Art,” Manuscripts of the Middle East 4 (1989): 7–29; and “Pictorial Art of the Bektashi Order,” in The Dervish Lodge: Architecture, Art, and Sufism in Ottoman Turkey, ed. Raymond Lifchez (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 228–241; Annemarie Schimmel, “Calligraphy and Sufism in Ottoman Turkey,” in Lifchez, The Dervish Lodge, 242–252; Yousuf Saeed, Muslim Devotional Art in India (New Delhi; Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 88, 91–92, 97. 5 Nath and Hendley, “Calligraphy,” 31; Hillenbrand, “Figural Calligraphy,” 14. 6 Halûk Perk, Osmanlı Tılsım Mühürleri (Istanbul: Halûk Perk Müzesi Yayinlari, 2010), 136–137.

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Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (2016–2017) by Francesca Leoni7 and Divine Protection: Talismanic Art of Islamic Cultures at the James Reinish Gallery, New York (2019) by Shawn Ghassemi.8 This chapter focuses on a type of calligraphic design that was perhaps the most popular in the Islamicate world, especially in the Persianate regions— particularly Ottoman Turkey and the Balkans, Safavid and Qajar Iran, Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia—since at least the ninth/fifteenth century.9 It is in the form of a large feline, often composed of verses extolling the prophet Muḥammad’s cousin and son-in-law ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 40/661), a legendary hero popular with many Muslims, both Shiʿi and Sunni. ʿAlī was known as the “Lion of God,” so this form of zoomorphic calligraphy is commonly referred to as the Lion of ʿAlī. The calligrams of the Lion of ʿAlī are not homogeneous but may differ in terms of their iconography, posture, textual content, and style. Various forms of the motif have been found on materials as diverse as paper, textiles, and woodwork, and incorporated in such things as royal commissions, Sufi devotions, and magical rituals. The ubiquity of the calligram attests to its importance in Muslim cultures, and gives us the opportunity to look closely at the role that writing, images, and the religious and occult sciences played in Muslim societies, as well as the interconnections between them. There have been several studies on the Lion of ʿAlī in the Persianate realm by scholars such as Malik Aksel, Thierry Zarcone, Raya Shani, and Fahmida Suleman.10 This chapter, however, shifts the focus to Southeast Asia, where this topic has largely been unexplored, investigating the development and usage

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Francesca Leoni, ed. Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2016), cats. 28, 46, 47, 105, 109. Shawn Ghassemi, Divine Protection: Talismanic Art of Islamic Cultures (San Francisco: Art Passages, 2019), cat. 11. “Persianate” was defined by Marshall Hodgson as referring to areas where “local languages of high culture … depended upon Persian wholly or in part for their prime literary inspiration,” The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 2:293. Southeast Asia—which was influenced by Persian language, literature, and cultural traditions— was thus a part of the Persianate world. See also footnote 68. Aksel, Türklerde dinî resimler, 83–89; Thierry Zarcone, “The Lion of Ali in Anatolia,” in The Art and Material Culture of Iranian Shiʿism: Iconography and Religious Devotion in Shiʿi Islam, ed. Pedram Khosronejad (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 104–121; Raya Shani, “Calligraphic Lions Symbolising the Esoteric Dimension of ʿAlī’s Nature,” in Khosronejad, The Art and Material Culture of Iranian Shiʿism, 122–158; Fahmida Suleman, “The Iconography of Ali as the Lion of God in Shiʿi Art and Material Culture,” in Khosronejad, The Art and Material Culture of Iranian Shiʿism, 215–232.

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of the motif within this region particularly from the twelfth/eighteenth to the early fourteenth/twentieth century. It seeks to further our understanding of the religious and artistic connections between Southeast Asia and the rest of the Islamicate world, how foreign ideas and motifs were adapted into local belief and cultural systems, and what meanings and functions calligrams had among Muslim societies more broadly. To provide context, this chapter will begin with a discussion of the talismanic properties of calligrams, followed by a brief background on the Lion of ʿAlī motif in the Islamicate world. It will then consider the possible routes of transmission of the design into Southeast Asia and highlight the main characteristics of the calligram in the region. Among the key points of this research is that there was an ambiguity regarding the identity of the animal depicted in the calligrams (often referred to as a tiger instead of a lion), and a disconnect between the textual content and ʿAlī, even though the designs were still associated with him by the local populations. The concluding sections will focus on two major types of Southeast Asian calligrams of the Lion of ʿAlī. The first, in which the designs are composed of the shahāda, is generally concentrated around the city of Cirebon, in Java. The second type, in which the calligrams are composed of a verse from the Sūrat al-Ṣaff (Q 61:13), is more widespread, being found in the Malay peninsula, Java, the Lesser Sunda Islands, and Sulawesi.

1

The Talismanic Properties of Calligrams

Calligrams have been produced in the Islamicate world since at least the ninth/ fifteenth century, as attested by a scroll dated 862/1458 dedicated to the Ottoman ruler Mehmed II (r. 848–850/1444–1446 and 855–886/1451–1481), which contains examples of zoomorphic calligraphy in the form of a lion and a bird.11 A common explanation given for the initial development and subsequent popularity of calligrams is that they circumvented the so-called Islamic “prohibition” of depicting living beings.12 Indeed, by their ambiguous nature, calligrams 11

12

Hillenbrand, “Figural Calligraphy,” 13. The scroll is in Istanbul, Topkapı Palace Museum, E. H. 2878. See Filiz Çağman, “E.10: Scroll of Mehmed II,” in The Anatolian Civilisations III: Seljuk/Ottoman, by Nazan Tapan et al. (Istanbul: Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 1983), 111, cat. E.10; Zeren Tanındı, “Scroll of Sultan Mehmed II,” in Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600–1600, ed. David Roxburgh (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2005), 288–289, 439, cat. 246; Blair, Islamic Calligraphy, 378–380; Shani, “Calligraphic Lions,” 122– 132, 137; Schick, “The Content of Form,” 184–185. Nath and Hendley, “Calligraphy,” 31; Schimmel, Islamic Calligraphy, 11; Hillenbrand, “Figural Calligraphy,” 14–15.

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(as well as other related forms of pictorial writing such as micrography and mirror writing) blur the lines between text and image and thus challenge the perception of the viewer.13 As İrvin Cemil Schick has pointed out, however, calligrams are not the only form of writing that do this. Examples of devotional calligraphy, such as the Ottoman ḥilye (word portraits of the prophet Muḥammad), and talismanic designs such as the “seal of prophethood” (muhr al-nubuwwa; it enjoins the user to “see” the text), similarly oscillate between the realms of the written and the graphic.14 Of more direct relation to calligrams are the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic scripts found on sixth/twelfth to seventh/thirteenth-century metalwork from Khurasan,15 and picture-poems (mudabbajāt) whereby the texts are arranged visually to form shapes such as trees.16 To these we may add diagrams—whether scientific, religious, or divinatory—that help to organize textual information in a graphical manner.17 The incorporation of writing into illustrations of people, buildings, and landscape in Arab and Persian miniature painting, as in the form of captions and inscriptions, similarly acts to combine text and image.18

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They are in a sense similar (but not identical) to puzzle pieces such as the “Duck and Hare” (Is it a duck? Is it a hare?). On micrography and mirror-writing, see footnote 2. İrvin Cemil Schick, “The Iconicity of Islamic Calligraphy in Turkey,”RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53–54 (2008): 211–224. For the ḥilye, see Nabil F. Safwat, The Art of the Pen: Calligraphy of the 14th to 20th Centuries (London: Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1996), 46–68. For the “seal of prophethood,” see the chapter by Christiane Gruber in this volume. On these scripts, see David S. Rice, The Wade Cup in the Cleveland Museum of Art (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1955); Adolf Grohmann, “Anthropomorphic and Zoomorphic Letters in the History of Arabic Writing,” Bulletin de l’ institut d’Egypte 38 (1955–1956): 117–122; Richard Ettinghausen, “The ‘Wade Cup’ in the Cleveland Museum of Art, Its Origin and Decorations,” Ars Orientalis 2 (1957): 327–366. Lara Harb, “Beyond the Known Limits: Ibn Dāwūd al-Iṣfahānī’s Chapter on ‘Intermedial’ Poetry,” in Arabic Humanities, Islamic Thought: Essays in Honor of Everett K. Rowson, ed. Joseph E. Lowry and Shawkat M. Toorawa (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 122–149, here 138–141; Julia Bray, “Picture-Poems for Saladin: ʿAbd al-Munʿim al-Jilyani’s Mudabbajat,” in Syria in Crusader Times: Conflict and Co-Existence, ed. Carole Hillenbrand (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 247–264. For a discussion of the relationship between diagram and text in a type of Malay divinatory diagram, see Farouk Yahya, “The Wheel Diagram in the Malay Divinatory Technique of the Faal Qurʾan,” Indonesia and the Malay World 45 (2017): 200–225. Anna Contadini, A World of Beasts: A Thirteenth-Century Illustrated Arabic Book on Animals (the Kitāb Naʿt al-ḥayawān) in the Ibn Bakhtīshūʿ Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 100– 101; Christiane Gruber, “Between Logos (Kalima) and Light (Nūr): Representations Of The Prophet Muhammad In Islamic Painting,” Muqarnas 26 (2009): 229–262, here 240; Massumeh Farhad, “Reading Between the Lines: Word and Image in Sixteenth-Century Iran,” in By the Pen and What They Write: Writing in Islamic Art and Culture, ed. Sheila

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It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss figural representation in Islam,19 but, while the explanation that calligrams were created to avoid the orthodox disapproval of depicting living beings may be valid in certain respects, there were other factors involved. One concerns the belief that God’s hidden signs are manifest in the universe as mentioned in the Qurʾan (e.g., 2:164 and 41:53). This is evidenced, for instance, in the idea that the five fingers of the human hand represent the five strokes that form the name of God (‫الله‬, Allāh).20 The written texts contained within the figural forms of calligrams can likewise be said to parallel God’s presence within Creation.21 In other words, calligrams reflect the basic Sufi doctrine that “all of God’s creation has a visible outer appearance (ẓāhir) while simultaneously carrying a deeper, hidden meaning (maʿnā), a more profound inner essence known as the bāṭin (interior), the source of eternal beauty.”22 Calligrams developed at a time when ideas on the ʿilm al-ḥurūf (science of letters) had taken hold across the Islamicate world, with the works of the seventh/thirteenth-century scholars Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) and Aḥmad alBūnī (fl. c. 622/1225) being particularly influential. Coeval with the Jewish Kabbalah, the ʿilm al-ḥurūf “is based on the occult properties of the letters of the alphabet and of the divine and angelic names which they form.”23 It was foun-

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Blair and Jonathan Bloom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 177–203, quotation from 202–203. There have been several discussions on this topic, such as Schick, “The Content of Form,” 177–180, and, most recently, in Christiane Gruber, ed., The Image Debate: Figural Representation in Islam and Across the World (London: Gingko, 2019). Schick, “The Content of Form,” 184. Timothy E. Behrend, “Textual Gateways: The Javanese Manuscript Tradition,” in Illuminations: The Writing Traditions of Indonesia, ed. Ann Kumar and John H. McGlynn (Jakarta and New York: Lontar Foundation, Weatherhill, 1996), 161–200, here 198; Schick, “The Content of Form,” 184–187. Quotation from Ladan Akbarnia, “Sufi Inspiration in the Visual Arts,” in Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Arts of Islam, by Ladan Akbarnia with Francesca Leoni (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2010), 85–87, here 85, see also 86–87. This also applies to portraiture: see Priscilla Soucek, “The Theory and Practice of Portraiture in the Persian Tradition,” Muqarnas 17 (2000): 97–108. James Bennett suggests that this concept applies also to Javanese shadow puppets; see his “The Shadow Puppet: A South-East Asian Islamic Aesthetic,” in Gruber, The Image Debate, 172–193, here 179, 188. The ẓāhir-bāṭin binary is also essential to premodern natural-scientific discourse (I am grateful to Matthew Melvin-Koushki for alerting me to this point). Toufic Fahd, “Ḥurūf,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. On the ʿilm al-ḥurūf, see also Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Of Islamic Grammatology: Ibn Turka’s Lettrist Metaphysics of Light,” Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 24 (2016): 42–113, esp. 54–59; and the chapters by Noah Gardiner and by Matthew Melvin-Koushki in this volume.

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ded on the notion that “God created the world through His speech; every existing creature is a result of a divine word and the whole history of humanity can be compared to an immense divine discourse or book.”24 The belief in the power of Arabic letters—and, by extension, names, words, and phrases—thus led to their use in various occult materials.25 The use of calligrams for talismanic purposes derives from the same principle. The employment of sacred written formulas for magical aims is not new,26 but the way in which they are distorted artistically in calligrams means that they are often difficult to read. This is not, however, unusual in the occult sciences. Many talismans contain obscure inscriptions designed to enhance their effectiveness.27 This can be achieved by arranging the texts in unconventional ways, such as by disconnecting the letters of a word,28 or by using magical words (such as budūḥ and various names and words of foreign origin29) or magical scripts (such as the “linear Kufic”30 and the “lunette sigla,” also known in Greek as charaktēres31). All these forms of magical writing, including calligrams, are not really meant to communicate messages to human viewers but are invocations of God or His intercessors for their aid,32 making their legibility irrelevant. 24 25

26

27 28 29 30 31

32

Pierre Lory, “Divination and Religion in Islamic Medieval Culture,” in Leoni, Power and Protection, 13–31, here 31. See the many examples in Tewfik Canaan, “The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans,” in Magic and Divination in Early Islam, ed. Emilie Savage-Smith (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 125–177. In his research on Malay magic practitioners, Amin Sweeney noted how “many of them, otherwise illiterate, have learned how to trace out in writing certain words, such as ‘Allah,’ ‘Muhammad,’ which are considered to be particularly useful in the preparation of talismans”; A Full Hearing: Orality and Literacy in the Malay World (Berkeley: University of California, 1987), 110–111. Canaan, “The Decipherment;” Raymond Silverman, “Arabic Writing and the Occult,” in Brocade of the Pen: The Art of Islamic Writing, ed. Carol Garrett Fisher (East Lansing: Kresge Art Museum, Michigan State University, 1991), 19–30; Kathleen Malone O’Connor, “Popular and Talismanic Uses of the Qurʾān,” in Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾan, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Francesca Leoni, “Sacred Words, Sacred Power: Qurʾanic and Pious Phrases as Sources of Healing and Protection,” in Leoni, Power and Protection, 53–67. They were not, however, necessarily obscure to their makers. Canaan, “The Decipherment,” 152. Canaan, “The Decipherment,” 145–159. Venetia Porter, “The Use of the Arabic Script in Magic,” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 40 (2010): 131–140. Canaan, “The Decipherment,” 167–169; Venetia Porter, Liana Saif, and Emilie SavageSmith, “Medieval Islamic Amulets, Talismans and Magic,” in A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, ed. Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu, 2 vols. (Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell, 2017), 1:521–557, here 523–524. As noted by Silverman, “Arabic Writing,” 20; cf. Schick, “The Content of Form,” 182, in relation to building inscriptions.

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Calligrams, however, have an additional element in their operation. As Michel Foucault has noted, a calligram not only “says” but also “represents.”33 The forms that are created by the texts contribute equally to the magical power of calligrams. They are perhaps the first thing that the viewer sees, or at least is able to recognize,34 because the rendering of the scripts can make it difficult for one to interpret the text quickly.35 The image chosen for the calligram often had symbolic associations and probably possessed inherent power independent of the calligraphic text. In Southeast Asia, for instance, shadow puppets (Malay, wayang kulit) were a common form of theater; performances were held not only for entertainment but also for sacred occasions and purification. Certain puppets were considered powerful and sacred, so it is not surprising to find some Southeast Asian calligrams shaped in the form of revered characters. When functioning as talismanic designs, calligrams differ in how their magical powers operate. We can gain a partial understanding of this by looking at parallels in other occult material, particularly magical images ( figurae magicae) that are found in magicians’ handbooks and “applied magic” (e.g., amulets, etc.). For example, in Greek magical papyri (primarily from Egypt, dating from the second century BCE to the fifth century CE), one category of magical images comprises what Peta McDonald, based on the work of Raquel Martín Hernández,36 calls “performative images”—images that “essentially depict the enactment of the magical praxis, what the invoked supernatural being is supposed to do, or prefigure its eventual results.”37 We can apply the

33 34

35 36

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Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, trans. and ed. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 20–21. Valérie Gonzalez has divided figurative calligraphy into two types: those in which the text is perceived first, before the image (“figurative calligraphy of the scriptural regime”), and those in which the reverse is true (“figurative calligraphy of the representational regime”); see “The Double Ontology of Islamic Calligraphy: A Word-Image on a Folio from the Museum of Raqqada (Tunisia),” in M. Uğur Derman Festschrift. Papers Presented on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Irvin Cemil Schick (Istanbul: Sabancı Universitesı, 2000), 313–340, here 320. Foucault in This is Not a Pipe, 24–25, observes that it is impossible to read the text and view the image at the same time. Raquel Martín Hernández, “Reading Magical Drawings in the Greek Magical Papyri,” in Actes du 26e Congrès International de Papyrologie. Genève, 16–21 août 2010, ed. Paul Schubert (Geneva: Droz, 2012), 491–498, here 494–495. Peta Louise McDonald, “The Iconography of the Images in the Magical Papyri” (MRes thesis, Macquarie University, 2015), 58. Thus for instance, in a Greco-Egyptian spell that seeks to hurt a troublemaker by having him trampled, an image of a boot is depicted; McDonald, “The Iconography,” 59.

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same framework to some forms of Islamicate calligrams that have an apotropaic function, such as that of a ship composed of the names of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and their dog Qiṭmīr (aṣḥāb al-kahf ).38 Writing the names of the Seven Sleepers on ships was believed to help prevent them from sinking, and consequently ship-shaped calligrams featuring their names became popular in the Ottoman world.39 The image of the ship in the calligram therefore functions as the object to which the Seven Sleepers’ power (in the form of text, i.e. their names) is directed. Here we have a text-image relationship in which the text is the subject and the image the object.40 Another category of magical images in Greek magical papyri is what McDonald refers to as “talismanic images,” which “act as visual manifestations of supernatural force” and “typically depict the being itself or visual elements which can iconographically be identified with the named being.”41 A spell invoking a god would therefore be accompanied by a figure of the deity. The image, however, is not “a mere representation of the supernatural being” but “itself channels the being’s power and thus acts as one of the main sources of the ritual’s efficacy.”42 We can similarly apply this interpretation to calligrams of the Lion of ʿAlī. The symbolism behind the various elements of this calligram will be discussed below, but for now it suffices to note that ʿAlī, the epitome of bravery and vigor, was represented in the form of a lion because he was known as the “Lion of God.” At the same time, the lion itself was considered the embodiment of courage and strength. Thus, by shaping the text into the form of a lion, the calligram harnesses both the power of ʿAlī (in the guise of his leonine equivalent) and the power of the beast it depicts. The texts that form the calligrams include invocations of ʿAlī or other sacred formulas, such as Qurʾanic verses. Here text 38

39

40

41 42

The Christian legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, which is also mentioned in the Qurʾan (Sūrat al-Kahf, 18:9–26), tells the story of seven young men and their dog who fell asleep in a cave near Ephesus (now Turkey) while escaping religious persecution and miraculously awoke centuries later. Venetia Porter, “Amulets Inscribed with the Names of the ‘Seven Sleepers’ of Ephesus in the British Museum,” in Word of God, Art of Man: The Qurʾan and Its Creative Expressions, ed. Fahmida Suleman (Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2007), 123–134, here 126. For examples, see Aksel, Türklerde dinî resimler, 65–70. See also Francesca Leoni’s chapter in this volume. Cf. J. Kirsten Smith, “Visual Strategies in the Greek Magical Papyri: The Productive Integration of Image and Text” (MA thesis, Harvard University, 2000), who in her study on figurae magicae in Greek magical papyri, argues that the texts that are written on the body of the magical images (often names) “reflect an attempt to appropriate the power of the divinity whose name is written or to project the power onto the object whose name is written,” 32. McDonald, “The Iconography,” 62. McDonald, “The Iconography,” 63.

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and image are thus both subjects, which work simultaneously in order to affect an external object, such as enemies and other malevolent forces. It is, nevertheless, impossible to disentangle the textual and visual elements from each other. David Morgan referred to calligrams as a form of “imagetext,” which are “representations that are neither image nor text alone, but a synthesis that needs to be classified separately because it is experienced neither as merely text nor as merely image.”43 This parallels Arabic epigraphic material as studied by Richard Ettinghausen, who noted that inscriptions ought generally to be legible and in the language of the viewer in order to communicate the messages they contain (as in the case of modern-day traffic signs). Yet, he observed that Arabic inscriptions are found also in non-Arabic speaking regions and often cannot be read, regardless of literacy levels, on account of their ornate nature. Ettinghausen argued that the textual content of the inscriptions is irrelevant and that it is instead the gestalt (the item as a whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts, comprising its visual aspects and other signifiers) that is more important.44 We can make a similar argument for calligrams. While the text and the figural representation that it forms are no doubt important, it is its gestalt—the overall combination of both its text and image (and even also possibly including its surrounding elements and ambience)— that makes a calligram effective.

2

Calligrams of the Lion of ʿAlī

The calligrams known as the Lion of ʿAlī are often composed of epithets and invocations of the legendary figure of ʿAlī, the cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Muḥammad. A formidable warrior, ʿAlī played a crucial role in the early struggles of the Muslim community in Mecca and Medina. He was the fourth of the Rightly Guided Caliphs who were the successors to the Prophet, but whose reign was troubled by political instability. ʿAlī is particularly revered among Shiʿis, who believe that he had been divinely appointed as Muḥammad’s heir. 43 44

David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 65. Richard Ettinghausen, “Arabic Epigraphy: Communication or Symbolic Affirmation,” in Near Eastern Numismatics, Iconography, Epigraphy and History. Studies in Honor of George C. Miles, ed. Dickran K. Kouymjian (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1974), 297–317, here 299–304. The inconsequential nature of the text is echoed by scholars such as Grabar, Mediation of Ornament, 106–107. See also the discussion in Sheila S. Blair, “Writing as Signifier of Islam,” in By the Pen and What They Write: Writing in Islamic Art and Culture, edited by Sheila Blair and Jonathan Bloom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 15–49.

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He also holds an eminent position among Sufis, who consider him the recipient of Muḥammad’s spiritual knowledge.45 In certain traditions, ʿAlī was linked to the development of calligraphy.46 In the Muslim world, the lion and its imagery were often linked to courage, regal power and protection—associations that have a history dating back to the pre-Islamic period.47 ʿAlī’s bravery and military prowess resulted in his being likened to a lion, and he thus became known as the “Lion of God” (asad Allāh) or “Lion” (ḥaydar). Among the earliest references to ʿAlī’s association with this animal is in the Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk (“The annals of the prophets and kings”) by Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923), specifically in relation to the Battle of Khaybar (7/628). ʿAlī was the standard bearer in the attack against the Jewish community of Khaybar and, in confronting their leader, is said to have recited, “I am he whose mother named him lion (Haydara): I will mete you out sword blows by the bushel—A lion (laith) in thickets, powerful and mighty.”48 Later works give further accounts on ʿAlī’s connection with the animal.49 In the Middle East, images of the lion have been used as astrological and apotropaic symbols for millennia. In the ancient Near East and Egypt, lions (as well as composite animals that incorporate the feline form) appeared as guardian figures on buildings and on objects such as temples, city gates, palaces, doors,

45 46 47

48 49

On ʿAlī, see L. Veccia Vaglieri, “ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.; I.K. Poonawala and E. Kohlberg, “ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭāleb,” Encyclopædia Iranica. Melvin-Koushki, “Of Islamic Grammatology,” 48, 50. For the lion in the Islamicate world, see H. Kindermann, “Al-Asad,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.; and Ernst Grube, “A Bibliography of Iconography in Islamic Art,” in Image and Meaning in Islamic Art, ed. Robert Hillenbrand (London: Altajir Trust, 2005), 159–320, here 187. For the Seljuk period, see Deniz Beyazit, “The Lion Motif,” in Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs, by Sheila R. Canby, Deniz Beyazit, Martina Rugiadi, and A.C.S. Peacock (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016), 219–222, cats. 136a–d. For the lion and kingship in Iran, see Parviz Tanavoli, Lion Rugs: The Lion in the Art and Culture of Iran (Basel: Wepf, 1985), 21–22; A. Shapur Shahbazi, “Flags. i. Of Persia,” Encyclopædia Iranica; for Mesopotamia, see Chikako E. Watanabe, Animal Symbolism in Mesopotamia: A Contextual Approach (Vienna: Institut für Orientalistik der Universität Wien, 2002), 42–56; Krzysztof Ulanowski, “The Metaphor of the Lion in Mesopotamian and Greek Civilization,” in Mesopotamia in the Ancient World: Impact, Continuities, Parallels. Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium of the Melammu Project Held in Obergurgl, Austria, November 4– 8, 2013, ed. Robert Rollinger and Erik van Dongen (Münster: Ugarit, 2015), 255–284, here 258–260, 262. Suleman, “The Iconography of Ali,” 220. David Alexander, “Dhuʾl-Faqār And The Legacy Of The Prophet, Mīrāth Rasūl Allāh,” Gladius 19 (1999): 157–187, here 166; Suleman, “The Iconography of Ali,” 220–221.

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thrones, amulets, and seals.50 The use of lion images for apotropaic and magical practices continued well into the Islamic period. For instance, a group of Iranian talismans, dating to the third/ninth or early fourth/tenth century, features images of lion and scorpion together, probably representing the zodiacal signs of Leo and Scorpio.51 In his Muqaddima (“Introduction”), the historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406) records a talisman known as the “lion seal,” which can be used to hold power over other people. The engraving is to be made “when the sun enters the first or third decan of Leo.”52 Although the connotations behind the imagery of the lion—kingship, strength, astrology, and magic—must have played some part in the development of the calligraphic Lion of ʿAlī, the precise origins of the calligram are unclear. The earliest known example appears on the aforementioned Mehmed II scroll dated 862/1458.53 It was probably not a coincidence that calligrams developed at this time when the Islamicate world was experiencing a flourishing “writerly culture,” when there was an increase in textual and manuscript production, with the emergence of a new theoretical defense of textuality and especially visuality over orality during the early ninth/fifteenth century.54 Calligrams of the Lion of ʿAlī in the Islamicate world are not identical but vary in their textual content and design, reflecting the beliefs and artistic styles of the societies that produced them. In this case, the Mehmed II calligram is depicted as a lion passant, walking toward the right with its left paw raised. The lion consists of a text praising ʿAlī, which reads: “The victorious Lion of God ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, commander of the faithful, may God ennoble his face and be pleased by him.”55 The lion’s tail ends with a serpent’s head, a motif that

50

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52 53 54 55

For Mesopotamian examples, see Christopher A. Faraone, Talismans and Trojan Horses: Guardian Statues in Ancient Greek Myth and Ritual (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 22–24, 32, note 41; Eva A. Braun-Holzinger, “Apotropaic Figures at Mesopotamian Temples in the Third and Second Millenia,” in Mesopotamian Magic: Textual, Historical, and Interpretative Perspectives, ed. Tzvi Abusch and Karel van der Toorn (Groningen: Styx, 1999), 149–172, here 154–158; Ulanowski, “The Metaphor of the Lion,” 260. Emilie Savage-Smith, “Amulets and Related Talismanic Objects,” in Science, Tools and Magic: Part One: Body and Spirit, Mapping the Universe, by Francis Maddison and Emilie Savage-Smith (London: Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1997), 132–147, here 133, 138–139. Abū Zayd ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Muḥammad Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal, 3 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), 3:163. Istanbul, Topkapı Palace Museum, E. H. 2878. See footnote 11. Melvin-Koushki, “Of Islamic Grammatology.” Translation adapted from Shani, “Calligraphic Lions,” 123.

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had a long history in the region and probably had astronomical associations.56 The calligram resembles Seljuk images of the lion in terms of iconography and style.57 Lion-shaped calligrams continued to be a popular motif in Turkey over the following centuries, particularly in the art of the Bektāshī, a crypto-Shiʿi order active in Ottoman Turkey and the Balkans. One of their main tenets is that Muḥammad and ʿAlī were manifestations of God on earth; calligrams of the Lion of ʿAlī are thus an expression of their belief in the divinity of ʿAlī.58 One particular design has the lion facing left with its legs bent, making it look as though it is crouching (Figure 11.1).59 Its body consists of the same praise of ʿAlī as that on Mehmed II’s scroll, but other parts of its body contain other texts. While in most calligrams it is difficult to ascertain any relationship between the letters and words with their placement in the constructed image, here the choice of texts and their position on the lion’s body are dictated by Bektāshī doctrine. The lion’s face is shown in the frontal view, composed of the names of Allāh and ʿAlī written in mirror writing, with the ʿayn of ʿAlī forming its eyes. This pertains “to the belief that ʿAlī (i.e., God) manifests himself in the human face,” while the lion’s dislocated tongue contains the text Muḥammad rasūl Allāh (“Muḥammad is the messenger of God”), alluding to the Bektāshī creed that Muḥammad was the spokesman of ʿAlī.60 Calligrams of the Lion of ʿAlī were produced in Iran from the mid-tenth/ sixteenth century onward, under the Shiʿi Safavids, usually employing a prayer invoking ʿAlī known as the nād-i ʿAlī: “Call upon ʿAli, revealer of miracles. 56 57

58

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Willy Hartner, “The Pseudoplanetary Nodes of the Moon’s Orbit in Hindu and Islamic Iconographies,” Ars Islamica 5, no. 2 (1938): 112–154, here 138, 143–144. For instance the lion on a frieze fragment from Iran or Central Asia, sixth/twelfth century, now in Kuwait, Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah, al-Sabah Collection, LNS 1071 C; see Beyazit, “The Lion Motif,” 219–221, cat. 136b; and the paired lions on a bronze lamp, probably from Konya, Turkey, second half of the seventh/thirteenth century, now in Konya Müze Müdürlüğü, inv. no. 400; see Nazan Ölçer, “Hasan b. ʿAli al-Mevlevi (c. 1250–1300): Lamp,” in Roxburgh, Turks, 121, 394–395, cat. 70. There are also calligrams of the human body and face, composed of the names of the Ahl al-Bayt. These indicate the Bektāshī belief that the signs of God’s presence in Man are manifest in the form of Arabic letters on the human face and body. For Bektāshī calligrams and their meanings, see de Jong, “The Iconography of Bektashiism;” and “Pictorial Art.” De Jong, “The Iconography of Bektashiism,” plate 16; and “Pictorial Art,” fig. 11.9; Shani, “Calligraphic Lions,” fig. 54. A paper cut with this motif, dated 1280/1863–1864, is now in The David Collection in Copenhagen, inv. no. 21/1974; see Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan Bloom, Cosmophilia: Islamic Art from the David Collection, Copenhagen (Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2006), 201, cat. 121. De Jong, “The Iconography of Bektashiism,” 12–13; and “Pictorial Art,” 234, 237–239; see also Shani, “Calligraphic Lions,” 132–134.

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figure 11.1

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Paper cut, Turkey, dated 1280/1863–1864. Paper. 33×45.5cm. The David Collection, Copenhagen, inv. no. 21/1974 Photo: Pernille Klemp. Courtesy of The David Collection

You will find him a comfort to you in crisis. Every care and every sorrow will pass through your companionship, O ʿAli, O ʿAli, O ʿAli.”61 Perhaps the most famous example of this motif is one in the Shāh Maḥmūd Nishāpūrī album (compiled c. 967/1560), which has been attributed to the Safavid calligrapher Mīr ʿAlī Haravī (d. c. 951/1544–1545) and was probably executed in the midtenth/sixteenth century when he was in Bukhara.62 Here again the form of the calligram reflects local artistic styles, resembling leonine representations found in contemporaneous manuscript painting and metalwork.63 This particular 61 62 63

Translation taken from Blair, Islamic Calligraphy, 449. On the nād-i ʿAlī, see Alexander, “Dhuʾl-Faqār,” 165. Istanbul, Istanbul University Library, F1426, fol. 46r; see Blair, Islamic Calligraphy, 449–451; Shani, “Calligraphic Lions,” 138–139. As in the illustrations of the lion as one of the four bearers of God’s throne in eighthninth/fourteenth-fifteenth-century copies of Zakariyyāʾ Muḥammad al-Qazwīnī’s ʿAjāʾib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharāʾib al-mawjūdāt (“The wonders of creation and the oddities of existence”), particularly the Sarre Qazvīnī manuscript in Washington, DC (Freer Gallery of Art, F1954.50v), and its related copy in St. Petersburg (Oriental Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, MS E7); see Julie Badiee, “An Islamic Cosmography: The Illustrations of the

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calligraphic design was clearly influential, as it was replicated in Iran and Deccan India over the following centuries.64 During the Qajar period, calligrams in the form of the lion-and-sun motif (a Persian emblem with astrological connections, referring to the Sun being domiciled in Leo) incorporated the nād-i ʿAlī in the body of the lion.65 Today, posters with figural calligraphy related to ʿAlī are still sold in shrine bazaars in Pakistan and coastal India.66

3

Transmission into Southeast Asia

The motif of the Lion of ʿAlī also appears in maritime Southeast Asia.67 Examples of the calligram have been found on the east coast of the Malay peninsula (encompassing Kelantan and Terengganu in peninsular Malaysia and Patani in southern Thailand), and the Indonesian islands of Java (particularly in Cirebon on the north coast, but also Sumedang, Surakarta, and Yogyakarta), Sulawesi (particularly Luwuq), and the tiny island of Rote in the Lesser Sunda Islands, just north of Australia and thus marking the furthest geographical reach of the motif (see Map 11.1). The extant objects and manuscripts that feature the calligram date from the twelfth/eighteenth to the early fourteenth/twentieth century. This period was characterized by greater contacts between Southeast Asia (which then consisted of a myriad of sultanates) with India, China, Europe, and the Ottoman Empire, particularly in politics, trade, scholarship, and human movement. The calligrams that were produced and used during this time reflect these diverse interactions. Although the earliest examples date only to the twelfth/eighteenth century, calligrams of the Lion of ʿAlī were probably being used in the region much

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Sarre Qazwīnī” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1978), 384, plate 20; Arthur Upham Pope, A Survey of Persian Art: From Prehistoric Times to the Present (Ashiya: SOPA, 1981), 10:plate 854A. Also a steel standard (ʿalam) from Iran datable to the ninth-tenth/fifteenthsixteenth century, now in a private collection; see Tanavoli, Lion Rugs, 27, fig. 33. See Shani, “Calligraphic Lions,” 138–149. For example, a thirteenth/nineteenth-century block-printed cloth banner in a private collection; see Tanavoli, Lion Rugs, 27, fig. 32; and a cotton standard/banner dated 1262/1845– 1846, now in Singapore, Asian Civilisations Museum, inv. no. 1998–01471; see Huism Tan, “Qajar Standard,” in The Asian Civilisations Museum A–Z Guide, ed. Sharon Ham and Shan Wolody (Singapore: Asian Civilisations Museum, 2003), 261. Personal communication, Terenjit Sevea, 15 June 2019. Farouk Yahya, Magic and Divination in Malay Illustrated Manuscripts (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 187.

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Map of Southeast Asia, showing locations of the Lion of ʿAlī

earlier. Unfortunately, objects on which they would have appeared were typically made of perishable materials, such as paper, wood, and textiles, which do not survive long in the hot and humid conditions of the region. As a result, the exact origin and development of the Lion of ʿAlī in Southeast Asia is difficult to ascertain. The design clearly has its origins in the Persianate world, and its transmission into Southeast Asia is no doubt due to the fact that the region was part of this vast transregional network. The impact of Persian cultural influence on Southeast Asian societies is well attested, although much research is still needed as to its nature and extent.68 Several early and important works of

68

For an overview of Persian contacts and influence in Southeast Asia, see M. Ismail Marcinkowski, “Southeast Asia. i. Persian presence in,” Encyclopædia Iranica; R. Michael Feener and Chiara Formichi, “Debating ‘Shiʿism’ in the History of Muslim Southeast Asia,” in Shiʿism in Southeast Asia: ʿAlid Piety and Sectarian Constructions, ed. R. Michael Feener and Chiara Formichi (London: Hurst, 2015), 3–15; Tomáš Petrů, “‘Lands Below the Winds’ as Part of the Persian Cosmopolis: An Inquiry into Linguistic and Cultural Borrowings from the Persianate Societies in the Malay World,” Moussons 27 (2016): 147–161; Nile Green,

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classical Malay literature in prose were translated from Persian,69 and local audiences would have been familiar with the concept of ʿAlī as the Lion of God (or rather, Tiger of God, as will be discussed below) through texts such as the eighth/fourteenth-century Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiah (“The tale of Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya”).70 In the occult sciences, divinatory texts, particularly those relating to sortilege, can also be traced to Persian models.71 The Lion of ʿAlī calligram often appears in conjunction with another motif ubiquitous in the Persianate world, the legendary bifurcated sword Dhū l-Fiqār, which the prophet Muḥammad had given to ʿAlī, with whom it became strongly associated.72 Reproductions and visual representations of the sword were common in many parts of Southeast Asia.73 The Indian Ocean networks played a key role in the dissemination of Persian influences into Southeast Asia, but the precise geographical and temporal nexus of transmission of the Lion of ʿAlī motif is uncertain. The design may have been transmitted via Muslim India, from areas such as Gujarat, the Coromandel Coast, Golconda, and Bengal, which long had close contacts with the region.74 Another possibility is that the calligram was introduced from the Ottoman areas.75 There have been contacts between Southeast Asia

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70 71 72

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“Introduction: The Frontiers of the Persianate World (ca. 800–1900),” in The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, ed. Nile Green (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 1–71, here 28–29, 38–41. Vladimir Braginsky, “Jalinan dan Khazanah Kutipan: Terjemahan dari Bahasa Parsi dalam Kesusastraan Melayu, Khususnya yang Berkaitan dengan ‘Cerita-cerita Parsi’,” in Sadur: Sejarah Terjemahan di Indonesia dan Malaysia, ed. Henri-Chambert Loir (Jakarta: Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia, 2009), 59–117. Lode F. Brakel, The Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiyyah, a Medieval Muslim-Malay Romance (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 166, 169. Farouk, Magic and Divination, 139–150; Farouk, “The Wheel Diagram.” On Dhū l-Fiqār, see Alexander, “Dhuʾl-Faqār;” Zeynep Yürekli, “Dhuʾl-faqār and the Ottomans,” in People of the Prophet’s House, ed. Fahmida Suleman (London: Azimuth Editions, Institute of Ismaili Studies, British Museum, 2015), 163–172; see also the chapter by Maryam D. Ekhtiar and Rachel Parrikh in this volume. Mohd. Zahamri Nizar, “Ikonografi Zulfikar dalam Sejarah Hubungan Turki dan Nusantara,” Suhuf 4, no. 1 (2011): 111–141; Annabel Teh Gallop and Venetia Porter, Lasting Impressions: Seals from the Islamic World (Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia in association with the British Library and the British Museum, 2012), 176–177; Harm Stevens, Bitter Spice: Indonesia and the Netherlands from 1600 (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum and Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2015), 52–65; Feener and Formichi, “Debating ‘Shiʿism,’” 12–13. Braginsky, “Jalinan dan Khazanah Kutipan,” 62–63; Feener and Formichi, “Debating ‘Shiʿism’,” 6–7, 10. As suggested by Jérôme Samuel, “A la recherche des ateliers perdus. Peinture sous verre et production en série à Java,” Archipel 94 (2017): 143–169, here 149.

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and the Ottoman world since the 1500s, and these intensified during the thirteenth/nineteenth century due to political and religious factors.76 Several talismanic motifs commonly found in the Ottoman region were also used in Southeast Asia, perhaps the most obvious example being the official signature of the Ottoman sultans, the tughrā, which frequently appears on Indonesian calligraphic batiks, where it seems to have acquired talismanic properties.77 The most relevant parallel for the Lion of ʿAlī however is the presence of another Ottoman calligram—the ship of the Seven Sleepers, such as one produced in 1283/1866 in Cangking, West Sumatra.78 There is also evidence that Southeast Asian calligraphers were learning and practicing calligraphy in Mecca, and, in fact, the thuluth style was referred to as “the Istanbul style of writing” (menyurat Istanbul).79 It is thus probably not a coincidence that the places where many of the calligrams are found—Kelantan, Patani, and Cirebon—were also the centers of religious learning and Sufism, run by scholars who were trained in the Ottoman-dominated holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Nevertheless, direct evidence that these scholars and calligraphers were interested in calligrams, or brought back objects featuring them, is lacking. The origin of the design cannot be identified without the discovery of further material evidence and historical sources, but it may be too limiting to posit a single, exclusive line of influence on the development of the Lion of ʿAlī motif in Southeast Asia. In the extensive

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For relations between the Ottoman world and Southeast Asia, see Andrew C.S. Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop, eds., From Anatolia to Aceh: Ottomans, Turks and Southeast Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press for The British Academy, 2015). The Ottoman connections are also reflected in Javanese glass painting; see Jérôme Samuel, “Iconographie de la présence turque dans le monde malais: ce que dit la peinture sous verre javanaise,” Archipel 87 (2014): 103–142; Jérôme Samuel, “Peinture sous verre javanaise et thématique ottomane: quelques compléments.” Archipel 88 (2014): 233–238. Fiona Kerlogue, “Islamic Talismans: The Calligraphy Batiks,” in Batik Drawn in Wax, ed. Itie van Hout (Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, 2001), 124–135, here 127–128, 131. Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS Arab e.58; see Farouk Yahya, “Jimat in Form of a Ship,” in Leoni, Power and Protection, 36–37, 91, cat. 105. Annabel Teh Gallop, “A Jawi Sourcebook for the Study of Malay Palaeography and Orthography: Introduction,” in “A Jawi Sourcebook for the Study of Malay Palaeography and Orthography,” ed. Annabel Gallop, special issue of Indonesia and the Malay World 43 (2015): 13–39, here 22–24. James Bennett, “Talismanic Panel Featuring Ganesha,” in Crescent Moon: Islamic Art & Civilisation in Southeast Asia, ed. James Bennett (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2005), 283, cat. 81, notes that zoomorphic calligraphy is known in Java as ukiran Mehmet (“Muḥammad carving”), which suggests a link to Ottoman practices. According to B.A. Soepratno, Ornamen ukir kayu tradisional Jawa, 2 vols. (Semarang: s.n., 1984), 2:34, however, the term for figural woodcarving is ukiran memet, which can be translated as “detailed woodcarving.”

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and complex Indian Ocean transregional network, simultaneous impact by the Ottoman and Indian regions—both of which were often responding to developments in the Safavid realm—is likely. Indeed, rather than entering the region via a single source, it is probable that different parts of Southeast Asia adopted and developed the motif independently. The use of images, motifs and designs containing sacred texts for talismanic purposes was widely practiced throughout Southeast Asia. They typically contain Arabic letters, words, and numbers with some esoteric significance that can affect malevolent spirits or other human beings. For instance, many images used to repel spirits have the letters hāʾ and wāw emanating from their bodies, probably representing the Arabic word Huwa (“He”), which, in mystical thought, refers to the Divine Name of the Essence.80 These written elements are integrated into the body of the figures, and the making of calligrams could be seen as an extension of this practice. In Cirebon, in addition to calligrams in Arabic script, there are those made from the Indic-based Javanese script.81 Although these are recent productions, they suggest a continuation of earlier practices dating to pre-Islamic times.82 In any case, the use of calligrams as magical devices in Southeast Asia is not restricted to Muslim communities. They can also be found among the Buddhists of Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand, where talismanic designs in the form of human- and animal-shaped calligrams composed of local, Indicbased scripts were produced.83 It is unclear when these societies began to use calligrams, but they suggest that the power of figural and zoomorphic calligraphy has long been recognized widely throughout Southeast Asia. Evidence of a cross-religious connection has been found in the Patani region of southern Thailand, where Andrew Forbes reported the presence of a calligram composed

80

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82 83

As in a talismanic drawing of the pelesit spirit in a manuscript from Patani or Kelantan, Malay peninsula, thirteenth/nineteenth century, now in Kuala Lumpur, Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia, MSS 1394(3), fol. 3v; see Farouk, Magic and Divination, fig. 73. As in a copy of the Serat Selarasa (“The tale of Selarasa”), Cirebon, Java, 1250/1835, now in Yogyakarta, Museum Sonobudoyo, L. 323; see Behrend, “Textual Gateways,” 199, fig. 222. Sulaeman Pringgodigdo, “Wall Decorations in Cirebon / Hiasan dinding Cirebon,” in Abdurachman, Cerbon, 105–112, here 109. For Burmese talismanic calligrams, see Thomas N. Patton, “In Pursuit of the Sorcerer’s Power: Sacred Diagrams as Technologies of Potency,” Contemporary Buddhism 13, no. 2 (2012): 222–223 (I am indebted to Yin Ker for this reference); for examples in a Tai manuscript from Myanmar or Thailand, nineteenth century, now in Washington, DC, Library of Congress, no. B380, see Susan Conway, Tai Magic: Arts of the Supernatural in the Shan States and Lan Na (Bangkok: River Books, 2014), 69–75.

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of Qurʾanic verses in the shape of a Thai Buddhist stupa.84 Although of a recent date, it demonstrates the porous boundaries between religion, iconography, and script in the formation of figural calligraphy.

4

Characteristics of Southeast Asian Calligrams

Southeast Asian calligrams of the Lion of ʿAlī have certain characteristics that set them apart from those in the Turkish, Iranian, and Indian areas. Foreign ideas and elements that entered Southeast Asia were often localized, that is, they were adapted to fit into the existing systems and were attributed local meanings.85 The Lion of ʿAlī was used by the peoples of the region precisely because it fit into local beliefs and worldview regarding the potency of writing, images, animals, and powerful personages. Concerning figural representation in Muslim Southeast Asia, James Bennett found that, historically, the attitudes toward them were mixed and that the anxiety regarding images might have had more to do with their magical potency rather than with theological concerns.86 As Bennett notes, Islam arrived in a region where images, whether created under animistic practices or in a Hindu-Buddhist context, were believed to “be capable of containing a life essence.”87 The superposition of Arabic script onto a figural form in calligrams “may have been to imbue greater spiritual efficacy, through the revered power of Qurʾanic calligraphy, into an old symbol still believed capable of repelling misfortune.”88 This hybridity can be seen in the Lion of ʿAlī calligram, about which there was some ambivalence regarding the identity of the animal depicted. The feline forming the calligram was often identified as a tiger (Malay, harimau; high Javanese, sima; low Javanese, macan) instead of a lion. It is often difficult to ascertain whether the animal depicted in the calligrams is a lion or a tiger, as the depictions typically lack identifying features such as a mane or stripes. 84 85

86 87 88

Andrew Forbes, “ ‘Azima’ or Muslim Talisman from Southern Thailand,” The South East Asian Review 13 (1988): [no page numbering]. Oliver W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (New York and Singapore: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999), 55–57. Bennett, “The Shadow Puppet,” 176–179; see also James Bennett, “Crescent Moon: Afterword/Bulan sabit: Bab lapan,” in Bennett, Crescent Moon, 246–261, here 251. Bennett, “The Shadow Puppet,” 176–177; quotation from Bennett, “Crescent Moon: Afterword,” 251. Bennett, “Crescent Moon: Afterword,” 251.

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There was, in fact, often a conflation between the lion and tiger in Southeast Asia, because the lion is not native to the region.89 Instead, knowledge of the animal and its images were derived from the Indian tradition (particularly in religion, literature, and art) which began to be adopted in Southeast Asia during the first millennium CE. Indeed, the terms for “lion” in local Southeast Asian languages were typically derived from the Sanskrit word siṁha (Malay and Javanese, singa). The lion usually had religious and royal connotations and was often associated with courage and strength. Images of the lion are usually stylized, not particularly naturalistic, and sometimes fanciful.90 In Southeast Asia the dominant predator is the tiger. Like the lion, the tiger was associated with courage and strength. As a result, there are many instances in which the figure of the tiger has replaced the lion, as in traditional Malay literature.91 This substitution has a long history in the region: in the thirteenthcentury Hindu-Buddhist temple of Candi Jago in East Java, a relief depicting the “The Lion and the Bull”—a story that appears in both the Indian Pañcatantra (“Five topics/books”) and Buddhist jātaka tales—depicts a tiger instead of a lion.92 Despite the conflation of the two animals in such instances, they were clearly differentiated in some forms of divination. For instance, in the Rejang divinatory calendar used by Malays, Batak, and Javanese, each day of the month is associated with a symbol, usually an animal. In this system, the tiger represents the third day of the month and the lion the fourteenth.93 The tiger was substituted for the lion not only because the former is more familiar but also because of its inherent power. In many societies in Southeast Asia, the power of the tiger was not only manifest in its physical form but also took on a magical dimension. In Malay society, for example, the tiger spirit 89 90

91 92

93

Farouk, Magic and Divination, 185–187. For an overview of lion images in Southeast Asia, see Daniel Perret, “Societies of Padang Lawas (Mid-Ninth–End of Thirteenth Century CE),” in History of Padang Lawas, North Sumatra. II. Societies of Padang Lawas (Mid-Ninth–Thirteenth Century CE), ed. Daniel Perret (Paris: Cahier d’ Archipel, 2014), 283–372, here 314–318. For the lion in Thai art, see Pamela York Taylor, Beasts, Birds, and Blossoms in Thai Art (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994), 42–48; for Malay art, see Farouk, Magic and Divination, 185–191; for Java, see the works by Hélène Njoto in footnote 122. For examples of this practice, see Russell Jones, “Harimau,” Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde 126, no. 2 (1970): 260–262. Marijke J. Klokke, The Tantri Reliefs on Ancient Javanese Candi (Leiden: KITLV, 1993), 210– 211; Ann R. Kinney, Worshiping Siva and Buddha: The Temple Art of East Java (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 102. On the Rejang, see Farouk Yahya, “An Illustrated Malay Manuscript of the Rejang Calendar in the Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia (MS 291),” Jurnal Filologi Melayu 22 (2015): 115–140; Farouk, Magic and Divination, 111–114.

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(Malay, hantu belian) assisted spirit mediums in séances during healing rituals. It also appeared in revelations or dreams that “called” or “accepted” new practitioners into this profession.94 In many parts of Southeast Asia the powerful tiger’s body parts—skin, bones, whiskers, teeth and claws—were often prized as amulets. Images of tigers were also used as talismanic designs. Among the Buddhist Tai communities of Myanmar and Thailand for instance, the tiger’s power “lies in its stealth, speed and the physical force of its attack,” and illustrations of the animal can be found in the notebooks of magic practitioners, on talismanic shirts, and as tattoos.95 The calligrams of the Lion of ʿAlī are varied in their iconography and style. The bodies are always in profile but may face left (with the text beginning in the tail/rump, Figures 11.2–11.7, or head, Figures 11.8a, 11.9) or right (with the text beginning in the head, Figures 11.8b, 11.10, 11.11). In most cases, the animal is standing on four legs, with its legs straight or with knees bent, in a crouching pose. The heads are depicted either in profile or in frontal view, reminiscent of the Bektāshī calligrams described earlier (Figure 11.1). There are also calligrams that consist of a pair of mirrored lions rampant, a design that was probably derived from European coats of arms (Figures 11.10, 11.11). The styles in which the felines are rendered also allude to local artistic forms. They are reminiscent of lions and tigers on two-dimensional works such as stone reliefs and woodcarvings. The closest resemblance is, however, to shadow puppets, particularly in posture, iconography, and style.96 This connection is particularly obvious in the calligram on the old Kelantan flag, which even has an ornamental strip typical of local shadow puppets underneath the calligram (see below). It is also possible that the calligraphic nature of the designs played into Southeast Asian aesthetics. In many forms of figurative art, and particularly in shadow puppets, characters are of two types in their appearance and nature—the “refined” and the “coarse.” The latter are often depicted naturalistically, while the former are highly stylized, reflecting their greater sophist-

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95 96

On beliefs regarding the tiger in maritime Southeast Asia, see Walter W. Skeat, Malay Magic: Being an Introduction to the Folklore and Popular Religion of the Malay Peninsula (London: Macmillan, 1900), 157–170; Robert Wessing, The Soul of Ambiguity: The Tiger in Southeast Asia (DeKalb: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University, 1986); Peter Boomgaard, Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World, 1600–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), especially chaps. 8 and 9. See also Farouk, Magic and Divination, 183. Conway, Tai Magic, 67, 154, 197. For an example of a tiger shadow-puppet, see Alit Djajasoebrata, Shadow Theatre in Java: The Puppets, Performance and Repertoire (Amsterdam: Pepin Press, 1999), 54. I am grateful to Tan Zi Hao for this reference.

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ication and wisdom.97 As wild beasts, tiger and lions are considered “coarse” creatures, but the very ornate and abstract forms of the Lion of ʿAlī calligrams might have been a way of indicating the sacred and refined nature of the creature that is being associated with the revered figure of ʿAlī. The Arabic script on the bodies of the animals also contributed to their power. Writing was considered sacred to many Southeast Asian societies.98 This is because they were believed to carry the “voice” of ancient ancestors or, more specifically, that “writing was a sacred talisman or physical token that contained words from the ancient past and made that past present.”99 Written texts such as manuscripts were venerated objects, being subject to rituals and kept as heirlooms, while talismans and talismanic objects employed texts for their efficacy. The textual content of the Lion of ʿAlī therefore connected the user and viewer to the divine. Yet in the Southeast Asian context, ʿAlī’s role in the calligrams is uncertain. The phrases that form the designs are not invocations of ʿAlī but instead comprise other texts, predominantly the shahāda and a Qurʾanic verse from the Sūrat al-Ṣaff (61:13). The reason for this change in textual content is unclear, but it breaks the direct connection between the calligrams and ʿAlī. The motif was, nevertheless, still often associated with him, as seen in the local appellations attributed to the design, such as Macan Ali and Sima Ngali. There also appears to be a close relationship with another of ʿAlī’s symbols, his sword Dhū l-Fiqār, with the two motifs often occurring together. With few exceptions, the Muslim population of Southeast Asia are Sunni, and the reverence shown toward ʿAlī does not necessarily imply a Shiʿi adherence, as has sometimes been suggested.100 Motifs associated with ʿAlī were also used by Persianate Sunni communities elsewhere, reflecting the Imamophilic nature of these societies.101 In such cases Shiʿi connotations were stripped from the motifs by adding the names of the Rightly Guided Caliphs, as prac-

97 98

99 100

101

Behrend, “Textual Gateways,” 184–185. For the power of writing in Southeast Asia, with a focus on the Makassarese of South Sulawesi, see William Cummings, “Scripting Islamization: Arabic Texts in Early Modern Makassar,”Ethnohistory 48, no. 4 (2001): 559–586; William Cummings, Making Blood White: Historical Transformations in Early Modern Makassar (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 37–57. Cummings, “Scripting Islamization,” 566. For instance in Muhammad Zafar Iqbal, Kafilah Budaya: Pengaruh Persia Terhadap Kebudayaan Indonesia (Jakarta: Citra, 2006), 127. A major exception was the Persian Shiʿi community in the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya (1351–1767CE). See the chapters by Maria Subtelny, and by Maryam Ekhtiar and Rachel Parikh in this volume.

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ticed by the Ottomans with Dhū l-Fiqār.102 Being within the Persianate ambit, Southeast Asian societies similarly display features of ʿAlid piety or loyalism, in which the Ahl al-Bayt (members of the prophet Muḥammad’s family) were celebrated for their holy links to the Prophet and their own personal attributes.103 As with the Ottomans, the Sunni identification of these communities is reflected in the addition of the names of Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān, and ʿAlī to some examples of the Lion of ʿAlī calligram (Figures 11.4, 11.8b, 11.11). The characters of foreign personages often played an important role in their acceptance and veneration in Southeast Asia. In Malay society, for instance, Mohd. Taib Osman argues that sacred figures from the Hindu and Islamic traditions were incorporated into the local cosmology, not as who they are but “for the power that they are believed to possess.”104 For instance, the prophet Khiḍr, who was associated in Islamic tradition with the Fountain of Life, was invoked in Malay magical incantations as the “Lord of water.”105 We thus find ʿAlī, a formidable fighter who epitomized physical power and bravery, invoked in Malay spells to enhance the strength of warriors (penggagah).106 In addition to his heroic qualities, however, ʿAlī was known for his piety and wisdom, as one half (alongside Fāṭima) of the perfect Muslim couple, a disciple of the prophet Muḥammad, and a messenger of Islam.107 It is possible that his association with the calligram might have extended beyond martial connotations, and an understanding of what he meant to Southeast Asian Muslim societies might help shed further light on the meaning and use of this design. In function and use, the calligrams were predominantly apotropaic. They are found mainly on panels (wood, glass, textiles) in the home or public spaces (Figures 11.2, 11.4, 11.7, 11.10, 11.11), on flags and banners (Figures 11.3, 11.12), on

102 103 104 105 106 107

Yürekli, “Dhuʾl-faqār and the Ottomans,” 165. Feener and Formichi, “Debating ‘Shiʿism’;” see also Mohd. Zahamri, “Ikonografi Zulfikar,” 137. Mohd. Taib Osman, Malay Folk Beliefs: An Integration of Disparate Elements (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1989), 107. Skeat, Malay Magic, 99, 297, 423; Mohd. Taib, Malay Folk Beliefs, 107–108. Skeat, Malay Magic, 653. Edwin Wieringa, “Does Traditional Islamic Malay Literature Contain Shiʿitic Elements? ʿAlî and Fâtimah in Malay Hikayat Literature,” Studia Islamika 3, no. 4 (1996), 93–111; Ronit Ricci, “Soldier and Son-in-law, Spreader of the Faith and Scribe: Representations of ʿAlī in Javanese Literature,” in Feener and Formichi, Shiʿism in Southeast Asia, 51–62; Faried F. Saenong, “ʿAlid Piety in Bugis Texts on Proper Sexual Arts,” in Feener and Formichi, Shiʿism in Southeast Asia, 99–113.

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items of clothing, or in magicians’ handbooks (Figures 11.8, 11.9). In most cases, they relied on the power of the calligraphic representations in order to offer protection and welfare. Yet some calligrams were put to other uses and required further actions in order to be activated. For instance, one banner was employed for healing, being used to cover the patient in order to cure him (Figure 11.3). In one manuscript, the calligrams were to be used in the sport of bull- and buffalofighting (Figure 11.8), and they had to be consumed by the contesting animal in order for it to defeat its opponent. Other types of calligrams offer additional insights into the ritual practices surrounding their use. One calligram, in the form of an elephant from Patani, southern Thailand, required benzoin resin to be burned before it, accompanied by recitations of religious texts (see below).108 The smoking of sacred objects with benzoin is common in Southeast Asia; it acts as an offering to spirits who favor its smell.109 Many of the Lion of ʿAlī calligrams discussed below would probably have been treated in the same way. Lion of ʿAlī calligrams were also found in a mosque (Figure 11.7) and in a copy of the Qurʾan (Figure 11.5), bringing into question the often quoted Muslim reluctance to represent living beings in religious contexts. This relates to how calligrams were perceived, that is, whether they were seen as images or as texts. In the bull- and buffalo-fighting manuscript, they are referred to in the text as peta (“drawing,” “picture”). In the colophon of the aforementioned Sumatran ship of the Seven Sleepers, however, the calligrapher refers to it as a kalimat (“word,” “sentence”).110 This indicates a variety of interpretations. Although a general overview of calligrams is useful, investigations into specific cases could lead to a more nuanced understanding of their perception and meaning among Muslim societies.

5

Southeast Asian Lion of ʿAlī Calligram Types

The following discussion looks more closely at two types of calligrams of the Lion of ʿAlī found in Southeast Asia. The first, composed of the shahāda, was generally concentrated in the Javanese sultanate of Cirebon. The other consists of a Qurʾanic verse from the Sūrat al-Ṣaff (61:13) and was more widely distributed across the region. The selection of objects examined is not exhaustive, but they provide a framework for studying issues such as iconography, style, 108 109 110

Forbes, “ ‘Azima’.” For the use of benzoin in Malay culture, see Skeat, Malay Magic, 75–76. Farouk, “Jimat,” 91.

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meaning, function, and the use of figural images among the Muslim societies of Southeast Asia. Although it could be argued for some of these objects that the calligrams are merely formulaic auspicious blessings and symbols of faith, in several manuscripts their occult-scientific functions—typically for strength and protection—are explicitly stated. The third type of Lion of ʿAlī calligram, found in the Javanese city of Yogyakarta, will be dealt with only cursorily, as the texts that form it have yet to be identified.

6

Type 1: The Lion of ʿAlī Composed of the shahāda

As noted above, one variant of the calligram of the Lion of ʿAlī found in Southeast Asia is composed of the shahāda, the Islamic statement of faith: ‫ل الله‬ ُ ْ ‫سو‬ ُ َ ‫ل َا ِإلهٰ َِإ َلّا الله م ُح َم ّدٌ ر‬ Lā ilāha illāllāh Muḥammadun rasūlallāh There is no god but God. Muḥammad is the messenger of God. In addition to being an expression of religious belief, the shahāda was believed in the Islamicate world to have special powers, and it appears on various talismans.111 In Java, chronicles and legends attributed supernatural power to the phrase, especially in proving the superiority of Islam to other faiths. In the Wawacan Sunan Gunung Jati (“Narrative poem of Sunan Gunung Jati”), such was the power of the shahāda that the saint Sunan Gunung Jati (see below) was able to turn areca nuts into gold by reciting it.112 The shahāda also had the power to convert to Islam one of the characters in the Hindu epic of the Mahābhārata.113 111 112

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Canaan, “The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans,” 131. Emon Suryaatmana and T.D. Sudjana, eds., Wawacan Sunan Gunung Jati (Jakarta: Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa, Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, 1994), 110. Yudhiṣṭhira’s weapon was called kalimahoṣadha (“the great medicine of Kālī”), but mistakes made by manuscript scribes led to its misidentification, by the early thirteenth/nineteenth century, as the Islamic shahāda; see S. Supomo, “From Śakti to Shahāda,” in Islam: Essays in Scripture, Thought and Society: A Festschrift in Honour of Anthony H. Johns, ed. Peter G. Riddell and Tony Street (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 230–234; also see Merle C. Ricklefs, Mystic Synthesis in Java: A History of Islamization from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries (Norwalk: EastBridge, 2006), 199.

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The calligram was, and still is, particularly popular in the sultanate of Cirebon, where it is commonly known as the Macan Ali (“Tiger of ʿAlī”). Cirebon is a port city on the north coast of Java, a region characterized by urban settlements with maritime trade links to other parts of Southeast Asia and the wider world. Its religious and cultural constitution reflects these foreign contacts, and its art and architecture display a combination of Javanese, Indian, Middle Eastern, and Chinese elements.114 Cirebon became one of the earliest kingdoms on the island to adopt Islam, during the ninth/fifteenth century. The city is commonly associated with the figure known as Sunan Gunung Jati (“Lord of the Teak Hill”; d. c. 978/1570). He is said to be a descendant of both the prophet Muḥammad and the royal house of Pajajaran (a Hindu kingdom that ruled West Java from 1482 to 1579) and, in Javanese tradition, is one of the legendary nine saints (wali sanga) reported to have propagated Islam on the island.115 There is a strong tradition of figural and zoomorphic calligraphy in Cirebon. Calligrams can be found on carved wood panels or reverse glass painting, which are hung on walls of the home (usually placed at entrances) for protection. The designs can be of animals, Hindu deities, or characters from shadow puppets, with the Arabic calligraphy usually painted in gold to make the text stand out.116 The figure of the Macan Ali is one of the best known examples of zoomorphic calligraphy in Cirebon, although it is unclear when it began to be used. One version of the Babad tanah Sunda/Babad Cirebon (“Chronicle of the land of Sunda”/“Chronicle of Cirebon”) mentions the use of a standard/banner bearing the Lion of ʿAlī during a tenth/sixteenth-century battle between the joint Muslim forces of Cirebon and Demak against a neighboring Hindu kingdom that refused to convert to Islam.117 The reliability of this account is, however, questionable, as the texts of these chronicles tend to date much later than the events they purport to describe.

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115 116 117

For a brief history of Cirebon, see Merle C. Ricklefs, “Cirebon,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed. For its art, see Paramita R. Abdurachman, ed., Cerbon (Jakarta: Yayasan Mitra Budaya Indonesia, Sinar Harapan, 1982); John N. Miksic, “The Art of Cirebon and the Image of the Ascetic in Early Javanese Islam/Kesenian Cirebon dan Citra Pertapa pada Islam Jawa Awal,” in Bennett, Crescent Moon, 121–143. For Sunan Gunung Jati, see Martin van Bruinessen, “Gunung Jati, Sunan,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed. Pringgodigdo, “Wall Decorations,” 106–109; see also Miksic, “The Art of Cirebon,” 130; Bennett, “Talismanic Panel.” P.S. Sulendraningrat, ed., Babad Tanah Sunda/Babad Cirebon (Cirebon: s.n., 1984), 75.

calligrams of the lion of ʿalī in southeast asia

figure 11.2

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Carved wooden panel with the Macan Ali, Cirebon, Java, c. 1147–1164/1735–1751. Red and gold paint on wood. Approx. 67 ×103cm. Kraton Kasepuhan, Cirebon Photograph by the author

The earliest surviving example is a carved wooden panel in the collection of the Kraton Kasepuhan (“Senior palace”) in Cirebon (Figure 11.2), dated to the twelfth/eighteenth century.118 The animal faces left with its body in profile but its head in frontal view. It has long legs and sits on its haunches, with its tail bending over its back. It has large round eyes and two protruding flared ears on each side, and its mouth is curved in a smile, showing a row of teeth. The Arabic text that shapes its body is in a foliated script, of a style found also in later calligrams.119 The body of the animal contains the shahāda repeated: “Lā ilāha illa āllāh” is visible in its torso and along its back, while “rasū-” can be seen on the haunch, belly, and the back of the neck, where the phrase continues to form its nose with “[l]allā[h]” (the shadda is on its forehead). Underneath the creature are two Javanese inscriptions in Arabic script (pegon). Accord-

118

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Inventory number unknown; see K.C. Crucq, “Houtsnijwerk met inscripties in de kraton Kasepoehan te Cheribon,” Djåwå 12 (1932): 8–10, here 10, illustrated on plate between 8– 9. For the use of foliated and floriated scripts in Southeast Asia, see Ali Akbar, “Tracing Individual Styles: Islamic Calligraphy from Nusantara,” Lektur 5, no. 2 (2007): 244–255, here 246–247.

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ing to Karel Christiaan Crucq, these are both chronograms (candrasengkala), although each gives a different date. The one under its forelegs reads “iku buta pandita rupane” i.e. 1-5-7-1, signifying [1164]/1751, while the one beneath its hind legs reads “wong peksi nguni tutur Basuki,” i.e. 1-1-4-7 (or 8), which corresponds to 1147–1148/1735–1736.120 Calligrams of the Lion of ʿAlī often reflect artistic styles in their design. Here, the form of the animal resembles the Chinese lion shi (lion-dog, fu-dog), a symbol that is often found on batik textiles produced in Chinese communities on the north coast of Java.121 Indeed, Chinese-style feline figures have a long history in Javanese Islamic art. They have appeared since at least the tenth/sixteenth century as guardians in the mausoleums of saints and on various wooden objects. The features of these animals are often profusely decorated with, or even formed by, volutes and foliate scrolls.122 Perhaps the foliated calligraphic Arabic script forming the Macan Ali calligrams in Cirebon was an interpretation of this style. In the panel, the animal sits next to a multi-branched palm tree and stands on Chinese-style curlicued, layered rocks, an ornamental design often found in Cirebonese art, where it is known as wadasan or karang (“coral”).123 The creature and the surrounding landscape are painted in gold against a red background, a color combination reminiscent of Chinese woodcarving. 6.1 The Cirebon Banner Another object from about the same period is perhaps the best known example of the calligram: the royal banner of Cirebon, dated to 1190/1776, now in the Museum Tekstil in Jakarta (Figure 11.3).124 Measuring 172× 322cm, it is made of 120 121

122

123 124

Crucq, “Houtsnijwerk,” 10. The museum label, however, dates the panel to [1132]/1720. On this motif in Javanese textiles, see Robyn Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia: Tradition, Trade and Transformation, rev. ed. (Singapore and Hong Kong: Periplus, 2003), 277, who refers to it as the qilin. For the lion in Chinese art, see Jessica Rawson, Chinese Ornament: The Lotus and the Dragon (London: British Museum, 1984), 110–114. Hélène Njoto, “Sinitic Trends in Early Islamic Java (15th to 17th century),” NSC Highlights: News from the Nalanda–Sriwijaya Centre 4 (2017): 2–3; Hélène Njoto, “Mythical Feline Figures in Java’s Early Islamisation Period (Fifteenth to the Early Seventeenth Centuries): Sinitic and Vietnamese Imprints in Pasisir Art,” Arts Asiatiques 73 (2018): 41–60. Njoto has suggested that the iconography and style of the figures might be the result of Vietnamese influence. On this rock motif, see Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia, 279–280. Inv. no. 017; see Judi Achjadi, The Jakarta Textile Museum (Jakarta: Jakarta Textile Museum, Jakarta Museums & Conservation Services, 1998), 77; James Bennett, “Royal Banner,” in Bennett, Crescent Moon, 285, cat. 90, illustrated on 41; Tawalinuddin Haris, “Bendera Macan Ali koleksi Museum Tekstil Jakarta,”Paradigma, Jurnal Kajian Budaya 1, no. 1 (2010):

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figure 11.3

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Royal banner, Cirebon, dated to 1190/1776. Cotton, silk, natural dyes. 172×322 cm. Museum Tekstil, Jakarta, inv. no. 017 Photo: Saul Steed. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of South Australia

cotton using the batik technique. On the left-hand side is a large calligraphic figure of the Macan Ali. It is difficult to determine the text that forms its body—it has been read as being the phrase known as the ḥawqala,125 but the shahāda is more likely.126 In its tail is the basmala. The body of the animal is in profile and the head in frontal view. Unlike the aforementioned wooden panel, however, its legs are short and bent at the knees. The text in its body criss-crosses in a manner reminiscent of the Buddhist endless-knot motif.127 Two smaller calligrams of a similar design flank a representation of the legendary Dhū l-Fiqār, the bifurcated sword of ʿAlī. Other talismanic symbols appear on both sides of the sword: a pentagram and four eight-pointed geometric designs known in Southeast Asia as Solomon’s ring. The latter are filled with

125 126 127

88–103. In addition, there are two copies of the flag: one in Amsterdam, Tropenmuseum, Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, inv. no. TM-5663-1; see Mirjam Shatanawi, Islam at the Tropenmuseum (Arnhem: LM, 2014), 24, fig. 12; another in Singapore, Asian Civilisations Museum, inv. no. T-0677. I am grateful to Mirjam Shatanawi, Pim Westerkamp and Noorashikin Zulkifli for their help with these objects. “There is no might or power except in God, the Most High, the Exalted”; see Achjadi, Jakarta Textile Museum, 77; Bennett, “Royal Banner.” Haris, “Bendera Macan Ali,” 92. The endless-knot motif could also be seen on stone wall panels and carved on the wooden minbar of the Masjid Agung Sang Cipta Rasa in Cirebon.

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the numbers 1 to 9 and Arabic letters that make up the word budūḥ.128 Between the two blades of Dhū l-Fiqār is a series of disconnected Arabic letters which Judi Achjadi interprets as a chronogram for the date of the banner, 1190/1776.129 Qurʾanic verses fill the edges of the composition: the Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ (Q 112),130 a verse from the Sūrat al-Anʿām (Q 6:103),131 and a verse from the Sūrat al-Ṣaff (Q 61:13).132 One of the main functions of flags and banners is to identify a particular group or society, through the choice of its emblems, inscriptions, colors, and materials.133 Because the shahāda is the Muslim proclamation of faith, Tawalinuddin Haris suggests that the placement of the calligram on the Cirebon banner was to identify the sultanate as an Islamic kingdom.134 The use of the shahāda on flags and banners is common in the Islamicate world: it appeared, for instance, on Ottoman banners, and is used now on the flags of Saudi Arabia and various jihadist groups.135 The choice of emblem often reflects the qualities that a group would like to identify with. Lions and tigers, symbols of bravery and strength, are featured on the flags, banners, and standards of many cultures worldwide, including those in Southeast Asia.136 This practice seems to have a long history in the region. In a sixth/twelfth-century Old Javanese poem (kakawin) called Smaradahana (“Burning of Smara”), a battle scene describes how, for one side, “their standard for the battle was a fierce tiger [embroidered with] gems; its whiskers entwined 128 129 130

131 132 133

134 135

136

Thus linking it with another talismanic device, the magic square. On these talismanic designs, see Farouk, Magic and Divination, 194–207. Achjadi, Jakarta Textile Museum, 77. If the letters are replaced by their numerical equivalents using the abjad system, the result would be: 1 5 3 7 4 2 6 3. “Say: He is God, the One and Only; God, the Eternal, Absolute. He begetteth not, nor is He begotten; and there is none like unto Him.’” All translations of the Qurʾan in this chapter are based on ʿAbdullah Yūsuf ʿAlī, Holy Qurʾān: Text and Translation (Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Book Trust, 1999 [repr. of 1994 ed.]). “No vision can grasp Him, but His grasp is over all vision; He is above all comprehension, yet is acquainted with all things.” The verse on the banner is slightly faulty. “Help from God and a speedy victory. So give the glad tidings to the Believers.” For a brief overview of flags in the Islamicate world, see Jonathan Bloom and Sheila S. Blair, eds., The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture, 3 vols. (New York, Oxford University Press, 2009), 2:75–76. Haris, “Bendera Macan Ali,” 93. Afshon Ostovar, “The Visual Culture of Jihad,” in Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamists, ed. Thomas Hegghammer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 82–107, here 88–91. For instance, the flag of the sultan of Kutai Kartanegara in Borneo (probably thirteenth/ nineteenth century) has an image of a crowned tiger. Leiden, Museum Volkenkunde, Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, inv. no. RV-614–135.

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together [caused feelings] of chaos and twisting of the entrails [in those who saw them]” (canto 30:7).137 The appearance of the Macan Ali calligram as an emblem on the Cirebon banner, as well as other Southeast Asian flags that also feature similar motifs (two of which will be discussed below, one from Kelantan and the other from Luwuq, Figure 11.12), is thus a continuation of this tradition. The designs were chosen because they resonated with local beliefs, and it is possible that they replaced similar motifs that were already in circulation. One interpretation is that the feline in the calligram represents the white tiger of Prabu Siliwangi (r. 1482–1521), king of the Sundanese kingdom of Pajajaran in West Java.138 According to tradition, Siliwangi had a white tiger that helped him defeat his enemies and is said to have transformed his people into tigers when their kingdom was in danger of being attacked.139 The power associated with the white tiger is still acknowledged in Java today. A practice known as the Ajian Macan Putih (“Incantation of the White Tiger”) is used to increase the charisma of a person; many examples of this practice can be found online.140 The figure on the banner has been identified also with another creature. According to Achmad Opan Safari, the term Macan Ali is a recent appellation dating to the 1970s. Instead, the Cirebon royal banner was previously known as Kad kalacan Singa Baruang Dwajalullah (“The Singa Barong is the emblem of the flag of God”).141 The singa barong or singhabarwang (a mythical composite animal with an elephant’s head, a lion’s body, and the wings of an eagle) is a prominent figure in Cirebonese rituals and art. A royal carriage in the shape of this creature, made in 956/1549 and now in the Kraton Kasepuhan in Cirebon, is a prized component of the royal regalia.142 It is thus possible that flags and other emblems of the city once featured this creature, which was later replaced by the Macan Ali calligram as contact with the Ottomans increased. The decision to put the calligram on the banner was in order to draw upon the talismanic properties not only of the animal depicted but also of ʿAlī. Here,

137 138 139 140 141 142

Edi Sedyawati, Gaṇẹśa Statuary of the Kaḍịri and Siŋhasāri Periods: A Study of Art History (Leiden: KITLV, 1994), 143. Paramita R. Abdurachman, “Introduction/Pendahuluan,” in Abdurachman, Cerbon, 11–25, here 20–21. Wessing, Soul of Ambiguity, 31, reports that Siliwangi himself was said to have become a white tiger. Agus S.W., “Khasiat Ajian Macan Putih dan cara mempelajarinya,” Harta Langit, 2018, https://hartalangit.blogspot.com/2018/12/khasiat‑ajian‑macan‑putih‑dan‑cara.html. Achmad Opan Safari, “Iluminasi dalam naskah Cirebon,” Suhuf 3, no. 2 (2010): 309–325. I am grateful to Annabel Gallop for this reference. See Helen Ibbitson Jessup, Court Arts of Indonesia (New York: The Asia Society Galleries, Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 207–208; Bennett, Crescent Moon, 52.

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the association with ʿAlī is enhanced by its coupling with his other symbol, the Dhū l-Fiqār sword.143 As noted earlier, there were numerous flags depicting Dhū l-Fiqār that were employed in Southeast Asia from the twelfth/eighteenth century to the early fourteenth/twentieth. The Dutch captured many of these during battles with the local populations, indicating that they were used for military purposes.144 The Cirebon banner would probably have been similarly employed in battle, and the Macan Ali and Dhū l-Fiqār motifs therefore served to invoke ʿAlī in order to enhance bravery, subjugate enemies, and gain protection for the Cirebon forces. Like the calligram, the incorporation of the Dhū l-Fiqār motif on the banner might also reflect preexisting local beliefs. Among Austronesian societies, metal (particularly weapons such as the keris dagger) represented the “male” element, while textiles represented the “female”; a combination of the two materials thus symbolized the unity of male and female.145 The appearance of Dhū l-Fiqār on a cloth flag perhaps similarly signifies this union and was adopted in Southeast Asia from Ottoman practice because it reflected ancient local beliefs. The apotropaic properties of the banner are increased by the presence of Qurʾanic verses and talismanic designs.146 The use of magical symbols on flags in Southeast Asia is not unusual: a thirteenth/nineteenth–early fourteenth/ twentieth-century flag from Budong-Budong, West Sulawesi, contains an image of Dhū l-Fiqār, the talismanic design known as Solomon’s ring, and various Arabic inscriptions.147 Similarly, the thirteenth/nineteenth-century flag of Sumenep, Madura, contains five of the magical symbols known as the “seven seals of Solomon.”148 Like the Cirebon banner, these flags would have conferred protection upon the societies that used them. Apart from military use, the Cirebon banner was believed to have healing properties. According to one account, a ruler of the Central Javanese prince143

144

145 146 147 148

There are swords in Iran that combine both an epithet for ʿAlī that mentions Dhū l-Fiqār (“There is no hero but ʿAlī and no sword but Dhū l-Fiqār”) and an image of a lion; see Alexander, “Dhuʾl-Faqār,” 166. Mohd. Zahamri, “Ikonografi Zulfikar,” 119–120, 126–127, 130; Stevens, Bitter Spice, 52–65. Amulets featuring the Dhū l-fiqār were used by the Ottomans during battle, see Yürekli, “Dhuʾl-faqār and the Ottomans,” 167. Justus M. van der Kroef, “Dualism and Symbolic Antithesis in Indonesian Society,” American Anthropologist, n.s. 56, no. 5, part 1 (1954): 847–862, here 849–851. Haris, “Bendera Macan Ali,” 99. Leiden, Museum Volkenkunde, Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, inv. no. RV-3600– 5545. Leiden, Museum Volkenkunde, Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, inv. no. RV-370– 803.

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dom of Mangkunegaran had fallen ill. The banner was lent to him and used to cover his body, and, as a result, the king recovered.149 The curative powers of sacred banners have been observed elsewhere in Java. During the thirteenth/nineteenth and early fourteenth/twentieth centuries, the sacred royal banner of Yogyakarta was paraded around the city at times of widespread illness. The banner, named Kangjeng Kyai Tunggul Wulung (“The blue-black banner”), has an image of Dhū l-Fiqār together with Arabic inscriptions. It is said to have been made from the cloth that hung around the Prophet’s grave. In 1350/1932 this banner, alongside another banner with the Dhū l-Fiqār motif, the Kangjeng Kyai Paré Anom (“The green and yellow one”), was paraded around the city during an outbreak of disease, accompanied by rituals and offerings.150 The use of the Yogyakarta and Cirebon banners for healing indicates that Dhū l-Fiqār was believed to have curative powers. The power of calligrams derives from the combination of its text, image, and surrounding elements. The Cirebon banner is the perfect example of how an object can draw power from the gestalt of its designs. The Macan Ali calligram provides power through the shahāda and the feline figure—which represents ʿAlī, the white tiger of Siliwangi, or the singa barong, or perhaps a combination of all three—which are supplemented by surrounding elements, such as Qurʾanic verses, talismanic motifs, and Dhū l-Fiqār. These components work together to enhance the talismanic properties of the banner. 6.2 The Lion of ʿAlī and Gaṇeśa Cirebonese wood panels that were hung for apotropaic purposes may feature figures from the Javanese pre-Islamic past. Among them is the elephant-headed Hindu god Gaṇeśa (known in Java as Batara Gana), the remover of obstacles.151 A calligram of Gaṇeśa appears, for instance, on a carved wood panel dating to 149

150

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According to Bambang Irianto, reported by Abu Nisrina, “Dimana Bendera Macan Ali?,” Satu Islam, 2014, https://satuislam.org/humaniora/mozaik‑nusantara/dimana‑bendera ‑macan‑ali. It is unclear when this loan occurred, but it would have been after 1170/1757 when the Mangkunegaran princedom was created. In 1976 its ruler Mangkunegara VIII (r. 1944–1987) presented the banner to the Museum Tekstil. Many thanks to Pim Westerkamp for this information. For the banners and a description of the procession, see R. Soedjana Tirtakoesoema, “De ommegang met den Kangdjeng Kjahi Toenggoel Woeloeng te Jogjakarta, Donderdag– Vrijdag 21/22 januari 1932 (Djoemoeah–Kliwon 13 Påså, Djé 1862),” Djåwå 12 (1932): 41–49; see also Bennett, Crescent Moon, 50; Merle C. Ricklefs, Islamisation and Its Opponents in Java: A Political, Social, Cultural and Religious History, c. 1930 to the Present (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012), 40–41. For Gaṇeśa in Java, see Sedyawati, Gaṇẹśa Statuary; Kinney, Worshiping Siva and Buddha, 151–153.

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the early fourteenth/twentieth century, now in the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore. Composed of the shahāda, the figure was known as tolak bala (“repelling disaster”) and would have been placed at the entrance of a house for protection.152 In the collection of the Kraton Kasepuhan are two identical wood panels, dated to 1242–1253/1827–1837CE (Figure 11.4).153 They depict Gaṇeśa standing on the Macan Ali poised above karang (coral) rocks, against a sky filled with seven calligraphic birds. He holds a sword (instead of his usual attribute, the ax) in his left hand, while his right clutches an unidentified object. According to Crucq, his body is composed of, among other things, the shahāda and the title of the Sūrat Yā-Sīn.154 The posture of the feline underneath is similar to the examples mentioned earlier, and the text is in a foliated script. As Crucq has observed, the body of the creature is composed of the shahāda and a salutation to the Prophet, and here the phrase lā ilāha illāllāh forms the endless-knot motif on its rump, with Muḥammad on its neck. It also has the names of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs—Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān, and ʿAlī—on or underneath its legs. The karang rocks beneath it include, among others, the ḥawqala: Bismillāhi tawakkaltu ʿala Allāh wa-lā ḥawla wa-lā quwwata illā billāhi l-ʿaliyyi l-ʿaẓīm (“In the name of God, I place my trust in God, and there is no might or power except in God, the Most High, the Exalted”).155 The birds are composed of phrases that begin with the word bismillāh.156 On the reverse of one of the panels is a Javanese inscription in pegon script that refers to the seven birds as representing the seven deadly sins. The inscription also contains two chronograms, although with a discrepancy between the dates. One gives the year 1755 of the Javanese era (śaka), equivalent to 1242/1827, the other 1253/1837.157 In the Hindu tradition Gaṇeśa often rides a rat but is known to ride other creatures as well. The iconography of Gaṇeśa riding a lion was particularly popular in Nepal, Kashmir, and the Tamil region of India,158 but this form did not 152 153 154 155 156 157 158

Inv. no. 2000.5571; see Bennett, “Talismanic Panel,” illustrated on 130; Bennett, “The Shadow Puppet,” 188. Inventory number unknown; see Crucq, “Houtsnijwerk,” 8–10, illustrated on plates after 10; Miksic, “The Art of Cirebon,” 130. Crucq, “Houtsnijwerk,” 9. Thanks to Liana Saif for this translation. For the full texts of all the inscriptions on the panel, see Crucq, “Houtsnijwerk,” 8–10. Crucq, “Houtsnijwerk,” 9–10. The museum labels date the panels to [1132]/1720. Anita Raina Thapan, Understanding Gaṇap̣ati: Insights into the Dynamics of a Cult (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997), 116–117, 188–190; Alexandra van der Geer, Animals in Stone: Indian Mammals Sculptured Through Time (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 335.

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One of a pair of carved wooden panels with Gaṇeśa riding the Macan Ali, Cirebon, c. 1242– 1252/1827–1837. Red and gold paint on wood. Approx. 78 × 50 cm. Kraton Kasepuhan, Cirebon Photo: Saul Steed. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of South Australia

appear to have been widespread in Javanese arts of the pre-Islamic period.159 Instead, it is possible that the iconography in the Kraton Kasepuhan panels was the result of Sufi connections. The Gaṇeśa-and-lion image recalls depic-

159

It does not seem to be among the Gaṇeśa figures described in Sedyawati, Gaṇẹśa Statuary.

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tions of Sufi saints in India and Pakistan, who are often shown riding lions or tigers, demonstrating their ability and power in taming wild animals.160 In these panels Gaṇeśa is shown wearing a turban-like headress (ketu), a feature usually associated with religious figures such as sages and ascetics.161 According to James Bennett, the local Shaṭṭāriyya order in Cirebon identifies Gaṇeśa “as the Earthly Angel (malekat lindhu) who crawled out of materiality to achieve heavenly spirituality.”162 He is thus the embodiment mystical power, particularly when combined with the figure of the Macan Ali. While a discussion of the mystical aspects of calligrams is beyond the scope of this chapter, the panels demonstrate the close relationship between Sufism and occult practices in Southeast Asia. Further research into these panels and similar examples may help reveal the degree to which mystical concepts played a part in Southeast Asian occult sciences. 6.3 Variations of the Motif Over the following decades, further variations of the calligram were produced. It appears, for instance, in a Qurʾan from the nearby town of Sumedang, West Java, copied in 1272/1856 (Figure 11.5).163 The middle of the Qurʾan contains a double-page illumination surrounding the beginning of the Sūrat al-Kahf (18:1– 8). Its structure—a pair of rectangular borders framing the text block, with triangular arches protruding from the sides—is typical of Javanese illumination. The triangular arches contain calligrams of the Macan Ali, rendered in the same foliated script as the wooden panels described before (Figures 11.2, 11.4). All four legs are short and point forward, making it look as though it is crouching on all fours, reminiscent of the figure in the Cirebon banner (Figure 11.3) and the Bektāshī calligrams (Figure 11.1). In other respects, however, it marks the beginning of a style found in later examples of the calligram. Its face is more heart-shaped, with slanted eyes and upward-pointed ears. These features appear in a manuscript of the Babad Talaga, Majalengka (“Chronicle of Talaga, Majalengka”), probably copied in Cirebon in about 1283/ 160 161 162 163

Saeed, Muslim Devotional Art, 72–75. Lydia Kieven, Following the Cap-Figure in Majapahit Temple Reliefs (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 55–56. Bennett, “The Shadow Puppet,” 188. Sumedang, Prabu Geusan Ulun Museum, no. I2; see Edi S. Ekadjati and Udang A. Darsa, Katalog induk naskah-naskah Nusantara: Jilid 5A: Jawa Barat: Koleksi lima lembaga (Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia, Ecole Française d’ Extrême-Orient, 1999), 234; Ali Akbar, “Qurʾan,” in Bennett, Crescent Moon, 272, cat. 25, illus. on 171; Annabel Teh Gallop, “Islamic Manuscript Art of Southeast Asia/Seni naskah Islam di Asia Tenggara,” in Bennett, Crescent Moon, 158–189, here 170.

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Qurʾan, Sumedang, Java, dated 1272/1856. Ink and colors on paper. Page 44 × 28 cm. Prabu Geusan Ulun Museum, Sumedang, no. I2, fols. 147v–148r Photo: Saul Steed. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of South Australia

1866.164 The manuscript contains a catalog of calligraphic designs following the main text. These include three variants of the Macan Ali, composed of the shahāda followed by a salutation of the prophet Muḥammad: ṣallā ʾllāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam (“Blessings and peace be upon him”). The third variant

164

Leiden University Library, CB 141, from the collection of E.W. Maurenbrecher, 1933; see Theodore G.Th. Pigeaud, Literature of Java: Catalogue Raisonné of Javanese Manuscripts in the Library of the University of Leiden and Other Public Collections in the Netherlands, (The Hague: Martinus Nyhoff, 1968), 2:782. The manuscript does not have a colophon, but at the end of the chronicle, on page 90, is a notice on the birth of a boy: “Punika Hijrah, rancangen putra ngi [unclear character] babarkĕn ring sasi Robingullakir pukul 1 / tanggale 8 dintĕne Saptu taun Alip 1283.1866. Tamat” (“This is the hijri date, recorded when the son … was born in the month of Rabī ʿal-Ākhir at 1 o’clock, the date being 8, on Saturday, in the year of alif [the first in the Javanese eight-year cycle] [AH] 1283 or 1866 [CE]. The end”); transliteration and translation by Merle Ricklefs, who notes that the hand is Cirebonese. I am grateful to him for his help with the manuscript.

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figure 11.6

Calligraphic drawings with two variants of the Macan Ali, Babad Talaga, Majalengka, probably Cirebon, Java, c. 1283/1866. Ink and colors on paper. Page 35 × 21.5 cm. Leiden University Library, Leiden, CB 141, pp. 90–91 © Leiden University Library

(MS, page 93) is similar in some respects to the one in the Sumedang Qurʾan, being formed of a foliated script, with slanted eyes surrounded by a mask-like feature that doubles as its pointed ears. The other two variants of the motif (not in a foliated script) also have sharp, pointed ears (Figure 11.6). Their facial features are, however, less well defined, the eyes being smaller (page 91) or nonexistent (page 90).165 6.4 The Cirebon Mosque A similar calligram appears on a carved wood panel in the Masjid Agung (“Great Mosque”) Sang Cipta Rasa in Cirebon (Figure 11.7). The mosque is located next 165

A calligram with similar features appears on a carved wood panel in the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, dated to the mid-fourteenth/twentieth century, inv. no. 2000–05572.

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figure 11.7

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Carved wooden panel with the Macan Ali, probably late twentieth or early twenty-first century, in the Masjid Agung Sang Cipta Rasa, Cirebon Photograph by the author

to Kraton Kasepuhan and probably dates to the tenth/sixteenth century, making it one of the oldest in Java. It contains several sacred architectural and decorative features that have been attributed to the legendary saints of Java (wali sanga).166 The panel is displayed above one of the doorways leading into the prayer hall, on the outside of the wall opposite the mihrab. It is thus placed in one of the most prominent places in the mosque. As there is a veranda outside the 166

On this mosque, see Hasan Muarif Ambary, “Historical Monuments/Peninggalan-peninggalan Sejarah,” in Abdurachman, Cerbon, 68–91, here 82–85.

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main structure where worshippers could also pray, this wall also becomes the qibla wall, facing Mecca. Its position indicates the great reverence paid to this figure in Cirebon. An often-repeated theory for the production and usage of calligrams is that they circumvented the “prohibition” of depicting living beings. The presence of the Macan Ali in the Cirebon mosque and the Sumedang Qurʾan raises the issue of the representation of living beings in a religious setting in Southeast Asia. The calligram is not the only animal figure in the Cirebon mosque. Two small lion-like figures sit at the feet of its original minbar (pulpit), which probably dates to the tenth-eleventh/sixteenth-seventeenth centuries. Similar paired leonine creatures are found on the minbar of another mosque in Java, as well as at the doorways of several mausoleums of Javanese saints.167 As Hélène Njoto has pointed out, this practice harks back to the Javanese Hindu-Buddhist period, when images of mythical creatures such as the nāga serpent and the makara (a sea monster) acted as guardian figures.168 This practice continued into the Islamic period: the wooden doors of the Great Mosque of Surakarta, Central Java, bear carvings of a mythical creature (probably the makara), while the wooden minbar of the Mosque of Kajen, Central Java, as well as a few in Lombok, have carvings of the nāga.169 It could thus be argued that the panel of the Macan Ali in the Great Mosque of Cirebon similarly performs an apotropaic function. Meanwhile Tawalinuddin Haris has argued that the calligram could be seen as actually representing not an animal but rather the shahāda itself, and, as such, it would not have been felt to be against Islamic principles to include it in religious contexts such as mosques and the Qurʾan.170 This therefore places the importance of the calligram on the text, or rather the creed it represents, instead of on the image. However, the shaped formed by calligrams also embody power in themselves, and the placement of the figure of the Macan Ali in the mosque and Qurʾan could be due to the benedictive and protective functions of lion/tiger images. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss these complicated issues, but the calligrams remind us of the variability of positions 167 168 169

170

Njoto, “Mythical Feline Figures,” 42–50. Njoto, “Mythical Feline Figures,” 44–45. For the Kajen minbar, see Merle C. Ricklefs, The Seen and Unseen Worlds in Java, 1726– 1749: History, Literature, and Islam in the Court of Pakubuwana II (St. Leonards, New South Wales: Asian Studies Association of Australia in association with Allen & Unwin and University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), 135; for the Lombok mosques, see Galih Widjil Pangarsa, “Les Mosquées de Lombok: évolution architecturale et diffusion de l’Islam,” Archipel 44 (1992): 75–93. Haris, “Bendera Macan Ali,” 93.

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regarding this matter and how local traditions might have an effect on the use and acceptability of such images.171 6.5 The Calligram Today The Macan Ali calligram remains a popular symbol in Cirebon today. It is a subject of works by artists such as the late Rastika (1942–2014) and his son Kusdono (b. 1981), whose glass paintings of figural calligraphy and shadow puppet characters are based on local iconography and styles.172 The Kraton Kanoman (“Junior palace”), which has a carved wooden panel of the calligram in its collection, has placed the motif on the cover of their guidebook.173 The palace also sells merchandize such as prints and stickers with the design. The Macan Ali seems also to have been adopted as the “mascot” of Cirebon. Merchandize such as stickers and T-shirts featuring the design, as well as of Dhū l-Fiqār, can be found in various locations around the city, placed on display or offered for sale to locals and tourists.174 The calligram is thus now a symbol of the city’s identity.

7

Type 2: The Lion of ʿAlī Composed of the Qurʾanic Verse 61:13

The second type of the Lion of ʿAlī calligram in Southeast Asia is composed of part of a Qurʾanic verse from sura 61, the Sūrat al-Ṣaff (“The Ranks”), verse 13: َ‫ب و َب َش ِ ّر ِ ال ْمؤُ ْم ِن ِي ْن‬ ٌ ْ ‫ح قرَ ِ ي‬ ٌ ْ ‫ن ال َل ّـه ِ و َف َت‬ َ ِ ّ‫ن َص ْر ٌ م‬ Naṣrun min Allāh wa-fatḥun qarīb wa-bashshiri l-muʾminīn Help from God and a speedy victory. So give the glad tidings to the Believers.

171 172

173 174

Insofar as these images were inspired by specifically Persianate practice, figural representation is utterly a non-issue. A glass painting of the Lion of ʿAlī calligram (titled Singa, “Lion”) by Rastika is in Jakarta, Wayang Museum (inventory number unknown). Some of Rastika’s and Kusdono’s works have been archived digitally at the Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA): http://archive .ivaa‑online.org. I am grateful to Tan Zi Hao and Kusdono for their help. Kraton Kanoman, Sejarah berdirinya kesultanan Kanoman Cirebon (Cirebon: Kraton Kanoman, 2011), which includes an entry on the panel on 18–19. T-shirts with the Macan Ali and Dhū l-Fiqār designs were purchased by the author at a clothes stall in front of the Great Mosque of Cirebon in 2018. For the sale of amulets in contemporary Turkey, see Chapter 13 by Christiane Gruber in this volume.

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The Sūrat al-Ṣaff is one of the suras that was revealed after the Prophet’s emigration (hijra) to Medina, probably soon after the Battle of Uḥud (3/625), in which the Muslim forces were defeated (the title refers to the ranks during battle). Verse 13 assures Muslims of God’s help.175 Its militaristic connotation meant that it often appeared on weapons, armor, talismanic shirts, standards, and banners across the Islamicate world, as it invokes God’s aid in ensuring victory.176 The “victory” referred here could, nevertheless, also be understood to be spiritual.177 The verse was found also on other types of objects that entail the user seeking help from God, such as those connected to healing.178 At the same time, it may be part of a benedictory inscription, suggesting a more prosaic role as a general expression of good wishes.179 Annabel Gallop has found the verse on several seals in Southeast Asia,180 but a detailed survey of Southeast Asian inscriptions featuring this verse has yet to be undertaken, which might shed light on its meaning and usage in the regional context. In contrast to the shahāda calligrams, which were mainly concentrated in Cirebon and its environs, those composed of Q 61:13 were more widespread across Southeast Asia. 7.1 Kelantan and Patani Many examples of calligrams of this type come from the Malay states of Kelantan and Patani, on the east coast of the Malay peninsula. Historically and culturally the two areas were closely connected, even though they are now part of separate political entities: the sultanate of Kelantan is now one of the states of Malaysia, and Patani is now part of Thailand. Islam is thought to have arrived there during the ninth/fifteenth century. From the thirteenth/nineteenth century to the fourteenth/twentieth, they were both major centers of Islamic learn175

176

177 178

179 180

ʿAbdullah Yūsuf ʿAlī, The Holy Qurʾān: English Translation of the Meanings and Commentary, revised and edited by the Presidency of Islamic Researches, IFTA (Medina: King Fahd Holy Qurʾān Printing Complex, 1990), 1741. Doris Behrens-Abouseif, “Beyond the Secular and the Sacred: Qurʾanic Inscriptions in Medieval Islamic Art and Material Culture,” in Suleman, Word of God, 41–49, here 44–45; Leoni, “Sacred Words,” 57. ʿAlī, The Holy Qurʾān, 1741. For example, it appears on a magico-medicinal bowl described by H. Henry Spoer, “Arabic Magic Medicinal Bowls,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 55, no. 3 (1935): 237–256, here 252. As on a casket made for the Fatimid caliph al-Muʿizz (r. 341–365/953–75), Madrid, Museo Arqueológico Nacional, inv. no. 50887; Behrens-Abouseif, “Beyond the Secular,” 46. See Annabel Teh Gallop, Malay Seals from the Islamic World of Southeast Asia: Content, Form, Context, Catalogue (Singapore: NUS Press in association with the British Library, 2019), 318, 341, 342, 486, 568.

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ing in Southeast Asia, when local ʿulamāʾ who were trained in Mecca, Medina, and Cairo produced religious works and established private boarding schools, a tradition that continues today.181 As a result of its geographical position and political history, Thai culture also had an influence on various aspect of life, including art and magic.182 Lion of ʿAlī calligrams appear in a concertina-format manuscript that was compiled for a crown prince (raja muda) of Kelantan, datable to the midthirteenth/nineteenth century and now in a private collection in Kuala Lumpur (Figure 11.8).183 It contains invocations, talismanic designs, and divinatory techniques for the sports of bull-, buffalo-, and ram-fighting. Animal fights, especially between bulls, were a popular sport in Patani and Kelantan up to the early fourteenth/twentieth century. In order to ensure success on the day of the fight, various steps were taken, including making ointments and concoctions for the animal, as well as magical techniques, such as drawing talismanic designs and effigies of the opponent. Many of these are given in the manuscript, including a few examples that take the form of the Lion of ʿAlī calligram. One is used to strengthen the bull or buffalo (Figure 11.8a).184 Here the verse begins from the head of the lion (Naṣrun …), continuing onto its belly and lower jaw (min Allāh). It then continues to its rear legs (wa-fatḥun) and front legs (qarīb), with the final words on its belly (wa-bashshiri l-muʾminīn). The design is to be drawn perhaps onto a plant shoot or bark (pucuk kulit; it is unclear what is meant) and given to the animal to consume for three days: Bab ini pegagah lembu atau kerbau. Maka surat pada pucuk kulit, beri makan tiga hari. Inilah rajahnya. This chapter is for strengthening the bull or buffalo. Draw it on a plant shoot [or piece of bark?], give it to eat for three days. Here is the design.

181 182 183

184

For a brief history of the two states, see Virginia Matheson Hooker, “Patani,” and C.S. Kessler, “Kelantan,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. See Farouk, Magic and Divination, 83–84, for a discussion of Thai elements in Malay magic and divination manuscripts. The patron of the manuscript may have been Tengku Bongsu Bachok bin Tengku Temenggung Long Tan (d. 1304–1305/1887), younger brother of Sultan Muhammad II of Kelantan (r. 1254–1304/1838–1886). The manuscript was in the collection of the late Nik Mohamed Nik Mohd. Salleh. On this manuscript, see Farouk, Magic and Divination, 277, cat. 23. Side A, 29th opening.

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figure 11.8a Talisman to strengthen a bull or buffalo, in a treatise on bull-fighting, buffalo-fighting, and ram-fighting, compiled for a crown prince (raja muda) of Kelantan, c. 1253–1305/1838– 1887. Colored inks and gold on paper. Page 18×11.5cm. Collection of the late Nik Mohamed Nik Mohd. Salleh, Kuala Lumpur, side A, 29th opening Photograph by the author

figure 11.8b Azimat Singa (“Talisman of the lion”), in a treatise on bull-fighting, buffalofighting, and ram-fighting, compiled for a crown prince (raja muda) of Kelantan, c. 1253–1305/1838–1887. Colored inks and gold on paper. Page 18×11.5cm. Collection of the late Nik Mohamed Nik Mohd. Salleh, Kuala Lumpur, side A, 30th opening Photograph by the author

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Another calligram, on the following page, highlights the ambiguity in the identity of the animal depicted.185 Here the creature is referred to as a lion instead of a tiger: Azimat Singa (“Talisman of the lion”) (Figure 11.8b).186 It is to be drawn on betel leaves which are fed to the competing bull or buffalo. The style of the calligram is different from the previous one, and the Qurʾanic verses that form it are not as obvious. Around it are the names of the archangels (Jibrāʾīl, Mikāʾīl, Isrāfīl, and ʿIzrāʾīl) and the four Rightly Guided Caliphs (Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān, and ʿAlī). Within the figure of the animal is written inshā Allāh (“if God wills”) and the name “ʿAlī b. Ṭālib.” Bab ini Azimat Singa namanya. Maka disurat pada sirih yang bertemu urat. Maka disuratkan ekor gembala ini dahulu ke dalam mulut lembu kita atau kerbau kita supaya tidak bertatang oleh lawannya dengan berkat gembalan singa. Inilah rajahnya. This chapter is on the Talisman of the Lion. Draw it on a betel leaf that has its veins coming together. Draw the tail of the herdsman[?] first into the mouth of our bull or buffalo so that it will not falter in front of its opponent, with the blessing of the lion tamer[?]. This is the design. Also in the manuscript is a set of three calligrams that is referred to in the text as Peta Naṣr (“Drawing of Naṣr”), in reference to the first word of the Qurʾanic verse that forms them.187 They are similar in style to the first calligram in the manuscript (Figure 11.8a)188 and are all highlighted in gold. In the text, the three designs are associated with the “Tiger of God” (Rimau Allah), and they are to be drawn using the oil from the forehead of the bull. The text then provides an incantation to be recited: Bab ini Peta Naṣr yang ketiga. Ini rajah dengan minyak dari muka lembu kita dari dahinya. Dan apabila sudah buat rajah Peta Naṣr yang ketiga itu inilah bangkitnya: “Naṣrun min Allāh wa-fatḥun qarīb wa-bashshiri lmuʾminīn.” Aku pinta menjadikan rimau tiga, kiri kanan di atasan belakang

185 186 187 188

Side A, 30th opening. Malay uses “azimat” to mean talisman, from the Arabic “ʿazīma” (incantation or spell). Side B, sixth opening. Published in Farouk, Magic and Divination, 193, fig. 207. The middle calligram is slightly different: “wa-fatḥun” forms the tail, while “qarīb wabashshiri l-muʾminīn” forms its legs.

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lembu aku. Lembu aku Rimau Allah atas kulit bumi dalam alam ini. Ali membelah batu di hadapan lembu aku, Ali lantar di kanan lembu aku, Ali gagah di kiri lembu aku, Ali kuat di belakang lembu aku. Muhammad akan payung lembu aku. Ali betukat [bertongkat?] besi kiri kanan tanduk lembu aku. Lembu aku menjadikan Rimau Allah yang tiada berlawan dalam alam ini. Ali berdiri di hadapan lembu aku sendiri-sendiri. Menolong serta aku, aku minta tolong serta lembu aku kesama-samanya dengan kata “lā ilāha illāllāh”. Inshā Allāh. This chapter is on the three “Drawings of Naṣr.” Draw it with the oil from the forehead of our bull. And once we have done the Drawings of Naṣr, [recite] this incantation: “Help from God and a speedy victory. So give the Glad Tidings to the Believers.” I seek to create three tigers, on the left, right, above, and behind my bull. My bull is the Tiger of God on this earth. ʿAlī broke the stone in front of my bull. ʿAlī lies on the right of my bull. ʿAlī is strong on the left of my bull. ʿAlī is strong behind my bull. Muḥammad will shelter my bull. ʿAlī with an iron staff on the left and right of my bull’s horns. My bull is the Tiger of God, with no equal in this world. ʿAlī himself stands in front of my bull, helping, and I seek help for my bull with “There is no god but God,” if God wills. These talismans raise several points regarding the Lion of ʿAlī calligrams. First, they highlight the ambiguity of the animal being depicted, being referred to the lion in one case and connected to tigers in the other. Second, they demonstrate the importance of the text used to construct the calligrams. Here, the use of Q 61:13 reflects how the bull-fighting competition was likened to a battle. Third, in the Peta Naṣr, although ʿAlī is not explicitly mentioned by name in the text forming the calligrams, he is still invoked for his strength in the accompanying incantation and identified with the tigers on the three sides of the bull, which itself is referred to as the “Tiger of God.” They are thus a good example of calligrams acting as “talismanic images,” in which the militaristic connotation of Q 61:13 in the text, ʿAlī’s prowess, and the power of the tiger (as represented by the figural form of the calligrams) were combined in order to ensure success in combat. Finally, they also demonstrate that calligrams do not necessarily work by themselves but may require specific rituals and actions—such as the recitation of oral incantations, placement on specific materials or surfaces, and ingestion—in order to be activated and effective. In another manuscript, a thirteenth/nineteenth-century compilation of magical and divinatory techniques probably from Patani or Kelantan, the motif

calligrams of the lion of ʿalī in southeast asia

figure 11.9

501

Talisman to protect against misfortune, Patani or Kelantan, thirteenth/nineteenth century. Ink on paper. Page 18.5 × 12 cm. Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, MSS 2778, side A, eighth opening Courtesy of the Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia

had a more protective function (Figure 11.9).189 Here, according to the text, the design was used to avoid misfortune (bala) upon one’s body: Ini penolakkan bala di tubuh kita jukadita[?] demikian buninya … (“This is to repel misfortune from our bodies, it is as follows …”). The verse Q 61:13 begins with the head and back of the animal (Naṣrun …), jumping to its front, then inside its back, 189

Kuala Lumpur, Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia, MSS 2778, side A, eighth opening; on this manuscript, see Farouk, Magic and Divination, 286, cat. 66, illus. on 192, fig. 206.

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then to its rump and tail, before continuing to form its legs (qarīb wa-bashshiri l-muʾminīn). Written inside the body are al-ghālib ʿalā al-ṭālib (“He who has dominion over the petitioner”)190 and insha Allāh (“If God wills”) in mirror writing. The same Qurʾanic verse also performed an apotropaic function in a fourteenth/twentieth-century printed talisman from Patani, dated [1338]/1920.191 Here, however, the verse has been shaped into the form of an elephant holding a Qurʾan in its trunk. The composition is framed by the Ninety-nine Names of God (asmāʾ Allāh al-ḥusnā), with the names of the Rightly Guided Caliphs placed in the four corners. Underneath it is a text in Malay giving instructions on how to use the talisman and describing its benefits, which include thirty-three rewards, such as protection from evil, escape from sickness, domestic harmony, easy childbirth, and freedom from theft. The owner is instructed to frame the talisman and to hang it near the front door of the house. Once a year benzoin should be burned before it and various specified verses from the Qurʾān repeated, together with praise to the Prophet Muḥammad. Then prayers should be offered for whatever may be desired.192 These are further examples of certain actions required for the activation and maintenance of calligrams. It is possible that other calligrams, such as those of the Lion of ʿAlī, were treated with similar rituals, that is, the recitations of Qurʾanic verses and the burning of benzoin. Further studiers, particularly in the field of anthropology, might help to identify the rituals involved in the production and use of calligrams in Southeast Asia. 7.2 The Kelantan Flags As in Cirebon, the calligram of the Lion of ʿAlī once appeared on the royal and state flags of Kelantan. Before the early fourteenth/twentieth century, flags of the Malay states tended to be of single colors, until it was necessary to make them more distinctive. The Kelantan flag was initially plain white, but, after it came under British protection in 1327/1909, the reigning sultan, Muhammad IV

190 191

192

I am grateful to Liana Saif for this translation. Published in Forbes, “ ‘Azima.’ ” Another calligram of an elephant formed from the same verse is in Kuala Lumpur, Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia, MSS 1072, side B, 20th opening. Quotation from Forbes, “ ‘Azima.’ ”

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(r. 1317–1339/1899–1920), commissioned a fresh design featuring the Lion of ʿAlī. The new flag was unfurled during the sultan’s birthday celebrations in 1328/1910.193 Like the Cirebon examples, the creature on the flag was identified as a tiger.194 Standing on four long legs, it faces right, with its tail curving over its back. It has a crest above the back of its head and a protruding tongue. The figure resembles puppets of tigers and lions in Kelantanese shadow plays, and underneath the calligram is an ornamental strip of a type that typically appears beneath shadow puppets.195 The choice of verse Q 61:13 for the calligram was to seek “Divine aid for the country and for its development.”196 The verse begins with the eyes and back of the creature (Naṣrun …), and the rest is placed mainly within its body. Its paws are rendered naturalistically. The calligram was embroidered in black against a plain white background. The same design was also used for the personal standard (bendera tubuh) of the sultan, except in this case the calligram was yellow. By the early fourteenth/twentieth century the use of an animal-shaped calligram on the state flag and sultan’s standard was apparently disapproved of. In 1341/1922, Muhammad IV’s successor Sultan Ismail (r. 1339–1363/1920–1944) changed the flags to feature emblems of non-figurative design. This was apparently due to reformist concerns about putting depictions of living beings on

193

194

195 196

“Kelantan’s Rajah. Birthday Celebrations at Khota Bharu. The Populace Rejoice,” Straits Times, March 11, 1910; Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, “The Flags of the Malay Peninsula,” Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 75 (1917): 3–4 and plates; Saʿad Shukri Haji Muda, Detik-detik sejarah Kelantan (Kota Bharu: Pustaka Aman Press, 1971), 140–141; Persatuan Pencinta Sejarah Kelantan, “Makna bendera dan jata negeri Kelantan Darul Naim,” PPSK: Persatuan Pencinta Sejarah Kelantan, 2015, http://pp‑sk.blog spot.com/2015/06/makna‑bendera‑dan‑jata‑negeri‑kelantan.html; Farouk, Magic and Divination, 187, 192, fig. 205. I am grateful to the staff of the Muzium Negeri Kelantan for references on this flag. According to the website of a Kelantanese antique dealer, Sultan Muhammad IV drew the inspiration for the design from a pair of wood panels that were formerly above the doors of the palace of his predecessor, Sultan Ahmad (r. 1304–1307/1886–1889), see Azman Azahari, “Ukiran kayu khat berbentuk harimau sepasang,” A.zahari Antik, 2010, http://azmankeriskb.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/ukiran‑kayu‑khat ‑berbentuk‑harimau.html. On these panels are two calligrams (one of them mirrored) of the Lion of ʿAlī of a Bektāshī design, similar to one in London, Nasser D. Khalili Collection, CAL 242, dated 1331/1913 (published in Suleman, “Iconography of Ali,” 216, fig. 82). This account has yet to be verified. “Kelantan’s Rajah,” Straits Times. Some recent discussions on the calligram have interpreted it as Qiṭmīr, the dog of the Seven Sleepers; see for instance Persatuan Pencinta Sejarah Kelantan, “Makna bendera.” For an example, see Farouk, Magic and Divination, 192, fig. 204. “Kelantan’s Rajah,” Straits Times.

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figure 11.10

Wooden panel, Kelantan, thirteenth/nineteenth to early fourteenth/twentieth century. Wood. 43.1 × 92.9 × 1.3 cm. Museum of Asian Arts, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, inv. no. UM.79.133 Courtesy of the Museum of Asian Arts

the flags and to worries that the use of Qurʾanic verses might have been disrespectful to the holy text.197 These accounts require further investigation, but the Kelantan coat of arms, which features a pair of barking deer (kijang)—also introduced by Muhammad IV—is still used by the state government. This indicates that there were probably other issues beside figural representation that influenced the replacement of the calligraphic flags. 7.3 Paired Mirrored Forms of the Calligram In another variation of the Lion of ʿAlī motif, the calligrams are mirrored, forming a pair of lions/tigers flanking a central motif. These designs are probably based on European coats of arms, with the mirrored figures—typically in the form of the lion rampant—acting as supporters to another mirrored calligraphic design occupying the center. An example can be seen in a pierced wooden panel from Kelantan, dated to the thirteenth/nineteenth or early fourteenth/twentieth century, now in the Museum of Asian Arts, University of Malaya, in Kuala Lumpur (Figure 11.10).198 The panel, which measures 43.1×92.9×1.3cm, has a circular central design formed by the mirrored name Muḥammad which is topped by Allāh. The feline calligrams flanking it are 197 198

Straits Times, “62-Year-Old Mini Flag of Kelantan for Museum,” April 4, 1971; Saʿad, Detikdetik, 140. Kuala Lumpur, Museum of Asian Arts, University of Malaya, inv. no. UM.79.133. It was acquired from Kelantan in 1979.

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shaped by Q 61:13 with Allāh placed at the top of their heads: in the one on the left, the text is in the “normal” direction but Allāh is written in reverse, while the figure on the right is mirrored but with Allāh written right to left. Huism Tan has observed that, in Malay vernacular architecture, pierced calligraphic wooden panels were often placed over doorways, where the sacred texts offer protection from malign spirits seeking to enter the home. The use of mirrored calligraphic compositions on pierced panels also enabled the viewer to see the same design from both inside and outside the room.199 The University of Malaya panel would probably have been placed above a doorway of a domestic or religious structure. The latter seems likely, as an almost identical panel appears in the Mosque of Jamhuriah (built 1345/1927) in Kuala Besut, Terengganu, close to the border with Kelantan. A similar design appears on several velvet doorway hangings now in the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur. One textile, probably from Kelantan or Patani and datable to the thirteenth/nineteenth or early fourteenth/twentieth century, is of red velvet with gold leaf applique, measuring 51 × 94.5cm (Figure 11.11).200 The Lion of ʿAlī calligrams flank a mirrored calligraphic shahāda, and the four corners feature mirrored calligraphic names of two of the Rightly Guided Caliphs, Abū Bakr and ʿUmar. The upper and side borders are decorated with a repeated pattern of rectilinear spirals known as the meander, a common motif in Chinese, Greek, and ancient Egyptian decoration.201 The large size, sumptuous material, and ornate designs of the textile point to its probable use in a palace. The placement of sacred verses above the entrance would thus have bestowed blessings (baraka) on the royal household and prevented the entrance of undesired elements. Tan has nevertheless observed that, although it is reasonable to assume that Qurʾanic inscriptions were placed in the home for apotropaic reasons, there is no concrete evidence for that use. Their meanings may also differ over time and with the perception of the viewer.202 These issues merit further investigation and analysis, but the magical qualities of the mirrored Lion of ʿAlī calligrams are perhaps more readily apparent in a manuscript in the Mangkunegaran Palace

199 200

201 202

Huism Tan, “Qurʾanic Inscriptions on Woodcarvings from the Malay Peninsula,” in Suleman, Word of God, 205–215, here 207. Kuala Lumpur, Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, inv. no. 1998.1.4107, from a set of three similar textiles (the other two are 1998.1.4108 and 1998.1.4109). There is also another similar hanging but with a black base, inv. no. 1998.1.4020. Rawson, Chinese Ornament, 144, 205. Tan, “Qurʾanic Inscriptions,” 208–209.

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figure 11.11

Doorway hanging, probably Kelantan or Patani, thirteenth/nineteenth to early fourteenth/twentieth century. Velvet with gold leaf applique. 51×94.5cm. Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, inv. no. 1998.1.4107 © Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia

in Surakarta, Java, datable to c. 1269–1298/1853–1881.203 It contains a catalog of various calligraphic designs that are thought to be talismanic, among which is the paired Lion of ʿAlī composed of Q 61:13. Here, the calligraphic lions/tigers are depicted more naturalistically, with their eyes and claws rendered in a realistic fashion. The heraldic origin of the motif is apparent from the presence of a shield between the two figures, containing Q 61:13. 7.4 Talismanic Shirt from Rote Calligrams of the Lion of ʿAlī with the same Qurʾanic verse (61:13) can be found also elsewhere in Southeast Asia. A talismanic shirt containing this design, now in the Museum Nasional Indonesia in Jakarta, is said to have originated on the island of Rote (or Roti) and probably dates to the thirteenth/nineteenth century.204 Made of cotton, it has a soft stand-collar with a slit at the throat and

203 204

Surakarta, Mangkunegaran Palace, MS Reksa Pustaka I 8; see Florida, Javanese Literature, 2:23, plate 5, 392. Jakarta, Museum Nasional Indonesia, inv. no. 3376; see Intan Mardiana Napitupulu and Singgih Tri Sulistiyono, eds., Archipel. Indonésie, les royaumes de la mer (Ghent: Snoeck, 2018), 156, cat. 141; Bambang Asrini Widjanarko, “Menenggang empati, berkunjung ke Museum Nasional,” Kompas.com, 2019, https://entertainment.kompas.com/read/2019/03/ 31/215307410/menenggang‑empati‑berkunjung‑ke‑museum‑nasional?.

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is sleeveless. Talismanic inscriptions and designs are written in black ink on a plain white background. The inscriptions on the front of the shirt include the shahāda (which also lines the edges of the shirt), Qurʾanic verses, and the Names of God. There are two circular talismanic designs, one of which includes the names of the Seven Sleepers formed in a six-pointed-star pattern, of a type found in the Ottoman world.205 There are six calligrams of the Lion of ʿAlī, three facing right and three left. Those that face left are similar in design to those in the Kelantan bull- and buffalo-fighting manuscript discussed earlier. In those facing right, the texts that form the outer contours of their bodies are mirrored, but those that are contained inside their bodies run in the normal direction. Like the Cirebon banner, the calligrams here work not in isolation but in conjunction with the other texts and designs on the shirt to confer protection and blessings to the wearer. The circumstances behind the production and use of this shirt are unclear. Rote is one of the easternmost Lesser Sunda Islands (Nusa Tenggara), which stretch from eastern Java to northern Australia. It is the southern-most island in Indonesia and “its traditions represent one of the furthest extensions of the culture of Southeast Asia.”206 The Rotenese are predominantly Christian, but there are also long-standing Muslim populations in the settlements of Pepela and Oe Laba, who are mainly of Butonese descent.207 They are descendants of immigrants from the sultanate of Buton, which comprised the island of Buton (located just southeast of Sulawesi) and its surrounding islands. Buton embraced Islam in the tenth/sixteenth century, with Sufism playing a prominent role in the religious and political spheres of the kingdom.208 In terms of its material (cotton) and style (sleeveless, with a slit at the throat), the Rote shirt does indeed resemble those from Buton and South Sulawesi and thus was probably produced or brought to the island by the Butonese.209 205

206

207

208 209

For objects with a similar design, see Canaan, “The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans,” 145, fig. 6; Porter, “Amulets Inscribed,” 128–130, figs. 7.4, 7.5; Perk, Osmanlı Tılsım Mühürleri, 95–103; Leoni, Power and Protection, cat. 86. James J. Fox, Bahasa, sastra dan sejarah: Kumpulan karangan mengenai masyarakat Pulau Roti (Jakarta: Djambatan, 1986), 3. For a brief background on the island, see James J. Fox, “Roti (Rote),” in Southeast Asia: A Historical Encyclopedia, from Angkor Wat to East Timor, ed. Ooi Keat Gin (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2004), 1151–1152. I want to thank James Fox for sharing his knowledge of Rote with me. For information about the Butonese community in this region, see James J. Fox, “Reefs and Shoals in Australia–Indonesia Relations: Traditional Indonesian Fishermen,” in Australia in Asia: Episodes, ed. Anthony Milner and Mary Quilty (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998), 111–139, here 123, 126–127. On Buton, see O. Schumann, “Sulawesi,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. I am grateful to James Fox for sharing this insight.

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There is a parallel in a talismanic shirt from Boné in South Sulawesi, produced before 1344/1926, now in Leiden.210 Made of cotton, it differs slightly from the Rote shirt in having short sleeves and no collar, but talismanic inscriptions and designs (which includes pentagrams) are similarly written in black ink on a white background. If the Rote shirt was indeed produced by the Butonese community, it demonstrates how motifs such as the Lion of ʿAlī accompanied population movements. The Rote and Boné shirts belong to a wider tradition of making and using talismanic shirts within the Islamicate world, which has been attested since at least the ninth/fifteenth century.211 In Southeast Asia, however, talismanic garments have been found not only in Muslim societies but also among those of other faiths, such as the Buddhist Tai people on the mainland and the Christian communities of the Philippines.212 Like the examples from Rote and Boné, these were produced by writing/drawing magical inscriptions in black ink on white cotton cloth, indicating a commonality of practice across the region. 7.5 The Luwuq Flag Another possibility is that the design of the calligram on the Rote shirt originated in Sulawesi rather than Buton. We have evidence of the Lion of ʿAlī motif on a flag from Luwuq, a Bugis kingdom in South Sulawesi that was the first in the area to adopt Islam (in 1013/1605). Here, an image of a lion, with Q 61:13 written in rows across its body, is shown in white on a dark background (Figure 11.12).213 The animal is not represented calligraphically but naturalistically, with particularly prominent mane and whiskers, walking toward the left with its tail curving over its back. The figure is reminiscent of certain Ottoman glass paintings of the Lion of ʿAlī.214 The names of the four archangels (Jibrāʾīl, Mikāʾīl, Isrāfīl, and ʿIzrāʾīl) are written in the corners. There is ambiguity regarding the identity of the creature being represented. The flag is known locally as

210 211

212 213

214

Leiden, Museum Volkenkunde, Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, RV-3600–5588. Emilie Savage-Smith, “Talismanic Shirts,” in Maddison and Savage-Smith, Science, Tools and Magic, 117–123; Rose Muravchick, “God is the Best Guardian: Islamic Talismanic Shirts from the Gunpowder Empires” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2014). See the Tai examples in Conway, Tai Magic, 144–159; and the talismanic shirt with biblical passages from the Philippines in Maxwell, Textiles of Southeast Asia, 365. I am grateful to Sharifah Nursyahidah Syed Annuar for informing me about this flag. On the flag see Claas Spat, “De rijkssieraden van Loewoe,” Nederlandsch-Indië Oud & Niew 3, 2 (1918): 64–72, here 71; Joanna Barrkman, “Talismanic Flags of South Sulawesi,” TAASA Review 16, no. 2 (2007): 12–14, here 13–14; Eko Rusdianto, “Islam di Sulawesi Selatan,”Pindai, 2015, http://pindai.org/2015/07/23/islam‑di‑sulawesi‑selatan. See, for instance, Zarcone, “The Lion of Ali,” fig. 46.

calligrams of the lion of ʿalī in southeast asia

figure 11.12

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Replica of the Macangngé flag of Luwuq, made by the batik studio Brahma Tirta Sari in Yogyakarta, 2007. Cotton. 124 ×216.5cm. Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, inv. no. SEA 03476 Courtesy of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory

Macangngé (“The tiger”), even though with its mane the animal is clearly identifiable as a lion, demonstrating a conflation between the two animals.215 In the modern replicas of the flag there is a statement in Arabic above the animal’s head: dhā asad (“This is a lion”). This is apparently a later addition: a photograph of the flag, taken in the mid-fourteenth/twentieth century, depicts the figure without this statement, suggesting that it was added later to clarify the identity of the creature being depicted.216 The Macangngé is one of several flags forming part of the regalia (arajang) of the datu (king, ruler) of Luwuq. Among the societies of South Sulawesi, regalia (which also include items such as weapons and plows) were believed to be infused with great quantities of the sumangeq (life force, spirit; Malay: 215

216

Makassar, La Galigo Museum (inventory number unknown), replica made in 1996; Darwin, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, inv. no. SEA 03476, made by the batik studio Brahma Tirta Sari in Yogyakarta in 2007. I am grateful to Elaine Labuschagne, Merinda Campbell, and James Bennett for their help with this object. The photo is now in the archives of the Gereformeerde Zendingsbond (GZB) missionaries. It can be seen here: Ringel Goslinga (@ringelgoslinga), “Vlag van de Datu van Luwu (foto, eigen collectie),” Instagram photo, September 17, 2018, https://www.instagram.com/ p/Bn1HBILnpoL/?igshid=lpi95ob944z3. I am grateful to Ringel Goslinga for information regarding the photo.

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semangat) of the ancestors and thus helped protect the realm and bring prosperity. As such, they were the subject of sacred rituals and cared for by special caretakers known as the bissu (gender-transcendent priests).217 Flags or banners (baté) did not only serve to distinguish different groups in society but were also considered sacred and kept as regalia. Each had a name, and they were taken out at moments of danger (as during war), when they were smeared with the blood of sacrificial animals to invoke the spirits of the ancestors.218 Some of the Luwuq regalia were believed to have originated in heaven, including a flag named Suléngkaé (“The kitchen tripod”), which was lost in a fire at the palace in 1323/1905.219 In addition to the Suléngkaé, there were four other flags, including the Macangngé, which were described by Claas Spat in 1918: Een, genaamd De Gontjang-e draagt een afbeelding van een groote schaar. Deze vlag was vroeger de krijgsbanier; hij ging voorop, dadelijk gevolgd door de slaven, ata riolâng, den vijand tegemoet; achter deze werd een effen paarse vlag gedragen, Kamoemoe-e. Een derde, genaamd De Matjang-e, bleef achter ter bewaking van de Datoe; deze vlag draagt als teeken een tijgerfiguur. Eindelijk is er nog een oranje-zijden vlag met in het midden een wit veld, waarop enkele Arabische spreuken en teekens, die in het bijzonder tot scheepsvlag is bestemd; de Datoe voerde hem op zijn prauw.220 One, called the Gontjang-e, carries an image of a large pair of scissors. This flag used to be the banner of war; this flag was in front, immediately followed by the slaves, ata riolâng, heading toward the enemy; behind this a plain purple flag was carried, Kamoemoe-e. A third, named the Matjange, remained behind to guard the Datoe; this flag bears a tiger figure as 217 218

219

220

On the regalia of Luwuq, see Spat, “De rijkssieraden;” Shelly Errington, Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 121–129. On the baté, see Christian Pelras, “Textiles and Weaving of the South Sulawesi Muslim Peoples: A Preliminary Report,” in Weaving Patterns of Life: Indonesian Textile Symposium 1991, ed. Marie-Louise Nabholz-Kartaschoff, Ruth Barnes, and David J. Stuart-Fox (Basel: Museum of Ethnography, 1993), 397–418, here 402; Leonard Y. Andaya, “Nature of War and Peace Among the Bugis-Makassar People,” South East Asia Research 12, no. 1 (2004): 53–80, here 63–65; Elizabeth Morrell, Securing a Place: Small-scale Artisans in Modern Indonesia (Ithaca, New York: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 2005), 59– 60. Spat, “De rijkssieraden,” 70. A suléngka is a tripod-shaped kitchen utensil. There was also a tenth/sixteenth-century sacred flag from the neighboring kingdom of Gowa called Suléngkaya. Many thanks to Roger Tol for this information. Spat, “De rijkssieraden,” 71.

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a sign. Finally there is an orange-silk flag with a white field in the center, on which some Arabic phrases and signs [are written], which is, in particular, meant as a ship’s flag; the Datoe flew/carried this flag on his boat.221 The power of these flags derived from the images and texts that they display. The “large scissors” on the Goncingngé (“The scissors”; Malay: gunting) is Dhū lFiqār; on the flag its image is filled with Arabic texts consisting of the basmala (on the hilt), a blessing (ṣalawāt) upon the Prophet (on the crossguard) and the shahāda (on the blades).222 The militaristic nature of this sword is reflected in the role of the Goncingngé in leading troops into battle, with the flag called Kamummuqé (“The purple one”) following behind it. Here, the Lion of ʿAlī motif clearly had a more protective role, as attested by the position of the Macangngé flag in guarding the king.

8

Other Types

A final type of the Lion of ʿAlī calligram can be found in the glass-painting tradition of the Central Javanese city of Yogyakarta. Here, the calligram was known as Sima Ngali (“Tiger of ʿAlī”). A Javanese account, published by Jacoba Hooykaas-van Leeuwen Boomkamp in 1939, attributes the origins of this design to Fāṭima: Nabi Ali, schoonzoon van den profeet, was ernstig ziek. Dèwi Partimah (Fatima, een zeer geliefde figuur in de populaire overlevering) ging naar den medicijnmeester. Deze wilde echter de noodige medicijn slechts geven, op voorwaarde, dat Fatima zich aan hem gaf. Het gevolg van deze verbintenis was de geboorte van een tijger, Simå Ngali. Deze ging naar den profeet en vroeg hem een bewijs, dat hij inderdaad zijn kleinzoon was. De profeet beval hem daarop, een vat inkt te halen van het dak van een moskee. De tijger klom op het dak, kreeg de inkt over zijn

221 222

I am grateful to Jan van der Putten and Roger Tol for their help with this translation and for clarifying Spat’s text. This flag is also on display in the La Galigo Museum in Makassar (inventory number unknown). The shape of the sword—particularly its crossguard—is reminiscent of seals dating from 1188/1775 to 1237/1821 from the neighboring kingdom of Tanete; see Gallop and Porter, Lasting Impressions, 176–177; Gallop, Malay Seals, 594–596. Many thanks to Annabel Gallop for pointing out the resemblance.

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lichaam, maar hierop vormden zich tegelijkertijd op wonderbaarlijke wijze de letterteekens, waaruit zijn afkomst bleek.223 Nabi Ali, son-in-law of the prophet, was seriously ill. Dèwi Partimah (Fatima, a very beloved figure in popular tradition) went to the medicine man, but he wanted to give the necessary medicine only on the condition that Fatima gave herself to him. The result of this union was the birth of a tiger, Simå Ngali. He went to see the Prophet and asked him for proof that he was indeed his grandson. The Prophet then ordered him to fetch a barrel of ink from the roof of a mosque. The tiger climbed on the roof, [and] got the ink [all] over his body, but at the same time the letters indicating his origins appeared miraculously.224 In one variation of the graphical representation of this animal, it is depicted facing right.225 Its body is painted black, and it has large tufted ears, an open mouth with a protruding tongue, and large claws. Its form thus resembles Javanese shadow puppets of tigers. There is a saddle on its back, while its tail grips a lance. In another version of the calligram, the animal faces left and has a bird perched upon its tail, holding a lance (with a flower garland) in its beak.226 In both cases the body of the tiger and its saddle are covered with Arabic calligraphy in gold. The texts, however, are obscure and have yet to be identified.

9

Conclusion

This chapter has delved, for the first time, into the characteristics of Lion of ʿAlī calligrams in Southeast Asia, and investigated how they fit into the wider tradition of such representations in the Islamicate world. It has also highlighted the importance of calligrams in the study of the occult sciences. As potent and popular talismans designed to harness the combined powers of the written word 223 224 225 226

Jacoba H. Hooykaas-van Leeuwen Boomkamp, “Volksoverlevering in beeld,” Djåwå 19 (1939): 54–68, here 63–64. I am grateful to Jan van der Putten for his help with this translation. Hooykaas-van Leeuwen Boomkamp, “Volksoverlevering in beeld,” 63–64, fig. 39; Samuel, “A la recherche des ateliers perdus,” 149–150, 167, fig. 10. Jérôme Samuel, “Die Hinterglaskunst in Java (Indonesien) im 20. Jahrhundert: Ursprünge, Entwicklung, Hauptthemen,” paper presented at 8. Tagung zur Hinterglasskunst, Schloßmuseum Murnau, 2013, 10.

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and the image, they provide a rich resource for our understanding of the roles played by texts, images, and belief systems in the practice of magic in Muslim societies, as well as how these elements interrelated to one another. The calligrams also demonstrate the importance of Southeast Asia for research into Islamicate societies and help to expand the discourse on art and the occult sciences beyond the traditional limits of the central Islamic lands. The region was strongly integrated with the rest of the Islamicate world, yet understanding the use of these designs helps to elucidate not only how motifs traveled but also why certain designs and texts were considered particularly important in certain societies. The identification of the feline with local traditions surrounding the tiger, the reverence and respect accorded ʿAlī, and the belief in the magical power of texts and images all played key roles in the reception of the Lion of ʿAlī calligram in Southeast Asia. All of these factors show how an understanding of regional variations can provide a more nuanced and comparative view of the occult sciences practiced in Islamicate societies. The Muslim community is not monolithic, and even within Southeast Asia there were varying attitudes across geography and time and even between neighboring cities regarding figural representation and esoteric practices. For instance, the people of Cirebon have proudly embraced the figure of the Macan Ali as an emblem of their city. In contrast, the Malaysian state of Kedah in 1996 issued as fatwa forbidding the use of Qurʾanic verses to form figural images, although this ruling was not gazetted.227 In 2008, however, another Malaysian state, Johor, issued a similar fatwa that was gazetted, making the production of figural calligrams an enforceable offense: 1.

2.

227 228

Khat yang berkaitan dengan dua kalimah syahadah, ayat Al-Quran, Al-Hadis, kalimah zikir dan sebagainya, dengan membentuk hurufhuruf dan tulisan tersebut menjadi seperti bentuk manusia dan haiwan adalah dilarang. Penulisan ayat Al-Quran dan Hadis dalam bentuk khat yang sukar untuk dibaca dan boleh berlaku kesalahan dalam pembacaan adalah dilarang, kecuali dijelaskan dibawahnya dengan tulisan yang terang lagi boleh dibaca.228

“Khat berbentuk lukisan manusia/haiwan,” JAKIM, e-SMAF: e-Sumber Maklumat Fatwa, http://e‑smaf.islam.gov.my/e‑smaf/fatwa/fatwa/find/pr/10677. “Tulisan khat berbentuk manusia,” JAKIM, e-SMAF: e-Sumber Maklumat Fatwa, http://e ‑smaf.islam.gov.my/e‑smaf/fatwa/fatwa/find/pr/12430.

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1.

2.

Calligraphy relating to the shahāda, Qurʾanic verses, hadith, dhikr etc., forming the letters and texts into human and animal forms are prohibited. Writing Qurʾanic verses and hadith in calligraphic forms that are difficult to read and can cause serious errors in their reading is prohibited, unless clarified underneath with clear, readable text.

How far these directives were adhered to in popular practice is unclear, but such views attest to the complex debates raised by calligrams and how closely they are linked to not only art and the written word but also to belief systems and even notions of identity, both pre-Islamic and Islamic, pre-modern and modern. The discovery of further examples of the Lion of ʿAlī from the region, as well as studies of other types of calligrams, would contribute to a greater understanding of how they were produced, viewed, and used for metaphysical and spiritual purposes, and of the role played by texts and images in Southeast Asian religious and occult sciences.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to the owners and staff of the various collections for their assistance in my research on their objects and images, and to Professor Anna Contadini, Dr. Francesca Leoni, Dr. Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Dr. Liana Saif for their insightful comments on numerous aspects of this article. Thanks are due also to the organizers and attendees of the events at which I have presented earlier versions of this paper for their kind invitation and constructive feedback: in addition to the Ashmolean conference, this paper was presented at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi (2017), and the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore (2017). Any mistakes are my own. I am very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for supporting my role in the two-year research project titled “Divination and Art in the Medieval and Early Modern Islamic World” at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, which made my research possible. Finally, warm thanks to Shajaratuddur Mohd. Ibrahim, Laila Razlan, and Ricky Valentino for their kind help in my travels.

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chapter 12

A Stamped Talisman Francesca Leoni

Il est curieux de voir tout le mal que prennent les auteurs des livres de magie pour augmenter, au rebours des écrivains strictement religieux, la confusion entre le saint et le sorcier; qu’on lise le chapitre de la Terbia, c’est-à-dire l’éducation (magique) dans un de ces livres, on n’ y trouvera que des conseils de morale, d’ascétisme, absolument comme s’ il s’ agissait d’un mourid ou aspirant dans une confrérie religieuse …. Edmond Doutté1

∵ Edmond Doutté’s dated remark about the confusion between saint and magician observed in Islamic magical texts reflects a long-standing conviction that the two operate in entirely separate spheres. Accordingly, while saints or “friends of God” (Arabic, awliyāʾ, sg. walī) are holy individuals venerated for their spiritual virtues and miracles (Arabic, karāmāt) and are called upon for salvific interventions, magicians (Arabic, suḥḥār, sg. sāḥir) are generally mobilized to alter the course of events for allegedly corrupt aims, thereby posing a more overt threat to divine authority and order.2 Until recently, the material forms taken by their activities were also considered on the basis of the same binary, with devotional objects (e.g., blessed images and prayers) linked to the domain of popular piety on the one hand, and amuletic gadgets (e.g., charms and curative stones) associated with the world of “superstition” on the

1 “It is surprising to see how far the authors of magic texts will go to increase the confusion between saint and sorcerer, counter to strictly religious authors. If we were to read a chapter of the Terbia, that is, (magical) training in one such book, we would find only moral suggestions or asceticism, just as if it was about a murid or aspiring member of a religious confraternity ….” (my translation); Edmond Doutté, Magie et Religion dans l’Afrique du Nord (Algiers: Adolphe Jourdan, 1908), 55. 2 Richard J. McGregor, “Friend of God,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed.; Toufiq Fahd, “Siḥr,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.

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other hand.3 Objects in which the seemingly irreconcilable resources of the two spheres are instead combined produced unease or remained overlooked.4 This article reconsiders this stark division and reflects more broadly on the fact that, in some instances, the “devotional” and “magical” spheres could merge in relation to specific objectives. The large talisman that is the main subject of this essay provides the basis for this argument (Figure 12.1).5 By combining pious texts and magical formulas for the same protective aim, this object not only defies categorizations and assumptions, but pushes us to reconsider accepted notions (and associated limits) of everyday devotion and, ultimately, to question established and dominant views of what constitutes belief. The article begins with a detailed analysis of the talisman’s content and layout, with special attention to the textual and iconographic formulas used in it, both in their own right and with respect to their positions and functions. I then move on to the object’s context in order to address issues of produc3 For the first category, see, for instance, Alexander Fodor, “Types of Shīʿite Amulets,” in Shīʿa Islam, Sects and Sufism: Historical Dimensions, Religious Practice and Methodological Considerations, ed. Frederick de Jong (Utrecht: M.Th. Houtsma Stichting, 1992), 118–134; David J. Roxburgh, “Visualising the Sites and Monuments of Islamic Pilgrimage,” in Architecture in Islamic Arts: Treasures of the Aga Khan Museum, ed. Margaret Graves (Geneva: Aga Khan Trust for Culture, 2011), 33–41; Christiane Gruber, “Prophetic Products: Muhammad in Contemporary Iranian Visual Culture,” Material Religion 12, no. 3 (2016): 259–293. For the second category—in addition to early works such as Edward W. Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians (London: J. Murray, 1860), esp. chaps. 10–12; Ernest A.W. Budge, Amulets and Superstitions (London: Oxford University Press, H. Milford, 1930), 33–81; and Bess A. Donaldson, The Wild Rue: A Study of Muhammadan Magic and Folklore (London: Luzac, 1938), esp. chaps. 1, 18 and 16—see Christopher Gandy, “Inscribed Silver Amulet Boxes,” in Islamic Art in the Ashmolean Museum, Part I, ed. James Allan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 155–166; Jürgen W. Frembgen, “The Scorpion in Muslim Folklore,” Asian Folkore Studies 63, no. 1 (2004): 95–123; and Živa Vesel, “Talismans from the Iranian World: A Millenary Tradition,” in Art and Material Culture of Iranian Shiism, ed. Pedram Khosronejad (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 254–275. 4 The dichotomy persists even in works that have transformed the way in which this type of material evidence is approached. In her influential introduction to the two-volume catalog on scientific and talismanic objects in the Khalili Collection, for instance, Emilie Savage-Smith underscores the protective and God-bound nature of the Islamic magical tradition but links invocations addressed directly to jinns and demons with illicit magic and its practitioners, “conjurors and sorcerers,” considering them rarer. Emilie Savage-Smith, “Magic and Islam,” in Science, Tools and Magic, ed. Francis Maddison and Emilie Savage-Smith, 2 vols. (London: Nour Foundation, in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1997), 1:59–60. 5 About the word “talisman” and associated terminology, see Emilie Savage-Smith, “Introduction,” in Emilie Savage-Smith, Magic and Divination, xxii–xxiii, and, more recently, Christiane Gruber, “From Prayer to Protection: Amulets and Talismans in the Islamic World,” in Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural, ed. Francesca Leoni (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2016), 33.

a stamped talisman

figure 12.1

Talisman, probably Turkey, late thirteenth/nineteenth or early twentieth century. Colored inks on paper. 86.6 × 60.9cm. Nasser D. Khalili Collection, London, MS 1179. © Nour Foundation, Courtesy of the Khalili Family Trust

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530

leoni

tion and authority and understand how this and cognate examples operated and conveyed meaning.6 The talisman, although unusual, is not unique. It belongs to a group of documents attested in the late Ottoman world that share several features (Figures 12.2–3).7 First, they are all on the same medium (paper) available in various formats and all probably produced during the thirteenth/nineteenth century.8 Second, they all show signs of wear and tear, which are not simply a mark of their age or their support’s fragility but also reflect various forms of physical interaction—from touching, rubbing and, possibly, kissing to folding and rolling for storage and easy carrying. This, in turn, indicates degrees of mobility and various contexts for their final use that complicate the objects’ nature and function. Third, they all exhibit an impressive variety of imprinted motifs 6 In doing so, this article joins recent studies aiming to reconstruct the vocabulary and logic structuring amuletic and talismanic material. See, in particular, Massumeh Farhad, with Serpil Bağcı, Falnama: Book of Omens (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009); Heather Coffey, “Between Amulet and Devotion: Islamic Miniature Books in the Lilly Library,” in The Islamic Manuscript Tradition: Ten Centuries of Book Arts in Indiana University Collections, ed. Christiane Gruber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 79–115; Venetia Porter, with Robert Hoyland and Alexander Morton, Arabic and Persian Seals and Amulets in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 2011); Özgen Felek, “Fears, Hopes, and Dreams: The Talismanic Shirts of Murad III,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Matthew MelvinKoushki and Noah Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 647–672; Rose Muravchick, “Objectifying the Occult: Studying a Talismanic Shirt as an Embodied Object,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 673–693; Venetia Porter, Liana Saif, and Emilie Savage-Smith, “Amulets, Magic, and Talismans,” in A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, ed. Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2017), 1:521– 556; and Christiane Gruber, “ ‘Go Wherever You Wish, for Verily You Are Well-Protected’: Seal Designs in Late Ottoman Amulet Scrolls and Prayer Books,” in Visions of Enchantment: Occultism, Spirituality, and Visual Culture (London: Fulgur, 2019), 22–35. Also, Rose Muravchick, “God is the Best Guardian: Islamic Talismanic Shirts from the Gunpowder Empires” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2014), and Yasmine al-Saleh “The Touch and Sight of Islamic Talismanic Scrolls” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2015). 7 Halûk Perk, Osmanlı Tılsım Mühürleri (Istanbul: Halûk Perk Müzesi Yayınları, 2010), 111–126. A further large-scale version, with dimensions similar to the one considered in this study, is in the Ankara Ethnographic Museum (inv. no. 16340); see Sabiha Göloğlu, “Depicting the Holy: Representations of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem in the Late Ottoman Empire” (PhD diss., Koç University, 2018), 273–274, fig. 177; and Sabiha Göloğlu, “Linking, Printing, and Painting Sanctity and Protection: Representations of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem in Late Ottoman Illustrated Prayer Books,” in The Miraj of the Prophet and Stations of His Journey, ed. Ayşe Taşkent and Nicole Kançal-Ferrari (Ankara: Republic of Turkey Ministry of Culture and Tourism; Independent Art Foundation, forthcoming). I thank Dr Göloğlu for sharing images of this and other talismans and for liaising with the Perk collection for the purpose. 8 The dating suggested here is based on some of the pictorial elements appearing on this and comparable talismans, as their analysis below will demonstrate.

a stamped talisman

figures 12.2–3

Talismanic scrolls, probably Turkey, late thirteenth/ nineteenth or early fourteenth/twentieth century. Colored inks on paper. c. 25 × 8 cm and 30 × 7 cm. Halûk Perk Müzesi, Istanbul © Akadur Tölegen

531

532

figure 12.4

leoni

Hand-shaped stamp with Qurʾanic excerpts and invocations, Ottoman Empire, 1154/1741. Copper alloy, engraved. 6.6 × 9.3 cm. Nasser D. Khalili Collection, London, tls2707 © Nour Foundation, Courtesy of the Khalili Family Trust

featuring texts, images, and diagrams whose content ranges from the pious to the occult. These impressions have all been applied by means of seals, which are generally made of a durable material, mostly copper alloys, and are inscribed with phrases and motifs in the negative (Figures 12.4–5).9 A handle on their back enabled the easy transfer and repetition of their formulas. Yet the fact that the prop could occasionally be removed indicates that these matrices 9 Various examples are illustrated in Perk, Osmanlı Tılsım, 35–110, and Porter et al., Arabic and Persian Seals, 169–172.

a stamped talisman

figure 12.5

533

Amulet/seal, possibly Turkey, thirteenth/nineteenth century. Brass, engraved. Diam. 7 cm. British Museum, London, 1893,0215.1 © Trustees of the British Museum

could also function as amulets in their own right, dispensing the benefits that they were seemingly designed to transfer.10 Elaborately laid out yet accessible, these printed talismans provide quick, attractive, and more affordable alternatives for personalized handwritten and painted versions documented in both scroll and codex form over the centuries, across various Islamic societies.11 As such, they open a window on additional makers and consumers of talismanic arts, revealing the preoccupations and needs that prompted people to commission and accumulate them in the first place.

1

The Talisman’s Contents

Bearing the shelf number Mss 1179 in the Nasser D. Khalili Collection, our talisman is an impressive 86.6×60.9cm brown sheet of paper entirely covered by

10

11

For a discussion of the practical versus apotropaic functions of amulets, see Venetia Porter, “Islamic Seals: Magical or Practical?” University Lectures in Islamic Studies 2, ed. Alan Jones (London: Altajir World of Islam Trust, 1998), 135–149 (reprinted in Savage-Smith, Magic and Divination in Early Islam, 179–200). For an overview and examples, see Leoni, Power and Protection, esp. cat. nos. 62–63, 88–90, 95, 105–106. For earlier examples, see al-Saleh, “ ‘Licit Magic,’” esp. 79–178.

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seal impressions in black and red inks (Figure 12.1).12 Its surface bears traces of burnishing, as well as the residues of an oily patina, probably the result of a spill.13 In addition to the areas of wear where it was folded, small losses of paper at top and bottom and on the right-hand side indicate that the sheet was possibly only a couple of centimeters longer and wider. Yet, as the distribution of the seal impressions indicates, what survives is not part of a larger object. This fact is confirmed by the other talismans in the group, all of which were originally executed on paper surfaces that probably match their current dimensions, save for the detectable areas of wear (Figures 12.2 and 12.3). The presence of a mostly unmarked perimetral band, as opposed to the contiguous, and often overlapping, distribution of the seal marks, further corroborates this point and sheds some light on how the talisman was produced. The larger and most visually compelling impressions appear to have been laid out first in key areas of the surface and in a somewhat symmetrical fashion, with the smaller stamps used as fillers on the sides and in the interstices to maximize the space and the device’s effectiveness (Figure 12.6).14 Even though the level of discoloration, the different shades of ink, and the ways in which the seal marks overlay one another might suggest that they were applied over an extended period of time, and, possibly, at multiple venues, their humble and disposable nature makes it more likely that they were imprinted in one session, by individuals possessing both the tools and the knowledge to realize protective devices addressing a range of needs.15 Unfortunately, their some12

13

14

15

I thank Nahla Nassar of the Khalili Collection for bringing this object to my attention while I was working on the exhibition Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural held at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford from 20 October 2016 to 15 January 2017. The Khalili Collection recently acquired another example of this kind, accompanied by the pouch in which it was rolled and stored (Mss 0793). Bands of this varnish-like substance, marked by an orange tinge and running horizontally across the entire surface, are visible about ⅓ and ⅔ down the length of the object. I thank Alexandra Greathead, head of paper conservation at the Ashmolean Museum, for pointing this out to me, following an examination of the object in 2016. A comparable logic can be observed on the scroll versions (Figures 12.2–12.3), where the short and oblong nature of the support has inspired an equally ordered and visually balanced application of the various impressions. Halûk Perk, who has amassed an extensive collection of engraved seals and stamped talismans over the last three decades, indicated that he often found talismans folded inside manuals on talismanic arts. Further, as he acquired seals in batches rather than as individual items, he believes that they were owned in such large quantities by their users, who would then select from them based on the specific needs of the client. Personal communication with the author, January 17, 2018. I want to thank Mr. Perk for granting access to his collection while I was doing research in Istanbul and for kindly providing the highresolution images for the items included in this article. Thanks also due to Christiane Gruber for introducing me to the collection.

a stamped talisman

figure 12.6

535

The five categories of impressions appearing on the talisman and their distribution

536

leoni

what orderly but not progressive or sequential placement on the surface of our object reveals little about the way in which the composition was viewed and used by its intended users. We may thus only speculate as to whether individual images or formulas prompted close engagement (as discussed below), or whether the cumulative and combined effect of the impressions dominated the ways in which people interacted with the device. The seal marks can be regrouped in several categories, which will be analyzed below: a) impressions consisting exclusively of text (Figures 12.7a–7b A–M) b) impressions combining letters and numbers (Figures 12.8 N–P) c) impressions combining text and images (Figures 12.9a–9b Q–X)16 d) calligrams (Figure 12.10 Y) e) diagrammatic images of sanctuaries and shrines (Figures 12.11 Z–AA). 1.1 Impressions with Text The textual stamps draw on both familiar and less familiar sources. To the former group belong Qurʾanic excerpts, hadith, and invocations featuring some of the so-called “beautiful Names of God” (al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā). Taken from Sūrat al-Qalam, the verse “And the Unbelievers would almost trip thee up with their eyes when they hear the Message, and they say: Surely, he is possessed!” is reproduced twice on the upper-right corner of the sheet (Figure 12.7a A).17 This passage is considered among the most effective verses against the evil eye, a phenomenon mentioned in the Qurʾan, recognized in Islam, and a key preoccupation, as the occurrence of other texts and apotropaic symbols on this talisman suggest.18 Also inscribed in a roundel and reproduced frequently across our page, is the divine saying (ḥadīth qudsī) “Were it not for you (O Muḥammad), I would not have created the universe” (lawlāka la-mā khalaqtu al-aflāk) (Figures 12.7a–7b B).19 Attributed to God himself, the phrase was popular in Sufi circles, where it was considered a divinely inspired “ecstatic utterance” that might be witnessed during a mystical experience.20 Yet the expression also 16 17 18 19 20

This includes those featuring well known apotropaic symbols such as the khamsa or the cypress, which will thus be addressed as part of this group. Q 68:51. All Qurʾan translations are from Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Holy Qurʾan (London: Wordsworth, 2000). Philippe Marçais, “ʿAyn,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. The expression refers to sayings of the prophet Muḥammad whose transmission goes back to God. William A. Graham, Divine Word and Prophetic Word: A Reconsideration of the Sources, with Special Reference to the Divine Saying or Ḥadîth al-Qudsî (The Hague: Mouton, 1977), esp. 53–54 and 69–71.

a stamped talisman

figure 12.7a Detail of the top half of the talisman with textual impressions

figure 12.7b Detail of the bottom half of the talisman with textual impressions

537

538

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captures the intensity of God’s love for the Prophet and what inspired his veneration. This aspect is intrinsically connected to stamped talismans such as the one considered in this article and whose efficacy relied heavily on devotions to venerable individuals, as we will see below.21 In a single rectangular panel, we find some of the divine attributes of God, another source of relief whose magical uses were theorized in works attributed to one of the key medieval contributors to occult sciences, Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad al-Būnī (d. 622/1225; Figure 12.7b C).22 “The most beautiful names belong to God; so call on Him by them” says an often quoted verse of the Qurʾan,23 reinforcing the belief that He is bound to respond to any appeal that makes use of them.24 In her study of the seals in the British Museum collections, Venetia Porter noted that, when used on amulets, God’s names do not follow a standard order25 but are paired on the basis of assonance and correlation or conform to specific verbal forms.26 This rule appears to be followed also in our case; the panel opens with yā raḥman (“O Merciful”), yā raḥīm (“O Compassionate”), each repeated twice, followed by others epithets, including yā dayyān (“O Redeemer”) and yā mannān (“O Bountiful”), which do not appear in conventional lists of the divine attributes but are recorded in some hadith collections and dhikr practices.27 The asmāʾ al-ḥusnā are not the only names called upon in the talisman. In addition to those of Abrahamic prophets, to be addressed below, two groups of seals invoke other interlocutors. The first, confined to the top left-hand corner of the sheet and having a four-leaved shape, records the names of the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs, in addition to Muḥammad and Allāh (Figure 12.7a D). Unusually however, ʿAlī’s name is not along the circumference, like those of the other three caliphs, but appears in the center of the seal, along with that of Muḥammad, as part of the invocation yā ʿAlī meded, “O ʿAli help us.” ʿAlī is

21 22

23 24 25 26 27

Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 215. Porter et al., “Medieval Islamic Amulets,” 1:531, 536. For a discussion of al-Būnī’s works, see Noah Gardiner, “Forbidden Knowledge? Notes on the Production, Transmission and Reception of the Major Works of Aḥmad al-Būnī,” Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 12 (2012): 81–143. Q 7:180. Tewfik Canaan, “The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans,” Berythus 4 (1937): 69–110, here 80. See also L. Gardet, “al-Asmāʾ al-Ḥusnā,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. They are listed in Q 59:22–24. Porter et al., Arabic and Persian Seals, 132. Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, The Naqshbandi Sufi Tradition: Guidebook of Daily Practices and Devotions (Fenton, MI: Islamic Supreme Council of America, 2004).

a stamped talisman

539

therefore singled out in this instance for both his political and his spiritual leadership, the latter emphasized by the direct appeal. The second seal mark, reproduced in the central area of the talisman, consolidates the link with Sufism noted earlier, by evoking Qandīl Nūranī Sayyid Muḥyī al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlanī (d. 561/1166), and Sayyid Aḥmad Rifāʿī (d. 577/1181), followed by the eulogy qaddasa [Allāh] sirrahu, “may he [God] glorify his secret” (Figure 12.7a E).28 Popular devotion to ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlanī, known as “the sultan of the walīs,” was extensive in the regions dominated by the Qādiriyya order, from Anatolia to the Indian subcontinent, well into modern times.29 A provider of assistance and a saint appealed to for protection from adversities and sickness, al-Jīlanī was also viewed as a master of evil spirits, as reflected in the many caves and deserted spots associated with his charisma and veneration cult across North Africa and the Near East.30 Similarly, his cousin Aḥmad Rifāʿī, also the founder of the popular Rifāʿiyya order, came to be venerated for his miraculous powers and celebrated during dedicated festivals and other popular annual celebrations from the Balkans through the Maghrib.31 Their presence on this sheet, therefore, represents a call for their intervention in worldly affairs, as well as a pointer to the context in which this and comparable talismans were produced and consumed, a subject to which I shall return in the second part of this article. The plea for supernatural intercession against life tribulations continues in two large impressions located prominently at the top of the talisman (Figure 12.7a F). Consisting of four concentric bands arranged around verse 20 from Sūrat al-Baqara (“God hath power over all things”), they contain shorter and longer supplications interspersed with names. Beginning with the innermost circle: ‫لا اله إلّا الله سعد بن )ابي( وقاص محمد رسول الله عبيدة الله بن الجراح محتج لمحمد سعيد‬ ‫بن يز يد انت منصور عبد الرحمن بن عوف توجه حيث شئت طلحة بن عبيد الله فإنك منصور‬ ‫ز بير بن عوام‬

28

29 30 31

Qandīl Nūrānī was another of al-Jīlanī’s names. K.H. Muḥammad Sholikhin, 17 jalan menggapai mahkota Sufi Syaikh ʿAbdul Qadir al-Jailani (Yogyakarta: Mutiara Media, 2009), 7. Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 247–248. Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 247–248; Tewfik Canaan, Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine (London: Luzac, 1927), 19–20, 246, 274–275. C.E. Bosworth, “Rifāʿiyya,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.

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There is no God but God, Saʿd b. [abī] Waqqāṣ, Muḥammad is the Messenger of God, ʿUbayd Allāh b. al-Jarrāḥ, You are the Affirmer of Muḥammad, Saʿīd b. Yazīd, You are Victorious, ʿAbd al-Raḥman b. ʿAwf, You lead in any direction you wish, Talḥa b. ʿUbaydallāh, You are Triumphant, Zubayr b. al-ʿAwām. The six names mentioned in this frieze are from among the ten al-mubashsharūn bi al-janna, the Companions of the Prophet to whom Heaven was promised during their lifetime. Their names are also found in circular arrangements on textiles associated with the Kaʿba.32 The placement of this seal mark on either side of a stamp representing Mecca’s Masjid al-Ḥarām may thus not be fortuitous and was possibly designed to invoke their blessings in ways comparable to the furnishings prepared for the ḥarāmayn. The intermediate circle reads: ‫اللهم صل على سيدنا محمد وآدم ونوح وإبراهيم وموسى وما بينهم النبيين صلاة الله على الغير‬ ‫اللهم صل على سيدنا محمد اللهم صل على سيدنا محمد النبي الامي وآله وصحبه اجمعين‬ O God, pray upon our master Muḥammad, and Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and all prophets among them, God’s prayer upon [all] others / O God, pray upon our master Muḥammad / O God, pray upon our master Muḥammad, the illiterate Prophet, his Family and all his Companions. Finally, in the outermost band, we find the following duʿāʾ, a variant of a protective prayer attested across the Arab world as ṣalāt tunjīnā:33

32

33

Venetia Porter, “The Mahmal Revisited,” in The Hajj: Collected Essays, ed. Venetia Porter and Liana Saif (London: The British Museum, 2013), 195–205. I thank Liana Saif for bringing this to my attention and for many clarifications and additional readings of several inscriptions on this talisman. Another version reads: ‫اللهم صل على سيدنا محمد صلاة تنجينه بها من جميع الوال والآفات وتقضي لنا‬

‫بها جميع الحاجات وتطهرنا بها من جميع السيئات وترفعنا بها عندك على درجات وتبلغنا بها اقصى الغايات‬ ‫“( من جميع الخـيرات في الحواة و بعد الممات وعلى آله وصحبه وسلم تسليما كثيرا‬O God, pray upon our master Muḥammad a prayer by which he will be saved from all woes and afflictions, by which You will fulfill all our needs, by which we will be cleansed of all our faults, that will raise us in Your presence to higher degrees, and that makes us achieve the ultimate goals in [the attainment] of all that is good in life and after death. [Prayers] be upon his family and his companions, may He grant safety and peace”). Hüseyin Hilmi Işık, Seʿâdeti ebediyye: Endless Bliss, fasc. 1 (Istanbul: Hakîkat Ki̇tabevi̇, 1993), 96; Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, Salawat of Tremendous Blessings (Islamic Supreme Council of America, 2012).

a stamped talisman

541

‫اللهم صل على سيدنا محمد في الارواح وصل وسلم على )؟( في الاجساد سبحان الله و بحمده‬ ‫سبحان الله العظيم و)؟(لا حول ولا قوة إلّا بالله العظيم )؟( تنجينا بها من جميع الوال و الآفات‬ ‫و تقضي لنا بها جميع الحاجات و تطهرنا بها من جميع السيئات وترفعنا بها اقصى الغايات من‬ ‫جميع الخـيرات في الحيواة و بعد الممات‬ O God pray upon our master Muḥammad in the souls, pray and grant peace … in the bodies / May God be exalted with praise / May God the Mighty be exalted … / There is no might or power except in God the Mighty … / May You save us by it from all woes and afflictions and fulfill with it all our needs / May You purify us with it from all our sins and elevate us to the ultimate goals in [the attainment] of all good in life and after death.34 The most significant aspect of this formula is the invocation of Muḥammad’s beneficial intercession by pleading with God to honor and bless him. It is perhaps no coincidence that the associated seal mark bears some resemblance to a version of Muḥammad’s ḥilya, the verbal portrait of his physical and moral qualities.35 Calligraphed ḥilyas were first developed by the Ottoman calligrapher Hafez Osman (d. 1109/1698) and were considered acts of sincere devotion by those who made them,36 as well as vehicles for the provision of the blessings associated with Muḥammad’s physical traces and remains.37 “It is as though he who sees my ḥilya has seen me in person,” recites a hadith attributed to ʿĀʾisha, which hints at how the Prophet’s presence and his beneficial

34

35

36 37

The intermediate band also uses the above-mentioned formula allāhumma ṣalli ʿalā sayyidinā Muḥammad, repeated several times, and including the names of other Abrahamic prophets. See, for instance, the version with a similar clover-shaped arrangement of the letter ‫ع‬ signed by İbrahim Edhem b. Ahmed Rifet and illustrated in Nabil E. Safwat, The Art of the Pen: Calligraphy of the 14th to 20th Centuries (London: Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1996), cat. no. 37. Muhammad Zakariyya, “The Hilye of the Prophet Muḥammad,” Seasons (Autumn-Winter 2003–2004): 13–22. References to the use, collection, and distribution of some of Muḥammad’s bodily remains—such as nail parings, hair, saliva, and sweat—occur in hadith literature and historical sources. See Brannon Wheeler, “Collecting the Dead Body of the Prophet Muḥammad: Hair, Nails, Sweat and Spit,” in The Image of the Prophet Between Ideal and Ideology: A Scholarly Investigation, ed. Christiane Gruber and Avinoam Shalem (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 45–61.

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influence could be obtained also through scripted means.38 In addition to being hung in private and public spaces, excerpts from ḥilyas were popular on portable amulets and talismans, extending the referent’s influence to the personal sphere and the everyday existence of individuals.39 Supererogatory prayers and supplications invoking divine protection from evil are the bridge to the second, more challenging, category of texts on this talisman. Still classified as duʿāʾ (“supplication”) by their headings, two of these texts address not saints but demons. The first one, stamped twice on the top half of the talisman, opens with a cartouche with the heading “prayer of Umm Ṣubyān”40 (Figure 12.7a G) and begins with a series of names, possibly referring to demons,41 followed by the three divine epithets “the Pre-Existent” (alqadīm), “the Eternal” (al-azalī), “the Everlasting” (al-abadī). Umm Ṣubyān, literally “mother of the children” or child-witch,42 is a female demon traditionally held responsible for diseases in children, as well as for problems of fertility and miscarriage in women.43 Her figure is often linked to Solomon, who is said to have obtained a protective remedy from her known as the “seven covenants of Solomon.”44 38 39 40 41

42

43 44

Annemarie Schimmel, And Muḥammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 36. See, for instance, Porter et al., Arabic and Persian Seals, cat. no. A100 and Safwat, The Art of the Pen, cat. no. 24. This is followed by the word būdir, whose meaning is unclear. Drawing on several sources, Tewfik Canaan reported variant names for demons such as Umm Ṣubyān, generally ending in -hūsh, -hīsh, -hāsh, -tāsh, -tūsh. Quoting Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī, he also lists names such as Qartūsh, of which the opening words of the above supplication seem to be a further variation; Canaan, “The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans,” 86. Alexander Fodor, “Types of Shīʿite Amulets from Iraq,” in Shīʿa Islam, Sects and Sufism: Historical Dimensions, Religious Practice and Methodological Considerations, ed. Frederick de Jong (Utrecht: M.Th. Houtsma Stichting, 1992), 118–134, Anne Regourd, “Représentations d’ Umm Sibyān dans les contes yéménites: de la dévoreuse d’enfant à la djinniyya possédant les humains,” in Femmes médiatrices et ambivalentes: Mythes et imaginaires, ed. Anna Caiozzo and Nathalie Ernoult (Paris: Armand Colin, 2012), 63–72. References to Umm Ṣubyān also appear in earlier literature, including Hans A. Winkler, Salomo und die Karīna: eine orientalische Legende von der Bezwingung einer Kindbettdämonin durch einen heiligen Helden (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1931) and Samuel M. Zwemer, Studies in Popular Islam: A Collection of Papers Dealing with the Superstitions and Beliefs of the Common People (London: Sheldon, 1939), esp. chap. 5. On her connection with Qarīna, another popular she-demon, see Canaan, “The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans,” 85. Samuel M. Zwemer, The Influence of Animism on Islam (London: Central Board of Missions and Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1920), 192–196. This elaborate formula— consisting of invocations to God, the four archangels, and the prophet Muḥammad, as

543

a stamped talisman

On this talisman, the duʿāʾ of Umm Ṣubyān is connected to a second stamp in a reddish hue featuring a verse from Sūrat al-Burūj, which declares “Those who persecute the Believers, men and women, and do not turn in repentance, will have the Penalty of Hell, they will have the Penalty of the Burning Fire,” a warning whose proximity to the main invocation seems to suggest that these would be the consequences experienced by those persisting with their wrongdoing.45 Hence, this verse lends the protection and efficacy of the Holy Scripture to the appeal, legitimizing an invocatory practice that, in the eyes of at least some thirteenth/nineteenth-century observers, could prove problematic.46 A similar combination of profane subject and pious supplication also characterizes the second entity addressed by the talisman, Ūghrī ʿAbbās.47 The plea reads as follows (Figure 12.7b H): ‫بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم اللهم إني إستغفرك من كل ما تبت عنه إليك ثم عدت فيه اللهم إن ّي‬ ‫إستغفرك من كل ما وردت به وجهك فخالطني ما ليس فيه رضاؤك‬ In the name of God, the Merciful and Most Compassionate. O God I ask for Your forgiveness for everything I had repented then returned to / O God I ask for Your forgiveness for everything with which I sought Your face but was mixed up with what does not contain Your favor. The list of requests continues immediately below (Figure 12.7b I):

45 46

47

well as recording the story of Solomon’s first encounter with the demon—specifies other areas exposed to her negative influence, which encompass trade and personal property. It also stresses the necessity for people to carry the prayer with them to ensure protection, which explains its appearance also on lithographed scrolls still available for sale in Egypt in the early twentieth century. Q 85:10. The same sequence of text blocks occurs on other talismans of the same type, which confirms their semantic link; see Perk, Osmanlı Tılsım, 114. This is especially true in view of the open condemnation of all forms of divination and magic articulated by thirteenth/nineteenth-century revivalist thinkers. For an overview, see Natana J. Delong-Bas, Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. chaps. 1 and 2. For the various forms of Islam in the late Ottoman period, see also Hasan Kayalı and A. Kevin Reinhart, “Studies in Late Ottoman Islam,” Archivum Ottomanicum 19 (2001): 193–303. Although numerous versions of the duʿāʾ of Ūghrī ʿAbbās exist in the popular domain, this figure remains elusive, appearing mainly in popular folklore. Old women in Istanbul used to keep the prayer close to their chest for protection against his negative influence.

544

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‫اللهم إني إستغفرك من كل ما وعدتك من نفس ثم ّ لم اؤف اللهم إني إستغفرك من كل نعمت‬ ‫انعمتها على فوقها على ما )؟( اللهم إني إستغفرك من الذنوب التي لا يعلمها غيرك ولم يطلع عليها‬ ‫سواك و لا يسعها إلّا رحمتك ولا ينجي منها إلّا مغفرتك و )؟( لا إله إلّا انت سبحانك إن كنت‬ (‫من الظالمين اللهم إني إستغفرك من كل )الذنوب‬ O God, I ask for Your forgiveness for every breath I promised You but didn’t fulfill / O God, I ask for Your forgiveness for every blessing that You bestowed on me and above and … / O God, I ask for Your forgiveness for all the sins that no one knows about but You and no one is privy to except You and that can only be contained by Your mercy, and from which one cannot be saved except by Your forgiveness and … / And there is no God but You, Exalted You are, I was among the unjust / O God I ask for Your forgiveness for all [wrongdoing].48 Completing the sequence is a paragraph that is visually separate from the previous ones, despite representing their continuation (Figure 12.7b J):49 ‫كثيرة وعندني )؟( عبادك فاني عبد من عبادك او امت من اماتك ظلت في بدنه او عرضه‬ (‫)؟( او لم تستطع من خزانتك التي لا تنقص )وأسالك ان تكرمني( برحمتك بالخـيرات )الله على‬ ‫كل شيء قدير هركيم كي بوغري عباّ س دعاسني اوزرندهگتورسه دنيوي واخروي مرآدينه‬ 50‫نائل وولور باذن الله تعالى تمت‬ … the many … of Your servants, for I am a servant among Your servants or a slave among Your slaves / remaining in his body and honor … are You not able [to give] from Your undiminished bounty, I ask You to bestow Your blessings on me with Your mercy / [God] is powerful over everything / Everyone who will get this prayer of Ūghrī ʿAbbās will have all his material and spiritual wishes granted, God Almighty willing. The end. 48 49 50

The name of Ūghrī ʿAbbās here appears in a large ‫ و‬at the center of the panel, along with the heading hādhā duʿāʾ-i Ūghrī ʿAbbās. See also Perk, Osmanlı Tılsım, 115. For an alternative version of this invocation, to be employed during the month of Rajab, see Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani and Muhammad Nazil Adil al-Haqqani, Pearls and Coral: Secrets of the Sufi Way (Fenton, MI: Islamic Supreme Council of America, 2005). I want to thank Dr. Ruba Kanaan for assisting with the reading and translation of this and other passages.

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545

This supplication is unlike those examined so far, as it features also a selection of images including a conical building, a flag,51 and three of Muḥammad’s personal effects (mukhallafāt): his sandals, shirt, and sword.52 The building has been identified as a stylized representation of Aḥmad Rifāʿī’s mausoleum,53 which, incidentally, appears, in more elaborate fashion, in a second impression at the bottom of our talisman (Figure 12.12).54 If correct, the association of the building with Rifāʿī helps clarify the remaining two objects on our impression; a mace resembling the topuz,55 a tool used in a ritual specific to the Rifāʿī order known as bürhan göstermek (“infallible proof”),56 and a ridged cap with a colored cloth band wrapped around it, probably representing the headdress worn by the order’s affiliates. While the reason for their combination here and their full meaning remain elusive, these revered designs provide the pictorial equivalent of the Qurʾanic verses accompanying the prayer of Umm Ṣubyān.57 Imbued with comparable sacredness, the motifs extend their protective aura to the nearby invocation, lending reassurance and legality to its remedial intent. There are three more panels in the group, each reproduced only once but containing precious information about the nature of the object, its makers, and users (Figure 12.7b K–M). The first of these texts is especially revealing, as it sheds some light on the interaction of makers and clients and the sensitivities attached to the use of talismanic material in everyday life (Figure 12.7b K):

51

52 53 54 55

56 57

The flag contains the star and crescent found in the modern Turkish flag but harks back to a late twelfth/eighteenth-century–early thirteenth/nineteenth-century Ottoman design. I will elaborate on the role of similar figures in talismans in the next section. M. Baha Tanman, “Depictions of the Mausoleum of Seyyid Ahmed el-Rifaʾî in Late Dervish Convent Ottoman Art,” Electronic Journal of Oriental Studies 4, no. 41 (2001): 1–37. See my discussion below, 557–560. This is smeared on our talisman but visible on other seal stamps produced from the same matrix; see, e.g., Perk, Osmanlı Tılsım, 118, cat. no. 2.1.05.01. For an illustrated example of this tool, see Jürgen W. Frembgen, Kleidung und Ausrüstung islamischer Gottsucher: ein Beitrag zur materiellen Kultur des Derwischwesens (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999), 150– 151, cat. no. 49. Tanman, “Depictions of the Mausoleum,” 4. Another recipe for amulets against miscarriage and deemed efficacious against Umm Ṣubyān is given by Zwermer, The Influence of Animism, 118–122. It is attributed to a shaykh, Aḥmad al-Dayrabī, who details it in his book Kitāb al-Mujarrabāt (first printed in 1328/ 1910) and similarly makes abundant use of sacred verses and names, as well as the protective powers of the mysterious isolated letters found at the beginning of certain Qurʾanic suras (al-ḥurūf al-muqaṭṭaʿāt).

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‫بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم إن استطعتم يا مشعر الجن والانس بالله الواحد القهار العارف الدافع‬ ‫و يعهد الذي اخذه عليكم ملء هذا الكتاب وان تشركوه في اخده الله وحمايته وصل الله على‬ ‫سيدنا محمد وآله اجمعين الطيبين الظاهر ين وسلم تسليما كثيرا يا الله يا الله يا الله يا رحمن يا رحيم‬ In the name of God the Merciful, the Compassionate / O assembly of jinns and men, by [the name of] God, the One, the Conqueror, the Knower, the Protector / He who filled this document made you take an oath to participate, with him, in accepting God and his protection / May God praise our master Muḥammad and all the pure and good members of his family and grant them peace / O God, O God, O Merciful, O Compassionate. The text is noteworthy for its reference to an “oath” that clients to-be would be asked (implicitly or not) to swear by the creator of the talisman. Such a statement formalizes the recognition that remedies and cures lie not in the object itself but in God as its powers’ sole provider, making sure to communicate explicitly, to users and observers alike, the terms under which this and related objects could be used. Found in the lower corner of the talisman, the other two panels reiterate the idea by listing the wide-ranging applications of the device (Figure 12.7b L–M): ‫روايت اولنور كه هر كيم بوحمائل شر يف اعتقاد كامل و نيت خالص اوزر كتوره و يا‬ ‫اوقو يه هر مطلب و مراد باذن الله حاصل اوله حق تعالى كندي خز ينه غيبندن رزق ايد ياوز‬ ‫كوزدن ياوز دلدن سحر مكر)ندن؟( مكار مكرندن و ظالملر شرندن امين اوله جمله دشمان اولسه‬ ‫بر قلنه خطى كتيرميه لر ناذن الله تعالى‬ ‫دوشمان اوزر ينه غالب او … باشوكوز وقولاق و نزله نظر و صيتمه يل و صيز يدن امين اوله‬ ‫ذر يتي اولميان خاتون ديري اوله باذن الله تعالى ذر يتي يشاميان باذن خداى محبت ايچون‬ ‫فايده سى چوق اوله‬ It is related that whosoever bears or reads this noble [?] amulet with full belief and pure intention may, God willing, attain all [his] wishes and desires; that the Lord Almighty may provide [for him] from His own invisible treasury; that he may be kept safe from the evil eye, from wicked tongues, from witchcraft, from deceit, and from cruelty; that, if all should be [his] enemies, they may not harm one hair [on his head], God Almighty

a stamped talisman

figure 12.8

547

Section of the talisman containing sequences of letters and numbers

willing; that he may prevail over his enemies; that he may be kept safe from [ailments of] the head, eyes, and ears, from the cold, from the evil eye [?], from fever and rheumatism, and from pain; that if [his] wife is childless, she may be youthful, God Almighty willing; and that if her children should not survive, she may, Lord willing, offer much in the way of affection.58 1.2 Impressions Containing Letters and Numbers Although sparsely used on our talisman, these impressions rely on various combinations of individual letters, numbers, or alphanumeric sequences (Figure 12.8 N–P). The recourse to separate letters, foremost among them the ḥurūf al-muqattaʿāt, is a well known magical technology that relies on the inherent power of the letters to control angels and spirits.59 The sequences of single letters on our seal impressions, presented in continuous rows or interspersed with numbers, reflect this practice. They also show the use of different styles characteristic of magical writing, including Kufic, the angular script known to have 58 59

The author is grateful to Dr. Ünver Rustem for translating this passage. For an introduction to the ʿilm al-ḥurūf (“science of letters”), see Pierre Lory, La science des lettre en Islam (Paris: Dervy, 2004).

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been used in early Islamic amulets and here seen in one of the inscriptions.60 In one instance, the four archangels preside over the letters’ efficacy (Figure 12.8 O). In others, elaborate knots make up most of the mark, increasing its magical potency (Figure 12.8 N). 1.3 Impressions Combining Text and Images As numerous as the first group is the third category of seal marks, in which figurative motifs are imaginatively combined with textual references. The simplest one, in the shape of a cypress, a traditional symbol of eternity,61 occurs four times on the central panel of the top half of the talisman (Figure 12.9a Q). It reminds readers and users of the Qurʾan’s salvific and restorative nature by citing the following āya: “And We sent down from the Qurʾan that which is healing and mercy for the believers, but it does not increase the wrongdoers except in loss.”62 This is followed by a call for blessings on the prophet Moses (Mūsā). More prominent than the cypress is possibly the most recognizable protective design of those employed on our document, the khamsa, otherwise known as the “hand of Fāṭima” or the “hand of ʿAbbās,”63 reproduced in two different forms, in the upper and lower half of the sheet (Figures 12.9a–12.9b R–S). In the first version, the hand is purely textual, combining the shahāda (on the thumb), Q 13:61 (on the index finger), and Q 11:88 (at the base of the palm), and several of the asmāʾ al-ḥusnā (middle, ring, and little fingers, as well as the palm) with the names of the twelve Shiʿi imams, inscribed in roundels bordering the palm (Figure 12.9b R). In the second khamsa, the design instead uses a more varied vocabulary, beginning with the names Allāh, Muḥammad, and ʿAlī (on the thumb), those of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and their dog Qiṭmīr (on the other four fingers), Q 17:82, and the phrases “O God, heal, as You are the Healer” and “O God, mend, as You are the Mender!” (‫الله اشف فانت الشافي الله عاف‬

60

61

62 63

Venetia Porter, “The Use of Arabic Script in Magic,” in The Development of Arabic as a Written Language, ed. M.C.A. MacDonald, Supplement to the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 40 (2010): 131–134. Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair, “Ornament and Pattern” in The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture, ed. Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair. Oxford Islamic Studies Online, http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t276/e705. Q 17:82. Fahmida Suleman, “The Hand of Fatima: In Search of Its Origins and Significance,” in People of the Prophet’s House: Artistic and Ritual Expressions of Shiʿi Islam, ed. Fahmida Suleman (London: Azimuth Editions in association with The Institute of Ismaili Studies in collaboration with the British Museum’s Department of the Middle East, 2015), 173–186, and Leoni, Power and Protection, 40–41.

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figure 12.9a Detail of the top half of the talisman with impressions combining text and image

‫فانت الآفي‬, Figure 12.9a S). These verses encircle the motif at the center of the hand, that is, two stylized scorpions, whose bodies are marked by the phrases “O Sufficient, O Healer” ( yā kāfī yā muʿāfī). The Ghāyat al-ḥakīm, one of the most influential medieval works on astrological magic, reports a story dating back to third/ninth-century Egypt, in which seals inscribed with images of scorpions are used to counteract or avoid their stings on the basis of sympathetic magic (similia similibus curantur).64 Significantly, the tale employs the term khātm for the inscribed ring and for the impressions produced with it, which suggests a custom of transferring potent designs onto various media in order to disseminate their benefits.65 That this image

64

65

Hellmut Ritter and Martin Plessner, “Picatrix”: das Ziel des Weisen, von Pseudo-Magǧrīṭī (London: Warburg Institute, 1962), 55, cited in Porter, “Islamic Seals,” 141. The text enjoyed wide success in Europe, where it became known as Picatrix, following its translation into Castilian first and Latin afterwards; David Pingree, ed. Picatrix: The Latin Version of the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm (London: Warburgh Institute, 1986). For examples of amulets inscribed with images of scorpions, see, Tewfik Canaan, Dämonenglaube im Lande der Bibel (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1929), 13–14, and Perk, Osmanlı Tılsım, 55–56, cat. nos. 1.1.22–25.

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was employed across the Islamic world for protective and prophylactic purposes from the start is further documented by its adoption in key monuments and city landmarks, such as mosques, gates, and bridges, effectively perpetuating a centuries-old custom.66 Efficacious yet still profane, the motif’s pagan origin is, in our case, mitigated by the phrases and expressions inscribed in its proximity, which subordinate its efficacy to God, the ultimate source of remedy. Last but not least, the second khamsa impression carries another meaningful seal mark, the “seal of the Great Name of God,” placed around a pentagram/hexagram or “seal of Solomon” and appearing twice.67 The seal consists of a series of motifs that can be combined in various sequences, as described evocatively by al-Būnī: “three sticks are lined up after a seal, at their head is like a bent head of a lance, a mim squashed and amputated, then a ladder that leads to every hoped-for object but that is nonetheless not a ladder; four objects resembling fingers have been lined up, they point toward good things but are without a fist, a ha in half then a waw bent over like a tube of a cupper (hijam) but which is not a cupping glass.”68 Less legible than other marks yet just as common, “the seal of the Great Name of God” appears to have gained special popularity in Ottoman lands, adding to the range of methods deemed acceptable to counteract spirits. This is due not only to its connection to Solomon, who obtained power over the jinn through a signet ring carrying the same signs, but also to the fact that it declares trust in God and His power.69 Not far from this khamsa, two other stamps shaped like double-tipped swords are visible (Figure 12.9a T).70 Known as Dhūʾl-Fiqār and employed as an auspicious symbol in Ottoman art, this motif mythologizes the invincible weapon captured by Muḥammad during the Battle of Badr and subsequently presented to his cousin and son-in-law ʿAlī, with whom it later came to be associated.71 The link with ʿAlī is reiterated by the inscription yā ʿAlī (“O ʿAlī”) on one

66 67 68

69 70 71

Finbarr Barry Flood, “Images against Nature: Spolia as Apotropaia in Byzantium and the dār al-Islām,” The Medieval History Journal 9, no. 1 (2006): 143–166, esp. 151–152. J.M. Dawkins, “The Seal of Solomon,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 2 (1944): 145–150; Gruber, “ ‘Go Wherever You Wish,” 7–10. G.C. Anawati, “Le nom supreme de Dieu,” in Atti del Terzo Congresso di Studi Arabi ed Islamici, Ravello, 1–6 Settembre 1966 (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1967), 7–58, esp. 26–27, and Porter et al., Arabic and Persian Seals, 166. Gruber, “Go Wherever You Wish,” 8. Fodor, “Amulets from the Islamic World,” 96, no. 117. For the use of the motif against evil spirits, see Fodor, “Types of Shīʿite Amulets,” 122. Zeynep Yürekli-Görkay, “Dhuʾl-faqār and the Ottomans,” in Suleman, People of the Prophet’s House, 163–172.

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of the tips, and with the formula ‫“( لا فتى إلّا علي ولا سيف إلّا ذو الفقار‬There is no brave youth except ʿAlī, there is no sword but Dhūʾl-Fiqār”) near the hilt.72 This is combined with Q 48:1 “Indeed, We have given you a clear victory” also found on the grip, and additional verses along the blade which are, however, too faint to be deciphered. In the same area of the talisman there is an oval stamp with an elaborate frame reproduced four times (Figure 12.9a U). In it, are several symbols related to the Day of Judgment, beginning with the liwāʾ al-ḥamd (“banner of praise”), two pulpits labeled minbar al-anbiyāʾ (“pulpit of the prophets”), three high chairs identified as kursī al-ʿulamāʾ (“chair of the scholars”), and a scale. The liwāʾ al-ḥamd is among the most tangible expressions of the Prophet’s ability to intercede for his community. According to several traditions it is under this banner that he will gather the true believers in order to protect them from the tribulations of Doomsday.73 The scale of justice (mīzān) likewise refers to the judgment taking place on that day; people’s deeds will be weighed on it, and the outcome will determine their eternal destiny. By looking beyond the realm of human existence, therefore, this seal mark ensures that its protection will cover users in this life as well as the next. Belonging to the text-image category are also two seal marks that stand out for their heraldic quality and explicit links with the Bektāshī and Rifāʿī orders respectively (Figures 12.9a–9b V–W).74 The design of the first one is inscribed in a lobed cartouche and is centered on a tall, ridged cap on top of an elaborate plinth and flanked by two ceremonial axes (tabar) (Figures 12.9a–9b V). Along each shaft the names of Aḥmad Rifāʿī and ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī are preceded, respectively, by the titles Abā Muslim tabardār and Sulṭān Shāh-i naksh-i band.75 The axes’ handles extend at the base of the image being sinuously transformed into the name of ʿAlī, whose calligraphic treatment and prominence in the composition reflect the central position held in Bektāshī creed.76 The name

72

73 74

75 76

The word fata is here mistakenly replaced by the word sayf. The motto and associated military symbol acquired special relevance for the Bektāshī order, functioning as symbols of sanctity; Zeynep Yürekli-Görkay, Architecture and Hagiography in the Ottoman Empire: The Politics of Bektashi Shrines in the Classical Age (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 77. Schimmel, And Muḥammad Is His Messenger, 282. Frederick de Jong, “The Iconography of Bektashiism: A Survey of Themes and Symbolism in Clerical Costume, Liturgical Objects and Pictorial Art,” Manuscripts of the Middle East 4 (1989): 7–29, and Frederick de Jong, “Pictorial Arts of the Bektashi Order,” in The Dervish Lodge: Architecture, Art and Sufism in Ottoman Turkey, ed. Raymond Lifchez (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 228–241. Literally, “Abū Muslim’s ax-bearer” and “the embroiderer of Sultan Shāh.” John Kingsley Birge, The Bektashi Order of Dervishes (London: Luzac, 1994), 131–145.

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figure 12.9b Detail of the bottom half of the talisman with impressions combining text and image

of Muḥammad, executed in mirror writing (muthanna), hovers over the turban, while the names of Abrahamic prophets are distributed evenly around it along with those of the four archangels placed at the four corners.77 Hanging beneath the headdress is also the teslim taşı (“the stone of surrender”), which represents the union of human individuality with the Eternal Truth.78 The second design also centers on a Sufi headgear and is recognized as “the coat of arms” of the Rifāʿiyyya order (Figure 12.9b W).79 Placed on a polygonal stool and above a bowl, the order’s headgear (tāj-i şerif ) is flanked by banners invoking Aḥmad Rifāʿī and ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jīlānī. Al-Jīlānī’s name occurs again on an inscription at the base of the stamp, alongside those of the four archangels, while the shahāda embroiders the canopy framing the tāj.

77

78 79

The list of twenty-four begins with Adam, first man and first prophet according to Islam, in a roundel at the very top, and ends with Jesus (ʿĪsā), found at the very base of the seal mark. Curiously, Dhūʾ l-Qarnayn is also mentioned here, possibly to be identified with Khiḍr, given the latter’s prominence in certain Sufi ṭarīqas. De Jong, “The Iconography of Bektashiism,” 10–11. Tanman, “Depictions of the Mausoleum,” 23, fig. 6.

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Through their explicit reference to the Bektāshiyyya and Rifāʿiyyya orders, these designs not only strengthen the association with Sufi traditions seen elsewhere on the talisman, but also add specific saints to the personalities petitioned by it, expanding the object’s intercessory power. Sainthood (wilāya), based on the belief that select special individuals manifest the attributes of God and partake of the Prophet’s exemplary virtues, was a central concept in Sufism.80 Hence, renowned leaders and their deeds came to be recognized as sources of continuous blessing or baraka. Taking into account the great involvement of spiritual leaders and dervishes in the provision of healing remedies and protective devices to their followers, these two stamps may point to their direct participation in the production of this and similar apotropaia, a possibility that will be explored in the second part of this essay. Another frequently reproduced round stamp portrays a domed building with a crescent inscribed in a star-shaped motif and the invocation ‫اللهم ارزقنا‬ ‫“( علما نافعا ورزقا واسعا و)؟( برحمتك يا رحيم‬O God, bestow on us beneficial knowledge, ample blessing and … by Your grace, O Compassionate”) (Figures 12.9a–9b X). 1.4 Impressions with Calligrams A single, popular example represents this category on our talisman: a ship whose hull consists of the names of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, the “Companions of the Cave” (aṣḥāb al-kahf ) recorded in the Qurʾan (Figures 12.6 Y and 12.10).81 The presence of the Sleepers’ names, referring to the six Christians and a shepherd who survived persecution by miraculously falling asleep in a cave for centuries,82 is common on Islamic amulets and talismans.83 Their use on

80 81 82

83

M. Baha Tanman, “Setting for the Veneration of Saints,” in The Dervish Lodge, ed. Lifchez, 130–171, here 131. Q 18:9–26. Rudi Paret, s.v. “Aṣḥāb al-kahf,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. A classical study on the subject is that of Louis Massignon, “Les sept dormants d’Éphèse (ahl al-kahf ) en Islam et Chrétienté: première partie,”Revue d’études islamiques 22 (1954): 59–112; Louis Massignon, “Les sept dormants d’ Éphèse (ahl al-kahf ) en Islam et Chrétienté: deuxième partie,”Revue d’ études islamiques 23 (1955): 94–106; and Louis Massignon, “Les sept dormants d’Éphèse (ahl al-kahf ) en Islam et Chrétienté: troisième partie,” Revue d’études islamiques 25 (1957): 1–11. Sheila Blair, Islamic Calligraphy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 506–508, Venetia Porter, “Amulets Inscribed with the Names of the ‘Seven Sleepers of Ephesus’ in the British Museum,” in Word of God, Art of Man: The Qurʾan and Its Creative Expressions, ed. Fahmida Suleman (Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies London, 2007), 123–134, and Jürgen W. Frembgen, “The Symbolism of the Boat in Sufi and Shiʿa Imagery of Pakistan and Iran,” Journal of the History of Sufism 6 (2016): 85–100.

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figure 12.10

Detail of the ship-shaped calligram

ship-shaped calligrams, in particular, is common in areas with strong maritime enterprises, from the Ottoman Empire to Southeast Asia,84 the latter probably influenced by the more popular Turkish examples arriving in the wake of commercial contacts.85 A saying attributed to the prophet Muḥammad invites the believers to teach the names of the Sleepers to their children, “for if they are written on the door of a house, that house will not be burnt, or on an object, that object will not be lost, or on a ship, that ship will not sink.”86 A broad prophylactic use is probably the intended aim of this example too, enhanced by additional phrases selected for their auspicious value: the shahāda (left-hand

84

85

86

Filiz Çağman and Şule Aksoy, Osmanlı Sanatında Hat (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlığı, Anıtlar ve Müzeler Genel Müdürlüğü, 1998), 83; Denise-Marie Teece and Karin Zonis, “Calligraphic Galleon,” in Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. Maryam D. Ekhtiar, Priscilla Soucek, Sheila R. Canby, and Navina Hadjat Haidar (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011), 297–298, cat. no. 206, and Farouk Yahya, “Jimat in Form of a Ship,” in Leoni, Power and Protection, 36–37, cat. no. 105. Venetia Porter notes that the Ottoman navy was dedicated to the aṣḥāb al-kahf, which explains their protective use in seafaring and trade; Porter, “Amulets Inscribed with the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,” 126. For a recent collection on Ottoman–Southeast Asian relations, see Andrew Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop, From Anatolia to Aceh: Ottomans, Turks, and Southeast Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press and British Academy, 2015). Tewfik Canaan, “The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans,” Berythus 5 (1938): 141–151, here 146; Porter, “Amulets Inscribed with the ‘Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,” 126.

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flag), Q 48:1 (left-hand sail), Q 61:13 (right-hand flag), as well as sequences of numbers and isolated letters and invocations to God.87 1.5 Impressions with Sanctuaries and Shrines The last category of seal marks on our talisman ranges in content and legibility, although, as in previous examples, it encompasses both motifs universally accepted in Islam and sectarian formulas. The most immediately identifiable design, reproduced both at the top of the document and at its very center, is that of Mecca’s sacred precinct (Figure 12.6 Z and 12.11). The main image, delineated by a circular enclosure with double rows of lamps marking the space of circumambulation, depicts the key structures at the heart of the mosque. Accessed through a single gate (bāb banī shayba) are a staircase,88 the maqām Ibrāhīm (the sanctuary erected on the site where Abraham stood in prayer), an outdoor pulpit, the Kaʿba shrouded in black, and the ḥaṭīm (the semicircular enclosure marking the spot where Ismail and Hagar found shelter). This succinct depiction is similar to other representations of Mecca featuring iconic monuments and sites.89 In this instance, however, the background is filled with inscriptions with strong Alid references. Inside the precinct, starting from the right-hand side, we find the formula “The prophet Muḥammad, may God pray for him; God’s peace and blessing upon Imam ʿAlī, may God be pleased with him (?) the remembrance [of ʿAlī] is worship” (‫حضرت پيغمبر صلى الله وسلم قدس‬ (‫)امام علي رضي الله عنه )؟( )؟( امام علي ذكر عبادة )؟‬. Separated from it by the ḥaṭīm is the phrase “O Abū l-Qāsim” ( yā abā l-qāsim), referring to Muḥammad, while on the left-hand side of the Kaʿba we read the expression “the remembrance of ʿAlī is worship” (dhikr ʿalī ʿibādat). The Alid connection is strengthened by the well known saying “I am the city of knowledge and ʿAlī is its gate” (‫انا مدينة‬ ‫ )العلم وعلي بابه‬prominently displayed on top of the Kaʿba, as well as by the inclusion of the names of ʿAlī’s wife Fāṭima al-Zahrāʾ and their sons, Ḥasan and Ḥusayn.

87

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89

In this version of the ship, a baldachin structure can also be seen on the stern, but its significance remains unclear. An identical calligram, said often to be found on painted glass, is reproduced in Şennur Şentürk, ed., Cam altinda yirmi bin fersah: geleneksel halk resim sanatından camaltı resimleri (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, 1997), 68. Significant is the absence of the structure giving access to the Zamzam well, which could be used to establish the date of the image after which the seal (and possibly the talisman) was produced. See some of the hajj certificates and manuscript illustrations in Venetia Porter, ed., Hajj: A Journey to the Heart of Islam (London: British Museum Press, 2012), esp. 28–29, fig. 5; 32–33, fig. 8; 39, figs. 14–15; 54–55, fig. 27.

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figure 12.11

Example of impression featuring a sanctuary (Mecca)

The most distinctive characteristic of this seal mark, compared to the others on the page, lies in its condition. Especially evident on the uppermost example, the impression appears to have been heavily rubbed, which possibly explains the transfer of ink across the upper part of the talisman following the direction in which it was folded. Direct interaction with a sacred image, understood as a channel to access and benefit from the qualities of the subject(s) represented in it, is often explicitly invoked in Islamic devotional literature.90 In particular, extended gazing, skin contact—by touching an object with one’s hand or forehead or by kissing it—as well as forms of ingestion all contribute to activating an image’s baraka.91 In addition to commemorating the completion of the pil90

91

For examples with instructions on how to interact with protective images, see Alexandra Bain, “The Late Ottoman Enʿam-i Serif: Sacred Texts and Images in an Islamic Prayer Book” (PhD diss., University of Victoria, 1999), cat. nos. 16, 19–20 and 24, 26, and 28; Nabil E. Safwat, Golden Pages: Qurʾans and Other Manuscripts from the Collection of Ghassan I. Shaker (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press for Azimuth Editions, 2000), 226, cat. nos. 57, and 228; Barbara Schmidt, Islamic Manuscripts in the New York Public Library (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press and The New York Library, 1992), 48, cat. no. I.11; and Gruber, “From Prayer to Protection,” 51. Christiane Gruber, “A Pious Cure-All: The Ottoman Illustrated Prayer Manual in the Lilly Library,” in The Islamic Manuscript Tradition: Ten Centuries of Book Arts in Indiana University Collections, ed. Christiane Gruber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 117–153, here 132 and 140–141, and Finbarr Barry Flood, “Bodies and Becoming: Mimesis, Mediation, and the Ingestion of the Sacred in Christianity and Islam,” in Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice, ed. Sally M. Promey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 459–493, here 461, 470–471.

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figure 12.12

557

Example of a second impression featuring a shrine (Aḥmad Rifāʿī’s tomb)

grimage, representations of Islam’s two most sacred sites, Mecca and Medina, flourished in the early modern period to popularize the visualization of venerable, and at times unreachable, destinations.92 Their appearance in illustrated devotional texts, in particular—from Muḥyī al-Dīn Lārī’s Futūḥ al-ḥaramayn (“Revelations of the Two Sanctuaries”) to al-Jazūlī’s Dalāʾil al-khayrāt (“Guides to Happiness”)—bears witness to their inclusion among those select formulas and symbols adopted for both contemplative and apotropaic purposes.93 The rubbing on the stamp reproduced on our talisman is best understood along these lines, powerfully merging the desire to acquire the miraculous powers of Islam’s most revered site usually realized through an actual visit, with pietistic practices triggered by its visual reproduction. Last but not least, a less recognizable though similarly powerful shrine, which has been object of detailed study by M. Baha Tanman, can be found in a single impression at the bottom of the talisman (Figure 12.6 AA and 12.12).94 In it we recognize a tomb sheltered by a canopied structure. A lamp hangs from the central arch of this construction, a detail often found in mausoleums of reli92 93

94

Roxburgh, “Visualising the Sites and Monuments of Islamic Pilgrimage.” This explains their subsequent reproduction on more ephemeral media, including talismans, such as those produced with the plaque now at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (inv. no. 54.51), engraved with images of Mecca and Medina. Tanman, “Depiction of the Mausoleum.”

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gious brotherhoods that facilitates the identification of the individual buried in it with the saint named in the top inscription, ḥaḍrat sayyid Aḥmad Rifāʿī. The image is full of references to Rifāʿī’s deeds, offering a compelling pictorial celebration of his miraculous power. For instance, the lions in the foreground are a reference to his legendary ability to tame these ferocious beasts.95 Similarly, the serpent stretched between the felines symbolizes the venomous animals believed to be subject to the shaykh and unable to harm his followers.96 For this reason, this image was used against poisonous animals, as testified by the wide range of decorative objects, paintings, and murals bearing it that flourished in the late Ottoman period. The background of the composition, beginning from the top-left corner and proceeding counter-clockwise, reads: ‫بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم السلام عليكم يا الغيب و يا ارواح المقدسة و يا امان و يا اوتاد و يا بدلا‬ ‫و يا رقبا و يا امنا و يا نجبا و يا حوار يون و يا قطب الاقطاب اغيثوني بغوثة وارحمني وانظروني‬ ‫بنظرة واغيثوني على المهمّات في الدنيا والآخرة بحرمة سي ّد الـكونين محمد وآله وصحبه اجمعين‬ In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate / Peace be upon You, O the hidden world and blessed spirits, O Surety, O Pegs, O Substitutes, O Guardians, O Trustees, O Nobles, O Disciples of Jesus, O Pole / lend me [your] help, have mercy on me, cast a glance upon me and help in all [my] undertakings in this world and the next / by the sanctity of the master of the two worlds, Muḥammad, his family, and his Companions all. Continuing under the three arches, starting on the left-hand side: 97‫بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم امرابرموامرا فانا مبرمون چبان شيش ايچون‬ ‫بسم الله صمد )؟( قي ّوم حكيم عدل )؟( إن فتحنا لك فتحا مبينا‬ 98‫صلى وسلم به‬

95 96 97 98

Tanman, “Depiction of the Mausoleum,” 14. See also Tanman’s elaboration on the symbolic meaning of the sphere under the lion’s paw in the image. In other versions of the composition, the image of a scorpion is also included. See Tanman, figs. 3–5. The rest of the text is obscure. Liana Saif suggested a possible alternative reading of this as wusima bihi, “to stamp with it.”

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559

In the Name of God, (the) Eternal, (the) Self-Subsisting, (the) Wise, (the) Judge: Indeed We have given you [a clear conquest] [Q 48:1]. Peace and blessings upon Him. The text around the serpent reads: 99‫ رقعة‬٣ ‫ في الجلد بحق الحي الذي )؟( موت‬٣ ‫يا ايها )؟( المنبوت موت‬ Finally, on the right-hand side area of the seal mark, from the corner down, we read: (‫الف صلاة )؟( الهم سلم و بارك)ة( على كنز الطلسم في النشر من لم يزل في قابناسوت و)؟‬ ‫قرب رب‬ A thousand prayers, O Lord grant peace and bless the treasure of he who made the talisman … ‫الف سلام عليك يا حبيب الله‬ A thousand greetings to you, O God’s beloved. 100‫والغيث المطمطم لاهوت الجمال ناسوت الوصال طلعت الحو كسو بالانسان ازلى‬ ‫بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم لها و لكل )؟( عظيم الف صلاة الف سلامات عليك الف صلاة منه‬ ‫فيه و عليه ال ّهم يا عظيم انت العظيم هون علي يا عظيم المي فرج عنيّ و عن المسلم)ين؟( بفضل‬ ‫الرحمن‬ In the name of God the Merciful and the Compassionate, for her and all … great, a thousand prayers, a thousand greetings upon you, a thousand prayers from him … in him and on him. O Great Lord, You are Great,

99 100

This is another obscure passage in which only the following phrase bi-ḥaqq al-ḥayy alladhī (“by the right of [God] the Living One who …”) is clear. These two phrases, inscribed in the two rectangles found in the upper right-hand side corner of this seal, are also unclear.

560

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ease my pain, O Great [God], O Lord, relieve me and all Muslims (?) by the grace of the Merciful One. Despite the more obscure content, this seal impression solidifies the idea of combining multiple spiritual forces observed across the talisman. The wellbeing of the maker of the seal is given equal consideration, possibly as a way to defend and further validate his essential role as the middleman between dispensers and receivers of blessings and aid.

∵ A few points emerge from a closer analysis of the talisman’s contents. The first is that this device’s power, like that of others in the same category, relies on the combination of resources and their cumulative effect. In our particular instance, the aspects affected by the supplications—from gender-specific illnesses to generic apotropaic functions—as well as the object’s large size, indicate that it was likely commissioned to protect the whole household, where it might have been prominently displayed. Second, the mundane perils and tribulations feared by the talisman’s purported users—stings of poisonous animals, physical ailments, and the evil eye—perpetuate preoccupations common since before the advent of Islam but reconfigured through an Islamic lens. Pious exclamations, prayers, and invocations sacralize these archaic concerns, in so far as they now subject their resolving to God, who is consistently presented as the ultimate source of succor and guidance for mankind. Third, the mediation of God’s agency through angelic and saintly intercessors is of pivotal importance for the object’s efficacy. By harnessing their beneficial power through direct invocations and “meta-pilgrimages” to sacred places, the talisman ultimately transposes, on paper, a variety of practices that remain comfortably within the parameters of everyday piety. As such the object can be best understood in relation to the strong devotional shift observed in the Ottoman sphere during the twelfth/eighteenth and thirteenth/nineteenth centuries, the subject to which I shall now turn.

2

The Talisman’s Context

The period during which our talisman was most likely produced, the long thirteenth/nineteenth century, witnessed profound religious transformations across the Islamicate world. Often framed as responses to changing internal conditions and external threats, paramount among them European imperial-

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ism, various reformist movements embraced the revival of traditional Islamic values for moral, social, and political reform.101 In the Ottoman sphere, in particular, the primacy of sharīʿa, the emphasis on the Qurʾan and early hadith, and the Prophet’s example sustained this revitalization, while mystical teachings, especially those promoted by moderate and more conservative orders such as the Naqshbandiyya, added a balanced spiritual dimension to the process.102 The urban nature of this order, which, by the thirteenth/nineteenth century counted over fifty lodges in Istanbul alone, meant that it obtained a great deal of support from among the ʿulamāʾ and members of the ruling elite,103 with some of their leaders becoming active players in the process of renewal sponsored by the state.104 Such a process of rejuvenation did not mean a despiritualized approach to Islam. Unlike the puritan stance espoused by Wahhabism—established in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula in the mid-twelfth/mid-eighteenth century by the theologian Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (d. 1206/1792) with the objective of purifying Islam of devotional practices and behaviors deemed innovations (bidʿa) and, as such, negations of the fundamental principle of tawḥīd— Ottoman Islam valued ritual practice and private devotions as ways to embrace God’s unity. Likewise, the Prophet was upheld as a prime example of conduct and infallible guidance, which led to his further veneration. The visitation of sites associated with Muḥammad’s life and physical traces, and the flourishing of poetic and visual meta-relics—from Turkish translations of al-Būṣīrī’s Qaṣīdat al-burda (“The Mantle Ode”) celebrating the curative powers of his mantle, to copies of his blessed sandal (naʿl)—testify to the process. In the same way, the accumulation of sacred objects and relics associated with him 101

102

103

104

On the concept of tajdīd (renewal) and its origins and various incarnations, see Butrus Abu Manneh, Studies on Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century (1826–1876) (Istanbul: Isis, 2001); for its role in contemporary revivalist movements, see Ira M. Lapidus, “Islamic Revival and Modernity: The Contemporary Movements and the Historical Paradigms,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 40, no. 4 (1997): 444– 460. For the Sunni-sharīʿa-Sufi synthesis at the heart of twelfth/eighteenth- and thirteenth/ nineteenth-century revivalisms, see Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. 192–224. Abu Manneh, Studies on Islam, 8; Butrus Abu Manneh, “The Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya in the Ottoman Lands in the Early 19th century,” Die Welt des Islams 22, nos. 1–4 (1982): 1–36. David W. Damrel, “The Spread of Naqshbandi Political Thought in the Islamic World,” in Naqshbandis: Historical Development and Present Situation of the Mystical Order. Proceedings of the Sevres Round Table, May 2–4, 1985, ed. Marc Gaborieau, Alexander Popovic, and Thierry Zarconne (Istanbul: Isis, 1990), 269–287, esp. 274.

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in Istanbul,105 heightened by the destructive Wahhabi campaigns of 1799–1803 against holy sites in the Hijaz, reinforced the view of the Prophet as an elect conduit of divine grace and thus as God’s primary intercessor.106 The material impact of this enlivened devotional climate is highlighted by Alexandra Bain in her study of late Ottoman prayer manuals.107 Bain considers these ubiquitous books as part of the polemics surrounding Ottoman Islam and Wahhabi Islam, in light of the latter’s growing influence in areas of Arabia officially under Ottoman control. More specifically, the combined content of these books constitutes an explicit celebration of specific practices— tawaṣṣul (supplicating God through an intercessor) and tabarruk (obtaining blessings from sacred objects and sites) paramount among them—condemned and persecuted by the fundamentalist movement.108 Bain notes the individuals involved in the production and consumption of such manuals and lists representatives of the government, scholars and members of the royal household among them, thus exposing individual journeys of devotional awakening amongst the elites.109 She also delves into the content of twelfth/eighteenthand thirteenth/nineteenth-century examples of such books, which contain selected Qurʾanic passages and prayers and incorporate litanies, blessings for the Prophet, and diagrams and pictures.110 The gradual inclusion of images and texts for the purpose of taʿwīz—using the former for talismanic and auspicious purposes—suggest a transformation of these manuals into protective

105

106 107

108

109 110

Süleyman Beyoğlu, “The Ottomans and the Islamic Sacred Relics,” in The Great Turkish Civilization, ed. Kemal Cicek (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye, 2001), 4:36–44. These are now collected and some of them exhibited in the Pavilion of Relics and Sacred Trusts in the Topkapi Palace Museum. The notion of tawassul, God’s supplication by means of an intermediary, was accepted in all four schools of Sunni Islam. See also Gruber’s article in this volume. Alexandra Bain, “The Late Ottoman Enʿami Şerif ” and “The Enʿami Şerif : Sacred Text and Images in a Late Ottoman Prayer Book,” Archivum Ottomanicum 19 (2001): 213–238. The manuals are presented under the title of enʿam-i şerif on account of the prominence often given to Sūrat al-Anʿām. For a discussion of alternative titles, see Gruber, “A Pious CureAll,” 117 n. 3 and references therein. Bain, “The Late Ottoman Enʿami Şerif,” 41. This is in addition to helping to reiterate the idea of the Ottomans as protectors of Islam against the threat posed by the Wahhabis to their sovereignty. Bain, “The Late Ottoman Enʿami Şerif,” 38–41. Comparable experiences at more popular level, however, are not addressed in her study, a gap that this essay partially remedies. Bain, “The Late Ottoman Enʿami Şerif,” 79–93 and 100–106. Some of these images, such as those of the ḥarāmayn, became especially popular in another body of devotional texts focusing on the Prophet’s veneration, including al-Jazūlī’s Dalāʾil al-khayrāt, which grew in popularity from the twelfth/eighteenth century.

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and therapeutic vademecums rooted firmly in religious piety.111 Renderings of prophetic relics and select sacred seals—which include the “seal of prophecy” (muhr al-nubuwwa), the “seal of the Great Name of God,” and the “seal of the eye upon God” (ʿayn ʿalā Allāh)—in particular, acquired a double function as props for contemplation and as viable sources of blessing (baraka) and healing (shafāʿa) for those unable to access the originals at the source, thus emerging as the most telling manifestation of this phase of revamped piety.112 A crucial facet of these wide-ranging devotional products is the role played by members of some Sufi orders both in their realization and in sustaining the modalities of pious interaction that underpinned their efficacy, an aspect that is of particular importance for the talisman considered in this article.113 Members of the Naqshbandiyya featured as teachers of prominent patrons and as calligraphers of devotional manuals or were makers themselves.114 Sufi spirituality was also tied to urban crafts and their guild system,115 to the extent that it exerted some influence on and, possibly, control over their products.116 If Evliya Çelebi’s (d. 1093/1682) observation on the thriving business of Istanbul’s guild of seal-makers was still applicable in the twelfth/eighteenth and thirteenth/nineteenth centuries, as the quantity of surviving matrices appears to suggest, then even this activity was probably exposed to the same influence.117 The mystical

111 112

113

114 115 116

117

See Gruber’s detailed study of one of such instances now in the Lilly Library at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Misc. Uncat. II.C.4), “A Pious Cure-All.” Their power, particularly when related to specific individuals such as the prophet Muḥammad, resided on “an indexical chain of contact” with his body “that imbued every mundane or profane materials with a sacrality capable of further transmission”; Flood, “Bodies and Becoming,” 463. Modes centered on the principle of “human physicality as locus and mediator of spiritual presence and power.” Patricia Cox Miller, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 5. Bain, “The Late Ottoman Enʿami Şerif,” appendix II, 347–363. Among the many Sufi-oriented guilds were those of metalworkers such as silversmiths and goldsmiths, as well as paper and bookmakers. Some of these guilds were even led by Sufi shaykhs, imparting a working ethics that often echoed the mechanics of order membership, from the close master-pupil relationship and the value assigned to silsilas (“chains of transmission”) at the heart of specific crafts, to the adoption of Sufi-inspired liturgy in daily activities to guarantee success. See Laleh Bakhtiar, Sufi Expressions of the Mystic Quest (New York: Thames and Hudson 1976), 94, J. Spencer Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 234, and William Rory Dickson, Unveiling Sufism from Manhattan to Mecca (Sheffield: Equinox Publishing, 2017), 131–132. Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnamesi, ed. Robert Dankoff, Seyit Ali Kahraman, Yücel Dağli, and Zekeriya Kurşun (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2001), 1:312. Already in the elev-

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connotations and, at times, explicit Sufi content of some of the seal impressions on our talisman further corroborate the possibility that aspects of their production was informed by Sufi ideas and went so far as to support some of their communal functions. The taʿwīz discussed earlier, for instance, was often explicitly practiced by Sufi shaykhs, whose spiritual training and knowledge equipped them with the tools necessary to produce reliable and authoritative measures against human tribulations. Increasingly recognized by the populace as guides to worldly fulfilment and otherworldly salvation, Sufi leaders and dervishes were even accused by some of having become excessively preoccupied with the production of amulets and talismans in the late Ottoman period,118 a fact that indicates their popularity as authorities for the creation of similar protective devices.119 When we consider the content and tone of the devotional miscellanea mentioned above, their Qurʾanic references, prayers, supererogatory acts, intense remembrance of God, and the invoking of blessings from the Prophet reproduce the standard devotions performed by members of the Sufi orders in the tangible and confined form of the book. These same resources are concentrated on an even smaller surface, the single talisman page considered by this study, its clearest difference being in the semi-mechanical way and impromptu circumstances in which this and others were realized. Both categories of works, however, rely on the long-held belief that the writing, and by extension the printing of sacred verses, prolongs the benefits of the uttered words, making their material application and repetition on another surface an essential aspect of the whole exercise.120 Contents and channels are effectively shared, which suggests that the more expedient, single-sheet talisman is but another manifestation, at the less expensive end of the scale, of the spiritual revivification affecting this part of the Islamic world in the twelfth/eighteenth and

118 119

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enth/seventeenth century these matrices included motifs such as magic squares, select Qurʾanic verses, and some of the healing seals discussed above. Gruber, “Go Wherever You Wish,” 4. Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 238. During his fieldwork in Palestine in the early twentieth century, Tewfik Canaan observed the production of talismans in the proximity of sanctuaries and even mosques by shaykhs equipped with ad hoc seals. Some were even produced to be fumigated during an illness. Seal impressions also occur on images of specific sanctuaries. Khaled Nashef, ed., Ya Kafi Ya Shafi: The Tawfik Canaan Collection of Palestinian Amulets, An Exhibition, October 30, 1998–February 25, 1999 (Al Bireh: Birzeit University, 1998), 33 and cat. no. 161. See also Baha’ al-Ju’beh, “Magic and Talismans: The Tawfiq Canaan Collection of Palestinian Amulets,” Jerusalem Quarterly 22–23 (2005): 103–108. Canaan, “The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans,” 73.

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thirteenth/nineteenth centuries. Objects such as these should thus not be dismissed as devotional distortions or aberrations, but rather be assessed as one of the ways in which everyday piety articulated one’s quest for sustainment and shelter from life’s many inescapable challenges.

Acknowledgments The author expresses her gratitude to Nahla Nassar, Professor Aslı Niyazioğlu, Dr. Liana Saif, and Dr. Farouk Yahya for reading and commenting on previous drafts of this article.

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chapter 13

Bereket Bargains: Islamic Amulets in Today’s “New Turkey” Christiane Gruber

Among the occult arts, amulets have proved especially popular in Turkey over the course of the past decade. They draw upon Ottoman-Islamic talismanic and devotional traditions while extending Mediterranean and Anatolian folk cultures into new commercial and religious terrain. Most important among such amulets are “blessing cards” (bereket kartelası), depictions of the prophet Muḥammad’s relics, and evil-averting glass beads known as “eye beads” (nazar boncuğu). While these talismanic items are widely found in Turkish stores and homes, they are most often offered for sale in “hajj goods” (hac malzemeleri) shops located close to Islamic shrines and mosques, especially the tomb complex of Eyüp in Istanbul (Figure 13.1). These shops of devotional goods cater to pilgrims and visitors who wish to purchase souvenirs and wares, such as prayer garb and rugs, rosaries, and other objects enabling the fulfilment of religious rites. Cheap and portable, blessing cards are believed to convey to their owners and viewers mystic virtue or blessings (Turkish, bereket; Arabic, baraka). Moreover, if made as pocketsize laminated sheets, their rectos tend to depict the Prophet’s verbal icon (hilye), his relics, the “seal of prophecy,” Qurʾanic verses, and devotional prayers to be recited on various occasions. On their versos, their many virtues ( faziletler) are enumerated, including protection from gossiping neighbors and a painful birth. At times, Muḥammad’s relics— especially his “seal of prophecy,” footprint, and sandalprint—are made also as pendants and turban hats, to be worn in direct contact with the body of the faithful. As three-dimensional objects, such amulets pay witness to human urges toward embodiment and physical intimacy, all while reviving older Ottoman Prophet-centered pietistic practices.1 Moreover, the production of eye beads thrives in Turkey, catering to local consumers and foreign tourists. These beads draw upon both Islamic and non-Islamic beliefs concerned

1 On this topic, see Christiane Gruber, The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 252–309.

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Religious-goods shops surrounding the Eyüp shrine complex, Istanbul, August 2015 Photograph by the author

with diverting and neutralizing the evil eye. In recent years, however, they have become increasingly “Islamized” via the replacement of the eye-bead’s pupil with Arabic-script calligraphic inscriptions of Qurʾanic verses. Today’s boom in the talismanic arts, prophetic relics, and eye beads in Turkey has benefited from several factors: a neoliberal market saturated with cheap commodities, the revival of Ottoman cultural and artistic traditions for both local consumers and the tourist trade, and the overt Islamization of the Turkish public sphere as undertaken by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Following official discourse and efforts, this “New Turkey” (Yeni Türkiye) seeks to inculcate religious morality at both the individual and political level, thereby raising a new “pious generation” of committed citizens.2 Over the past few years, the Islamic (and Islamized) occult arts in Turkey respond to these forces at the popular level while also shining new light on the flexible and everevolving nature of the occult arts in Islamic lands. 2 Daren Butler, “With More Islamic Schooling, Erdogan Aims to Reshape Turkey,” Reuters, 25 January 2018, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special‑report/turkey‑erdogan‑educa tion/.

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Blessings in Laminate

Amulets dot Turkey’s landscape of popular Islamic devotion, from the largescale Hacı Bayram mosque complex in Ankara to smaller shrines across the country. In Istanbul proper, the neighborhood of Eyüp hosts wholesale shops of religious goods that surround the shrine complex of Abū Ayyūb (Eyüp) al-Anṣārī, the prophet Muḥammad’s standard-bearer who is believed to have taken part in the first Umayyad siege of Constantinople, in 54–58/674–678. Upon the Ottoman conquest of the city in 857/1453, the miraculous discovery of this Muslim warrior’s tomb helped Islamize the city. Thereafter, the Eyüp neighborhood was further consecrated through Ottoman building activities, pilgrimage practices, and political rituals, most significant among them visitations to the Prophet’s stone footprint preserved in Eyüp’s tomb and the sultans’ accession ceremonies, which included the “girding of the sword” at the shrine. Eyüp remains the religious heart of Istanbul throughout the year, in particular during the holy month of Ramadan.3 Eyüp is a place where officially sanctioned (and largely Sunni) forms of Islamic practice coexist, and at times collide, with vernacular manifestations of devotion. For these reasons, activities in and around the shrine have been a matter of contention for some time. For example, warning signs inform pilgrims and visitors not to tie votive ribbons, light candles, or make offerings at the sacred site. Besides articulating the proper rules governing shrine visitation, various state institutions—such as the Eyüp Municipality and the Ministry of Religious Affairs—have purged the shrine’s surroundings of objectionable people and articles, including sellers of charms, candles, and other items of “superstition” (as occurred in 1994).4 In Timur Hammond’s fitting expression, these “matters of the mosque”5 attempt to delineate and restrict Islam’s fluid assemblage of beliefs, practices, and objects.

3 For an overview of the Eyüp neighborhood and shrine complex, see Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, “Eyüp,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed.; Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul: Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision, and the Construction of the Ottoman Capital (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 45–51; and Tülay Artan, ed., Eyüp. Dün-bugün (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1994); for a historical-ethnographic study of the shrine during the modern and contemporary periods in particular, see Timur Hammond, “Mediums of Belief: Muslim Place Making in 20th-Century Turkey” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2016). 4 Timur Hammond, “Matters of the Mosque: Changing Configurations of Buildings and Belief in an Istanbul District,” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 18, no. 6 (2014): 684. 5 Hammond, “Matters of the Mosque,” throughout.

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While such efforts aim to regulate faith and its material dimensions, more vernacular forms of religious life—that is, of “lived Islam”—continue to thrive. Around the shrine of Eyüp, charms and candles are indeed gone, but in their place have appeared other devotional paraphernalia, many of which tread a careful line between what is deemed official religion and what is censured as “superstition.” Most widely found are the portable blessing cards (bereket kartelası), which contain religious texts and images printed on laminated paper (Figure 13.2). In shape, size, and format, many of these hand-held cards closely follow the format of Turkish state-issued identity cards (nüfus cüzdanı) that were used before their biometric updating in 2016. The terminology used for these cards—that is, kartela, which also means “paint swatch”—highlights the fact that these vademecum Islamic amulets come in a panoply of colors. The promise of variety largely delivers. As can be seen in Figure 13.2, just one of these boxes contains a wide range of blessing cards, whose contents include amuletic designs, healing verses from the Qurʾan (Kur’an’daki şifa ayetleri), the bilingual Turkish-Arabic enumeration of God’s Beautiful Names (esma-ül hüsna), meal or food prayers (sofra/yemek duaları), and the basmala. One card also highlights the merits of writing down the names of the Seven Sleepers of the Cave (Ashab-ı Kehf ), which are considered especially effective in staving off headaches, children’s crying, and catastrophic fire.6 Finally, at the bottom of the box in Figure 13.2, an upside-down bright green sticker inscribed with God’s and Muḥammad’s names asks its viewer: “What have you done for God today?” (Bugün Allah için ne yaptın?). This rhetorical question encourages its pious beholder to perform daily good deeds on behalf of the Lord via a Turkish verbatim translation of a common Christian supplication. This mélange of Islamic devotional paper goods is eclectic, as it blends excerpts from the Qurʾan and Islamic occult arts with an entreaty drawn from Christian religious rhetoric. Blessing cards are a new phenomenon, appearing on the market in about 2011. At the time, a laminated verbal icon—or hilye—of the prophet Muḥammad was issued on the occasion of his birthday (mevlid) celebrations on

6 On the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and the incorporation of their names into amulets that are considered especially protective against disaster in the home, on the road, and at sea, see Venetia Porter, “Amulets Inscribed with the Names of the ‘Seven Sleepers’ of Ephesus in the British Museum,” in Word of God, Art of Man: The Qurʾan and its Creative Expressions, ed. Fahmida Suleman (Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2007), 123–134.

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A box of blessing cards (bereket kartelası) offered for sale at a religious-goods shop next to the Eyüp shrine complex, Istanbul, August 2016 Photograph by the author

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A laminated “radiant document” (nurani belgesi) of the prophet Muḥammad in the size and format of a Turkish state-issued identity card. Laminated paper. 10.3 × 7.7 cm Item purchased near the Eyüp shrine in August 2015 and now in the author’s collection

12 Rabiʿ I (Figure 13.3).7 While some cards identify this type of latter-day hilye as a personal identification card (nüfus cüzdanı), others, such as the example illustrated in Figure 13.3, bear the description “radiant document” (nurani belgesi).8 7 Numerous articles about Muḥammad’s hilye card can be found on Turkish news websites by searching for “Hz. Muhammed’e nüfus cüzdanı.” For a critical discussion of these types of Turkish identity cards and state-sponsored religious practices in Turkey today, see Yılmaz Özdil, “İnsanda biraz utanma olur,” Sözcü, 2017, http://www.sozcu.com.tr/2017/yazarlar/ yilmaz‑ozdil/insanda‑biraz‑utanma‑olur‑1743213/. 8 The expression nurani belgesi is linguistically awkward, suggesting that the card’s manufacturer was not fully conversant in either Arabic or Ottoman Turkish.

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Often, Muḥammad’s seal impression and a roundel of his calligraphed name fill the upper left corner of the card, in lieu of a Turkish citizen’s photographic portrait. The Kaʿba and a rose accompany this synecdochal and scripted “portrait” of Muḥammad, offering viewers further visual allegories for the Prophet through a sacred geographic marker and heavenly scented flower—a mode of iconotextual representation that effectively skirts the thorny issue of figural depiction.9 In addition to these visuals, the front of the card provides textual information about Muḥammad’s parents and grandparents, his birth and death places and dates, and the place and date of his appointment to prophecy (peygamberlik). On the back, the Prophet’s “radiant document” also notes his civil status as married; his religion as Islam; his tribe as Qurayshi; the color of his face as “radiant” (nurani) and “glowing” (parlak); his eyes and hair as black; and his size as not too tall and not too short—all physical descriptors traditionally found in Islamic hilye texts and Ottoman hilye paintings and panels.10 The identity card’s number (kimlik no.) also is given as 124000-313-25-5-1, which stands for the number of monotheistic prophets (124,000), apostles (313), Muslim prophets (25), leading Abrahamic prophets (Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, and Muḥammad), and the last prophet of all, Muḥammad. Through charged numerical symbolism, this contemporary Turkish “radiant document” serves to celebrate Muḥammad’s Prophetic pedigree and supreme standing in a long line of illustrious apostles sent by God to humankind. Once purchased, these mass-produced items are carried in pockets and hung on walls in the hopes of securing protection and blessings to individuals, homes, stores, and restaurants. Just like monumental calligraphic hilyes, 9

10

On Ottoman traditions of describing and depicting the Prophet as a rose, see Christiane Gruber, “The Rose of the Prophet: Floral Metaphors in Late Ottoman Devotional Art,” in Envisioning Islamic Art and Architecture: Essays in Honor of Renata Holod, ed. David Roxburgh (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 227–254; and on the hilye as an iconotextual design, see İrvin Cemil Schick, “The Content of Form: Islamic Calligraphy between Text and Representation,” in Sign and Design: Script as Image in Cross-Cultural Perspective (300–1600CE), ed. Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak and Jeffrey Hamburger (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2016), 173–194; and İrvin Cemil Schick, “The Iconicity of Islamic Calligraphy in Turkey,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53–54 (Spring–Autumn 2008): 211–224. On Ottoman hilyes, see Faruk Taşkale and Hüseyin Gündüz, Hz. Muhammed’in Özellikleri: Hat sanatında hilye-i şerîfe/Characteristics of the Prophet Muhammed in Calligraphic Art (Istanbul: Kültür Yayınları, 2006); Mohamed Zakariya, “The Hilye of the Prophet Muhammad,” Seasons (Autumn–Winter 2003–2004): 13–22; and Nabil Safwat, The Art of the Pen: Calligraphy of the 14th to 20th Centuries. Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, vol. 5 (New York: Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1992), 46–68.

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these portable verbal icons serve as meditative devices to help viewers recall and meditate upon the Prophet’s presence and being. Ever since the eleventh/seventeenth century, calligraphic hilyes have also functioned as talismans in Ottoman and Turkish lands. The reasons for their perceived prophylactic power are two-fold: first, like the Qurʾan, the Prophet himself is considered a prime “talismanic force,”11 and, second, a hadith (of opaque origin) records Muḥammad encouraging his followers to contemplate his resemblance (ḥilya) after his death in order to “feel as if they have seen me.” This hadith goes on to encourage believers to kiss and rub the Prophet’s countenance (ḥilya) to secure protection from hardship and disease.12 Another laminated hilye card, offered for purchase in Eyüp in August 2016, expands upon these details. On its verso, it enumerates the noble icon’s virtue (Hilye-i Şerif’in fazileti).13 The text encourages the owner to read, look at, and carry this Prophetic talisman in order to activate its dormant powers: “Whosoever looks at it from below with love will be protected from hell and the tortures of the grave. Whosoever carries it at their side will be granted a pavilion in heaven by God. Whosoever carries it above them will be saved from all disasters. And whosoever reads it will be granted what they desire within forty days.” These modern, miniature hilyes thus function as visual aids for pious contemplation and as talismans containing a mystic virtue that is thought to be unleashed by ritualized reading, viewing, and bearing. What are the origins of such laminated blessing cards, how are they used in everyday life, and from what forces are they believed to protect individuals in today’s Turkey? Although they seem novel, they represent an outgrowth of pre-modern Islamic occult traditions as these intersect with late Ottoman calligraphic arts. Moreover, from the mid-fourteenth/twentieth century on, many similar postcards were issued as colored prints. These often depict the Prophet’s hilye, Qurʾanic chapters and verses deemed especially protective, and other talismanic devices. Some of these postcards are imprinted with the expression, “May your holiday be blessed” (Bayramınız kutlu olsun). Some stamped postcards that survive today include the writers’ handwritten notes wishing their addressees a happy Bayram or ʿĪd al-Fiṭr (Feast of Breaking the Fast), which marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

11 12 13

W.E. Staples, “Muhammad, a Talismanic Force,” The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 57, no. 1 (1940): 63–70. Taşkale and Gündüz, Hz. Muhammed’in Özellikleri, 18. This card, now in the author’s collection, depicts the hilye surrounded by basmalas on its recto.

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While such items were and are given as gifts to celebrate the end of Ramadan, the Prophet’s birthday, and other Islamic holidays, they also circulate outside of religious festivities. Indeed, these blessing cards can be acquired or offered at any time during the calendar year and so are widely found in quotidian settings: for instance, nestled in an individual’s pocket or wallet, affixed to the front and rear windows of cars, taxis, and buses, or hung on the walls of homes, stores, and restaurants. These light, portable, and easy-to-use amuletic items thus prosper in diverse contexts, from the personal to the domestic and commercial. Whether carried on the body or pasted to a surface, they are believed to protect from disease and disaster, avert the evil eye, and strengthen vulnerable areas such as a vehicle’s windows or a building’s doors, which are thought particularly susceptible to negative energies and dangerous forces. Not infrequently, various blessing cards and laminated magnets are accumulated for optimal talismanic effect. Such is the case for a popular restaurant in the Beyoğlu area of Istanbul, where amuletic cards and magnets ornament a wall behind the food dishes laid out before customers (Figure 13.4). From the top row to the bottom appear a beautifully calligraphed basmala; the “eye verse” (nazar ayeti), the Qurʾanic verse (68:51) that mentions the harmful eyes of enemies, topped by an evil-averting blue eye bead (nazar boncuğu); a swirling disk of thirty-five basmalas said to be the “means to prosperity and blessing” (rızık ve berekete vesiledir); a magnet containing three Qurʾanic excerpts, that is, the “ant-blessing prayer” (karınca bereket duası), which contains invocations to God, the Prophet, and the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, the “eye verse” (nazar ayeti), and the “Throne Verse” (ayetel kürsi), the latter a Qurʾanic passage that praises God’s omnipotence (2:255). These verses—most especially āyat al-kursī—count among the Qurʾan’s pre-eminent “verses of protection” (āyāt al-ḥifẓ).14 For these reasons, they are believed to provide blessings and protection, especially against the evil eye. These talismans highlight the widespread paraliturgical use of the Qurʾan against malefic intention in Turkey, a practice that stretches back centuries to the holy text—itself God’s divine speech offer14

Āyat al-kursī is widely recited as a cure-all formula (Francesca Leoni, “Sacred Words, Sacred Power: Qurʾanic and Pious Phrases as Sources of Healing and Protection,” in Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural, ed. Francesca Leoni [Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2016], 57). For instance, during the early decades of the fourteenth/twentieth century, Bess Allen Donaldson recorded Iranian practices involving āyat al-kursī, such as the bending and unbending of the fingers of both hands in order to follow the rhythm of the verse’s ten pauses (Bess Allen Donaldson “The Koran as Magic,” Muslim World 27 [1937]: 264). James Robson recorded the use of āyat al-kursī to quiet crying children and to cure epilepsy (James Robson, “Magic Cures in Popular Islam,” Muslim World 24 [1934]: 34 and 36).

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Cards and magnets displaying a variety of Islamic amulets, affixed to a wall in a restaurant located in Beyoğlu, Istanbul Photograph taken by the author in January 2018

ing both “healing and mercy” (17:82). These amulets are based on the scriptural foundations of the faith, and thus “commonly performed talismanic uses of the Qurʾan stem not from a deviation from the Islamic tradition but arise at the center of its religious authority.”15

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Kathleen Malone O’Connor, “Popular and Talismanic Uses of the Qurʾān,” in Encyclopaedia

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Below these textual talismans drawn from Holy Scripture, the middle magnet incorporates several amuletic texts and images, among them the “eye” and “throne” verses flanking representations of Muḥammad’s traces and personal effects, in this instance his foot- and sandalprints, strand of hair, noble-seal impression, and holy mantle. These Prophetic marks and items are believed to channel the Prophet’s baraka, a theme that will be discussed in greater detail shortly. Also included in this middle magnet is a wheel-like diagram containing God’s supreme name (Allāh), from which thirty-five basmalas pirouette in unison. This graphic rendering suggests that the power of the one God pivots outwardly, like rays of sun. For its part, the basmala often is written as an incipit to a document— including all Qurʾanic suras—and uttered aloud by an individual embarking on an activity or endeavor. As an opening and easing praise-formula whose genealogy stretches back to holy scripture, it is believed to carry beneficial properties. Its manifold repetition was (and, in some places, still is) believed to act as an antidote to poison.16 In contemporary Turkey, many websites, booklets, and amulets describe its numerous merits ( faziletler).17 For example, one blessing card depicting the thirty-five basmala wheel includes on its verso the following explanation: “The benefits of the thirty-five noble basmala: If the basmala is written thirty-five times and hung in the home or workplace, the blessing of that place increases. The earnings of that place increase. That place will be protected from jinns, the evil of Satan, fire, and malicious eyes.”18 That the basmala is considered especially effective in countering poison and protecting a workplace from fire while augmenting its financial income would certainly be a proposition appealing to a restaurateur. Moving down the rows of talismans, the lowermost magnet displays ninetynine of God’s “beautiful names” rendered in Arabic script, next to which appears the Prophet’s “noble countenance” (hilye-i şerif ). The iconotextual hilye serves to recall the Prophet’s physical and moral features while also channeling his talismanic force, while the enumeration of the names of God is believed to carry with it numerous advantages, among them securing entry into

16 17 18

of the Qurʾān, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe: http://dx.doi.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1163/ 1875‑3922_q3_EQCOM_00152. Robson, “Magic Cures in Popular Islam,” 36. See, among others, “Besmele’nin Faziletleri,” Dua Hazinesi, http://www.dualarhazinesi .com/2014/08/besmelenin‑faziletleri.html. 35 besmele-i şerifin fazileti: Besmele 35 defa yazılıp eve veya iş yerine asılırsa o yerin bereketi artar. İş yerinin kazancı çoğalır. Cin, şeytan şerrinden, yangından ve kem gözlerden korunmuş olur. Blessing card offered for sale in a religious goods shop in İzmir in June 2016 and now in author’s collection.

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Paradise.19 Taken together, these names are intended to capture the unbounded totality and supreme power of God through his many honorific epithets, several of which praise his ability to provide, preserve, and restore. These and many other adjectival names praise God’s paramount ability to guide, protect, and heal the faithful. As a textual product, the asmāʾ al-ḥusnā magnet thus appears as if a “visual dhikr”—or pious recollection in pictorial form—insofar as it invites devotees to perform prayerful litanies (sg. wird).20 As a grapheme, moreover, these ninety-nine names occupy single cells that depict a checkerboard, in a manner similar to the magic square, itself a staple of Islamic occult arts.21 Although these many amulets fall squarely within Islamic traditions, to what extent do they reflect their viewer’s religious sentiments and worldview? To answer this question, I interviewed the restaurant’s owner—to whom I shall refer by the pseudonym “Iskender”—in August 2015. Iskender informed me that his father gave these amulets to him and personally placed them in his restaurant in 2012. Echoing a practice in his home village on the Black Sea, the placing of these Islamic amulets was a gesture, from father to son, wishing the restaurant protection and prosperity. According to Iskender, running a restaurant is fraught with perils and uncertainties: for example, a kitchen fire can consume one’s investment, while the rising cost of foodstuffs erodes the business’s profits. More recently, especially during and after the Gezi uprisings of 2013, the Taksim area has witnessed police violence and a harsh economic downturn. Iskender has thus had to cope with the occasional closing of his restaurant during tear-gas attacks. Additionally, in our COVID-19 pandemic era, the precarity of his business must be more acute than ever. This adverse turn of events for the restaurateur requires some extra hope, better luck, and greater protection. To this end, Iskender told me in 2015, the Qurʾanic amulets may be of symbolic assistance—just like the miniature Qurʾan hanging in the kitchen and the garlic suspended above the restaurant’s entrance door.22

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Al-Ghazālī, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God, trans. David Burrell and Nazih Daher (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1992), 172. On the expression “visual dhikr,” see O’Connor, “Popular and Talismanic Uses of the Qurʾān”; and Leoni, “Sacred Words, Sacred Power,” 65. On the magic square (wafq), see Schuyler Cammann, “Islamic and Indian Magic Squares Part 1,”History of Religions 8, no. 3 (1969): 181–209; Schuyler Cammann, “Islamic and Indian Magic Squares Part 2,” History of Religions 8, no. 4 (1969b): 271–299; Tewfik Canaan, “The Decipherment of Arabic Talismans,” in Magic and Divination in Early Islam, ed. Emilie Savage-Smith (Aldershot UK and Burlington VT: Ashgate Variorum, 2004), 125–178; and Bink Hallum’s chapter in the present volume. The garlic is believed to act as a dispeller of negative energy and disease in Islamic Proph-

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For Iskender, however, the Islamic amulets are of paramount importance. In his estimation, the uttering of positive prayers (duas) must wield more power than belief in the negative nazar (evil eye). Here, Iskender draws a distinction between licit and illicit magic, and, potentially, between Islamic and nonIslamic belief systems. Although he shows a clear preference for identifiably “Islamic” amulets, he admits that he does not speak, read, or write Arabic, and their contents therefore remain accessible to him only in Turkish translation, if available. Despite these items’ system of religious reference, Iskender also tells me that he does not consider himself particularly devout. As a largely secular individual, he highlights the fact that he does not fast during the month of Ramadan and enjoys drinking alcohol, especially with his father—the very person who clad the restaurant in a shield of Islamic amulets. Thus, for Iskender, these laminated cards and magnets do not—and, on account of the language barrier, cannot—prompt him to utter Arabic prayers drawn from the Qurʾan. Instead, he notes, they remind him to be “honest” (dürüst) and to do “good” (iyilik) in his everyday life. They thus act as an encouragement to ethical behavior, a code of conduct that he takes seriously in his personal and professional life. After all, he tells me, he gives all his leftover food to his employees, the homeless, and the street dogs and cats of Beyoğlu. While it might be difficult to detect a particular ordering principle in this case, Iskender’s approach to amulets—whether these are defined as “Islamic” or not—proves unexceptional. Many people in Turkey have recourse to protective devices through their dynamic inscription into a religious tradition, even when rationalist discourses also contribute a dominant paradigm for identity formation. As Iskender’s example shows, the Qurʾan can still hold pride of place, even in more secular settings. To maximize its baraka, it can be combined freely with miscellaneous apotropaia, including garlic, eye beads, and even cult images of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (d. 1357/1938), the founding father of the secular Republic of Turkey. Consequently, to draw too strict a distinction between “Islamic” and “nonIslamic” amulets would skirt a more complex reality, in which these various amuletic devices do not merely comprise a hodgepodge of material stuff. More significantly, they reveal that Qurʾanic and prophetic talismanry can thrive

etic medicine and Anatolian vernacular traditions. Although it caused noxious breath, garlic was nevertheless used as a curative substance in Islamic traditions of Prophetic medicine (al-ṭibb al-nabawī). See, e.g., Cyril Elgood, “Tibb-ul-Nabbi or Medicine of the Prophet,” Osiris 14 (1962): 76 (on garlic relieving the pains of a cold or easing the sting of a scorpion bite), and 191, no. 123 (for the advice, “Eat garlic, for in it lies the cure for seventy diseases”).

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alongside vernacular beliefs and laic imagery. As Heinko Henkel reminds us, “Muslimness, and the discourses regarding it, are hinged to only some aspects of the heterogeneous realm of material culture.”23 Those aspects and objects not necessarily encompassed by the Islamic tradition nevertheless are believed to help harness positive forces and, like garlic, repel the undesirable.

2

Prophetic Baraka: Muḥammad’s Traces and Effects

The production of blessing cards has accelerated in recent years. Since 2015, many of them depict the Prophet’s relics on their rectos and display Turkishlanguage descriptions of their merits ( faydalar) and virtues ( faziletler) on their versos. While many of these innovative cards include the representation of a single Prophetic trace or object—such as Muḥammad’s foot- or sandalprint and his “noble seal” (mühr-ü şerif )—others depict them as a larger collective, that is, as a sweeping metonymy for the Prophet’s presence and being. Much like the hilye, which invites an imagining of Muḥammad through text arranged in diagrammatic form, these types of representation deftly circumvent figural representation. The contemporary depiction of the Prophet’s traces and effects also revives the past by drawing upon older Ottoman Prophet-centered devotional and artistic traditions, while propelling Islamic occult arts toward new, and increasingly lucrative, horizons. The Prophet’s “noble seal” (mühr-ü şerif ) is found on several blessing cards, including the so-called “radiant documents” emulating the older format of state-issued identity cards (as in Figure 13.3). On such cards, it also constitutes a subject unto itself, with the seal’s inscribed outline shown on the recto and its range of virtues enumerated on the verso (Figure 13.5). Most often, the seal contains Arabic inscriptions that provide the shahāda—the Muslim witnessing of the faith declaring that “There is no god but God, and Muḥammad is His Prophet”—or, more succinctly, “Muḥammad is the Messenger of God.” The latter is the case in Figure 13.3, where the Prophet’s status as God’s envoy is written in a lapidary script in emulation of the seal impression left by his signet ring.24

23 24

Heiko Henkel, “The Location of Islam: Inhabiting Istanbul in a Muslim Way,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 1 (2007): 65. For a discussion of Muḥammad’s seal, see Venetia Porter et al., Arabic and Persian Seals and Amulets in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 2011), 1–2; and Christiane Gruber, “ ‘Go Wherever You Wish, for Verily You are Well Protected’: Seal Designs in Late Ottoman Amulet Scrolls and Prayer Books,” in Visions of Enchantment: Occultism, Spirituality, and Visual Culture, ed. Daniel Zamani and Judith Noble (London: Fulgur, 2019), 23–35.

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figure 13.5

Laminated blessing card (bereket kartelası) of the prophet Muḥammad’s “noble seal” (right) and its virtues (left), offered for sale at a religious-goods shop next to the Eyüp shrine complex, Istanbul, August 2016. Laminated paper. 11.4 × 7.5 cm Item now in the author’s collection

The question of their authenticity aside, Muḥammad’s seal and examples of its impression on several letters attributed to his hand are today preserved in Topkapı Palace, Istanbul.25 These locally-held “blessed trusts” (mübarek emanetler) associated with the Prophet no doubt inspired these amuletic designs on blessing cards.26 On the one hand, Muḥammad’s “noble seal” was the impression left by his signet ring, while, on the other, his “seal of prophecy” was a fleshy protuberance located between his shoulder blades, whose circular shape was likened to a pigeon’s egg or curtain button. This mark left on the Prophet’s 25 26

Hilmi Aydın, Pavilion of the Sacred Relics: The Sacred Trusts, Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul (Istanbul: Kaynak Kitaplığı), 98–100. It also has inspired collegiate-styled silver rings of “the Prophet’s Noble Seal” that are widely available to a Turkish male clientele. For example, see the various rings (identified as Allah Resulü Muhammed Mührü Şerif gümüş erkek yüzük) offered for sale at gittigidiyor (the Turkish eBay) at: http://www.gittigidiyor.com/arama/?k=m%C3%BChr%C3 %BC+%C5%9Ferif+y%C3%BCz%C3%BCk. The Prophet’s seal impression also appears as the central logogram in the flag of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In the flag and other ISIS products, it functions as an iconotextual device representing ISIS militants as “armed” with the Prophet’s authority, inheritance, strength, perhaps even blessing.

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body, Islamic textual sources inform us, allowed the Christian monk Baḥīrā to recognize Muḥammad’s apostleship well before the beginnings of revelation. In addition, various authors stress its Prophetic baraka. For example, in his book compiling statements about the physical features and moral characteristics of the Prophet (shamāʾil al-nabī), al-Tirmidhī (d. 279/892), a pupil of the famous hadith compiler al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870), records its ability to cure pain upon viewing, convert to Islam upon rubbing, and forgive sins upon kissing.27 The seal depicted in Figure 13.5 probably represents the corporeal trace of Muḥammad’s prophecy, not the impression left by his signet ring. Inscribed with the complete shahāda, its virtues are enumerated on its back. The following advice, attributed to al-Tirmidhī (= Tirmizi), is imparted: “Whoever has performed ablutions and looks at the noble seal in the morning will be protected until evening, whoever looks at it at the beginning of the month will be protected until the end of the month, whoever looks at it when leaving a place will be protected until his return. He will pass prosperous and blessed times. If someone dies within a year of looking at the noble seal, God willing, he will cross over to the Afterworld with faith.”28 These words of wisdom about visually unlocking the seal’s baraka are credited to al-Tirmidhī and are found also in Ottoman amuletic depictions of the seal of the Prophet made between the tenth/sixteenth and thirteenth/nineteenth centuries.29 As a consequence, the ritualized viewing and interacting with such amuletic images are represented as emerging from hadith compilation and hence rooted in long-lasting Sunni

27

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Al-Tirmidhī, Shamāʾil al-Nabī, ed. Māhir Yāsīn Faḥl (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 2000), 42–46 (bāb mā jāʾa fī khatam al-nubuwwa); and Hidayat Hosein, “A Translation of AshShama’ʾil of Tirmizi,” Islamic Culture (July 1933): 401–404. The Turkish text reads in full: “Mührü Şerif’in Fâzileti: Her kim abdestli olarak sabahtan Mühr-ü Şerif’e baksa, akşama kadar, ayın evvelinde baksa ayın sonuna kadar, yola çıkarken baksa, gittiği yerden dönünceye kadar, kendisine geçen zamanlar hayırlı ve mübarek olur. Müfrü [sic] Şerif’e baktığı sene içerisinde ölürse, inşallah iman ile ahirete göçmüş olur. Tirmizi.” Among other things, see the minute Ottoman thirteenth/nineteenth-century depiction of the hilye of the Prophet (on its recto) and his seal of apostleship (on its verso) now held in the Topkapı Palace Library, G.Y. 1500. The seal includes a citation of al-Tirmidhī encouraging its viewers to look at the seal day and night in order to secure protection from a range of calamities (Aşk-ı Nebi: Doğumunun 1443. Yılında Hz. Peygamber / Love for the Prophet: The Prophet Muhammad on the 1443th Anniversary of his Birth [Istanbul: Kültür Sanat Basımevi, 2014], 128, cat. no. 23). For an example dated to the tenth/sixteenth to twelfth/eighteenth century, see Safwat, The Art of the Pen, 48–50, cat. no. 25; and Francesca Leoni, ed., Power and Protection: Islamic Art and the Supernatural (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2016), 85, cat. no. 94.

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Muslim belief and practice—itself carried over, innovated upon, and passed down by Ottoman and Turkish patrons and artists. Other contemporary amulets depicting Muḥammad’s relics and traces are likewise represented as carrying prophylactic powers and being anchored in long-standing Islamic and Ottoman image-based devotional practices. Today, the Prophet’s blessed trusts are shown singly or collectively, or as a combination of the two. As such, they are understood as adhering to an acceptable “Sunna” and promoted as a “normative” form of piety, especially in today’s Turco-Muslim cultural context and religious worldview. It is widely believed that their intercessory power (tawaṣṣul)—especially when combined with ritualized behaviors, prayers, and petitionary utterances—help to reach a desired goal. As object intermediaries laden with talismanic virtue, such items essentially promise Muslim believers rewards for pious thought, speech, and behavior. Among them, one card (printed by Kabe Basım) that was offered for sale in Eyüp in 2016 depicts on its recto a selection of Muḥammad’s symbols and relics (Figure 13.6), while its verso includes an outline of his sandalprint filled with Arabic prayers and accompanied by a Turkish explanatory text. Beginning first with the recto, the Prophet appears as if an “absent presence”30 through several of his attributes, symbols, and emblems. At the center of the card appears the green dome of his house/mosque in Medina—itself a geographical marker of his Prophetic career and place of inhumation—imprinted with his “noble seal.” The words “Allāh” and “Muḥammad” in Arabic flank the dome’s finial and function as calligrams that are readily legible even to those who cannot read the Arabic script. Around this central medallion, moving clockwise from the upper right corner, appear Muḥammad’s seal, its impression on green paper, and its container; the impression of his foot (ayak izi) on a silver plaque meant for hanging on a wall; his leather sandal (nal); his black mantle (hırka) wrapped in green cloth and nestled in a gold box; a strand of hair from his beard (sakal) mounted in wax and preserved in a pellucid reliquary; his water cup (kadeh), which was strengthened with silver plating during the tenth/sixteenth century; and a jeweled container and small glass vial containing soil from his grave (kabir toprağı). In addition to recalling Muḥammad through an encyclopedic approach to his traces, places, and relics, this blessing card copies the color illustrations

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Expression borrowed from Pierre Centlivres and Micheline Centlivres-Demont, “Une présence absente: symboles et images populaires du Prophète Mahomet,” in Derrière les images, ed. Marc-Olivier Gonseth et al. (Neuchâtel: Musée d’Ethnographie, 1998), 139–170.

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Laminated blessing card (bereket kartelası) of the prophet Muḥammad’s relics, offered for sale at a religious-goods shop next to the Eyüp shrine complex, Istanbul, August 2016. Laminated paper. 9.5 × 6.5 cm Item now in the author’s collection

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of each object as reproduced in Hilmi Aydın’s 2004 publication on the sacred trusts held in the Topkapı Palace Museum.31 These images thus not only record locally held prophetic relics but also borrow directly from a scholarly publication that is lavishly illustrated with color images. On the one hand, the sacred trusts per se form the object of local and tourist pious visitation to the palace museum (and the ceremonial washing of the Prophet’s mantle still today counts among Ramadan festivities for a small group of special guests). On the other hand, Aydın’s publication elucidates these relics’ meanings and uses in Ottoman political and religious life, recording, in particular, how they were collected, preserved, touched, kissed, washed, worn, and prayed over so as to activate their protective powers and baraka.32 However inadvertently, the publication also appears to have triggered popular laminated print copies of these relics, along with a revivification of associated beliefs and practices. The Prophet’s sandalprint and footprint hold pride of place in contemporary Turkish blessing cards and other religious paraphernalia. For instance, the card illustrated in Figure 13.6 includes an outline of Muḥammad’s sandalprint— filled with simple Arabic-language blessings addressed to Abraham, the Prophet, and his family, below which a short Turkish-language “how-to” text describes how to unleash the image’s apotropaic powers. The text promises that: Whosoever carries the noble sandal on his person will be protected, by the permission of God, from the evil targeting him. If it is placed in a house, the house will be protected from fire and theft. If it is above a woman, it will ease childbirth by the grace of God. If carried, it improves one’s livelihood and blessings. And whosoever continuously carries it will be granted visitation (ziyaret) to the Prophet’s grave.

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Aydın, Pavilion of the Sacred Relics, 101 (the seal and its container), 122 (the silver footprint), 127 (the leather sandal); 54 (the mantle); 103 (the beard hair), 140–141 (the cup), and 196–197 (the soil containers). For a general discussion of Muḥammad’s relics in Islamic and Ottoman traditions, see Süleyman Beyoğlu, “The Ottomans and the Islamic Sacred Relics,” in The Great OttomanTurkish Civilization, ed. Kemal Çiçek (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye, 2000), 4:36–44; Josef Meri, “Relics of Piety and Power in Medieval Islam,” Past and Present 206, suppl. 5 (2010): 97– 120; and Brannon Wheeler, “Collecting the Dead Body of the Prophet Muhammad: Hair, Nails, Sweat and Spit,” in The Image of the Prophet Between Ideal and Ideology: A Scholarly Investigation, ed. Christiane Gruber and Avinoam Shalem (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 45– 61.

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Another blessing card of the sandalprint made in 2015 makes similar recommendations: If the depiction (resim) is next to a person, they are protected from assault, defeat by enemies, the evil of satans, and the evil eye (nazar). If it is held in the pregnant woman’s right hand, God will ease childbirth. Magic and spells (sihir ve büyüler) cannot have an effect on those who carry it. Whoever carries it continuously will be granted visitation to the Prophet’s grave. They will see the Prophet in their dreams. They won’t lose in battle, a ship won’t sink, and a house won’t burn. And if its owner needs help with any illness, they will undoubtedly receive healing (şifa). Time and again, devotees are encouraged to carry, wear, or hang an image of the Prophet’s sandalprint in order to counter evil, disaster, and disease and to reap benefits, cures, and blessings—above all, visiting the prophet Muḥammad at his grave and seeing him in a dream vision. This belief in the potential protection afforded by the sandalprint is by no means new or unique in Islamic lands; rather, it stretches back centuries to the many copies and calques of Muḥammad’s sandal(s) (sg. naʿl, dual naʿlayn), which were believed to extend the baraka of the original object. Moreover, in late Ottoman contexts in particular, the sandalprint was promoted as a legal or acceptable (mashrūʿ) symbol of Sunni learning and as a talisman brimming with special properties (khawāṣṣ), virtues ( fawāʾid), and benefits (manāfīʿ).33 Today, the Prophet’s sandalprint appears in many formats and media, including as a metal pendant and magnet or embroidered as a chic, minimalist design on tote bags and turban hats (called kufis). Widely sold in Eyüp’s religiousgoods shops, the turban hats come in various sizes and colors, the sandalprint ornament embroidered in variously tinted threads. Adult customers often purchase the smaller hats and offer them as gifts to young males embarking on their first studies in religion, Arabic, or the Qurʾan. One can easily distinguish these young pupils by their sandal-printed turban hats as they wait 33

On Muḥammad’s sandal, see Anastase-Marie de St. Elie, “Le culte rendu par les Musulmans aux sandales de Mahomet,” Anthropos 5 (1910): 363–366, and Christiane Gruber, “A Pious Cure-All: The Ottoman Illustrated Prayer Manual in the Lilly Library,” in The Islamic Manuscript Tradition: Ten Centuries of Islamic Book Arts in Indiana University Collections, ed. Christiane Gruber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 136–137. See also the Ottoman Turkish sandal poem dated 1872 CE reproduced in Hilmi Aydın, Hırka-i saadet dairesi ve mukaddes emanetler (Istanbul: Kaynak Kitaplığı, 2004), 130–135, whose verses promise cure and healing (e.g., p. 133: “Kimi cümle derdine ister deva / Cümlesi de derdine buldu şifa”).

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figure 13.7

Boys wearing turban hats decorated with the prophet Muḥammad’s sandalprint, Eyüp shrine complex, Istanbul, August 2016 Photograph by the author

in line to attend their weekly classes in the Eyüp complex (Figure 13.7). In such cases, the sandalprint turban hats suggest visually that the students must place their heads below the Prophet’s footwear—itself an expression and act of humility—and also that they must follow in Muḥammad’s steps as they turn to learning the core teachings and principles of the Prophetic Sunna. If, along the way, the sandal ornament should provide these pious, studious youngsters with some extra blessings in their endeavors, then all the better. Turkish adult males also wear sandalprint turban hats to complete their own overtly religious looks and outfits, which often include a beard and loosely fitting shirts and pants. On July 12, 2017, while I was waiting for a cab at the Topkapı Palace taxi stop, a man wearing such recognizably “Muslim garb”34 and sporting a turban hat rode his motorcycle to the taxi stop to deliver food to its drivers. I noticed the sandalprint ornament crowning his headgear and asked him how and why he came into the hat’s possession; he informed me that he

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On Islamic vestimentary systems and the crafting of “Muslim looks,” see Emma Tarlo, Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2010).

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purchased it himself at a religious-goods shop in Eyüp. He was drawn especially to its beautiful decoration (süsleme). He explained that he believed that placing his head under Muḥammad’s sandalprint represents an act of devotion, a “reason” (sebeb) to live, work, and carry on, despite all of life’s uncertainties and difficulties. Put simply, the sandal is for him a sebeb: a reason in and of itself, requiring no further explanation. This said, he added that the sandalprint might protect him as he whizzes around everyday on his motorcycle delivering food. For others—especially the makers and sellers of these types of goods—the Prophet’s sandal and sandalprint can turn a handsome profit. For example, Cübbeli Ahmet Hoca (b. 1384/1965), the famous Turkish Muslim preacher based in the Istanbul district of Fatih, has, in the recent past, promoted the many blessings of Muḥammad’s sandal. He has written a tract and delivered sermons on the subject and has even produced real leather sandals emulating those of the Prophet. In 2017, he spent considerable time encouraging his listeners to “run, citizen, run to acquire these specially priced, genuine leather sandals whose benefits are countless and that bring about dreams of the Prophet.”35 The cost of these items? 130 Turkish liras, or the equivalent of about $ 40 at the time. This was a high price for his middle- to lower-middle-income followers. As his critics have been quick to point out, the financial gain from these products enables Cübbeli Ahmet Hoca—the much-beloved and equally-reviled “dealer in religion” (din tüccarı)—to vacation in the Swiss Alps and jet-ski in Malta. Regardless of one’s opinion of Cübbeli Ahmet Hoca and his leather replicas of the Prophet’s sandals, the prophet Muḥammad’s relics present big business opportunities in Turkey today. They highlight the more commercial aspects of this type of trade—itself paradigmatic of the country’s larger neoliberal economic landscape—as they intersect with a renewed interest in Islamic and Ottoman religious and artistic cultures. At the same time, these visual and material products allow Turkish Muslims to perform their visibly Muslim Sunni selves in everyday life.36 As a case in point, one may turn to one last blessing card that depicts the Prophet’s footprint (kadem), printed by Semazen Pazarlama in 2015. Its verso includes a list of nineteen merits. We read that the footprint protects against evil people, defeat by one’s enemies, Satan, jealousy (hasûd), and the evil eye 35

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“Din tüccarı Cübbeli, Peygamberi güya rüyaya getiren terliği 130 Tl ye pazarlamış,” HaberSom, 30 April 2017, http://www.habersom.com/din‑tuccari‑cubbeli‑peygamberi‑guya‑ru yaya‑getiren‑terligi‑130‑tl‑ye‑pazarlamis/. This sociological expression is inspired by Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1973).

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(nazar). It renders magic (sihir) ineffective, induces dreams of the Prophet, brings blessing to all buildings, provides assistance if carried in battle, and acts as a safeguard during a journey. If carried on a boat, the boat won’t sink; if in a house, the house won’t burn. If its carrier petitions any intermediary (tevessül) for anything, then they will most certainly attain their desires. If a sick (but not deceased) person carries it, they will be granted intercession by the Prophet on the Day of Judgment. At the bottom of the verso, these nineteen merits are noted as cited directly from the “Saadetü’d-Dareyn, pages 535–536.” Two details are notable. First, like Muḥammad’s other relics, the footprint is promoted as an intercessory means (tawaṣṣul) to secure one’s desires and optimize positive results. In some Muslim traditions, including those propagated in Salafi-Wahhabi contexts, the use of objects and persons (including the Prophet and saints) to achieve an objective is frowned upon, considered a blameworthy innovation (bidʿa), and hence forbidden and even punished. Conversely, these blessing cards highlight a Turkish Sunni Muslim worldview in which the use of object-based tawaṣṣul is not only permitted but widely encouraged. As a result, this particular construction of Islamic orthodoxy and orthopraxy embraces the symbolic power and ritualized use of objects believed laden with baraka, chief among them the Prophet’s footprint and sandalprint. Second, the merits of the footprint as included on the blessing card are noted as excerpted from Shaykh Ibrāhīm al-Samnūdī’s (d. 1314/1897), Kitāb Saʿādat al-dārayn fī l-radd ʿalā l-firqatayn al-Wahhābiyya wa-muqalladat al-Ẓāhiriyya (“The bliss of the two abodes in the refutation of the two sects, Wahhabis and Zahiris”), which was printed in Cairo in 1319/1901. Al-Samnūdī’s opus offers an outspoken manifesto against Wahhabism. The text articulates a doctrine of the ahl al-Sunna against Salafism while also promoting belief in tawaṣṣul. To a certain degree, this position translates in turn into the preservation of Muḥammad’s relics from Wahhabi destruction and also religiously supports their reiteration in Muslim practices and products, extending forward to today’s mass production of the amuletic and talismanic arts. Blessing cards and other devotional paraphernalia depicting the Prophet’s relics thrive at the juncture of various cultural, political, and religious forces at work in Turkey today. As they reiterate Ottoman forms of Islamic devotion, they engage in an aesthetics of public piety and heritage preservation. Such forces and practices come together to form a nostalgic form of “pious neoOttomanism.”37 To some critics, this revivalist “Ottomania” is simply obsessed 37

Jeremy Walton, “Practices of Neo-Ottomanism: Making Space and Place Virtuous in Istanbul,” in Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe?, ed. Deniz Göktürk, Levent Soysal, and İpek Türeli (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 89.

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with, and parasitic on, a glorious bygone past, while, to others, it represents a positive mining of Ottoman-Muslim civilization and its discursive, artistic, and material repertoire. For creative entrepreneurs, this past also can be monetized in a capitalist system of supply and demand, yielding copious “prophetic profits.” As for the pious consumers themselves, these relic cards and objects are believed to provide guidance and help and even to invoke dream visions of Muḥammad. They allow numerous Turkish Muslims to stake out a proimage and pro-amulet Sunni position that simultaneously rejects WahhabiSalafi models of proper piety, which otherwise seek to bar the use of intercessory media and the occult arts in general.

3

Nazar Boncuğu: The Eye Bead’s New “Islamic” Twists

In Turkey, evil eye beads (nazar boncuğu) made of blue glass are sold and used alongside more overtly “Islamic” amulets, such as Qurʾanic verses and images of the Prophet’s relics.38 These glass objects are believed to protect against and avert the evil eye. They also function as decorative devices often found hanging in homes and stores, ornamenting jewelry, and in a wide array of other objects offered for sale to local consumers and tourists wishing to acquire what is popularly considered a recognizable “Turkish” souvenir (alongside other favorites, such as “Turkish” delight and “Turkish” coffee). The eye bead has thus achieved a bivalent status as a “heraldic shield” in its dual role as a national visual emblem and a quintessential amulet (Figure 13.8). The belief in the evil eye is neither peculiar to Turkey nor limited to Muslim lands. It is a universal superstition concerned with the gaze of a jealous individual, whose malefic eye is believed to emit (sometimes deliberately, sometimes involuntarily) negative energy that causes bodily harm, including death.39 In other words, the evil eye is a “covetous form of looking”40 propelled

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For a general discussion of eye beads in Turkey, see Ronald Marchese, ed., The Fabric of Life: Cultural Transformations in Turkish Society (Binghamton, NY: Global Academic Publishing, 2005), 99–125. Further studies follow below. See in particular Alan Dundes, “Wet and Dry, the Evil Eye: An Essay in Indo-European and Semitic Worldview,” in Interpreting Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 93–296; and Edward Westermarck, Pagan Survivals in Mohammedan Civilisation: Lectures on the Traces of Pagan Beliefs, Customs, Folklore, Practices and Rituals Surviving in the Popular Religion and Magic of Islamic Peoples (Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1973), 24. Salime Leyla Gürkan, “Nazar [in World Cultures],” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 32 (2006): 443.

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Booth selling a variety of eye beads, Nazarköy, June 2016 Photograph by the author

by envy—itself a term derived from the Latin invidia, meaning “to look maliciously upon.”41 As a psycho-kinetic force, malevolent envy is believed to target especially vulnerable people, sensitive places, and transitional states, including children, pregnant women, animals, and doorways, as well as moments of birth, illness, pregnancy, and death.42 For these reasons, objects protecting against the evil eye can be found in many religions and cultures. In Islamic traditions, the belief in the evil eye can be traced back to the Qurʾan (68:51), which warns of the piercing power of the enemy’s eyes (abṣār). Mentions of the malefic glance appear frequently in the hadith, in which the prophet Muḥammad is recorded as recommending to his followers: “Take refuge from naẓar in God, because the [touch of the] eye is real.”43 The topic 41 42 43

Helmut Schoeck, “The Evil Eye: Forms and Dynamics of Universal Superstition,” Emory University Quarterly 11 (1955): 154. H.Z. Koşay, “Etnoğrafya Müzesindeki Nazarlık, Muska ve Hamailler,” Türk Etnoğrafya Dergisi 1 (1956): 87. The hadith mentions the fact that the “[evil] eye is real” (al-ʿayn ḥaqq), see, e.g., Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, 39.16 and 76.36; Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 39.16; and Sunan Ibn Mājah, 31.3635. These and other mentions of the evil eye can be consulted at https://sunnah.com.

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of the evil eye is taken up by numerous Muslim writers, including Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406), who held views antagonistic toward magic and superstition. He nevertheless devotes an entire section to the subject in his Muqaddima (“Introduction [to history]”), in which he describes this mental form of assassination induced by the gaze: Another psychic influence is that of the eye, that is, an influence exercised by the soul of the person who has the evil eye. A thing or situation appears pleasing to the eye of a person, and he likes it very much. This (circumstance) creates in him envy and the desire to take it away from its owner. Therefore, he prefers to destroy him.44 Blending local vernacular and sometimes non-Islamic traditions and beliefs with information drawn from Islamic textual sources, the evil eye has permeated Middle Eastern cultures for centuries. Its prevalence is attested to by numerous terms and expressions, among them ʿayn in Arabic; nazar or göz in Turkish; and chashm-i bad (evil eye) and chasm-i ḥasūd (envious eye) in Persian.45 To counter the malefic gaze, a wide range of talismans have been made, whose constituent materials include, for example, cowry shells (known as “eye-crackers”), agate, onyx (known as “father of avarice”), mother-of-pearl, panther’s claws, pieces of horn, and deer skin.46 In Turkey, blue glass “eye beads” (göz boncuğu) are the preferred format and material for this evil-averting device. Such beads can be combined with Fāṭima’s hand, apotropaic spitting, and uttering protective phrases.47 The color blue is considered especially effective in dispelling and killing negative 44 45

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Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, 3 vols., trans. Franz Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), 170. Rachel Parikh, “Evil Eye,” in Islam: A Worldwide Encyclopedia, ed. Cenap Çakmak (New York: Praeger, 2017), 2:422–423; Ph. Marçais, “ʿAyn,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed.; Ebrāhīm Šakūrzāda and Mahmoud Omidsalar, “Čašm-zaḵm,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica https://iranicaonline.org/articles/casm‑zakm‑lit; İlyas Çelebi, “Nazar [in Islam],” in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 32 (2006): 444–446; D. Edwards, “The Evil Eye and Middle Eastern Culture,” Folklore Annual of the University Folklore Association 3 (1971): 33–41; Bess Allen Donaldson, The Wild Rue: A Study of Muhammadan Magic and Folklore in Iran (London: Luzac, 1938), 13–23; and Gürkan, “Nazar [in World Cultures].” Donaldson, The Wild Rue, 20. Metin Ekici and Pınar Fedakar, “Gelenek, aktarma, dönüşüm ve kültürel endüstrisi bağlamında nazar ve nazar boncuğu (Evil Eye and the Evil Eye Bead in the Context of Tradition, Transmission, Transformation and Cultural Industry),” Milli Folklor 101 (2014): 43–44; and on Persian traditions of spitting to avert the evil eye, see Donaldson, The Wild Rue, 18.

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energy.48 The reason for this belief is in part due to the rarity of blue eyes among Turks; as a result, blue-eyed people are thought to have supernatural powers, including the capacity to emit or absorb nazar.49 As for the shape and image of the eye itself, it is considered to be able to “throw back” the evil gaze through the medium of glass, whose mirroring and reflective properties are said to be especially effective against extramitted rays of covetousness.50 If the glass bead happens to display a crack—which, due to the material’s fragility, is often the case—it also is thought to have encountered or repelled an evil gaze.51 These glass beads thus function as sentinels on active duty, with eyes wide open and on the lookout for enemy forces to neutralize via both preemptive and defensive means. While the tradition of nazar boncuğu stretches back for centuries, there has been a noticeable increase in its production since the middle of the fourteenth/twentieth century.52 While many eye beads are mass produced in China, more local places and methods of fabrication in Turkey today benefit from support and interest. For example, the town of Nazarköy (literally, “village of eye beads”), located near the coastal city of Izmir, draws its income almost entirely from its production of glass eye beads made in traditional kilns. Visitors to Nazarköy travel to the village specifically to amble among the booths displaying thousands of evil-averting beads. As seen in Figure 13.8, most beads are made of blue glass and shaped like eyes, with concentric pupils marking their centers. Other beads meant to protect a domestic space are shaped like houses, while pairs of fish (called aşık balık, or fish-in-love) are believed to protect married couples in particular. Nazarköy is the home of Mahmut Sür, who was recognized in 2012 by UNESCO as a “Living Human Treasure” for his contributions to the design and production of beads in the village. Although Sür benefited from traditional training in glassmaking, he is committed to updating his bead designs and col-

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Çelebi, “Nazar [in Islam],” 445. Nilgün Çıblak, “Halk kültüründe nazar, nazarlık inancı ve bunlara bağlı uygulamalar,” Türklük Bilimi Araştırmaları 15 (2004): 111; Ekici and Fedakar, “Gelenek, aktarma, dönüşüm ve kültürel endüstrisi bağlamında nazar ve nazar boncuğu,” 45. Westermarck, Pagan Survivals in Mohammedan Civilisation, 39. Çıblak, “Halk kültüründe nazar, nazarlık inancı ve bunlara bağlı uygulamalar,” 110. There has been a recent rediscovery of the hamsa motif in Israel after its initial marginalization when the country focused on secularization (Alexandra Nocke, The Place of the Mediterranean in Modern Israeli Identity [Leiden: Brill, 2009], 132–135). It is possible that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s reforms in the early decades of the fourteenth/twentieth century similarly affected the production and usage of talismans in Turkey.

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ors. He reminds us that the “updating of tradition” (geleneğin güncellemesi)53 is necessary—that innovation breathes new life into, rather than corrupts, “Turkish handicrafts” as these have been passed down through the generations. Today, his studio and kiln provide an experience for tourists, who visit his garden, drink tea, listen to music, and try their hand at making glass beads. In such lively surroundings, Nazarköy “has embraced this method of presentation and now [the village] has taken its place in the field of cultural tourism as a place where tradition remains alive.”54 Reigning supreme among such traditions is the evil-dispelling glass talisman. Today, eye beads continue to be produced through a creative “updating of tradition.” While Sür does not specify what such innovations might be, it is clear that they emerge in part due to financial and religious pressures. When I visited Nazarköy in August 2016, I spoke at length with the master glassmaker Uğur.55 He informed me that he and his colleagues are preoccupied with lowering the cost of their products, since they now must compete with evil eye beads that are cheaply mass-produced in China. Moreover, they must make beads containing more overtly “Islamic” content. To illustrate this increasing domestic demand for less “pagan-like” amulets, Uğur shared an anecdote with me. He said that one day a veiled woman told him that she would not buy an eye bead because such items are “Satan’s eye” (şeytan gözü). However, she reassured him that she does believe in the injurious power of the human gaze (nazar), since nazar is mentioned in the Qurʾan. This religious Muslim woman’s fear of lapsing into pagan or polytheistic superstition is not unique but is shared and proliferating among some devout Sunni Muslims in Turkey today. To remain in business, Uğur and other artisans have had to become even more innovative than Sür, creating recognizably “Islamic” eye beads for a diversifying clientele. As a consequence, new types of beads have begun to emerge in the past few years. Instead of containing a cornea and pupil, these novel products include Arabic-script calligraphic content, such as the names of God and Muḥammad and various apotropaic Qurʾanic verses, especially āyat alkursī (Figure 13.9). Also offered for sale alongside these newly “Islamized” eye beads in Nazarköy are Qurʾanic talismans, models of the Kaʿba, and other devo-

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Ekici and Fedakar, “Gelenek, aktarma, dönüşüm ve kültürel endüstrisi bağlamında nazar ve nazar boncuğu,” 46. Ekici and Fedakar, “Gelenek, aktarma, dönüşüm ve kültürel endüstrisi bağlamında nazar ve nazar boncuğu,” 48. Uğur is a master bead-maker who also manages the Facebook page “Nazarköy Boncuk” (https://www.facebook.com/nazarkoy.boncuk.7).

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“Islamized” eye beads inscribed with the name of God (Allāh) and the “Throne Verse” (āyat al-kursī) in Arabic script, Nazarköy, June 2016 Photograph by the author

tional paraphernalia that one would find more readily in Eyüp. Here and elsewhere then, amulets and talismans still thrive, albeit overlaid increasingly with signs and symbols more firmly rooted in Islamic tradition. This kind of “updating of tradition,” to borrow Sür’s fitting expression, sheds light on ongoing anxieties and their creative solutions within the sphere of—and marketplace for—the occult arts in Turkey today.

4

Islamic Amulets in a “New Turkey”

“Islamized” eye beads are not limited to the village of Nazarköy: they can be found hanging in private homes, stores, and restaurants and accompanied by other items for sale in souvenir shops in many Turkish cities. In Istanbul, tourist stores lining the street heading down to Galata Tower offer many such objects for sale, including cheap magnets that emulate Turkish traditional ceramic painting. Some magnets that appeared on the market in the summer of 2016 diverged from the typical fare, however. Instead of tulip and textile designs, the magnets were covered entirely in Arabic inscriptions, including the names

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Tile magnets decorated with Arabic-script and “Islamic” amuletic content, offered for sale in a tourist-souvenir shop, close to Galata Tower, Istanbul, July 2016 Photograph by the author

of Allāh and Muḥammad, the Qurʾanic verses of the throne and evil eye, and thirty-five basmala (Figure 13.10). Offered at a cost of one Turkish lira (or about US$0.30 at the time) per piece, these inexpensive items are purchased by local inhabitants and foreign visitors alike. The fact that an entire genre of Arabic-script amulets has arisen lately is suggestive in several ways. First, it points to an “Arab” turn for the local Turkish Muslim population, which is otherwise much more comfortable reading

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Romanized texts. This Arabization of the amuletic arts is echoed in official rhetoric, especially in President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s systematic effort to purge the Turkish language of European and English words while concurrently reasserting Arabic terminology and pronunciation in the Turkish language.56 The use of spoken and written Arabic has soared in the past few years, due to the influx of millions of Syrian refugees, who now call Turkey home. For Erdoğan and other politicians and cultural entrepreneurs, this linguistic turn is marshalled in support of a larger ideological platform that seeks to align Turkey with the rest of the Muslim world rather than with the “West.” Consequently, these types of talismans and amulets no doubt reflect present-day Turkish cultural politics. Second, blessing cards, eye beads, and other trinkets are not only purchased by a Turkish clientele that identifies itself as Muslim to one degree or another (or not at all) but are also acquired by tourists. Ever since the Gezi uprisings of 2013 and especially after the failed military coup of 2016, the number of American and European visitors has declined precipitously. In their stead, vacationers from Arab states—including Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE—have become much more common in Istanbul. Arabic-script “Islamic” amulets, which have multiplied alongside the number of Arab tourists, probably cater to growing Arabophone Muslim demand. These types of commercial products, offered at bargain prices, reflect changing demographics and desires as these intersect with the heritage and tourism industries. Taken together, these contemporary Islamic talismans showcase the fertile intersections between Muslim devotional life, folk beliefs and practices, consumer capitalism, and the rhetoric of Realpolitik in today’s “New Turkey.” Not shunned or prohibited, the occult arts prove an innovative and thriving field of production, bringing financial gain to businessmen and spiritual aid to their owners. By drawing upon and reasserting Ottoman symbols and a script associated with Islam, these images and objects expand a long tradition of Islamic occult arts right up to the present day.

56

Burak Bekdil, “Erdoğan: French Words in Turkish are Foreign, Arabic Ones Aren’t,” Middle East Forum, 4 July 2017, http://www.meforum.org/6797/erdogans‑language‑revolution.

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chapter 14

Postscript: Cutting Ariadne’s Thread, or How to Think Otherwise in the Maze Travis Zadeh

[I]f I may say so, we have diseased language … Friedrich Max Müller1

… You can’t fix this ’cause I’m in the same mix. m.i.a.2

∵ 1

Theōria / Naẓar

A hallmark of scholastic classifications of knowledge, the conceptual division between theory and practice has long shaped philosophical discourses on the relationship between contemplation and action. In the context of Islamic intellectual history, the distinction notably guides the psychology and ethics of Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (d. 339/950).3 So too does it shape the classificatory thought of the philosopher-physician Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037), who, throughout his writings, follows a venerable tradition of dividing the various branches of knowledge

1 Lectures on the Science of Language, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, 1861–1864), 2:358. 2 “Warriors,” in studio album Matangi (2013). 3 See, for instance, Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī, Ārāʾ ahl al-madīna al-fāḍila, ed. ʿAlī Bū Mulḥim (Cairo: Dār wa-Maktabat al-Hilāl, 1995), 102, 107, 121; al-Fārābī, Kitāb al-Siyāsa al-madaniyya almuqallab bi-mabādiʾ al-mawjūdāt, ed. Fawzī Mitrī Najjār (Beirut: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Kāthūlīkiyya, 1964), 73–74; al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl al-saʿāda, ed. ʿAlī Bū Mulḥim (Beirut: Dār wa-Maktabat al-Hilāl, 1995), 25, 47, 49, 72–73, 79, 87–88; al-Fārābī, Iḥṣāʾ al-ʿulūm, ed. ʿAlī Bū Mulḥim (Beirut: Dār waMaktabat al-Hilāl, 1996), 18, 50, 51, 61, 84. See also Abū ʿAbdallāh al-Khwārazmī (d. 387/997?), Mafātīḥ al-ʿulūm, ed. Gerlof van Vloten (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1895), 131–132.

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(ʿilm) into the theoretical (naẓarī) and the practical (ʿamalī).4 Such classificatory systems are often buttressed by the argument that the fullest application of theoretical knowledge, as an abstract mode of contemplating and deriving general principles, is the ethical pursuit of human flourishing (eudaimonia > saʿāda).5 A good deal of postmodern critique has sought to upend the often-explicit hierarchies that govern the neat bifurcation between observation and action implied by the binary of theōria and praxis. As the wide-ranging contributions in the present volume repeatedly demonstrate, locating exactly where magic and the occult fit into such evaluative, classificatory, and performative schemas is anything but straightforward.6 The ontology of magic, its epistemic significance, and its moral value are as mercurial as they are ambiguous. The path is tortuous and labyrinthine by design. So what might theory and practice mean today for the study of the Islamic occult sciences as they are staged in the intellectual and material frameworks of the Western academy? Theory, in the etymological sense suggested by both theōria and naẓar, points not just to contemplation or abstraction but specifically to ocular forms of observation and speculation. One of the most salient features of modern critical theory is the realization that the objects of our inquiries are constantly unfolding, as they respond dynamically to observation itself. Observation is never neutral but rather contextual, decisive, and determinative. The ideal of distanced objectivity is an ideological construct that serves as an authorizing agent, not an actual state of independent impartiality.7 Sociologists, for instance, have long realized that they do not simply observe society but also shape it through the questions they pose, the surveys

4 For example, Ibn Sīnā, al-Shifāʾ, al-Ilāhiyyāt, ed. Georges Anawati and Saʿīd Zāyid (Cairo: alHayʾa al-ʿĀmma li-Shuʾūn al-Maṭābiʿ al-Amīriyya, 1960), 3–4; Ibn Sīnā, Dānish-nāma-yi ʿAlāʾī, Ilāhiyyāt, ed. Muḥammad Muʿīn (Tehran: Anjuman-i Āthār-i Millī, 1331sh/1952), 2; Ibn Sīnā, “Fī aqsām al-ʿulūm al-ʿaqliyya,” in Ibn Sīnā, Tisʿ rasāʾil (Cairo: Maṭbaʿa Hindiyya, 1908), 104– 118, 105; Ibn Sīnā, al-Qānūn fī l-ṭibb, ed. Muḥammad Amīn al-Ḍannāwī, 3 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1999), 1:12. 5 For more on the division of sciences in Persian manuals of ethics see, Naṣīr al-Dīn alṬūsī (d. 672/1274), Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī, ed. Mujtabā Minuwī and ʿAlī Riḍā Ḥaydarī (Tehran: Zar, 1356sh/1978), 37–41. 6 On the shifting status of various occult fields of learning in Arabic and Persian encyclopedias of sciences over the centuries, see Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Powers of One: The Mathematicalization of the Occult Sciences in the High Persianate Tradition,” Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 5 (2017): 127–199. 7 For the production of objectivity as an authorizing force in modern scientific discourse, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 17–53.

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they conduct, and the categories they create.8 Attention to such feedback and reflexivity can help us fathom how the Western academic study of Islam, with its historical fixation on the “backward” practices and “superstitious” beliefs of Muslims, has itself come to shape the various patterns of modern Islamic reform. Modern scholarship has long been making magic as much as observing it, by carving out and labeling particular domains and activities as rational, authentic, and normative, while marginalizing others as primitive, folkloric, and deviant. In some basic sense, we labor under the weight of the analytical categories and the concepts behind them inherited from high colonialism that serve to both authorize and disqualify. Magic-talk is never impartial or disinterested.9 It is in this light that attending to the historical contingencies of the categories and concepts we employ has been an enduring strategy in critical theory. In recent years, various fields of Islamic studies have come to face with renewed attention the challenges and unstated logic posed by the master categories we use to analyze the world and our place in it. This increased attention has benefited from theoretical insights developed in anthropology, sociology, the study of religion, and the history of science, which have tackled the unstated grammar of modernity that governs such master categories as science, religion, secularism, magic, and reason. As with all historical inquiry, our sphere of analysis may intersect in various ways with the conceptual vocabularies of others. But, as in a Venn diagram, such areas of confluence are never coterminous. The locations that deserve attention are precisely the spaces that are orthogonal to our own unstated conceptions of the normal, the authoritative, or the real. As with superstition and magic, such second-order analytical terms as “occult,” “esoteric,” “mystic,” and “gnostic” have served as important foils for framing and affirming the rational and scientific basis of Western modernity. While such analytical categories often have parallels in Islamic intellectual history, their use and application as trans-historical or trans-cultural signifiers or as nodes for comparative analysis is, as with all acts of translation, by no 8 See Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); for this collection and more observations pertinent to the topic, particularly as it relates to the study of religion, see Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 11–13. 9 For the intellectual contexts shaping such formulations in the western academy, see broadly Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3–24; Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 164– 177.

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measure self-evident. Just as modern Western scholarship has been busy making magic, as it were, through classificatory hierarchies and various strategies for producing qualified knowledge, so too have Muslim intellectuals long been occupied with identifying, evaluating, and categorizing the diverse branches of what we may term here occult learning. In many notable ways these classificatory practices overlap. Yet the historical, ethical, and basic evaluative premises of these enterprises have often been radically distinct. As an organizational rubric, the occult—foregrounded in the present volume and in a growing body of recent scholarship—points historically to hidden, invisible, and secret forces in nature binding the cosmos together. At a sociological level, the occult also suggests the actual status of certain bodies of knowledge and forms of practice that are hidden from view.10 Across the diverse contours of Islamic thought, an obvious parallel with the occult, at least ontologically, is ghayb, a catchall for the hidden world of the unseen. The category notably plays a significant role in the Qurʾan and throughout the development of Islamic cosmography. Yet the status of ʿilm al-ghayb, as a form of epistemic authority, is generally restricted to the realm of angels, demons, and jinn, often associated with knowledge obtained through dreams or revelation. As such, it does not readily account for the full array of disciplines implied by the term “occult sciences,” which include—at least in the vocabulary of Renaissance philosophy—alchemy, astral learning, and natural magic. The semantic field predicated in the distinction between bāṭin and ẓāhir, the hidden and the manifest, is also generative. The distinction highlights the secretive dimensions often associated with occult learning. The language of unveiling as an elite strategy of esoteric disclosure has been important throughout the development of Islamic thought and authority. As an authorizing strategy for both containment and concealment, the esoteric has obvious structural and conceptual parallels with a vast array of historical contexts and cultural practices; there are also real and measurable points of confluence between what we could identify as Islamic, Jewish, and Christian esoteric writings and discourses of authority.11 Furthermore, the esoteric is notable, in

10

11

For the Latinate discourses on the occult implied here, see Hanegraaff, Esotericism, 177– 180; Hanegraaff, “Occult/Occultism,” in The Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 884–889. See, e.g., Moshe Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and Its Philosophical Implications, trans. Jackie Feldman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); see also Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “The Globalization of Esotericism,” Correspondences 3, no. 1 (2015): 55–91.

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comparative terms, for its current use in the burgeoning study of Western esotericism as a discrete field of analysis. Yet, here again the category of the bāṭin and its nominalized form bāṭiniyya are sensu stricto not only narrower in their classificatory roles in the development of Islamic learning but are also shaped by distinct sectarian valences that are easily lost in their elision with esotericism.12 Similarly generative in the development of Western scholarship on Islam and in modern Islamic reformist discourses has been the pervasive category of the mystical, with its roots in the hidden, secret, and mysterious implied in the Greek etymology of such terms as mystēs, mystērion, and mystikos. As for the modern construction of mysticism as a distinct and even universal field of religious activity and its conflation with Islamic discourses of taṣawwuf, the chief problem has been the reifying force implied in the category itself. Above all, the nominalization of mysticism serves to exclude certain beliefs and practices as distinct from other domains of normativity and orthodoxy in such a way as to make much of Islamic intellectual and cultural history unintelligible.13 Likewise, despite the direct semantic parallels between ʿirfān in Arabic and gnōsis in Greek as conceptualizations for divine, secret, or hidden knowledge, the modern category of gnosticism as either a coherent religious movement or a clearly defined cosmological disposition is vexing. While there are numerous examples in which early Arabic translations of the classical Greek corpus affirm the semantic overlap between gnōsis and ʿirfān or maʿrifa, in comparative terms the utility of gnosticism, as constituted in nineteenth-century Western scholarship, and its application to Islamic intellectual history are anything but evident. This is particularly the case in contexts in which gnosticism is used as a broad umbrella for a set of transhistoric beliefs putatively shared by various religious communities across time and place.14

12

13

14

For an overview of the problem of the universalization of esotericism and hopes for its rehabilitation, see Liana Saif, “What Is Islamic Esotericism?,” Correspondences 7, no. 1 (2019): 1–59; see also Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Magic in Islam between Religion and Science,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 14, no. 2 (2019): 255–287, 259 n. 5, 280–281. Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East’ (London: Routledge, 1999), 7–34. For more on the Iranian context, see Ata Anzali, “Mysticism” in Iran: The Safavid Roots of a Modern Concept (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017), 197–235. For the relevant scholarship on the problem of gnosticism as a comparative field of study, see Patricia Crone, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 215–218; for a similar formulation in the context of Arabic “hermeticism,” see Kevin van Bladel, The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 19.

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These tensions extend beyond merely emic and etic distinctions of the insider/outsider variety. Evaluative hierarchies, which are designed to authorize certain ways of knowing and being while silencing and ridiculing others, govern the syntax that animates our analytic categories. In some basic sense, there is no way out of this labyrinth, for knowledge production is invariably staged in relationship to what is right and what is wrong through various discursive exercises of power that stigmatize others as unfit, unqualified, or unreasonable.15 In today’s vocabulary, our epistemic demarcations—inherent in all group formation—are marked by such master divisions as gender, class, race, creed, and nation. It is not that we should do away with our terms of engagement, most of which, as far as the Western academy is concerned, have been inherited and fashioned in the course of European colonial history. The notion that we could remove from our conceptual frameworks the productive power of naming is a practical absurdity. Words are useful, they are powerful, and they are, one might even say, alchemical—in their capacity to produce something out of nothing through the slippage between being and language, in that Joycean illusion of the world within a word.16 What any history of language would demand of us, however, is that we analyze the conceptual grammar underwriting our categories—what it forecloses and makes impossible to see.17 Even the new terms we invent in an attempt to account more fully for the intricacies and complexities of being inevitably have unintended consequences that come to condition our conceptual horizons. An influential example for our field is the term “Islamicate,” coined by Marshall Hodgson.18 The category has been immensely productive as a means of labeling in broad civilizational terms a host of activities that extend beyond what “Islamic” (in the narrow sense of pertaining solely to the interiorized domain of belief) could

15

16 17

18

On the matter of disqualification in the sociology of knowledge, see Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 82–86. For the postcolonial implications, see, for instance, Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 43; Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 159–160. See Jeri Johnson, “Introduction,” in James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), ix–xxxvii, esp. xxxix–xxx. For the strategy of tracing the grammar of concepts as developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, see Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 25 n. 9. Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 1:45–46, 57–60.

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apparently achieve on its own. It is in this sense that the term has long served as an organizing rubric for a wide array of scholarship, the present volume included. Yet, despite its practical advantages as a means of highlighting areas that extend beyond merely the religious or confessional, the term “Islamicate” carries with it palpable limitations. Foremost, the cognitive divide between the Islamic and the Islamicate proceeds from a demarcation between religion and society, between an inner belief and outward expression. Demonstrably shaped by specific Protestant formulations, this division, in turn, creates a space for separating what is normative or orthodox from what is not authentically Islamic as such. For both Muslims and non-Muslims alike, everything that in today’s terms is viewed as not pertaining to Islam proper can be lumped together in the waste bin of non-normative or heterodox beliefs and practices. Here we may find shrine visitation, Sufi piety, occult learning, millenarian sovereignty, wine drinking, image making, and general merriment. The retrievable repertoire meant to betoken authenticity necessitates a potent variety of oppositional logic. Stripping all such purportedly non-orthodox layers away from a nominally authentic core of Islam makes it all but impossible to understand the historical centrality of numerous areas of devotion and learning that, from a modern vantage, are generally not conceived of as authentically Islamic.19 The upside to all this is that the unfolding power of language, in its messy reality, means that both categories and the concepts behind them are in a continual state of flux. We may take some solace in the recognition that, as scholars, we can do with our conceptual armature what we wish.20 It is also worth stating though that jargon and other terms of art often serve to distinguish those in the know from those who know nothing, as notably on display in the various linguistic strategies for affirming medical, legal, and scientific authority. This ability to name, codify, and classify is precisely what generates scholarly authority through specialized knowledge. Critique does not end by merely abandoning outdated categories and the ideas that animate them or by simply fashioning new ones. Rather, the task at hand demands recog19

20

For a sustained critique of the term “Islamicate” and its broader implications, see Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 113–175. On the mimetic tokens that constitute the properties of Islam, see Aziz Al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities (London: Verso, 1993), 24–26. For further on this oppositional logic, see also Joseph Massad, Islam in Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). For more on this observation in the context of the category of religion, see Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269–284, esp. 281–282.

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nizing that second-order forms of conceptualization invariably foreclose certain possibilities of thinking in other terms. The challenge posed by our taxonomies thus extends beyond solely a matter of accounting for the surplus and deficit inherent in all translation; we must also mind how knowledge is generated and how power is exercised. Attention to the conceptual frameworks we have inherited is powerful, as it offers possibilities for thinking otherwise.21

2

Passing Strange

When speaking of magic and the occult, there is much to be gained by accounting for the performative and material conditions that animate the intellectual and cultural lives of the subjects we study. So too should we attend to the diverse contexts that frame, guide, and make possible our own scholarly endeavors. The parallels between scholarly taxonomic systems across time often prove uncanny. Practices of naming, defining, and classifying magic are quite old. In the diverse contexts of Islamic history, these stretch back to before the days of the Baghdadi bookman Ibn al-Nadīm (d. 380/990), who opens his famed bio-bibliographical survey with a comparative history of scripts and writing found across the world and closes with a chapter on the global history of alchemy and its mysterious ciphers and scripts. Along the way, Ibn al-Nadīm dedicates a section to writings on magic, charms, talismans, and tricks, which also includes works on summoning jinn and demons. In Ibn al-Nadīm’s schema, there are licit and illicit forms of magic. Here Ibn al-Nadīm uses the word siḥr for magic, which can also have the sense of enchantment or sorcery. Many of the titles and authorities grouped in his treatment of magic and spells also overlap with the cognate disciplines of alchemy and astral science, though Ibn al-Nadīm treats each of these fields separately.22

21 22

On this discursive maneuver, see Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 42–63. Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-Fihrist, ed. Ayman Fuʾād Sayyid, 4 vols. in 2 (London: Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 2009), 1:9–49 (scripts), 2:207–266 (astral learning included along with mathematics, mechanics, and music, etc.), 2:333–342 (magic, talismans, nīranjātiyyāt, etc.), 2:441–466 (alchemy). For a study and translation of the final maqāla of the Fihrist, see Johann Fück, “The Arabic Literature on Alchemy according to an-Nadīm (A.D. 987). A Translation of the Tenth Discourse of The Book of the Catalogue (al-Fihrist) with Introduction and Commentary,” Ambix 4, nos. 3–4 (1951): 81–144. For more on the organizational principles of the Fihrist as they relate to both writing and alchemy, see Travis Zadeh, “Uncertainty and the Archive,” in Digital Humanities and Islamic and Middle East Studies, ed. Elias Muhanna (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 11–64, esp. 55–59.

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But there were other bibliographic and classificatory efforts at bringing together various branches of the occult sciences. In the course of later classical Islamic learning, one of the more enduring forms is represented by the rubric al-ʿulūm al-gharība, a phrase often used to group alchemy, astrology, and various divinatory and magical practices. The equation of gharīb with occult, however, is not entirely straightforward. The adjective gharīb evokes at once the strange, extraordinary, rare, difficult, foreign, remote, and uncanny and can even be put into the service of the noble or elite, as in Fakhr al-Dīn alRāzī’s (d. 606/1210) pairing of gharīb with sharīf (noble, honorable, august).23 Regardless of the broad associations, the term gharīb is read above all as pertaining to actual phenomena that exist in the world and that can be verified and affirmed through scientific authority. Here and throughout a growing body of recent scholarship, the label has been read as an autochthonous category for the occult sciences in particular and occult phenomena in general. There is a case to be made for doing just this, particularly in light of the significant role that occulta philosophia played in early modern discourses of natural history and mathematical science, where we can trace a parallel move to affirm the many “marvelous” and “wondrous” phenomena of existence as entirely natural and thus the basis for scientific study and rationalization. In the idioms of Islamic learning, the strange or extraordinary sciences are often paired conceptually with such adjectives as “obscure,” “hidden,” and “secret” (ghāmiḍa, khafiyya, sirriyya).24 To be sure, something of the strange implied by the phrasing might be lost when eliding gharīb into “occult.” As with magic, though to a different degree and for distinct

23

24

The identification is made in the context of physiognomy (ʿilm-i firāsa), described as both sharīf and gharīb, see Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Jāmiʿ al-ʿulūm (Sittīnī), ed. Sayyid ʿAlī Āl Dāwūd (Tehran: Thurayyā, 1382sh/2003), 268. Cited in Melvin-Koushki, “Magic in Islam,” 281 n. 55. The pairing is part of a general semantic field that evokes the celebrated status of occult learning, as in the phrase “the noble extraordinary sciences and the wondrous subtle arts” (al-ʿulūm al-gharība al-sharīfa wa-l-funūn al-ʿajība al-laṭīfa), in Sirāj al-Dīn alSakkākī, al-Shāmil fī l-baḥr al-kāmil, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, MS Walter 91, fol. 135b. For a further discussion of the labels ghāmiḍa, as “obscure,” and khafiyya, as “hidden,” earlier synonyms for al-ʿulūm al-gharība, see the discussion of this topic in the introduction to the present volume by Liana Saif and Francesca Leoni. See also Matthew MelvinKoushki, “De-Orienting the Study of Islamicate Occultism,” in “Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives,” ed. Matthew Melvin-Koushki and Noah Gardiner, special double issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 287–295, esp. 288–289; Melvin-Koushki, “Powers of One,” 128 n. 2; Melvin-Koushki, “Persianate Geomancy from Ṭūsī to the Millennium: A Preliminary Survey,” in Occult Sciences in Pre-modern Islamic Culture, ed. Nader El-Bizri and Eva Orthmann (Beirut: Orient-Institut Beirut, 2018), 151–199, esp. 152 n. 3.

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ends, the occult likewise has its own troubled history as a modern placeholder for a variety of practices and beliefs that are set in opposition to reason and science.25 Yet, as with all such attempts at cross-cultural equivalence, the equation between al-ʿulūm al-gharība and the occult sciences opens up numerous venues for comparison and for tracing direct lines of contact, even while closing off others. As for its own synchronic significance, while gharīb and its direct variants do not form part of the Qurʾanic lexicon,26 the term appears in numerous sayings ascribed to the prophet Muḥammad, such as the eschatologically portentous hadith that “Islam began as a stranger, and it will return just as it began a stranger, so may there be blessings upon strangers.”27 As for its categorical value, gharīb comes to serve as a meaningful index for a host of semantic fields. From works on rare or difficult lexical material in a variety of corpora (e.g., gharīb al-ḥadīth, gharīb al-Qurʾān, gharīb al-lugha) to collections dedicated to preserving the passing graffiti of strangers and documenting their hardships (e.g., adab al-ghurabāʾ), the adjective is used in the early formation of Arabic literature to organize numerous phenomena.28 Notably, gharīb evokes such cognitive and emotive registers as the remote, obscure, peculiar, uncommon, rare, difficult, foreign, and strange, just as it can be glossed as both queer and curious.29 Most salient in the present context is the taxonomical significance of gharāʾib (sing. gharība), as a default placeholder for discourses on the wonders of creation. The term is generally coupled with ʿajāʾib (wonders, marvels, and other natural curiosities). An early work to use these terms in its

25 26 27

28

29

See Hanegraaff, Esotericism, 181–191; Egil Asprem, “Science and the Occult,” in The Occult World, ed. Christopher Partridge (London: Routledge, 2015), 710–719. Elsaid M. Badawi and Muhammad Abdel Haleem, Arabic-English Dictionary of Qurʾanic Usage (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 661–662, s.v. gh-r-b. “Badaʾa l-islāmu gharīban wa-sayaʿūdu kamā badaʾa gharīban, fa-ṭūbā li-l-ghurabāʾi,” Muslim b. al-Ḥajjāj (d. 261/875), Saḥīḥ, 2 vols. (Vaduz, Liechtenstein: Jamʿiyyat al-Maknaz alIslāmī, 2000), “Kitāb al-Imān,” 1:83, §§ 389–390; for more on the circulation of this saying, along with its apocalyptic variants and connotations, see the editorial note in Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal (d. 241/855), Musnad, ed. Shuʿayb al-Arnāʾūṭ, 52 vols. (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Risāla, 1993–2001), 6:325–326 n. 2, § 3784. For early examples, see Abū ʿUbayd al-Qāsim b. Salām (d. 224/838), al-Gharīb al-muṣannaf, ed. Muḥammad al-Mukhtār al-ʿAbīdī, 2 vols. (Tunis: Dār Saḥnūn li-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzīʿ, 1996); Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī (d. 356/967), Kitāb al-Adab al-ghurabāʾ, ed. Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn alMunajjid (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-Jadīd, 1982). See, for instance, Reinhart Dozy, Supplément aux dictionnaires arabes, 2 vols. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1881), 2:205; Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, ed. J. Milton Cowan (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1961), 783.

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title is the Persian encyclopedia of natural history by the courtier Shams alDīn Muḥammad al-Ṭūsī (fl. 562/1166), titled the Kitāb ʿAjāʾib al-makhlūqāt wagharāʾib al-mawjūdāt (“The wonders of all creation and the rarities of all existence”). In addition to a full account of the world, stretching from the macrocosmic workings of the heavenly spheres to the microcosmic marvels of insects, al-Ṭūsī also includes in his cosmography sections on angels, jinn, demons, idols, and talismans, along with the unique, hidden properties (khawāṣṣ) of plants, animals, and minerals. By al-Ṭūsī’s day the treatment of hidden properties had already been clothed in the language of wonders and rarities. Medical, philosophical, and alchemical writings on khawāṣṣ drew inspiration from earlier works in Greek on physika, which covered a vast field of topics including stones, plants, animals, agriculture, medicine, as well as crafts and tricks. In the Arabic translation of classical philosophy and medicine, the term khāṣṣa (pl. khawāṣṣ) was also frequently associated with the Greek idios and idiotētes, the unique physical qualities or properties that could influence other forms of matter.30 The concept plays an important role in the medical writings of Galen who uses the expression idiotētes arrētoi, “indescribable properties,” to refer to phenomena with discernable effects but which cannot be explained by the manifest elemental forces of the humors in their various combinations and mixtures. For Galenic medicine, this included not only a variety of substances and conditions but also amulets and charms. In medieval Latin medical and scholastic writings, the phrase was generally rendered as qualitates occultae, the hidden properties which represented the immediate agent or efficient cause behind a given physical phenomenon. These hidden forces were beyond direct perception or sensation and could only be witnessed indirectly through their effects on substances, such as the manifest force of magnets, the power of various drugs, or the influence of planetary movements. They also played part in the physical push and pull of sympathy and antipathy that governed the cos-

30

For literature on khawāṣṣ, see Paul Kraus, Jābir ibn Hayyān: Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’ Islam, 2 vols. (Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1942–1943), 2:61–95; Manfred Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1972), 393–416; Lucia Raggetti, “The ‘Science of Properties’ and its Transmission,” in In the Wake of the Compendia: Infrastructural Contexts and the Licensing of Empiricism in Ancient and Medieval Mesopotamia, ed. J. Cale Johnson (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 159–176. See also William Newman, “The Occult and the Manifest Among the Alchemists,” in Tradition, Transmission, Transformation: Proceedings of Two Conferences on pre-Modern Science Held at the University of Oklahoma, ed. F. Jamil Ragep et al. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), 173–200.

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mos and with it the efficacy of talismans.31 The vocabulary of the strange and marvelous, evoked by the likes of the physician and alchemist Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (d. 313/925) frequently accompanied discussion of the unique physical properties found throughout existence. Rāzī notably viewed Galen as an authority for the efficacious use of incantations and amulets.32 Wonders and rarities abound in philosophical and medical discussions of the physical world that often touched on various occult practices. In a discussion of Zoroastrian ritual observances and magic performances, the famed polymath at the Ghaznavid court Abū l-Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī (d. 440/1048) refers to his Kitāb al-ʿAjāʾib al-ṭabīʿiyya wa-l-gharāʾib al-ṣināʿiyya (“Book of natural wonders and amazing arts”). According to al-Bīrūnī’s description, his collection focused on, among other topics, incantations, natural magic, and talismans (alʿazāʾim wa-l-nīranjāt wa-l-ṭilasmāt). In al-Bīrūnī’s hands we can see how the generic organization of the strange and extraordinary could be imbued with scientific authority.33 Unlike al-Bīrūnī’s unfinished book of wonders, however, al-Ṭūsī’s collection survives in various manuscripts, several of them lavishly illustrated. The work showcases amusing anecdotes of the strange and uncanny, as does it contain a good deal of practical information on meteorology, medicine, and pharmacology, concluding with a chapter on poisons and antidotes.34 As with many earlier compilations of natural marvels, al-Ṭūsī’s col-

31

32

33 34

For the Galenic treatment of properties and its roots in Stoic philosophy, see Tobias Reinhardt, “Galen on Unsayable Properties,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 40 (2011): 297–317. For the later influence of these categories, see Brian Copenhaver, “The Occultist Tradition and its Critics,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 454–512, esp. 459, 504 n. 16; and Hanegraaff, Esotericism, 178–182. For Galen’s treatment of amulets and charms, Caroline Petit, “Galen, Pharmacology and the Boundaries of Medicine: A Reassessment,” in Collecting Recipes: Byzantine and Jewish Pharmacology in Dialogue. Science, Technology, and Medicine in Ancient Cultures, ed. Lennart Lehmhaus and Matteo Martelli (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 53–79. See Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, Kitāb al-khawāṣṣ wa-l-ashyāʾ al-muqāwima li-l-amrāḍ wa-dhikr ʿajāʾib al-buldān, Dār al-Kutub, Cairo, MS Taymūriyya Ṭibb 264, pp. 1–3 (introduction), 33– 40 (ʿajāʾib al-buldān), 43–46 (Hermetic talismans), 50 (Galen). For his citation of Galen, Rāzī copies from Alexander of Tralles, Therapeutica = Alexander von Tralles. Original-Text und Übersetzung nebst einer einleitenden Abhandlung, ed. and trans. Theodor Puschmann, 2 vols. (Vienna: Braumüller, 1878–1879), 2:473–475. The relevant Greek passages are treated in Petit, “Galen,” 71–73. Referred to in Abū l-Raḥyān al-Bīrūnī, al-Āthār al-bāqiya ʿan al-qurūn al-khāliya, ed. Parwīz Adhkāyī (Tehran: Mīrāth-i Maktūb, 1380sh/2001), 285–286, §77. Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Ṭūsī, ʿAjāʾib-nāma, ed. Manūchihr Sutūda (Tehran: Nashri Kitāb, 1966), 5 (for the full title), 336–369 (idols, images, and talismans), 496–512 (jinn and demons), 615–637 (poisons). For a study of illuminated manuscripts on wonders of

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lection is guided by a teleological argument for God’s existence through the manifest order of creation, itself a common theme that can be traced back through antiquity.35 Of the many cosmological compendia organized around ʿajāʾib wa-gharāʾib, one of the most widely disseminated and arguably most influential is the Arabic natural history by Abū Yaḥyā Zakariyyāʾ al-Qazwīnī (d. 682/1283), which takes the same title as al-Ṭūsī’s collection. Al-Qazwīnī likewise follows a welltrodden path in natural philosophy, starting with the premise that, through contemplating the wonders of creation, one ultimately comes to know the existence of the divine Creator. Similar discussions can be traced back to the earliest stages of Greek philosophy and are found throughout Islamic intellectual history, such as the argument deployed by the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (Brethren of Purity) to describe the development of monotheism from polytheism as based on the awe that humans feel in the face of the wonders and rarities of creation.36 In the context of the occult, al-Qazwīnī’s collection is particularly useful, as he opens his cosmography, in true scholastic fashion, with a definition of the key terms of his title, namely wonders, creations, rarities, and beings (i.e., ʿajāʾib, makhlūqāt, gharāʾib, mawjūdāt). As for his understanding of gharīb, al-Qazwinī notes: The extraordinary is every seldom-occurring wondrous matter (kull amr ʿajīb qalīl l-wuqūʿ) that diverges from customary phenomena and commonly witnessed experiences (mukhālif li-l-ʿādāt al-maʿhūda wa-l-mushā-

35

36

creation, with a focus on al-Ṭūsī and al-Qazwīnī, see Persis Berlekamp, Wonder, Image, and Cosmos in Medieval Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). For another early Persian collection, covering similar material with attention not only to various occult phenomena but also to uncovering tricks and deceptions, see the work ascribed to the astronomer and mathematician Muḥammad b. Ayyūb al-Ṭabarī, Tuḥfat al-gharāʾib, ed. Jalāl Matīnī, 2nd ed. (Tehran: Mūza wa-Markaz-i Asnād-i Majlis-i Shūrā-yi Islāmī, 1391sh/2012), 19–25 (editor’s introduction on the question of authorship and dating); see also Clifford Edmund Bosworth and Iraj Afshar, “ʿAjāʾeb al-Maḵlūqāt,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica. For an early Arabic example of this discourse in the realm of alchemy, see, e.g., ps.Apollonius, Sirr al-khalīqa, ed. Ursula Weisser (Aleppo: Maʿhad al-Turāth al-ʿIlmī al-ʿArabī, 1979); in the framework of traditionalist hadith scholarship, see also Abū l-Shaykh alIṣfahānī (d. 369/979), Kitāb al-ʿAẓama, ed. Riḍā Allāh b. Muḥammad Idrīs al-Mubārakfūrī, 2 vols. (Riyadh: Dār al-ʿĀṣima, 1998). Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Rasāʾil, 4 vols. (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1957), “Risāla fī l-ārāʾ wa-l-diyānāt,” 3:482. For more on this topic, see Travis Zadeh, “The Wiles of Creation: Philosophy, Fiction, and the ʿAjāʾib Tradition,” Journal of Middle Eastern Literatures 13, no. 1 (2010): 21–48.

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hadāt al-maʾlūfa).37 This occurs from the influence (taʾthīr) of powerful psyches (nufūs qawiyya), celestial phenomena (umūr falakiyya), or elemental bodies (ajrām ʿunṣuriyya), all of which are determined by the power of God almighty and His will.38 To illustrate the point further, al-Qazwīnī lists as examples the miracles of prophets and saints (muʿjizāt al-anbiyāʾ/karāmāt al-awliyāʾ), the prophecies of soothsayers (akhbār al-kahana), the power of jinn, the evil eye, the mental capacity (himma) associated with certain Indian sages, and various forms of divination. Here too are rare astral, meteorological, and geological phenomena, such as comets, meteors, blizzards in the middle of the summer, violent hailstorms, and powerful earthquakes, as well as prodigious births, speaking infants, and talking animals. Al-Qazwīnī concludes his treatment of the topic by observing that philosophers (ḥukamāʾ) have established three categories for “strange phenomena” (al-umūr al-gharība): 1) psychic influences and subsidiary reactions (al-āthār al-nafsāniyya wa-l-infiʿālāt al-tābiʿa) on the faculties of the imagination that occur without any direct, natural intermediary—when used for good these are either Prophetic miracles (muʿjiza) or saintly wonders (karāma), when used for ill they are the illicit magic (siḥr) of evil souls; 2) talismans that function through their connection by form, shape, and location with unique celestial forces and elemental bodies (quwā samāwiyya wa-ajsām ʿunṣuriyya); 3) nīranjāt that produce strange phenomena through the power of terrestrial bodies, as in the way lodestones (maghnāṭīs) attract iron.39

37

38

39

For the significance of habit or custom (ʿāda) as a dominant category in theological discussions of miracles, see Harry Wolfson, Philosophy of the Kalām (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 544–558; see also Frank Griffel, Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 194–201. Abū Yaḥyā Zakariyyāʾ al-Qazwīnī, ʿAjāʾib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharāʾib al-mawjūdāt, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, MS Cod.arab. 464, fol. 6b (the third muqaddima). For the dedication in al-Qazwīnī’s redaction for the Ilkhanid statesman ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Juwaynī (d. 681/1283), otherwise missing from the Munich recension (copied 678/1280), see alQazwīnī, ʿAjāʾib, British Library, London, Or. 14140, fol. 2a. This dedication appears in al-Qazwīnī, ʿAjāʾib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharāʾib al-mawjūdāt (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Aʿlamī, 2000), 9. As with the editio princeps by Ferdinand Wüstenfeld (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1848), this popular edition is lacunose and contains notable errata. A critical edition or even a diplomatic edition of just the Munich manuscript, the oldest dated manuscript known to survive, are still desiderata. Al-Qazwīnī, ʿAjāʾib, Munich, fol. 6b; Wüstenfeld’s edition ascribes this statement to the ḥukamāʾ (12), as does the Beirut edition (17), which parallels here British Library, MS Or. 14140, fol. 6a. For Ibn Sīnā in this passage, cf. Syrinx von Hees, Enzyklopädie als Spiegel des

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Neither the language used in this classification of the strange or extraordinary nor the ideas developed are especially novel. But a focus on originality would largely miss the significance of al-Qazwīnī’s collection of wonders, which represents a pious distillation of natural philosophy in an accessible, concise, and entertaining form. The category al-umūr al-gharība, the tripartite division, and the examples given all parallel directly the treatment of the topic in the final section of the famed philosophical primer al-Ishārāt wa-ltanbīhāt (“Pointers and reminders”) by Ibn Sīnā. Here, the great teacher of the philosophy of Aristotle offers a scientific basis for extraordinary phenomena, which includes a general theory of prophecy and miracles. In earlier writings, Ibn Sīnā develops other divisions of the extraordinary, but in this particular work he makes exactly the same division as listed by al-Qazwīnī, namely: 1) paranormal causation through the power of the soul or psyche as the basis for both miracles and magic; 2) nīranjāt; and 3) talismans.40 Except for transposing slightly the order of the list, al-Qazwīnī follows closely Ibn Sīnā’s classification. Perhaps equally important, he fully accepts the naturalization of magic and miracle, itself a central tenet of Avicennan metaphysics. The Ishārāt, a succinct text, which represents the last significant articulation of Ibn Sīnā’s philosophy, enjoyed several major commentaries over the course of history.41 This specific taxonomy became well known, as the Ishārāt circulated widely in scholastic philosophical circles and in madrasa education.42 A good example is the commentary by the renowned philosopher and occultist Fakhr al-Dīn al-

40

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Weltbildes. Qazwinis Wunder der Schöpfung: eine Naturkunde des 13. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002), 100 n. 49. Ibn Sīnā, al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt, ed. Mujtabā Zāriʿī (Qum: Bustān-i Kitāb-i Qum, 2002), 390, § 10.30. For more on Ibn Sīnā’s earlier classifications and his use of the term nīranj, see Charles Burnett’s chapter in the present volume. See also Charles Burnett, “Nīranj: A Category of Magic (Almost) Forgotten in the Latin West,” in Natura, scienze e societa medievali: studi in onore di Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, ed. Claudio Leonardi, Francesco Santi, and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008), 37–66, esp. 43– 44. For the place of this work in Ibn Sīnā’s oeuvre, see Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works, 2nd rev. ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 130–133, 155–159 (work 11). On the long commentarial tradition associated with the Ishārāt, as well as Ibn Sīnā’s treatment of the paranormal, see Michael Rapoport, “The Life and Afterlife of the Rational Soul, Chapters VIII–X of Ibn Sīnā’s Pointers and Reminders and Their Commentaries” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2018), 203–215, 358–368. For more on Ibn Sīnā’s Ishārāt in the context of madrasa education, see Gerhard Endress, “Reading Avicenna in the Madrasa: Intellectual Genealogies and Chains of Transmission of Philosophy and the Sciences in the Islamic East,” in Arabic Theology, Arabic Philosophy: From the Many to the One, ed. James E. Montgomery (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 371–422.

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Rāzī (d. 606/1210), who, when discussing this passage, refers to his own detailed treatment of the topic in al-Sirr al-maktūm (“The hidden secret”), a study of theoretical and practical astral magic.43 Al-Qazwīnī, who served as chief judge of the provincial city of Wasit, near Baghdad, and taught at a madrasa there until his death, does not directly identify his classification of gharīb with Ibn Sīnā’s Ishārāt, but he does not need to.44 By this point, the major arguments developed by Ibn Sīnā on the naturalization of both magic and miracle as derived from the singular metaphysical power of the soul would have been fully legible to his audience, as they had been largely absorbed in authoritative circles of teaching and learning.45 As for his own intellectual maturation, al-Qazwīnī trained with the astronomer and natural philosopher Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī (d. 663/1264) in Mosul. Al-Abharī, in turn, studied Ibn Sīnā’s philosophy in the mold of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī. AlAbharī, like many among his generation, is known to have read the Ishārāt, along with many of Ibn Sīnā’s other works.46 By now, the once radical claim, with its obvious Neoplatonic resonances, that what distinguishes illicit magic

43

44

45

46

Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Sharḥ al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt, ed. ʿAlī Riḍā Najafzāda, 2 vols. (Tehran: Dānishgāh-i Tihrān, 1384sh/2005–2006), 2:663–664. For al-Rāzī’s classifications of paranormal phenomena (al-umūr al-gharība), see Tariq Jaffer, “Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Taxonomy of Extraordinary Acts,” in Light upon Light: Essays in Islamic Thought and History in Honor of Gerhard Bowering, ed. Jamal J. Elias and Bilal Orfali (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 347–365. For more on al-Rāzī’s collection of astral magic, see Michael-Sebastian Noble, “The Perfection of the Soul in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s al-Sirr al-Maktūm” (PhD diss., Warburg Institute, University of London, 2017) and his chapter in the present volume. For early biographical material on al-Qazwīnī, see the history ascribed to Ibn al-Fuwaṭī (d. 723/1323), al-Ḥawādith al-jāmiʿa wa-l-tajārib al-nāfiʿa fī l-miʾa al-sābiʿa, ed. Mahdī Najm (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2003), 299; for more on al-Qazwīnī’s teachers and Sufi lineage, see Ibn al-Fuwaṭī, Majmaʿ al-ādāb fī muʿjam al-alqāb, ed. Muḥammad Kāẓim, 6 vols. (Tehran: Muʾassasat al-Ṭibāʿa wa-l-Nashr, 1416/1995), 4:261, §3806, 5:372, §5290; see also Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348), Taʾrīkh al-Islām wa-wafayāt al-mashāhīr wa-l-aʿlām, ed. ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Salām Tadmurī, 53 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb alʿArabī, 1987), 51:101–102, § 85. For his studies with al-Abharī, see al-Qazwīnī, Āthār al-bilād fī akhbār al-ʿibād (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1960), 463, 536. For more, see Berlekamp, Wonder, 46– 50; von Hees, Enzyklopädie, 56–57, 257. See, for instance, Frank Griffel, “Al-Ġazālī’s Concept of Prophecy: The Introduction of Avicennan Psychology into Ašʿarite Theology,” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2004): 101–144. See Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ṣafadī (d. 764/1363), al-Wāfī bi-l-wafayāt, ed. Aḥmad al-Arnāʾūṭ and Turkī Muṣṭafā, 29 vols. (Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 2000), 2:101, §499; Ibn alFuwaṭī, Majmaʿ, 3:356 n. 1. Endress, “Reading Avicenna,” 396, 404–405, 407, 410–416. Elements of this particular line of transmission of the Ishārāt quoted in al-Ṣafadī are put into question by Ayman Shihadeh, Doubts on Avicenna: A Study and Edition of Sharaf al-Dīn al-Masʿūdī’s Commentary on the Ishārāt (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 14–15.

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from Prophetic and saintly miracles was not a matter of ontology but a question of ethics—whether the act is for good or for evil—had been largely routinized across broad swaths of society.47 Al-Qazwīnī merely glosses these points as accepted facts of nature. Just before presenting this three-part division of strange phenomena, alQazwīnī refers to the account of how the famed philosopher and Ashʿarī theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) sought out assistance to summon jinn. Elsewhere, al-Qazwīnī identifies Ghazālī’s guide to the world of the unseen as the occultist and religious authority Abū l-Faḍl Muḥammad al-Ṭabasī (d. 482/ 1089). Al-Qazwīnī knew al-Ṭabasī above all for his grimoire, al-Shāmil fī l-baḥr al-kāmil (“The comprehensive compendium on the entire ocean”), an influential Arabic handbook of practical magic, which survives in multiple manuscript copies. It is a collection dedicated to commanding demons, jinn, and angels largely through incantations (ʿazāʾim) and talismans.48 The centrality of such practices and beliefs can be measured not only in the high discourses of natural philosophy and speculative theology or in the continued significance of karāmāt but also through a growing body of literature dedicated to harnessing strange or extraordinary powers for various practical ends, at times cloaked in the language of the Qurʾan and pious invocations to God and other celestial powers. Here the cognitive and emotive value that conditions the language of the strange and the wondrous is located in its veridical ontological status, the “there-ness of the event,” based in empirical observation and scientific reality.49 Al-Qazwīnī’s collection of wonders and rarities is a useful index of the diffusion of these attitudes, as it made available an authoritative body of sci47

48

49

See, for instance, Travis Zadeh, “Magic, Marvel, and Miracle in Early Islamic Thought,” in The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West, ed. David Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 235–267; Frank Griffel, “Muslim Philosophers’ Rationalist Explanation of Muḥammad’s Prophecy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad, ed. Jonathan Brockopp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 158–179; Fazlur Rahman, Prophecy in Islam: Philosophy and Orthodoxy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1958), 30–91. Al-Qazwīnī, ʿAjāʾib, Munich, fol. 7a. The story referred to here is repeated in greater detail in al-Qazwīnī, Āthār, 406–407. For more on al-Ṭabasī, see Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften, 188, 386–387, 392. See also Travis Zadeh, “Commanding Demons and Jinn: The Sorcerer in Early Islamic Thought,” in No Tapping around Philology: A Festschrift in Honor of Wheeler McIntosh Thackston Jr.’s 70th Birthday, ed. Alireza Korangy and Daniel J. Sheffield (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014), 131–160, esp. 144–150. A useful parallel with the emotive register of taʿajjub are medieval Latin discourses on admiratio, for which see Walker Bynum, “Wonder,” American Historical Review 102, no. 1 (1997): 1–26, esp. 24 on facticity and “there-ness.”

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entific learning in a concise and readily transportable form. This natural history traveled through both courts and madrasas. The countless manuscripts of the work—both lavish presentations copies for wealthy patrons and modest redactions for more humble readers, as well as the numerous translations in Persian, Turkish, and Urdu—all signal its status as a canonical collection that continued to delight and edify, inspiring, in turn, other notable imitations and expansions over time. The increasing attention that these cosmological collections of wonders and rarities pay to the various fields of practical magic is merely another indication of the central status that the extraordinary sciences commanded.50 The illuminated star catalog that opens the collection is itself tied to talismanic visual imaginary of astral science.51 And here lies one of the main challenges when addressing the sciences of extraordinary or paranormal phenomena that animate classical Islamic learning and authority. While these extraordinary forces may well be occulted from view, their power to condition the boundaries of the possible are visible, located in measurable and qualitative ways in normative expressions of Islamic learning and piety.

3

Ambiguity, Uncertainty, and Circularity

None of this is to argue that there were not detractors, that the practices and beliefs associated with occult learning were uniform across time and place, or that these bodies of knowledge enjoyed equal levels of prominence or acceptance. There is much to be said, as Liana Saif and Francesca Leoni note in the

50

51

On the significant expansions of the text, in both Arabic and Persian, see Julius Ruska, “Ḳazwīnīstudien,”Der Islam 4 (1913): 14–66, 236–262, esp. 244–251. For more on these transformations, see Karin Rührdanz, “Illustrated Persian ʿAjāʾib al-Makhlūqāt Manuscripts and Their Function in Early Modern Times,” in Society and Culture in the Early Modern Middle East: Studies on Iran in the Safavid Period, ed. Andrew J. Newman (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 33– 47. This can also be measured by the inclusion of extensive marginalia, many of them concerned with the occult sciences. See, for example, al-Qazwīnī, ʿAjāʾib al-makhlūqāt, copied in Lahore in 1270/1854, British Library, MS I.O. Islamic 3243, which contains marginal treatises on, among other subjects, geomancy, divination, and alchemy, described in Hermann Ethé and Edward Edwards, Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts in the Library of the India Office, 2 vols. (Oxford: Horace Hart and Claredon Press, 1903–1937), 1:369– 374, § 714. For an important Ottoman example, see the partial Turkish redaction by the courtier Musliḥaddīn Muṣtafā Sürūrī (d. 969/1562), completed in 960/1553, which survives in several manuscript copies and contains notable continuations in the fields of occult learning, such as British Library, MS Add 7894 and Library of Congress, Washington, DC, MS G93.Q3185. See Berlekamp, Wonder, 119–151.

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introduction to this volume, about uncertainty and ambiguity. The question of the probity and veracity of magic and the extraordinary shaped early Islamic discussions of the occult in taxonomical, juridical, and theological terms.52 As Saif and Leoni also observe, this ambiguity extends beyond matters simply of ontology or cosmology, as it also shapes the historical reception of occult learning itself.53 One of the most important chapters in Islamic history is the spirited endeavor by Muslim modernists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to combat “superstition” in all its varieties, taking up the challenge posed by the punishing discourses of Western rationality. Yet, as with the broader myth of modern disenchantment, it would be wrong to say that the sustained efforts at reform—at casting out or at least radically circumscribing the demons, saintly wonders, and occult forces that have long governed Islamic normativity—were ever fully or uniformly successful.54 The strategies of containment are no less interesting, predicated, as they are, on rejecting and occulting from view whole swaths of history as not authentically Islamic. As far as these intellectual pathways are concerned, part of the problem is that much of Western scholarship, which had long been invested in an exotic image of the Orient as the esoteric font for both enchantment and deception, also became a willing participant in this project. The numerous orientalist writings on Islamic magic, such as those by the scholar Duncan Black MacDonald (d. 1943) or the Protestant missionary Samuel Marinus Zwemer (d. 1952), while often peppered with erudition, were profoundly polemical.55 If 52

53 54

55

On ambiguity concerning the reality (ḥaqīqa) of the various branches of the occult sciences in classificatory discussions of knowledge, see, e.g., Ibn Farīghūn (fl. 340/951), Jawāmiʿ al-ʿulūm, ed. Qays Kāẓim al-Janābī (Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqāfa al-Dīniyya, 2007), 261–263. For a useful example of the theological rejection of the existence of magic as nothing but trickery, see the arguments developed by the Muʿtazilī Abū Bakr al-Jaṣṣāṣ (d. 370/981), Aḥkām al-Qurʾān, ed. Muḥammad al-Ṣādiq Qamḥāwī, 5 vols., reprint (Beirut: Dār Iḥyā al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, 1992), 1:50–72 (Q 2:102). Large parts of Jaṣṣāṣ’s argument here feature in the reformist treatment of magic by Muḥammad ʿAbduh (d. 1323/1905) and Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1354/1935), Tafsīr al-manār, 2nd ed., 12 vols., (Cairo: Dār alManār, 1367–1372/1947–53), 9:45–60. On ambiguity, see Saif and Leoni’s introduction to the present volume. Numerous examples abound. Germane to the present volume are observations by Christiane Gruber in her contribution. Likewise, a productive example of the enduring power of the occult, as well as an index of how much the scholarship on this topic has changed in eighty years, is a comparison of Bess Allen Donaldson, The Wild Rue: A Study of Muhammadan Magic and Folklore in Iran (London: Luzac, 1938) with Alireza Doostdar, The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). See Samuel Marinus Zwemer, The Influence of Animism on Islam: An Account of Popular Superstitions (New York: Macmillan, 1920). Also of note is The Moslem World, founded

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the “woman question” was for orientalists and missionaries a cause célèbre for railing against the putatively illiberal and oppressive manifestations of Islamic society, the occult offered grounds for repeated efforts at exposing the decadence, decay, and decline that kept Muslims from becoming truly modern. Such scholarship aimed to reform the “Muslim mind.” This could, as the logic went, be achieved only through conversion, if not to Christianity then to secular modernity itself, which, through a mischievous tautology, were largely coterminous.56 Viewed in this light, Marshall Hodgson’s vocabulary represents a sympathetic attempt at seeing Muslims in more nuanced terms, by creating spaces for orthodoxy and normativity that he deemed authentically Islamic. This entire conceptual arena, in turn, could be contrasted with all the other accretions that mounted over time through external contacts, sources, and agents that were not properly Islamic. Here we can place all the magic that various reformists— in their debates with orientalists, Christian missionaries, and fellow Muslims— would hold out as untrue to their religion. Among the abiding strategies in the course of modern Islamic reform have been the efforts to cordon off the various branches of magic, astrology, mysticism, divination, etc., as imported from foreign sources, or to silence them as mere expressions of the backward folkloric superstitions of women and the ignorant masses antithetical to the rationalizing, scientific, and modernizing forces of authentic Islam. The pages of orientalist scholarship dedicated to tracing the ancient Indic, Greek, Persian, Egyptian, Christian, or Jewish roots of many beliefs and practices nourished the argument—though for very different ends—that proper Islam must be isolated, for reformist purposes or for positivist pursuits, from foreign influences.

56

by Zwemer in 1911 and edited by him until 1947. Zwemer dedicated the journal to tracking the progress of Christian missions to Muslim lands and published in it numerous articles focused on exposing Muslim superstitions. The occult is treated extensively in Duncan Black Macdonald, The Religious Attitude and Life in Islam, Being the Haskell Lectures on Comparative Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1909); much of the same material is repeated in Duncan Black Macdonald, “Siḥr,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1st ed.; also relevant in this context is Duncan Black Macdonald, “Concluding Study,” in The Vital Forces of Christianity and Islam: Six Studies by Missionaries to Moslems, intro. Samuel Marinus Zwemer (London: Oxford University Press, 1915), 215–239. Countless other examples can be adduced. See Gil Anidjar’s syllogistic thesis, based on his reading of Edward Said’s Orientalism, “Secularism is Orientalism. And Orientalism is Christianity. It is Christian imperialism,” in Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (2006): 52–77, esp. 66; for a reflection on this formula touching on the present topic, see Robert Yelle, The Language of Disenchantment, Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3–4.

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The reductionist assertion that authentic Islam is located solely in scripture and law, as manifested in the Qurʾan and Sunna, is largely a result of these twin processes of essentialization. Ironically, such reifying gestures were only reinforced by Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s famous formulation that anything that scholars say about Islam as a living faith is valid only in so far as Muslims consent to it.57 Indeed both Hodgson and Smith, influential scholars of Islamic history and society, steeped in the Religionsgeschichtliche at the time in vogue among North American liberal Protestants, were reacting, in different ways, to the often offensive and jingoistic character of orientalist scholarship, anticipating the sweeping critiques that Edward Said famously leveled at the entire discursive edifice of orientalism as a monument to Western supremacy. Yet the notion that “Islam is whatever Muslims say it is” turns out to be a conceptual cul-de-sac, not only for historical inquiry but also for social analysis.58 As with all group formations, we are dealing here with discursive processes that are not stable, flat, or homogeneous but are constantly unfolding and becoming, through contestation and reformulation.

4

Facing Down Demons

When under siege, the stranger is all the more threatening. Much of the defensive posture guiding Muslim reformist discourses on modernization is formed through the dialogical pressure of Western hegemony. The influential synthesis of magic and miracle as ontologically equivalent in metaphysical terms rationalized the extraordinary as rooted in science and thus licensed a host of practices and beliefs that went largely unchallenged until the rise of European colonialism in the nineteenth century. The search for authenticity in the contours of modernity can never reach that vanishing horizon of unadulterated purity.

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Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “Comparative Religion: Whither—and Why?,” in The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology, ed. Mircea Eliade and Joseph Kitagawa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 31–58, esp. 43–44. See Ahmed, What Is Islam?, 246–297. Here Ahmed builds on, but also challenges, Talal Asad’s notion of Islam as a discursive tradition; see Talal Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (Washington, DC: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1986). For an insightful critique of Ahmed’s reading of Asad, see Zareena Grewal, “The Problem with Being Islamic: Definitional and Theoretical Limits and Legacies,” August 23, 2016, Marginalia: Los Angeles Review of Books, marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org.

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The charge of the “foreign” sticks, for there is much truth behind it, as largescale group formations and ideologies are hybrid by nature, products of mixed parentage. Much of the conceptual vocabulary and epistemic power of the occult sciences are indeed born of exotic origins. The ṭilasm is from the Greek telesma, the nīranj is related to the Middle Persian nērang, and the mandal, which Ṭabasī and others use as a term of art for the sorcerer’s circle, can be traced to the Sanskrit maṇḍala, signifying both circle and realm. The high learning of judicial astrology is not only ancient but stretches back and forth across Asia, Mesopotamia, and the Mediterranean basin. Also cut from foreign cloth are Galenic medicine, Ptolemaic geography and cosmography, and the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle—all of which shape indelibly the course of Islamic history. The appeal to ancient wisdom, languages of hidden and secret knowledge, stories of ascension, unveiling, and disclosure, and practices of summoning celestial hosts, and binding demonic forces find so many commonalities across the numerous contact zones that Muslims have historically shared with others that pointing them out in comparative terms borders on the banal. Identifying the ways in which Muslims have long shared in the broad thought-worlds of others is certainly a humanizing gesture, but arguably more pressing are the diverse ways that such exchanges and points of contact are transformed over time and authorized in distinctly Islamic terms. We are confronted here with processes of appropriation, naturalization, and transformation that, like all large-scale social forces, are continually reconstituted and restated.59 Practices of defining the occult, pinning down its slippery nature and indeterminacy, represent merely one arena for affirming external boundaries while attending to internal divisions, be it in grand cosmological terms or in more mundane practical matters of daily life. Neither the fields of Islamic learning, the practices they demanded, nor the vocabulary that shaped them have been static over time. Take, for instance, nīranj in Ibn Sīnā’s categorization. His identification of the word with a body of forces connected to earthly elements echoes discussions of nērang in the Dēnkard (“The acts of religion”), a compendium of Mazdean beliefs and practices written in the tenth century CE in Book Pahlavi. The priestly authors of the compilation treat nērang as a form of ritual spell or incantation (afsōn) that seeks to activate and harness elemental influences of water, air, fire, and earth in both the visible (gētīy) and invisible worlds (mēnōy), 59

For an overview of these processes as related to the Abbasid translation movement, see A.I. Sabra, “The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam: A Preliminary Statement,” History of Science 25 (1987): 223–243.

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two cosmological planes central to Mazdean dualism. In the visible world, nērang react with the elements of the body (āmēzišn ī tan), while from the invisible world they draw on the wondrous acts of the Amahraspands, the divine entities emanating from the supreme lord Ohrmazd. In addition to propitiating deities ( yazdān) and vexing demons (dēw), the nērang of the Dēnkard are connected to the movement of constellations (axtar) and planets (abāxtar), as well as to the conditions of the various regions (kišwarān) on earth.60 The treatment of the elements is refracted through the authority of medicine, shaped in the Sasanian context and in early Islamic society through the absorption of the Galenic system of the humors.61 The discussion in the Dēnkard invests nērang with natural powers to ward off various diseases, to maintain health, and to serve as an antidote to poisons. Present throughout the valances of nērang is the association with the efficacious power of ritual recitation from the Avesta, which functions as a sacred formulary (Avestan mąθra, compare Sanskrit mantra). Yet, even in Zoroastrian contexts the semantic value of nērang is by no means stable across time, as it also takes on several different valences within the realm of ritual performance.62 60

61

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See Dēnkard, Book III, in DkM = The Complete Text of the Pahlavi Dinkard, ed. Dhanjishah Meherjibhai Madan, 2 vols. (Bombay: Fort Printing Press, 1911), 1:157–158, 399–400; translated as Le troisième livre du Dēnkart, trans. Jean de Menasce (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1973), 158–159, 372–373. For a transcription, translation, and discussion of DkM III, 399–400, see Harold Bailey, “Iranian Studies III,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 7, no. 2 (1934): 275–298, esp. 276–283. Richard Payne, A State of Mixture: Christians, Zoroastrians, and Iranian Political Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 89. For a broader discussion of conceptions of medicine and the body in the Dēnkard, see Paolo Delaini, Medicina del corpo, medicina dell’anima: la circolazione delle conoscenze medico-filosofiche nell’Iran sasanide (Milan: Mimesis, 2013), 155–168. For examples of nērang as earthly amulets in both Pahlavi and Pāzand, see Antonio Panaino, “Two Zoroastrian Nērangs and the Invocation to the Stars and the Planets,” in The Spirit of Wisdom = Mēnōg ī xrad: Essays in Memory of Ahmad Tafazzoli, ed. Touraj Daryaee and Mahmoud Omidsalar (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 2004), 196– 218; Antonio Panaino, “Magic. i. Magical Elements in the Avesta and Nērang Literature,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica. See, for instance, the treatment of the nērang ī drōn and the broader use of nērang as a “ritual direction,” in The Hērbedestān and Nērangestān, ed. and trans. Firoze Kotwal and Philip Kreyenbroek, 3 vols. (Leuven: Peeters, 1992–2002), 1:84, (§20.2), 2:13–14 (editorial introduction), 2:62 (§ 10.14), 2:68 (§ 10.28), 3:80 (§ 23). For further variants in usage, see Mary Boyce, “Padyāb and Nērang: Two Pahlavi Terms further Considered,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 54, no. 2 (1991): 281–291. Nērangs are often collected at the end of prayer books of the Khordeh Avesta. In daily ritual performance, the most common use of nērang by Zoroastrians today is in the nērang ī kustīg, the formula recited when washing and retying the sacred girdle. My reading of this material has benefited from conversations with Daniel Sheffield.

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Needless to say, while nīranjāt in early Arabic and New Persian sources echo a good deal of this discussion, the larger Mazdean cosmography is entirely suppressed and largely abandoned, as the term takes on a life of its own.63 Undoubtedly, part of the significance originally associated with the category as adapted and repurposed by early generations of Persian converts lay in its liminal if efficacious power, drawn from the cosmic language and rituals of others. This is not entirely distinct from, say, the etymology of the word “magic,” from the Greek mageia, the activity of the magos, coded largely as a derogatory reference to Zoroastrian priests (Old Persian magu-) and their ritual activities.64 In this sense, the label “magic” has itself long been a way of infusing the religious beliefs and practices of outsiders with exotic power. If, in the case of the nīranj, these pathways of exchange and transformation are readily visible, a contrapuntal example would be the mandal. As noted above, given its consonantal form and lexical meaning as foremost a circle (dāʾira), the word is clearly related to the Sanskrit maṇḍala, meaning a disk, circle, halo, orbit, and, by extension, a region, both cosmic and terrestrial, connected also to the zodiac and used as a general label for cosmic diagrams prominent in various Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu ritual practices for summoning deities and astral powers.65 The early Arabic and New Persian accounts that describe the use of the mandal in incantations (ʿazāʾim) appear, however, to be several stages removed from any direct discourses or engagement with earlier Indic theurgic practices. Even al-Bīrūnī, who has a good grasp of nīranj as a form of sacred incantation practiced by Zoroastrian priests, gives no sense of the mandal as connected to esoteric diagrams or magical incantations, though he recognizes in it a cosmological meaning of a celestial realm, explaining the Sanskrit term at one point as equivalent to wilāya (region, dominion).66

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For more, see Burnett, “Nīranj,” 38–44, and his chapter in this volume. See also the synchronic description of the word and its meanings in Toufic Fahd, “Nīrandj,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. See further the comments on the Persian origin of the nīranj in Muḥammad al-Fullānī al-Kashnāwī (d. 1154/1741), al-Durr al-manẓūm wa-khulāṣat al-sirr al-maktūm, 2 vols. (Cairo: Muṣṭafā l-Bābī l-Ḥalabī, 1961), 1:317–319. On this see, Albert de Jong, The Traditions of the Magi: Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 222, 387–413. See Theodor Benfey, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (London: Longmans, Green, 1866), 677; cf. John Platts, A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English (London: Oxford University Press, 1884), 1074, s.v. mandal; Manfred Mayrhofer, Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen, 3 vols. (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1986–2001), 2:294, s.v. máṇḍala-. Abū l-Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī, Kitāb Taḥqīq mā li-l-Hind, ed. Edward Sachau (London: Trübner, 1887), 196, cf. 219. For his identification of Zoroastrian priests as aṣḥāb al-nīranjāt, see alBīrūnī, Āthār, 266–267 (§§ 11, 17), 273–274 (§ 39), 278–279 (§§51, 57).

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Yet, notable for our purposes, references to making maṇḍalas survive in the fragmentary Sogdian literary corpus from Central Asia.67 Centered in the cities of Samarqand and Bukhara, ancient Sogdiana sat at the crossroads of Asia and the Iranian plateau. The religious landscape of the region was notoriously fluid, with Buddhist, Nestorian, Mazdean, and other indigenous practices and beliefs existing side by side and often comingling.68 A relevant example is a scroll discovered in the caves of Dunhuang on the Silk Road, which contains a composite text shaped by Iranian, Indic, and Turkic vocabulary and cosmography. Often referred to in modern scholarship as a shamanistic manual of magic, the short tract opens with a description of the use of stones for their apotropaic and healing powers and concludes with directions for preparing a rainmaking ceremony that involves the construction of a four-cornered mandala (mntr > mandal) to be decorated with the images of planets, constellations, and the zodiac.69 The maṇḍala as a ritual diagram designed to attract deities is also found in Sanskrit Buddhist materials that circulated in Central Asia, well before the Arab invasions.70 We must imagine numerous vectors by which the mandal ultimately became an Islamic technology for harnessing occult forces, particularly in light of the functional parallels with cosmic diagrams developed and deployed across Asia

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For the references to the maṇḍala in the surviving Sogdian corpus, see Badr al-Zamān Qarīb [Gharīb], Sogdian Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Tehran: Farhangān Publications, 1995), 214, § 5288, s.v. mntr2. See Étienne de la Vaissière, Histoire des marchands sogdiens, 2nd rev. ed. (Paris: De Boccard, 2004); Crone, Nativist Prophets, 96–105. See Émile Benveniste, Textes sogdiens, édités, traduits et commentés (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1940), 66 (P. 3, l. 162), cf. 258 (glossary). Housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris (Pelliot Sogd. 3), this scroll has been the subject of extensive scholarship. See W.B. Henning, “The Sogdian Texts of Paris,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 11, no. 4 (1946): 713–740, esp. 726–730. The text has been reedited and translated by Samra Azarnouche and Frantz Grenet, “Thaumaturgie sogdienne: Nouvelle édition et commentaire du texte P. 3,” Studia Iranica 39, no. 1 (2010): 27–77, esp. 47, 56; Samra Azarnouche and Frantz Grenet, “Where Are the Sogdian Magi?” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 21 (2007 [2012]): 159–177, esp. 172. See also Frantz Grenet, “The Circulation of Astrological Lore and Its Political Use between the Roman East, Sasanian Iran, Central Asia, India, and the Türks,” in Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppe, ca. 250–750, ed. Nicola Di Cosmo and Michael Maas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 235–252, esp. 250–251. See the edition and translation by Seishi Karashima and Margarita Vorobyova-Desyatovskaya, “The Avadāna Anthology from Merv, Turkmenistan,” in Buddhist Manuscripts from Central Asia: The St. Petersburg Sanskrit Fragments, ed. Seishi Karashima and Margarita Vorobyova-Desyatovskaya, 1:145–523 (Tokyo: Soka University, 2015), 182 (fol. 15r, l. 1), 183 n. 48.

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and the Indian subcontinent in various Tantric traditions. Despite notable transformations and adaptations over time, the preparation of such ritual diagrams often involved the use of sacred invocations, rites of purification, the kindling of sacred fire, and the burning of incense and other medicinal substances, all undertaken at auspicious astral moments, with the aim of harnessing otherworldly powers.71 These practices have direct corollaries with the mandal as described in early Arabic and Persian manuals for conjuring astral spirits, demons, angels, and jinn. In light of the early history of sustained contacts across Central Asia and through South Asia, such linguistic and scientific zones of exchange and interaction offer numerous routes for the incorporation of the mandal into the occult repertoire of Islamic incantations. The power of the category lies not so much in its foreign origin, which can at once be divested of earlier associations and entirely repurposed in a new idiom through distinct practices and cosmological concerns. Rather, it is precisely the proven efficacy of these diagrams and the rituals associated with them that lends the mandal universal, scientific authority. A normative example of the preparation of such diagrams for harnessing occult powers is found in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s classification of the sciences, where he offers a detailed description of the various rituals associated with the science of incantations (ʿilm al-ʿazāʾim).72 Al-Rāzī’s account of this science, with its diagrams, sacred Qurʾanic recitations, fumigations, and bodily purifications, echoes many of the procedures described by al-Ṭabasī, who, in his manual of magical recipes and formulas, offers several examples of the mandal as a set of diagrams that an enchanter (muʿazzim) can use to summon demons and spirits from the other world in order to subjugate them.73 Throughout this 71

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See Gudrun Bühnemann, “Maṇḍala, Yantra and Cakra: Some Observations,” in Mandalas and Yantras in the Hindu Traditions, ed. Gudrun Bühnemann (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 13– 56; Jeffrey Kotyk, “Buddhist Astrology and Astral Magic in the Tang Dynasty” (PhD diss., Leiden University, 2017), 21–54; Ellen Marie Gough, “Making a Mantra: Jain Superhuman Powers in History, Ritual, and Material Culture” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2015), 1–36; Marko Geslani, Rites of the God-King: Śānti and Ritual Change in Early Hinduism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 148, 152–153, 245; Koichi Shinohara, Spells, Images, and Maṇḍalas: Tracing the Evolution of Esoteric Buddhist Rituals (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). I thank Phyllis Granoff for offering comparative insights and suggestions. Al-Rāzī, Jāmiʿ al-ʿulūm, 438–447. For al-Rāzī’s classification of this branch of learning within the mathematical sciences (ʿilm al-riyāḍiyyāt), see Melvin-Koushki, “Powers of One,” 145–146. See, e.g., the diagrams of mandals in al-Ṭabasī, Kitāb al-Shāmil, Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, MS Or. Fol. 52, 12, 72, 85 (paginated), copied 833/1430; al-Ṭabasī, Princeton University Library, Islamic Manuscripts, New Series, no. 160, fols. 14a, 73a–b; al-Ṭabasī, Salar Jung Museum,

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literature the mandal is associated with Solomon’s prophetic mastery over jinn, where it became one of the many techniques in the arsenal for conjuring occult forces.74 Not only were these diagrams fully naturalized in a distinctly Islamic cosmography, but they were often treated in the social imagination as a tested means of summoning occult forces. A colorful testimonial of the power of the mandal is preserved in an autobiographical report by the Ḥanbalī jurist of Baghdad Abū l-Wafāʾ Ibn ʿAqīl (d. 513/1119), who relates the story of a house in the city that had been haunted by jinn. In order to expel the evil spirit, Ibn ʿAqīl seeks to employ an enchanter, who captures the jinn, which has taken the form of a serpent dangling from the roof. The enchanter does so by reciting verses from the Qurʾan and casting a mandal (ḍaraba l-mandal) on the ground into which the jinn falls and is captured.75 In Ibn ʿAqīl’s account, the diagram serves to trap forces from the invisible world. However, there is general variance over how the actual ceremony of casting a mandal, its form, and its purpose would proceed. It is often the enchanter who sits within the diagram itself, where the lines drawn on the ground serve as a form of protection against the harm of the demons and jinn summoned.76

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Hyderabad, MS 2208 (ʿUlūm-i sirriyya, § 12), fols. 9a, 49b. The Salar Jung copy of al-Ṭabasī is in a collection along with Aḥmad al-Būnī (d. c. 622/1225), Shams al-maʿārif. For a partial Persian translation of al-Ṭabasī’s Shāmil, see Bodleian Library, Oxford University, MS Walter 91, fols. 63a, 89a. For more on the Solomonic associations in this body of literature, see Anne Regourd, “Le Kitāb al-Mandal al-Sulaymânî, un ouvrage d’ exorcisme yéménite postérieur au Ve/XIe siècle?,” Res orientales 13 (2001): 123–128; Anne Regourd, “Images de djinns et exorcisme dans le Mandal al-Sulaymānī,” in Images et Magie: Picatrix entre Orient et Occident, ed. Jean-Patrice Boudet, Anna Caiozzo, and Nicolas Weill-Parot (Paris: Honore Champion, 2011), 253–294. Reported in Sibṭ Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 654/1256), al-Juzʾ al-thāmin min Mirʾāt al-zamān, facsim. reprod., ed. James Jewett (Chicago: University of Chicago University Press, 1907), 53–54; alDhahabī, Taʾrīkh al-Islām, 35:355–356; Badr al-Dīn al-Shiblī (d. 769/1367), Ākām al-marjān fī aḥkām al-jānn, ed. Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Salām (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, n.d.), 97. See al-Rāzī, Jāmiʿ al-ʿulūm, 442. For an early Persian definition of the mandal in similar terms, see Abū Manṣūr al-Ṭūsī (d. 465/1073), Lughat-i furs, ed. ʿAbbās Iqbāl (Tehran: Chāpkhāna-yi Majlis, 1319sh/1940), 322. Similarly useful in the later Mughal context is Mīr Jamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Injū Shīrāzī (d. 1035/1625), Farhang-i Jahāngīrī, ed. Raḥīm ʿAfīfī, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Mashhad: Dānishgāh-i Mashhad, 1980), 2:1904–1905. See also Muḥibb al-Dīn Abū Fayḍ Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī (d. 1205/1790), Tāj al-ʿarūs min jawāhir al-qāmūs, ed. ʿAlī Shīrī, 20 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1993), 15:727. The idea of the lines of the mandal as a form of protection against the forces summoned is treated in Muḥammad al-Fullānī al-Kashnāwī, Bahjat al-āfāq, al-Maktaba al-Azhariyya, Cairo, MS 37/45594, fols. 212a–213a; al-Kashnāwī also gives a useful description of the general rules for producing the mandal in his alDurr al-manẓūm, 2:317–319. The procedure of drawing a circle (dāʾira) and sitting within

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Regardless of the multiplicity of forms, these diverse practices that are united by a single name have in common the power of drawing a design, usually coupled with recitation of sacred speech, as a means of summoning occult forces. This performance is often accompanied by the preparation of various natural materials possessing special properties that are activated by fumigation. A series of vivid illustrations of the mandal, in the sense of a diagram for harnessing spirits from the other world, feature in the Nujūm al-ʿulūm (“The stars of the sciences”), an illuminated Persian encyclopedia produced for ʿAlī ʿĀdil Shāh I, the ruler of Bijapur (r. 965–987/1558–1579). A royal copy of this collection, dated 978/1570, is preserved in the Chester Beatty Library of Dublin. While the codicological record of the text is lacunose, the surviving manuscripts of this vast compendium focus largely on occult science. The work draws from a body of knowledge deeply connected with Indian cosmography, portions of which appear to have been written by ʿAlī ʿĀdil Shāh himself.77 On display here is, however, also an entire section ascribed to the learned Ḥanafī scholar of Central Asia Sirāj al-Dīn Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sakkākī (d. 626/1229), who, like alṬabasī has long been identified with writings on talismans and incantations for subjugating occult powers. The Timurid historian Ghiyāth al-Dīn Khwāndamīr (d. 942/1535) describes al-Sakkākī as a master of the extraordinary sciences and the wondrous arts (ʿulūm-i gharība va funūn-i ʿajība), listing specifically the subjugation of jinn (taskhīr), nīranjāt, the summoning of astral forces (daʿvat-i kavākib), talismans, and magic and enchantment (siḥr va sīmiyāʾ).78

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it in order to conjure astral spirits is described, but without use of the term mandal, in Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī (d. 353/964), Ghāyat al-ḥakīm, ed. Hellmut Ritter (Berlin: B.G. Teubner, 1933), 298, 299. The Chester Beatty Library in Dublin has two copies of the work, IN2 and IN54, both of which are incomplete. For a detailed description of their contents, see Linda Leach, Mughal and Other Indian Paintings from the Chester Beatty Library, 2 vols. (London: Scorpion Cavendish, 1995) 2:819–889, 891–903. A third copy is in the Wellcome Institute, London, Per. MS 373, described in Emma Flatt, “The Authorship and Significance of the Nujūm al-ʿulūm: A Sixteenth-Century Astrological Encyclopedia from Bijapur,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 131, no. 2 (2011): 223–244. For more on the historical context of the Nujūm, see Emma Flatt, The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates: Living Well in the Persian Cosmopolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), esp. 210–267. For this biographical account of al-Sakkākī as a sorcerer and his ultimate downfall, see Ghiyāth al-Dīn Khwāndamīr, Ḥabīb al-siyar, ed. Jalāl al-Dīn Humāʾī, 4 vols. (Tehran: Khayyām, 1333sh/1954), 3:80–81. Al-Sakkākī was also held out, even in occult literature, as an object lesson for transgressing the bounds of probity; see, for instance, the opening of the astrological treatise, Hayʾāt al-aflāk, British Library, MS Or. 5416, fol. 4b. For more, see Zadeh, “Commanding Demons,” 133–134.

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Al-Sakkākī’s Arabic collection takes the same title, al-Shāmil fī l-baḥr al-kāmil, as al-Ṭabasī’s earlier manual. As with al-Ṭabasī, al-Sakkākī was celebrated as a skilled enchanter (muʿazzim), hailed as a muftī to both humanity and the jinn, so it is not a surprise to find their writings collected side by side.79 The surviving Arabic and Persian writings associated with al-Sakkākī on the occult arts remain in manuscript form and await detailed study.80 In the Bijapur manuscript, the section ascribed to al-Sakkākī on subjugating (taskhīrāt) astral and planetary spirits, demons, jinn, and angels, illuminates in lavish detail what was meant visually by casting a mandal. Here we encounter several paintings that depict an enchanter, referred to as the master of the summons or assembly (ṣāḥib-i daʿvat). In the illustrations, the master summons spirits while seated within a mandal, reciting sacred formulas, having prepared various recipes to be thrown into a sacred fire, with angels or demons standing outside the magical boundaries of the diagram waiting to be commanded for any purpose. These illustrations closely follow the directions provided in the text itself that are often noted as proven (mujarraba) to be efficacious. In addition to drawing the mandal in the form of concentric circles or rectangular patterns, the directions for incantations to bind spirits usually involve the 79

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See Bodleian Library, MS Walter 91, an illustrated Persian miscellany produced in India before 1200/1786, titled on the flyleaf, Majmūʿa-yi nuskha-yi Sakkākī dar ʿilm-i daʿvat, containing: 1) a treatise on jinn and astral talismans, fols. 1b–36a; 2) a treatise by Tankalūshā (i.e., Teukros), the legendary Babylonian astral authority, fols. 36b–52a; 3) a Persian selection from al-Ṭabasī’s Shāmil, fols. 52b–101b; 4) the Taskhīrāt of al-Sakkākī, fols. 102a–134b; 5) Persian selections from al-Sakkākī’s Shāmil, fols. 136b–181b; 5) material drawn from a collection titled Sirr al-asrār, also related to al-Sakkākī’s Shāmil, fols. 182b–211b. Much of this is repeated in British Library, MS Or. 11041, an illustrated Persian manuscript titled Sirr al-asrār fī ʿilm al-ṭilasmāt. For Arabic manuscripts of the Shāmil, see British Library, MS Delhi Arabic 1915, fols. 70b– 240a, itself a miscellany that opens with the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm, once held in the Mughal royal archive in Delhi; John Rylands Library, Manchester, MS 402; School of Oriental and African Studies, London, MS 46347. In addition to the Persian manuscripts cited above, see also the Royal Asiatic Society, London, MS Ellis Persian 11, fols. 41b–82b, the Kitāb Miyyālāṭīs al-Akbar, a Hermetic treatise on the stations (manāzil) of the moon purportedly translated for Aḥmad b. Ṭulūn (d. 270/884), included in the Shāmil, MS Delhi Arabic 1915, fols. 91a–114b. Discussed in Emily Selove and Taro Mimura, “Sex and Trickery in a Sorcerer’s Encyclopaedia: A Sampling of al-Sakkākī’s Kitāb al-Shāmil wa-baḥr al-kāmil,” (forthcoming). I thank Emily Selove for sharing with me a draft copy of the article. For published Persian materials, see al-Sakkākī, Kitāb Nafāʾis al-funūn, lith. ed. (Bombay: Mīrzā Muḥammad Shīrāzī, 1892); al-Sakkākī, Khutūmāt va taskhīrāt-i jinn va aʿmāl-i qirṭās va-ʿulūm-i gharība, photostatic copy of a manuscript (Quetta: Maktaba ʿArabiyya, n.d.). Emily Selove of the University of Exeter is leading a Leverhulme Trust research project on the work of Sakkākī, “A Sorcerer’s Handbook,” to create an edition, translation, and literary study of al-Sakkākī’s Shāmil.

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recitation of various sacred phrases known for their blessings (baraka), taken from the Qurʾan, the names of God, and other pious supplications, the invocation of strange demonic and/or angelic names, the sacrifice of various animals, the fumigation of incense and medicaments (adwiya), the use and placement of specific tools, and the writing of ciphers and seals (khātam, pl. khawātim), generally to be conducted at specific astral timings.81 Such is the case with the incantation designed to subjugate Queen ʿAyna, a demon said to control thousands upon thousands of demons and jinn; she was known in early Islamic demonology as the daughter of Iblīs, an identification grounded in a theological belief that demons were the Devil’s progeny (Figure 14.1).82 Given the clearly Indic context of the production of the Nujūm al-ʿulūm and much of the character of its contents, which draws freely from various Indic sources, particularly jyotiṣa traditions of astral science, it is not surprising that this section on summoning spirits has been read as an example of syncretistic engagements with “Hindu” thought and practice, especially in light of the maṇḍala as a Sanskrit word.83 Leaving aside the categorical problem of syn81

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Nujūm al-ʿulūm, Chester Beatty, MS IN2, fols. 114a–126b, 221a–226b. The manuscript is both lacunose and sometimes out of order, this treatise included. The later section (fols. 221a– 226b) is actually the opening of the treatise in question, on conjuring or summoning spirit beings (iḥḍārāt-i rūḥāniyān), which starts with a general description of the practice of preparing the mandal and opens with directions for summoning the astral spirit of the Sun. Also notable is a folio that was removed from the manuscript and became a part of the Edwin Binney Collection, now in the San Diego Museum of Art, 1990.435, the provenance of which is discussed in Edwin Binney, “Indian Paintings from the Deccan,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 127, no. 5280 (1979): 784–804. The Persian treatise Taskhīrāt cited here and ascribed to al-Sakkākī, can be found in MS Walter 91, fols. 102a–134b; Kashmir University Library, MS 2746, fols. 1a–31b; Salar Jung, Hyderabad, MS 1529 (ʿUlūm-i sirriyya §13). Nujūm al-ʿulūm, fols. 124b–125b; MS Walter 91, fols. 125b–127a. The spelling ʿAyna is used here, though the vocalization of the name is uncertain. The figure accompanying the demon in the illustration is identified explicitly in the directions for the incantation as a parī seated on a lion with long hair, evidently among the legions of demons and jinn that ʿAyna controls, referred to in the incantation’s description of her powers. This folio is described and reprinted in Leach, Mughal and Other Indian Paintings, 845, 851 (9.182), and in Deborah Hutton, Art of the Court of Bijapur (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 55, fig. 2.13. Both appear to be unfamiliar with earlier Islamic practices of casting mandals to summon occult powers. Likewise, Leach’s identification with “Hindu” elements, echoed by Hutton, is probably not as direct as they imply, given the circulation of similar material in eastern Iran several centuries earlier. While Iblīs is known to have other daughters, ʿAyna appears with some frequency. For more examples, see MS Walter 91, fols. 91a, 190b–191b, 202b; MS Delhi Arabic 1915, fols. 141b, 164b, 193b; al-Kashnāwī, al-Durr, 59, 63–64. For the earlier demonology associated with ʿAyna, see al-Ṭabasī, Shāmil, Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, MS. Or. Fol. 52, 71–74 (paginated). On shayāṭīn (demons) as the offspring of Iblīs, see al-Rāzī, Jāmiʿ al-ʿulūm, 440. See Leach, Mughal and Other Indian Paintings, 2:847; Hutton, Art of the Court, 59.

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figure 14.1

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An incantation (ʿazīma), requiring the sacrifice of two cocks, performed in a mandal designed to subjugate the queen demon ʿAyna, accompanied by a parī mounted on a lion. Nujūm al-ʿulūm, Bijapur, India, dated 978/1570. Ink and colors on paper. Page 26.1 × 16.9 cm. Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, MS IN2, fol. 125b © The Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin

cretism,84 it would appear that of the many direct Indic influences on this collection, this is not one of them. Rather, the mandal had long been calibrated in the language of Islamic cosmography as an efficacious technique for harnessing spirits, well before Muslim religious authorities crossed the Subcontinent and reintroduced it into India in a form entirely shaped by discourses on Solomonic magic and Qurʾanic theurgy. When Muslim authorities in South Asia began to draw extensively on esoteric dimensions of yoga and tantra, both before and after the production of such texts as the Nujūm al-ʿulūm, they already possessed a vocabulary of astral knowledge and occult power that had been drawn from Indic learning centuries earlier.85

84 85

See Saif and Leoni’s discussion of syncretism in the introduction to the present volume. For examples, see Kazuyo Sakaki, “Yogico-Tantric Traditions in the Ḥawḍ al-Ḥayāt,” Journal

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As with the flow of people, ideas and practices travel circuitously, often in ways that obfuscate direct lines of transmission and exchange. In this way, the metaphor of genealogy, as a means of tracing the linear descent of an idea or practice back to its source, following all its permutations and ramifications in a hierarchical taxonomy, can quickly obscure the multiple movements and transformations across time and place. The alchemical condition of language resists a stable, closed, archive of monogenetic material, which is not fixed but rather polyvalent and polygenetic.86 As in many other arenas of occult practice and authority, the Islamic vocabulary of the mandal has important afterlives among both Christians and Jews.87 Moreover, the ritual form and content of the mandal are themselves unstable, even as the word circulates among Muslims through time and place. Particu-

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of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies 17 (2005): 135–156, esp. 148, 152 n. 15, n. 21. For the mandal and the discourses of taskhīr al-arwāḥ, the subjugation of spirits, in this context, see Carl Ernst, Refractions of Islam in India: Situating Sufism and Yoga (New Delhi: Sage, 2016), 208, 227–228 (chart. 10.7), 315 (§ 3.1). I thank Supriya Gandhi for our conversations about the later Persian reception of Nath Yoga in the Indian subcontinent as a means for harnessing occult power. For earlier currents, see, for instance, David Pingree, From Astral Omens to Astrology from Babylon to Bīkāner (Rome: Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’ Oriente, 1997), 51–62, 79–90; David Pingree, “The Indian and PseudoIndian Passages in Greek and Latin Astronomical and Astrological Texts,” Viator 7, no. 1 (1976): 141–195; David Pingree, “Some of the Sources of the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 43 (1980): 1–15; cf. van Bladel, Arabic Hermes, 115– 118. For the classic formulation of the rhizome as a metaphor to collapse epistemic hierarchies, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3–25; see also David Greetham, “Phylum-Tree-Rhizome,” Huntington Library Quarterly 58, no. 1 (1995): 99–126. See David Pingree, “Learned Magic in the Time of Frederick II,”Micrologus 2 (1994): 39–56, esp. 42, 48; Jan Veenstra, “The Holy Almandal: Angels and the Intellectual Aims of Magic,” in The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, ed. Jan Bremmer and Jan Veenstra (Leuven: Peeters: 2002), 189–229; Jan Veenstra, “Venerating and Conjuring Angels: Eiximenis’s Book of the Holy Angels and the Holy Almandal: Two Case Studies,” in Magic and the Classical Tradition, ed. Charles Burnett and W.F. Ryan (London: Warburg Institute, 2006), 119–134; see also the Latin edition, L’Almandal et l’Almadel latins au Moyen Âge. Introduction et éditions critiques, ed. Julien Veronese (Florence: Sismel, 2012). See the comments by Bernd-Christian Otto, “Historicising ‘Western Learned Magic,’ ” Aries 16 (2016): 161–240, esp. 195–196 n. 150. Also see Dora Zsom, “A Judeo-Arabic Fragment of the Magical Treatise Kitāb Dāʾirat al-aḥruf al-abǧadiyya,” The Arabist: Budapest Studies in Arabic 38 (2017): 95–120, esp. 102, 115; and A Fifteenth-Century Manuscript of Jewish Magic: MS New York Public Library, Heb. 190, ed. Gideon Bohak, 2 vols. (Los Angeles: Cherub, 2014), 1:166, l. 1 (edited text), 2:166 (facsim., with diagram). My discussion here has benefited from conversations with Alessia Bellusci.

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larly in the west, the expressions ḍarb and fatḥ al-mandal came to be associated with divinatory practices of scrying, which involve gazing into a goblet, kettle, or a circle of ink to summon jinn who can then help uncover knowledge of the unseen. The Syrian alchemist and all-around occultist, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jawbarī (fl. 619/1222) has this form of casting a mandal in mind when he describes the various tricks that enchanters use, often through chemical means, to swindle the unsuspecting. The British orientalist Edward Lane (d. 1876) witnessed several instances of this form of mandal divination while living in Egypt, which he referred to as the “Mirror of Ink.” Lane was famously convinced by the divinatory performances he observed.88 The slippery nature of the sign, as it moves both within and beyond various communities, reflects how practices are renamed, reconstituted, and reinvented continually in new discursive systems. The fact that such wordplay can extend in countless directions is merely one indication of the ebb and flow of theories and practices and the concepts and words that condition them. Many of these routes have been obscured from sight, repurposed and naturalized, often beyond recognition. These processes of occultation are often deliberate, as they are tied to mechanisms for claiming ownership, appropriating, and possessing, while also rejecting and effacing. Like the word naẓar—which can evoke both the philosophical language of theoretical observation and the widespread use of amulets to guard against the evil eye—these currents of human effort move in multiple directions forward and backward across the globe. Such patterns are not only part of the diverse landscapes of Islamic intellectual and cultural history, they continue to abide the world over. Our systems of knowledge are conditioned by the global movement of bodies, capital, and ideas, which are invested simultaneously not only in languages of rationalized disenchantment but also in enduring commitments to the strange and uncanny powers of the unseen.89

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ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jawbarī, Kitāb al-Mukhtār min kashf al-asrār, published as Al-Ǧawbarī und sein Kašf al-asrār, ed. Manuela Höglmeier (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2006), 233–235, §§ 13.1, 3; Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406), al-Muqaddima, ed. ʿAbd al-Salām al-Shaddādī, 4 vols. (Casablanca: Bayt al-Funūn wa-l-ʿUlūm wa-l-Ādāb, 2005), 2:149–150. For examples, see ps.Ibn Sīnā, al-Mujarrabāt al-rūḥāniyya (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Nūr, 2005), 63, 68–69, 233, 245. See also Edward Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, ed. Edward Stanley Poole (London: John Murray, 1860), 263–275, 275 n. 1; William Worrell, “Ink, Oil and Mirror Gazing Ceremonies in Modern Egypt,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 36 (1916): 37–53. See the discussion of market forces driving the production and consumption of amulets in Gruber’s Chapter 13 in this volume.

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Knowledge production is as much a question of what we decide to tuck away as what we keep on view. The distinction between archive and canon can offer an encouraging path, if not out of the labyrinth, then at least further along its twisting arteries.90 When facing the vast volumes of Islamic literature and material culture preserved in the archives of modern institutions, we must recognize that all forms of possession and curation are governed by specific values and material conditions. The production of memory, of what is preserved and commemorated communally, is also a curatorial process of leaving out, ignoring, and even destroying. Such forces have shaped profoundly the study of Islam in general and the occult sciences in particular. Much of the field has been hidden by successive generations of forgetting and abandonment. Even so, the surviving archives are immense, and, despite growing efforts, increased interest, and important interventions, vast bodies of physical labor and textual capital remain unrecognized and unexplored, awaiting consideration. To reconsider what others have abandoned demands that we ask the simple question why it has been forgotten at all. The power of our scholarship lies not only in the ability to name but in our capacity to think otherwise and to do so with clarity and sympathy. For a host of reasons and motivations—even if unstated, unrecognized, or posed for radically different ends—the occult has never been so clearly in view.

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See Aleida Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 97–107.

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Index Page references in bold type indicate a more in-depth treatment of the subject. Aaron 244 Abbasid period/Abbasids (750–1258, 1261– 1517) 72, 134, 140, 181, 232, 253, 255, 390 ʿAbbās I (Safavid Shah of Iran, r. 1587–1629) 295, 296, 298, 299, 301, 303–305, 303n164, 305n173, 306n178, 307, 406n71 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq b. Qāsim Shīrāzī (Amānat Khān, d. 1644–1645) 118 ʿAbd al-Jabbār b. Aḥmad al-Hamadhānī (d. 1024) 133n185 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī see [al-]Bisṭāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ʿAbd al-Raḥman b. ʿAwf (Companion of the Prophet, d. c. 654) 540 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī 268 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jawbarī see [al-]Jawbarī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Abharī, Athīr al-Dīn (d. 1264) 622–623 Abraham b. Ezra (d. 1165) 99n112 Abraham/Ibrahīm 282–283n74 as lettrist/relation with letters 241, 244 magic squares and 241, 242 millennium and planet of 235, 236 references on talismans/amulets to 540, 552 Abrahamic faiths 213 see also Ḥanīfs philosophies/religions denying prophethood vs. 209, 210, 213, 215 Abrahamic prophets 110 references on talismans/amulets to 538, 541n34, 552, 552n77, 578 revelation and 213, 215, 246 Abū al-ʿAbbās 328 Abū ʿAbdallāh al-Maghribī see [al-]Maghribī, Abū ʿAbdallāh Abū ʿAbdallāh al-Kūmī see [al-]Kūmī, Abū ʿAbdallāh Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā al-Māhānī see al-Māhānī, Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī see al-Sulamī, Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān

Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham see Ibn al-Haytham, Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan Abū ʿAlī al-Muḥassin b. Ibrāhīm b. Hilāl alṢābiʾ (d. 1010) 107, 131 Abū Ayyūb al-Anṣārī (Eyüp, Companion of the Prophet, d. 674) 441, 574 Abū Bakr (1st Caliph of the Rashidun Caliphate, r. 632–634) 477, 488, 499, 505 Abū Bakr al-Rāzī see al-Rāzī, Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʾ Abū Dhāṭīs see Anūdāṭish Abū l-Faḍl Muḥammad al-Ṭabasī see alṬabasī, Abū l-Faḍl Muḥammad Abū l-Fatḥ ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Khāzinī see [al-]Khāzinī, Abū l-Fatḥ ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī see al-Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid Abū l-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī al-Masʿūdī see al-Masʿūdī, Abū l-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī Abū l-Ḥasan (kunya) 131, 133n185 Abū l-Ḥasan Thābit b. Ibrāhīm b. Zahrūn (d. 976 or 980) 133, 133n185, 134n186 Abū l-Ḥasan Thābit b. Sinān (d. 976) 133 Abū Ḥātim al-Muẓaffar al-Isfizārī see alIsfizārī, Abū Ḥātim al-Muẓaffar Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī 169n22, 194 Abū Hurayra (Companion of the Prophet, d. 680) 432 Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm b. Hilāl al-Ṣābiʾ (d. 994) 134–136, 134n187, 135n188 Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. Jarīr al-Ṭabarī see [al-]Ṭabarī, Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. Jarīr Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal al-Ḥarrānī (d. before 978–979) 124tab., 131–142, 132 fig., 132–133n184, 134–135n188, 143 Abū l-Maḥāsin Muḥammad b. Saʿd b. Muḥammad al-Nakhjuvānī see Ibn Sāvajī Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī (d. 787) 105n121, 207, 351 Maqāla fī l-aʿdād al-mutaḥābba (“Discourse on Amicable Numbers”) 351 Abū l-Muẓaffar Barkiyāruq (Sultan of the Seljuk Empire, r. 1094–1105) 124tab. Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (d. 950) 607

652 Abū Naṣr Manṣūr b. ʿAlī b. ʿIrāq 130n180 Abū Nuwās (poet, d. c. 813–815) 329 Abū l-Qāsim Aḥmad al-Sīmāwī see al-Sīmāwī, Abū l-Qāsim Aḥmad Abū l-Qāsim al-Ḥijāzī 138, 141 Abū l-Qāsim, Amīr (marshall of sayyids of Nishapur) 281 Abū Saʿd Jarrāḥ (Khwārazmshāh prince) 124–125tab. Abū Sahl al-Kūhī (d. c. 995) 135 Abū Saʿīd Mīrzā (Sultan of the Timurid Empire, r. 1451–1469) 269, 405 Abū Sālim ʿAbd Allāh al-ʿAyyāshī see alʿAyyāshī, Abū Sālim ʿAbd Allāh Abū Sulaymān al-Sijistānī (d. 985) 135n188 Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr b. Bahr al-Jāḥiẓ see alJāḥiẓ, Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr b. Baḥr Abū l-Wafāʾ al-Būzjānī see [al-]Būzjānī, Abū l-Wafāʾ Abū l-Wafāʾ Ibn ʿAqīl see Ibn ʿAqīl, Abū lWafāʾ Abū Yaḥyā Zakariyyāʾ al-Qazwīnī see alQazwīnī, Abū Yaḥyā Zakariyya Abū Yaʿqūb ibn ʾIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī see al-Kindī, Abū Yaʿqūb ibn ʾIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ Aceh-Dutch War (1873–1914) 446–447 action 46 categories of (Ibn Sīnā) 44–45 observation vs. 608 Adam 181, 185 creation of 239, 243 Hebrew occult texts attributed to 240 knowledge of occult sciences 3 as lettrist/relation with letters 237, 238– 240, 241, 336 magic squares and 110 millennium and planet of 235, 236 references on talismans/amulets to 540 Adelard of Bath 27, 49 ʿAḍud al-Dawla (Buyid Amir of Iraq, r. 978– 983) 60, 111tab., 124tab., 131, 135, 143 Agathodaimon 195, 210, 212, 240, 245 Agrippa, Henry Cornelius, De occulta philosophia 52 Ahl al-Bayt (“People of the House”) devotion to/veneration of 307, 444 divinatory/intercessory powers and healing capabilities 273, 448

index references on talismans/amulets to 30, 270, 421, 427, 430, 441, 444, 445, 466n58, 477 Aḥmed Paşa b. Ḫıżır Beğ (d. 1521), Müfti 409 letter of congratulation (tehniyetnāme) to Selīm I 408, 412 ʿĀʾisha bt. Abī Bakr (d. 678) 541–542 ʿajāʾib (“wonders, marvels, natural curiosities”), equation with gharāʾib 616–617 Ajian Macan Putih (“Incantation of the White Tiger,” practice) 485 Akbar (Mughal Emperor, r. 1556–1605) 437 al-Akhlāṭī, Sayyid Ḥusayn (d. 1397) 197, 299, 396, 401 on lettrism 277 talismanic operations by 300, 301, 303 works 256, 272, 292, 397 AKP (Justice and Development Party, Turkey) 31, 573 Aksel, Malik 456 alchemy (kīmiyā) 12, 614 aim of 44 as corporeal science 45, 46–48 definition/term 43, 273–274 foundations of 45 magic and 27, 192 material ingredients in alchemical recipes 46–47 parallels with sīmiyāʾ 337–338 purification of 21n70 role of planets in 47–48 spirits and souls in 47–48 Aleppo, sack of 235, 257–258, 261, 262 Alexander, David G. 438 Alexander the Great (King of Macedon, r. 336–323BC) 241, 425 Aristotle and 3, 182–183, 327 algorithms 58, 105 ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (4th Caliph of the Rashidun Caliphate, first Imam, r. 656–661) 232, 238, 271, 425, 439 see also Dhū l-Fiqār; Lion of ʿAlī calligrams alchemy and 272 devotion to 444, 446, 448, 477 heroic qualities of 462, 464, 477 intercessory powers of 441

index al-Jafr wa-l-jāmiʿa (“Comprehensive Prognosticon”) 251, 386 as lettrist/relation with lettrism 249– 252, 262, 273, 399 as “Lion/Tiger of God” 456, 462, 464, 500 magic squares and 111n138, 251–252, 256 predictions by 259 references/invocations on talismans/ amulets to 30, 427, 428, 430, 441, 444, 445, 488, 499, 538–539, 555 as successor to the Prophet 236n17, 463–464 tomb of 446 use of talismanic weaponry 421 ʿAlī ʿĀdil Shāh I (Sultan of Bijapur, r. 1558– 1579) 634 ʿAlidism/ʿAlids 28, 250, 268, 269, 271, 307 references on talismans/amulets to 25, 445, 477, 555 alif (letter) 242, 243, 259, 346 al-ʿAlīm (name of God) 244, 259 ʿAlī Qulī Khān Shāmlū (Safavid military commander, d. 1624–1625) 296 ʿAlī al-Riḍā (8th Shiʿi Imam) al-Ṣaḥīfa al-riḍawiyya 270, 271 shrine of 271, 303, 303n164, 304–305, 305n173,n175, 305–306n176 ʿAlī Ṣafī, Fakhr al-Dīn (d. 1532–1533) 267, 307 see also Tuḥfa-yi khānī Ḥirz al-amān min fitan al-zamān (“The Amulet of Protection from the Vicissitudes of Fate”) 268n5, 292 ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī, Mīr (d. 1501) 267–268n4, 269, 271, 285 Majālis al-nafāʾis 289 Allāh see also divine names references/invocations on talismans/ amulets to 428, 430–431, 438 value of name in lettrism 244 Allāh Vīrdī Khān (Safavid military commander, d. 1613) 296, 299 ALM (letter combination), in Qurʾan verses 386n21, 403, 405n70 alphabets 237, 354 Arabic alphabet 4, 237

653 cryptographic 334, 353–354 origins of 238 al-Alūsī, Shihāb al-Dīn Maḥmūd (d. 1854) 389 Amahraspands (divine entities, Zoroastrianism) 629 Amasya, Treaty of (1555) 445 amicable numbers 109, 109n133, 351 see also awfāq (magic squares) ʿĀmilī, Shaykh ʿAlī Minshār (d. 1576) 297 Amīr b. Khiḍr Mālī 70n38 amīr (title) 281–282 amulets see also talismans amuletic gadgets vs. devotional objects 527–528 Arabic script amulets 601–602 commercialization of 572, 586n26, 593, 595, 599, 600–602 as encouragement for ethical behavior 584 “Islamized” 600–602, 600ill., 601ill. making of 28, 564 popularity of 572 protection in commercial life 583–584 in Turkey see blessing cards; eye beads Ananda (Prince of Anxi, enthroned 1282) 66 ʿAnāq (monstrous daughter of Eve) 336 Anatolia 286, 288n97, 390, 412, 539 al-Andalus 125, 191, 259 al-Andalusī, Ṣaʿīd 113tab. angelicity/angelic forms, reception of angelic forms after death 174 “angel of illumination” (angel of inspired knowledge and names of God) 234– 235 angels 173 see also archangels; spirits/spiritual powers animal fights (Malay peninsula) 497–500, 498ill. animals attracting animals by magic 167, 183 composite 464, 485 depiction of 473, 503 Ankara 574 aṅkayantra (numerical tantric diagrams, northern India) 69, 75

654 al-Anṣārī, Muḥammad b. Abī Ṭālib (d. 1336– 1337), Kitāb al-Siyāsa fī ʿilm al-firāsa (“Book of Politics of the Science of Physiognomy”) 332–333 al-Anṭākī, Abū l-Qāsim ʿAlī (d. 987) 130 Kitāb tafsīr al-Arithmāṭīqī (“Commentary on the Arithmetical”) 111tab., 131, 140 al-Anṭākī, Dāwūd (d. 1599), Tadhkirat ūlī l-albāb (“Memorandum for Men of Intelligence”) 344 anthropomorphic scripts 458 Antichrist 241, 253, 261 see also Timūr Antinoupolis, letter square from 63 anti-occultist rhetoric 6, 7, 19n62, 263, 396, 402 see also Ibn Khaldūn Anūdāṭīsh (Abū Dhāṭīs) Kitāb Muṣḥaf zuḥal (“Book of the codex of Saturn”) 325 Muṣḥaf al-qamar 340 Anwār al-jawāhir wa-l-laʾāliʾ fī asrār manāzil al-maʿdan al-ʿālī (“The Glow of Jewels and Pearls over the Secrets of the Stations of the Sublime Metal,” Anonymous) 194 Anxi, Prince of, palace 66 apocryphal magic 353 Apollonius of Tyana (d. c. 100) 78, 79, 80n63, 110, 274, 349 apotropaic devices see amulets; talismans Aqquyunlu Empire (tribal confederation) 29, 396, 403 lettrist imperialism/universalist claims 404 Timurid Empire vs. 403–406 Aqsām al-ʿulūm al-ʿaqliyya (“Division of the Intellectual Sciences,” Ibn Sīnā) 3–4, 43–44 aqṭāb (“Poles”), mujaddidūn as 236, 254 Arabica (journal) 15–16 Arabic language and script 239 see also calligrams lettrism and 238 as tool for legalizing of dubious activities 31 translation of occult works into 240, 255, 279

index Arabo-Persian occult sciences, scholarship and 381, 401, 403 Aratus 195 Arberry, Arthur J. 325 archangels, references on talismans/amulets to 499, 508, 548, 552 Archimedes/Arshimīdis (d. 212BCE) 110, 111n138, 128, 248–249 Ardabil 286, 287 Ardabīlī, Shaykh Ṣadr al-Dīn Mūsā (d. 1391– 1392) 286 Aristotelianism 5, 81, 135n188, 187, 195 Aristotle 195, 325, 628 see also pseudo-Aristotle Alexander the Great and 3, 182–183, 241, 327 Brethren of Purity and theology of 177 Kitāb Kunūz al-muʿazzimīn fī asrār alḥurūf […] (“The book of treasures of the conjurers”) 320 Kitāb al-Siyāsa fī aḥkām al-riʾāsa (“Book of politics concerning the rules of government”) 320 natural philosophy of 81 Arithmetical Introduction (Nichomachus of Gerasa) 62, 138, 140 arms and armor 25 see also body armor; daggers; swords; talismanic weaponry definition 420 talismanic nature of 29–30, 420– 421 Arsūmāmandarūs 335 artefacts 20–21, 22 Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (Washington), Falnama: The Book of Omens (exhibition, 2009–2010) 9 artificial trickery (siḥr ṣināʿī) see also illicit magic true magic (siḥr ḥaqq) vs. 178–179 ascent planetary 210–211, 224 of the soul 177 asceticism 223, 225, 226, 227, 277 Aṣḥāb al-Kahf (“People of the Cave,” “Seven Sleepers of Ephesus”) 462n38 protection in seafaring and trade by 554ill., 554n85

index references on talismans/amulets to 421, 434, 438–439, 448, 462 on blessing cards/magnets 575, 580 in calligrams 471, 478, 507, 553–554, 554ill., 555n87 on stamped talismans 548, 553–554, 554ill. Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology (University of Oxford) 20–21 Islamic Occultism in Theory and Practice (conference, 2017) 1, 2 Power and Protection (exhibition, 2016– 2017) 9–10, 23n76, 455–456 Ashmole, Elias 20–21 Asian Civilisations Museum (Singapore) 488, 492n165 al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā (“most beautiful Names of God”) 432–434, 502, 536, 538, 548, 575, 583 see also divine names Asrār-i qāsimī (“Qāsimian secrets,” Kāshifī) 28, 268, 342 additions/interpolations in Safavid period 293–298, 307 dating/authorship 298–306 Bombay lithograph editions 293, 293n120 cipher 291 circulation 291, 293 identity of “Qāsim”/patron 274, 280–291 manuscripts 274n32, 279n52, 293, 293n119 scope of 273–278 simplified version see Tuḥfa-yi khānī sources of inspiration 278–280, 285– 286, 296 Astarābādī, Faḍlallāh (d. 1394) 243, 278 astral idolatry see planetary idols astral magic (hīmiyā) 28, 183, 274, 293, 294n125, 341–342, 345, 384 see also planets; [al-]Sirr al-maktūm Sabian 207–227 astral-prophetic cycles 232, 234, 235, 236, 249–250, 261, 262 astral rituals meditation and 226 Sabians 208–209, 213–214, 215, 216, 223– 224

655 astral vital agents 172–173 astrology 168 see also astral magic astral influences and magic squares 81– 84, 86, 90, 91–94, 95, 96, 98, 99–102, 108, 108n130, 143, 302 astrological conditions for making talismans 50, 83–84, 98 elective/electional 50, 91, 98, 141, 167, 182, 267 eschatological meaning of 174, 176–177 as foundation of talismanry 174 institutionalization at courts 380, 385, 404, 412, 412n89 interrogational 54, 54n29 judicial 628 lettrism and 403, 406, 412, 412n89 as magic 171–174, 183 mathematics and 172, 411 scholarship on 381 as science 3, 46, 53 works on 351 astronomical observations 127, 143 astronomical tables (zīj) 127, 135, 143, 351 astronomy/astronomers 45, 177 mathematical 125, 126, 128, 135–136, 143, 302n161, 411 al-Aṭʿānī, Muḥammad b. Aḥmad (d. 1405) 236n17, 254, 262 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal (d. 1938) 584, 598n52 Atlagh, Ridha 13 ʿAṭūfī (d. 1541) 409n84 Aubin, Jean 287 Avesta (primary collection of religious Zoroastrian texts) 629, 629n62 Avicenna see Ibn Sīnā Avicennism 210, 215, 222 Sabianism and 210 awfāq literature 27, 59–60, 268 see also Diwān al-ʿadad al-wafq from Buyid Baghdad 60, 86, 111tab., 124tab., 131–132, 143 early awfāq literature (pre-7th/13th c.) 105n121, 114–126 earliest author of 131, 132–136 overview of authors 111–113tab., 124– 125tab.

656 manuscripts British Library, Add. MS 7713 (Anon. Pers. BL) 105n121, 114 British Library, Delhi Arabic 110 116– 126, 123ill. Princeton University Library, Third Series, no. 591 118 mathematical texts 70, 71, 87–94, 105– 106 medical texts 71–86, 87, 92 Psalms in 75, 78, 80, 101 rise of 106–114 from Seljuk Isfahan and Marw 60, 72, 113tab., 124–125tab., 126–128, 130, 131, 143 talismanic texts 71 awfāq (magic squares) 27 see also awfāq literature; lettrism; sīmiyāʾ ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib and 251–252, 256 astral influences/astrological principles 81–84, 86, 90, 91–94, 95, 96, 98, 99–102, 108, 108n130, 143, 302 construction (techniques) 96, 302 balanced mixture (al-mizāj almuʿtadil, construction technique) 137 definition 57–58 failure/possible limited potential of 80– 84 harmonious relationship between numbers and figure 91–94 healing power of 80, 102, 143, 241 history/origins 59–70, 109–111, 137, 140, 142–143, 241, 242, 252 “Indian letters” 346–350 Islamicate 70–106, 74ill, 75ill., 114 hubs of awfāq activity 126–128, 131– 132 Jewish 99n112 letters in/letter squares/relation with lettrism 71, 83, 89n81, 101, 102, 106, 114, 144 magic constant 88n80, 89, 95, 109n134, 122, 139 mathematics of 27, 58–59, 70, 71, 105– 106, 105n121, 120 see also awfāq literature; Dīwān alʿadad al-wafq

index Moon’s influence on 90, 92, 93, 94, 96, 100–102, 108n130, 301, 350 music and 91, 94 Neopythagoreanism and 62, 79, 140 occult properties (khawāṣṣ) of 80, 82, 84, 86, 87, 88–89, 88n81, 95, 103, 105, 114, 120, 143 orders and types of 58n2, 86, 92, 96, 99 3 × 3 wafq 58n2, 61, 62, 63, 63–65, 65, 68–69, 71–105, 74–75ill., 77ill., 79ill., 82–83ill., 87–88ill., 90–91ill., 97– 98ill., 100–101ill., 103ill., 110, 122, 138, 140, 142, 348–350 4 ×4 wafq 58n2, 61, 65, 68, 122, 138, 300, 301 5 ×5 wafq 58n2, 122, 299 6 ×6 wafq 66–67, 67ill., 67n27, 138, 241, 299n145 7 ×7 wafq 122 9 ×9 wafq 65, 92 10 ×10 wafq 65, 99 19 ×19 wafq 137n195 28 ×28 wafq 122 100×100 wafq 109n134, 110, 110n137– 138, 111n138, 241, 248, 251, 256 adorned wafq 137 bordered wafq 136, 138 of mixed composition 137 other forms/shapes 114 unique/rare bordered wafq 136 planets associated with 86, 92, 96, 98n108, 99, 102, 108, 108n130 pre-Islamic China 61, 63–67, 67ill., 67n27, 70, 71 Greece 62–63, 79–80, 109–110, 252 India 61, 68–69, 70, 71 references from Holy Scripture in 75–76 talismanic use of 59, 61, 71, 114, 120, 143 bladder problems of horses 76–78, 77ill. for childbirth (eutotic wafq) 68–69, 71–76, 74–75ill., 79–105, 79ill., 82– 83ill., 85ill., 90–91ill., 97ill., 98ill., 100–101ill., 103–104ill., 348–350 for destruction and depopulation 96n89, 97ill., 98ill. determining proportions of ingredients 68 multiple talismanic functions 96, 101

index release of prisoners 100ill., 101, 101ill. seafaring 100ill., 101, 101ill. for winning favors of kings 96n89, 97ill., 98ill. Awrangzīb (ʿĀlamgīr, Mughal emperor, r. 1658–1707) 118 awṣiyāʾ (“delegates,” s. waṣī) see also mujaddidūn assignment of millennia to 235, 236, 236n17, 249, 252 āyat al-kursī (Throne Verse) 431, 435, 438, 580, 582, 599, 600ill., 601 Aydın, Hilmi 590 ʿAyna, Queen (demon) 636, 636n82, 637ill. al-ʿAyyāshī, Abū Sālim ʿAbd Allāh (d. 1679) 390n31 Riḥla (“Travelogue”) 389–393 Azhār al-afkār fī jawāhir al-aḥjār (“The Blooms of Thoughts on Precious Stones,” al-Tīfāshō) 30, 422–423 Azimat Singa (“Talisman of the lion”) 498ill., 499 Azrael/ʿIzrāʾīl (archangel) 499, 508 Baʿalbakī, Risāla-yi khavāṣṣ al-ḥurūf (“Treatise on the Properties of Letters”) 280 Babad Talaga, Majalengka (“Chronicle of Talaga, Majalengka”) 490–492, 492ill. Babad tanah Sunda/Babad Cirebon (“Chronicle of the land of Sunda/Cirebon”) 480 Bāb al-Tibn Observatory (Baghdad) 111tab., 124tab., 135 Bâburî, Sâqib 105n121 Babylon 184 Babylonian knowledge/scholars 195, 273n27, 340, 635n79 Badr, Battle of 251, 550 Badr al-Dīn, Shaykh (Bedreddīn, d. 1420) 397, 397n44 Wāridāt (“Inspirations”) 397n44 Baffioni, Carmela 162 Baghdad awfāq literature from Buyid 60, 86, 111tab., 124tab., 131–132, 143 fall of 65, 67, 446 Harranian Sabian community in 131– 134, 132 fig., 140, 141, 141n209, 142 Bahāʾ al-Dawla (Buyid Amir of Iraq, r. 988– 1012) 134

657 Bahāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad, Shaykh (Shaykh Bahāʾī, d. 1621) 295, 295n130, 296, 297, 298–300, 298n136–137, 303–306, 306n179 Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband (d. 1389) 287, 288n97 Baḥīrā (Christian monk) 587 Bain, Alexandra 562 Balkans 539 calligrams in 456, 466 Balkh 113tab., 124tab., 125tab., 127, 305 banners Cirebon banner 482–487, 483ill., 490, 503, 507 curative powers of sacred 486–487 functions of 484, 486 talismanic motifs/symbols on 441, 442ill., 446–447 al-Bāqī, Maḥmūd ʿAbd (d. 1600), Divān 442, 443ill. barābī, alphabet of the 354 baraka (blessing power), Prophetic 582, 584, 585–595 Barbarossa, Khayreddīn/Ḥayreddīn (Ottoman admiral, d. 1546) 441, 445 barong (type of sword) 446 Bashir, Shahzad 230, 231 Basım, Kabe 588, 589ill. basmala (“In the name of God […]”) 326, 582 references on talismans/amulets to 601 on blessing cards/magnets 575, 580, 581ill., 582 in calligrams 483, 511 Basra 112tab., 124tab. Batara Gana see Gaṇesá batik 446, 471, 482–483, 483ill., 509ill. bāṭin (“the hidden”), ẓahir (“the manifest”) vs. 459, 610–611 Battle of Badr 251, 550 Battle of Chaldiran (1514) 381, 385, 394, 408 battlefields, (semi-)precious stones/metals used on 423 Battle of Karbala 271, 290 Battle of Kaybar (628) 464 Battle of Marj Dābiq (1516) 393n33 Battle of Muş (1467) 405 Battle of Otlukbeli (1473) 405, 409

658 Battle of Raydāniyya 388–389 Battle of the Trench (627) 421 Battle of Uḥud (625) 439, 496 Bausani, Alessandro, L’enciclopedia dei Fratelli della Purità 162 Bāyezīd II (Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, r. 1481–1512) 110, 380–381, 404, 405, 406n70, 411–412 Bayhaq 268 al-Bayhaqī, Ẓahīr al-Dīn (d. 1169) 127 Bayram (national holiday) 579 Bāysunghur b. Shāhrukh (d. 1434) 402n56 Bedreddīn see Shaykh Badr al-Dīn Bektāshī Sufi (crypto-Shiʿi order) 444, 445 Lion of ʿAlī calligrams in 466, 467ill., 490 references on talismans/amulets to 549ill., 551, 552ill., 553 Bengal 470 Bennett, James 473, 490 benzoin, smoking of sacred objects with 478, 502 bereket kartelası see blessing cards bewitchment 186 bewitchment of reason see sīmiyāʾ Beyoğlu (neighbourhood, Istanbul) 580– 584 Bidlīsī, Idrīs (d. 1520) 403, 404, 406, 407, 408, 412 Hasht bihisht (“Eight Paradises”) 404– 406, 412 Biggs, Norman L. 63 “The Roots of Combinatorics” 62 Bijapur 634, 635 Binbaş, Evrim 256 al-Bīrūnī, Abū l-Rayḥān (d. c. 1048) 130n180 Kitāb al-ʿAjāʾib al-ṭabīʿiyya wa-l-gharāʾib al-ṣināʿiyya (“Book of Natural Wonders and Amazing Arts”) 618 Kitāb al-jamāhir fī maʿrifat al-jawāhir (“Book of Collections on the Knowledge on Precious Stones”) 29–30, 422–423, 425 on mandal 630 Maqāla fī istikhrāj al-awtār fī l-dāʾira (“Treatise on the Derivation of the Chords in a Circle”) 107–108 bissu (gender-transcendent priests) 510

index al-Bisṭāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (d. 1454) 29, 106, 197–198, 231–233, 397–398, 407n73–74, 410, 412–413 see also Naẓm al-sulūk fī musāmarat almulūk Durrat tāj al-rasāʾil (“The Crown Jewel of the Epistles”) 197, 406 lettrism in lifetime of 252–260, 262 Miftāḥ al-jafr al-jāmiʿ (“Key to the Comprehensive Prognosticon”) 398, 399 Shams al-āfāq fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-awfāq (“The Sun of Horizons on the Science of Letters and Magic Squares”) 197– 198, 233, 240, 248, 252, 256, 258, 262, 331 Bisṭamiyya Sufi order 254, 257 bladder problems, magic squares for horses’ 76–78 blessing cards (bereket kartelası, Turkey) 31, 572, 575, 576ill., 577ill., 581ill., 586ill., 589ill. accumulation for optimal talismanic effect 580–584, 581ill. contents/depictions on 575–578, 580, 585–595 format 575 as gifts of celebration of religious festivities 579–580 origins of 575, 577, 579 as “radiant document” of the Prophet 577–578, 577ill., 585 rise in production 585 use in commercial life 583–584 in restaurants 580–584, 581ill. use in everyday life 578–580 blessing power (baraka), Prophetic 582, 584, 585–595 blessings, from sacred objects and sites (tabarruk) 562 Blochmann, Henry Ferdinand 115–116, 115n154 body see also nīranjāt; talismans operation of body on body 43, 45, 53 operation of body on spirit 43, 53 body armor 420 mail shirts 429ill., 430–434, 433ill. orientation of talismanic motifs on 428–434, 429ill., 433ill.

index quranic verses and divine names on 430–434, 433ill. reference to Dhū l-Fiqār on shirts 444 talismanic shirts (under mail shirts) as extra protection 444 Boné (South Sulawesi) 508 botany 21n69 Brahma Tirta Sari (batik studio, Yogyakarta) 509ill. Brahmins 209, 219 Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ) 234, 277–278, 334, 395n39 see also Epistle of Magic; New Brethren of Purity; Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ esotericism of 168, 170, 175, 180, 184 identity and self-image of 86, 185, 194– 195 Neopythagorean cyclical theory of history 401n55 Bright Hall (Mingtang, palace of Zhou dynasty emperors) 64 British Museum 22n73, 538 Buddhism 631 calligrams in 472–473 tiger imagery in 474, 475 Buddhist rituals 630 Buddhist Tai communities 475, 508 Budong-Budong (West Sulawesi) 486 Buhlūl (“the madman of Kufa”) 340 Bukhara 467, 631 al-Bukhārī (hadith compiler, d. 870) 587 bull- and buffalo-fighting 478, 497–500, 498ill., 507 Bulletin d’ études orientales, “Sciences Occultes et Islam” 13 al-Bulqīnī (d. 1403), Sirāj al-Dīn 254, 257n92 Būnīan corpus, on awfāq (magic squares) 59–60, 336, 350 al-Būnī, Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad (d. c. 1225) 111n138, 196 see also Shams al-maʿārif wa-laṭāʾif alʿawārif on divine names 249, 538 Laṭāʾif al-ishārāt (“The Secret of Signs”) 193, 234, 239 lettrism of 106, 144, 231, 232, 243, 250, 340, 390n31, 397, 398

659 Sirr al-ḥikam wa-jawāmiʿ al-kilam (“The Secret of Judgments and the Compilation of the Sentences”) 325 as source of inspiration/influence of 16, 59–60, 71, 194, 197, 198, 232, 233, 299, 410, 459 Burma see Myanmar Burnett, Charles 12, 27 Bursa 28, 233, 408 al-Būṣīrī, Qaṣidat al-burda (“The Mantle Ode”) 561 al-Bustānī 349–350 Buton (sultanate) 507–508 Buyid period/Buyids (934–1062) 169n22 awfāq literature from 60, 86, 111tab., 124tab., 131–132, 143 al-Būzjānī, Abū l-Wafāʾ 124tab., 130n180, 135 Kitāb fī tartīb al-ʿadad al-wafq fī lmurabbaʿāt (“Book on the Arrangement of the Harmonious Number in Squares”) 111tab., 131, 137, 139 Byzantium/Byzantines 359, 369, 382, 405– 406n70 Cairo 256, 257, 277, 389, 403, 406, 407, 497 awfāq literature from 112tab., 124tab. conquest of (1517) 380, 386, 386–393, 394, 398, 399, 407, 408n77, 412 see also Kemālpaşazāde Aḥmed as occult-scientific capital of the Islamicate world 385, 393, 395, 396, 411 Cai Yuanding 64 calendars calendrical reform 127, 235 Jalālī calendar 127 reconciliation of 235 Rejang divinatory calendar 474 caliphate (khilāfa), intellectual magic of 180–182 caliphs see also Rightly Guided Caliphs cursing of 445 Callataÿ, Godefroid de 164, 168n19, 191, 196 calligrams 24, 454–456 see also Lion of ʿAlī calligrams; Macan Ali calligrams as alternative for depicting living beings 457–459 in Buddhism 472–473

660 dating of 465, 468–469, 472 definition 454 functions and meanings 455, 461 images/shapes/forms 455, 461, 462 human body and face 466n58 Seven Sleepers/ship-shaped 471, 478, 507, 553–554, 554ill., 555n87 textual content vs. gestalt 463 language/script 454, 472, 481, 502 lettrism and 459–460 local adaptation of 473 media used 454, 480 pre- and non-Islamic 472 on stamped talismans 553–555, 554ill. Sufi doctrine and 455, 459 talismanic properties/magical properties of 455, 457, 459–463 calligraphy 455n2, 464, 471 see also calligrams; ḥilya; Lion of ʿAlī calligram figural 459, 468, 472, 473, 479, 480, 513– 514 zoomorphic 456, 457, 458, 471n79, 472, 480 Canaan, Tewfik 11, 19n64, 543n41, 564n119 Candi Jago (Java), Hindu-Buddhist temple 474 Cangking (West Sumatra) 471 carnelian (precious stone) 422–423 categorization of magic see classification/categorization of magic causality, volitional 172, 192, 199 Çelebi, Evliyā (d. after 1685) 563 Seyāḥat-nāme (“Book of Travels”) 435 Çelebi, Kâtip see Ḥājjī Khalīfa celestial powers see also planets; spirits/spiritual powers in earthly objects vs. own person 223– 224 celestial spheres see also planets mimesis of 218 production of letters and 231n4 celestial spirits/intermediaries see spirits/spiritual powers celestial-sublunary connections 208 celestial world, governance/authority of sublunary and terrestrial world 173, 211, 216–217, 221

index Central Asia 65, 115, 118, 456, 466n57, 631, 632 Centre National de la recherche scientifique (CNRS, Paris) 8n19 centuries, epicycles of religious and civilizational renewal 232, 234, 236, 249–250, 261 Chagatai khanate 66 Chaghatay (Timurid princes and military elite) 289 chains of transmission 270, 270n15 Chaldeans 222 Chaldiran, Battle of (1514) 381, 385, 394, 408 charlatanism 7, 276 childbirth, eutotic wafq (magic squares) for facilitating 68–69, 71–76, 74–75ill., 79– 105, 79ill., 82–83ill., 85ill., 90–91ill., 100–101ill., 103–104ill., 348–350 China 324 calligrams in 454, 468 magic squares in 61, 63–67, 67ill., 67n27, 70, 71 production of eye beads in 598, 599 Chinese lion imagery 482 Chittick, William 260n104 Christianity/Christians 575, 626 esoteric writings 610 Islam vs. 22n71, 587 mandal and 638–639 occult/occult sciences and 6, 324, 382, 384, 385, 439 Philippines 508 Christy, Henry 22n73 Cirebon (Java) 480, 490 calligrams in 457, 468, 471, 472, 480– 482, 481ill. Cirebon banner 446, 482–487, 483ill., 490, 493, 507 Macan Ali (“Tiger of ʿAlī”) calligrams 476, 480, 481ill., 482, 483, 483ill., 485–486, 487, 488, 489ill., 490–491, 492ill., 493ill., 494–495, 495n174, 513 in manuscripts 490–492, 491–492ill. Masjid Agung (“Great Mosque”) Sang Cipta Rasa 478, 492–495, 493ill. wood panels 480, 481–482, 481ill., 487–490, 489ill., 492–495, 493ill.

index civilizational renewal, epicycles of 232, 234, 236, 249–250, 261 civilizational transformation 28 Classic of Changes (Yijing) 64, 65 classification/categorization of magic 31, 608–610, 614–615 classification of knowledge 607–608 classification of (occult) sciences 3–4, 26, 26n80, 31, 53, 171, 273, 273n27, 407n73– 74, 408n79, 410n86, 608, 610, 615 history 406–407 semantics 609–619 classification of strange/extraordinary (gharīb) phenomena 620–623 Clement IV (pope, 1265–1268) 45 CNRS (Centre National de la recherche scientifique, Paris) 8n19 Codex Vindobonensis (collection of Viennese paintings of Ottoman officials) 445 coins/coin-shaped amulets 425–426, 426ill. colonialism, European 411 colonialist outlook on occult sciences/practices 22, 31, 382, 394, 609 combinatorics 58 commercialization of talismanic objects/ amulets 572, 586n26, 593, 595, 599, 600– 602 see also blessing cards; eye beads communal transformation/reform 28 Companions of the Prophet, reference on talismans/amulets to 441, 540, 558 composite animals 464, 485 concoction 186, 194 magical concoctions for attracting animals 167, 188 organic 170 Conjunction, Lord of the (ṣāḥib-qirān, astrological title) 403, 405, 408 conjurations 164–168 conjuring, science of (rīmiyā) 28, 274, 278, 279, 293, 294n124, 305n173, 342, 633 see also Asrār-i qāsimī definition/term 275–276, 276n38 Constantinople, conquest of 260, 263, 441, 574 Constitutional Revolution (Iran, 1905–1911) 6 conversion to Islam 479, 480, 626 Copernican Revolution 411

661 copper 47, 49 Córdoba 113tab., 189, 367 Coromandel Coast (India) 470 corporeal action 44 corrupt magic see illicit magic cosmic diagrams 630, 631–632 cosmic superiority of rulers see lettrist imperialism cosmos, parameters of 237 Coulon, Jean-Charles 19n63, 28, 193, 336 La magie en terre d’Islam au Moyen Age 16–17 cows, artificial generation of 353 Crucq, Karel Christiaan 482, 488 cryptographic alphabets 334, 353–354 cycles see epicycles cypresses, on stamped talismans 548, 549ill. daggers, talismanic motifs and precious stones/metals on 423, 427–428 Dai De, Record of Rites by Dai the Elder 64 Damascus, conquest of 394, 398, 400, 407 dangerous magic see illicit magic al-Dashtakī, Sayyid Ṣadr al-Dīn 297n135 Davānī, Jalāl al-Dīn (d. 1502) 403, 405, 406, 412 Yazdī vs. 403–404 Dawlatshāh b. ʿAlāʾ al-Dawla Bakhtīshāh al-Ghāzī al-Samarqandī, Tadhkirat alshuʿarāʾ 288–289 Day of Judgment 253 references on talismans/amulets to 549ill., 551 days 230, 236–237 see also time end of days of the world 259–260 De aluminibus et salibus (pseudo-Rāzī) 46– 47 De anima in arte alchemica (pseudoAvicenna) 48 Dee, John (d. 1609) 385 De imaginibus (Thābit b. Qurra) 27, 108 Delhi 60, 69, 115 Delhi Collection see Dīwān al-ʿadad alwafq Deliverer from Error (al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl wa-l-muwaṣṣil ilā dhī l-ʿizza wa-l-jalāl, al-

662 Ghazālī), on awfāq (magic squares) 102–106 Delos, altar of 111n138 Demak Sultanate (Java) 480 demons 614 duʿāʾ (“supplication”)/summoning 542– 545, 614 mandal for protection against/expulsion of 633 Dēnkard (“Acts of Religion,” Encyclopedia of Mazdaism) 628, 629 De occulta philosophia (Agrippa) 52 depiction of living beings 457–459, 473, 478, 494, 503, 513–514 descendants of the Prophet see Ahl al-Bayt; sayyids destructive magic 192 see also illicit magic; prohibited magic devils 167 see also demons; jinn; Satan/Iblīs devotion merger with magic 528, 542–545, 549– 550, 563–564, 574–575, 584–585 see also eye beads; stamped talismans vernacular forms of/popular Islamic devotion 574, 575, 585, 597 devotional objects 563–565 see also prayer manuals; relics; sacred seals amuletic gadgets vs. 527–528 role of Sufism in development of 563 Dhū l-Fiqār (mythical bifurcated sword of ʿAlī) 421 association with ʿAlī 439–441 healing power of 486–487 as intercultural/interreligious symbol of solidarity 447, 448–449 on merchandise 495, 495n174 name 439 references on talismans/amulets to 30, 438, 439, 441–447, 443ill., 477 appearance in conjunction with Lion of ʿAlī 446, 470, 476, 483–484, 486–487, 495, 511 on arms and armor 421, 427, 434, 436ill., 438, 440ill., 444, 446 on banners 441–442, 442ill., 446–447 on stamped talismans 549ill., 550– 551

index Dhū l-Qarnayn 241 diamonds, in talismanic weaponry 424ill., 425, 426ill. al-Dimashqī, ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Lakhmī al-Ishbīlī al-Maghribī (d. after 1517), al-Durr al-muṣān fī sīrat al-muzẓaffar Salīm Khān (“The Preserved Pearl: On the Career of the Victorious King Selīm”) 408n77 Dioscorides 237 al-Dayrabī, Aḥmad, Kitāb al-Mujarrabāt 545n57 disconnected letters 250–251 divination 167, 170 science of 63 in state administration and military matters 182 as type of magic 174 divine inspiration 246–247 divine law see sharīʿa divine names 231, 239, 243, 307 al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā (“most beautiful Names of God”) 432–434, 502, 536, 538, 548, 575, 583 hadith on 432–433 ḥisāb al-jummal (numerical values of prophet’s names and correlations with divine names) 232, 234, 235, 243– 245, 256, 259, 386, 392 lettrism and 234–235 manipulation of 268 references on talismans/amulets to 441, 444 on blessing cards/magnets 575, 581ill., 582–583 in calligrams 502 on stamped talismans 536, 538, 550 on talismanic weaponry 432–434, 433ill., 446 divine sciences 175 divine speech/sayings relation with manifest existence 230 see also lettrism on stamped talismans 536, 538 divine throne, day of the 236–237 divinity, delusion of 216–218, 219 Dīwān al-ʿadad al-wafq (“Collection of the Harmonious Number”) 60–61, 115, 116, 123ill., 131, 143

index see also Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal alḤarrānī authorship 128–130 description, provenance and date 117– 119 structure 121–122, 129 text 120–126 authors of awfāq treaties mentioned in 124–125tab., 136 Donaldson, Bess Allen 11 Doutté, Edmond 11, 527 Dozy, Reinhart Pieter Anne 327 Duʿāʾ Kumayl 251 duʿāʾ (protective prayer, supplication), on stamped talismans 540–541, 540n33, 542–544 Dunhuang caves (Silk Road) 631 Durmish Khān Shāmlū (Qizilbash commander) 291, 291n111–112 al-Durr al-muṣān fī sīrat al-muzẓaffar Salīm Khān (“The Preserved Pearl: On the Career of the Victorious King Selīm,” alDimashqī) 408n77 Durrat tāj al-rasāʾil (“The Crown Jewel of the Epistles,” al-Bisṭāmī) 197, 406 dynastic cycling 401–402 edged weapons 420, 424 see also daggers; swords talismanic motifs on 427 Egypt 125, 392 lettrist imperialism in 412 lion imagery in 464–465 magical papyri from 461 Ottoman conquest of 29, 381, 383, 385, 386–393, 389n26, 394, 398, 399, 407, 412 see also Fetḥ-i Mıṣır ḥaķķında īmā ve işārāt talismanry in 246 writing tablet from 63 Egyptian knowledge 195 Egyptian religion, ancient 245–246, 626 Ekhtiar, Maryam 23, 29 El-Bizri, Nader, The Occult Sciences in PreModern Islamic Cultures 17 elective/electional astrology 50, 91, 98, 141, 167, 182, 267 elephants, in calligrams 485, 487–490, 489ill., 502

663 elixers, science of creating see alchemy Elizabeth I (Queen of England and Ireland, r. 1558–1603) 385 emancipation of the soul (al-tajrīd, occult science) 3 emerald, in talismanic weaponry 424ill., 425–426, 426ill., 448 Emmanuel the Dayān 73n44 enchantment of reason see sīmiyāʾ end of time and history 232, 235, 249, 253, 259–260 Enlightenment/post-Enlightenment mindset 5, 6, 10, 19n62, 21 Enoch 240 envy 595–596 Epicureanism 195 epicycles, of religious and civilizational renewal 232, 234, 236, 249–250, 261 Epistle on Magic (52b, Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, Brethren of Purity) 162, 273n27, 334 see also magic on astrology/astrological theory in 171– 174, 187 authorship 190, 191 fable of ailing king and vizier in 174–176, 184 influence on and parallels with other works 189–198 manuscripts Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Atif Efendi 1681 164n10, 168–169, 169, 187 Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Esad Efendi 3638 166tab., 169, 170 Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Feyzullah 2131 166tab., 169 Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Köprülü 870 167tab., 170 Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Ragip Pasha 839 165n10, 166tab. Istanbul, Süleymaniye, Ragip Pasha 840 165n10, 166tab. London, British Library, Or. 2359 164n10 London, British Library, Or. 4518 165n10 London, Sotheby’s Lot 27, p. 26, Sotheby’s Arts of the Islamic World 165n10, 167tab., 169 Oxford, Bodleian, Laud Or. 260 169

664 Oxford, Bodleian, Marsh 189 167tab., 169 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, 6.647– 6.648 166tab., 170 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Arabe 2303 167tab., 169 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Arabe 2304 167tab., 170 scholarship and (un)critical editions 162–164 Beirut (1957) 163, 164, 170, 186 Bombay (1887–1889) 163 Cairo (1928) 163 shorter version (52a) vs. 154, 164, 165n10, 168–169, 168n19, 170, 187–188, 198–199 sources of inspiration 335 structure of 163 title 164, 165tab. Epistles of the Brethren of Purity see Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ era see millennia Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 602 Erginbaş, Vefa 444 eschatological narratives, fable of ailing king and vizier (Epistle on Magic, Brethren of Purity) 174–176, 184 eschatology eschatological predictions 241 meaning of astrology in 176–177 meaning of magic in 174–176, 184 esoteric, categorization of 609, 610–611 esoteric exegesis, of Qurʾan 175–176, 307 esotericism 25 of Brethren of Purity 168, 170, 175, 180, 184 Islamic 5, 7, 78, 250, 252, 254, 271, 513, 610 Western 2, 6, 19, 19n62, 610, 611 ethics 267, 607, 608, 623 encouragement of ethical behavior 584 Ettinghausen, Richard 463 Euclid 128, 138 Elements 141 Europe 27, 394, 411, 468 awfāq (magic squares) in 61, 62 European colonialism 22, 31, 383, 394, 411, 609 European scholarship 7–8, 61, 328 see also Western scholarship

index Eusebius of Caesarea 79 eutotic wafq see childbirth Eve 336 evil eye 187, 220, 573 see also eye beads hadith on 596–597 Qurʾān verses on 536, 580, 582, 596 execution, talismans for protection from 300–301 exegesis, esoteric 175–176, 307 exhibitions 9–10, 23n76, 420, 455–456 extraordinary (gharīb) phenomena, classification of 620–623 eye beads (nazar boncuğu) 31, 572–573, 580, 581ill., 595–600, 596ill., 600ill. see also evil eye boom in 573 “Islamized” 599–600, 600ill. (mass) production of 598–599 as souvenirs 595, 599 Turkish variety 597–598 Eyüp (Abū Ayyūb al-Anṣārī, d. 674) 441, 574 Eyüp (city, Turkey) 574 Eyüp tomb complex (Istanbul) 572, 573ill., 574–575, 576ill., 588, 591–592 Ezekiel, as lettrist/relation with letters 242 fables ailing king and vizier (Epistle on Magic, Brethren of Purity) 174–176, 184 of the physician (Epistle 44, Brethren of Purity) 185 Faḍlallāh Astarābādī (d. 1394) 243, 278 Fahd, Toufic 13 Fakhr al-Dīn Muḥammad 118, 119 fāʾ (letter) 244 Falnama: The Book of Omens (exhibition, 2009–2010, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery) 9 al-Fāsī, Muḥammad al-Ḥajwī al-Thaʿālibī (d. 1956), al-Fikr al-sāmī fī taʾrīkh al-fiqh al-islāmī (“High Intellection: on the History of Islamic Jurisprudence”) 389 fatalism, Muslim 261 Fatḥ-nāma-yi humāyūn (Yazdī) 401n52 Fatḥ-nāma-yi ṣāḥib-qirānī (Yazdī) 401n52 Fatih (district, Istanbul) 593 Fāṭima bt. Muḥammad 477 references on talismans/amulets to

index in awfāq (magic squares) 85, 86 on banners 445 “hand of Fāṭima” (khamsa) 30, 441, 444, 548–550, 549ill., 552ill. in Lion of ʿAlī calligrams 510–511 on stamped talismans 555 Fatimids 254 Fazlıoğlu, İhsan 384 felines see lion imagery; tiger imagery female occultists 317, 324, 331n43 see also Sharāsīm/Ishrāsīm al-Hindiyya fengshui (form of geomancy) 63, 63–64n15 Fereydūn (Persian mythical king) 110, 137 fermentations (taʿāfīn) 194 Fetḥ-i Mıṣır ḥaķķında īmā ve işārāt (“Allusions as to the Conquest of Egypt,” Kemālpaşazāde Aḥmed) 380, 383–384, 400, 407, 411, 412, 413 analysis of Q 21:105 29, 383, 386 lettrist arguments for conquest in 29, 385–393, 412 manuscripts, Konya, MS Mevlana Müzesi 2315 385 scholarship on 383 Fī ʿadād al-wafq (“On the Numbers of Harmony,” Ibn al-Haytham) 112tab. Fierro, Maribel 169n22, 191 figural calligraphy 459, 468, 472, 473, 479, 480, 513–514 figurines, nīranjāt and 51 al-Filāḥa al-nabaṭiyya (“The Nabatean Agriculture,” Ibn Waḥshiyya) 191 Fīrūz Shāh Tughluq (Delhi sultan, r. 1351– 1388) 68n30 flags 484, 486 see also banners Lion of ʿAlī on state flags 502–504, 508– 511, 509ill. sacred 510–511 Fleischer, Cornell 261, 383, 384, 398 Flügel, Gustav 190 Fodor, Alexander 240 foot- and sandalprints (of the Prophet), on talismanic objects 585, 588, 589ill., 590– 594, 592ill. Forbes, Andrew 472–473 form combination of number and 87–89 harmonious relationships 91–94

665 Foucault, Michel 461 Four Seasons and Five Elements (Chinese philosophy) 64 Franks, Arthur W. 22n73 Frères de la Purité, pythagoriciens de l’Islam, Les (Marquet) 163, 181, 188 fumigation/suffumigation 194, 208, 216, 275, 332, 344, 345, 347, 352–353, 361, 365, 632, 634, 636 sense-altering 171 of talismans and sacred objects 48, 50, 478, 502, 564n119 awfāq (magic squares) 96, 98 futuvvat orders 271 Gabriel/Jibrāʾīl (archangel) 282, 282– 283n74, 499, 508 Galata Tower (Istanbul) 600 Galenic medicine 628, 629 Galen of Pergamon (d. 210) 99n112, 142, 186, 274, 617–618 Gallop, Annabel 496 Gaņesá (Batara Gana, elephant-headed Hindu god) identification of 490 Lion of ʿAlī and 487–490, 489ill. Gardiner, Noah 15, 19n63, 26n80, 28, 71n40, 297, 385 garlic 583, 583–584n22, 585 gematria 232, 244, 386, 392 see also ḥisāb al-jummal geomancy (science) 54, 63, 63–64n15, 64, 302 geometry 45, 87, 89n81, 94, 95, 106, 135, 136, 409 see also awfāq (magic squares) combination of numbers and form 87– 89, 91 Gereformeerde Zendingsbond 509n216 Gezi uprisings (Turkey, 2013) 583, 602 Ghadīr Khumm 169n22 “ghāmiḍa” (“obscure”) 2, 615, 615n24 gharāʾib, equation with ʿajāʾib (“wonders, marvels, natural curiosities”) 616–617 al-gharība, al-ʿulūm (the unusual, rare, or difficult sciences) 2, 2n2, 615–616, 615n23–24, 621 gharīb (adjective) classification of 620–623

666 term/definition 619–620 equation between “occult” and 615– 616 Ghassemi, Shawn 456 Ghāyat al-ḥakīm (“The Goal of the Sage,” alQurṭubī) 27, 53, 196, 328, 352 authorship 190, 191, 196 on awfāq (magic squares) 84, 86, 94–96, 348, 350 on conjuring astral spirits 634n76 on divisions of magic 43, 55 influence of and parallels with Epistle on Magic (Brethren of Purity) 189–192, 197, 198, 199 on nīranjāt 51, 52 on scorpions 549–550 on “seal of Solomon” 550 on sīmiyāʾ 339, 341, 342, 343 sources of inspiration 334 ghayb (“the unseen”), equation between ʿilm al-ghayb and occult sciences 610 al-Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid (d. 1111) 14, 236n17, 253, 623 al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl (“Deliverer from Error”) 102–106 Tahāfut al-falāsifa (“The Incoherence of the Philosophers”) 4 al-Jīlanī, Qandīl Nūranī Sayyid Muḥyī al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Qādir (d. 1166) 537ill., 539 on stamped talismans 549ill., 551, 552, 552ill. glass-paintings, Lion of ʿAlī calligrams in 511–512 gnōsis, parallels between ʿirfān (wisdom) and 611 gnosticism, categorization of 611 God, worship through intermediaries/mediation 210, 216–217 God’s Beautiful Names see [al-]asmāʾ alḥusnā Golconda (India) 470 gold 44, 47, 67n27, 127, 241, 299, 300 Golem 242 Goncingngé/Gontjang-e (“The scissors”) flag (Luwuq) 510 Gonzalez, Valérie 461n34 good deeds, on blessing cards/magnets 575 Great Mosque (Surakarta, Central Java) 494

index Great Resurrection (qiyāma) 177 Greece, awfāq (magic squares) in 62–63, 79–80, 252 Greek knowledge/sciences 273n27 transmission into Islamic domain 8, 16, 195, 628 Greek philosophers, awfāq (magic squares) and 109–110, 248, 249 Greek religion, ancient 626 Greeks 245 astral idolatry of 223n47 Gril, Denis 231n4 Gruber, Christiane 31, 428n29 guilds, seal-makers’ 563, 563n115–116 Gujarat 470 Günther, Sebastian, Die Geheimnisse der oberen und der unteren Welt 17–19 Hacı Bayram mosque complex (Ankara) 574 hadith 270 on divine names 432–433 on evil eye 596–597 on final hour 260 on gharīb 616 on ḥilya 541–542, 579 on imbuing body with apotropaic blessings 434 on magic 184 on mujaddidūn 252–253 on spiritual beings/angels 221 on stamped talismans (ḥadīth qudsī) 536 Hādūs 3 Hagar 555 “hajj goods” shops (Turkey) 572, 591 Ḥājjī Khalīfa Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī l-kutub wa-lfunūn (“Removing Uncertainty as to the Titles of Books and Disciplines”) 43, 298n141, 322, 327, 410 al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh (Fatimid caliph, r. 996–1021) 112tab., 124tab. al-Ḥalabī, Buṭrus b. Diʾb (Pierre Dipy) 323 hāʾ (letter) 243 Halflants, Bruno 164 Ḥall al-mushkilāt (“The resolution of difficulties,” Ibn Sāvajī 294–296 Hallum, Bink 26n80, 27, 57

index Halūk Perk Müzesi Museum (Istanbul) 455, 531ill. Hamdani, Abbas 162 Hamès, Constant, Coran et talismans 15 Hammond, Timur 574 al-Ḥamūya/Ḥamūʾī, Hibatallāh b. Yūsuf b. Ibrāhīm 270n15 al-Ḥamūya, Ṣadr al-Din Abū l-Majāmiʿ Ibrāhīm (d. 1322) 270n15 Hanafi Sunnism 268, 269 “hand of Fāṭima”/“hand of ʿAbbās” (khamsa), references on talismans/amulets on 30, 441, 444, 548–550, 549ill., 552ill. Ḥanīfs, Sabians vs. 216–218, 226 al-Ḥarālī (master of al-Būnī, d. 1240) 340– 341 Haravī, Mīr ʿAlī (d. 1544–1545) 467 Haris, Tawalinuddin 484, 494 harmonious numbers 109, 109n134, 139 see also awfāq (magic squares) harmonious relationships between numbers and forms 91–94 Harranians 188, 195, 273n27 Harranian/Sabian community (Baghdad) 131–134, 132 fig., 140, 141, 141n209, 142 al-Ḥarrānī, al-Mufaḍḍal b. Thābit see Abū l-Khaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal al-Ḥarrānī Hārūn al-Rashīd (Abbasid caliph, r. 786–809) 340, 328–329, 334, 338, 354 in Arabic magical literature 329 servants of 328–329, 338 Hārūt and Mārūt 175–176, 184, 336, 340 Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī 86, 441 see also Ahl al-Bayt references on talismans/amulets referring to 444, 445, 555 Hasht bihisht (“Eight Paradises”, Bidlīsī) 404–406, 412 Hathaway, Jane 447 ḥawqala (“There is no power nor strength except by Allah”), in calligrams 483, 488 Ḥaydar Mīrzā (Safavid prince, d. 1595) 442, 443ill. headgear, on stamped talismans 552 healing/healing power 10 awfāq (magic squares) and 80, 102, 142, 241 Dhū l-Fiqār and 486–487

667 illusory magic (wahm) and 169 Lion of ʿAlī calligrams/tiger spirit and 475, 478, 483ill., 486–487 Qurʾan verses and 496, 548, 575, 581 sandals 591 sayyids and 273 stamped talismans and 553, 563 stones and 631 helmets, talismanic motifs on 428 Herat 268–269, 270, 286, 286n88, 287, 287n96, 289, 292 Safavid takeover of 291, 291n111, 307 Herbelot, Barthélémi d’ (d. 1695) 322, 324 Hermann of Carinthia (fl. 1138–1143) 27, 53 Hermes Trismegistus 182, 195, 210, 212, 237, 274, 294, 327, 335, 351 Idrīs-Hermes-(Enoch) identification with Idrīs 240, 245, 246 al-Kitāb al-maknūn fī asrār al-ʿulūm alkhafiyya (“The Well Guarded Book on the Secrets of the Occult Sciences”) 3, 335 on perfected inner nature 246 Hermetica (pseudo-Aristotle) 3, 108, 182, 187–188, 191, 193, 194, 197 heterodoxy 5 the hidden (bāṭin), the manifest (ẓāhir) vs. 459, 610–611 Hijaz 238, 392, 393n33, 562 hijra (Prophet’s emigration to Medina) 496 Hikayat Muhammad Hanafiah (“The Tale of Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya”) 470 ḥilye/ḥilya (physical description of the Prophet) 458, 572, 587n29 hadith on 541–542, 579 prophylactic power of 579 on talismanic objects 541–542, 578 blessing cards/magnets 575, 577– 579, 582, 585 hīmiyā see astral magic Hindu rituals 630, 636, 636n82 Hindus, conversion to Islam 479, 480 hippiatric treatises 76, 76n57, 87 Ḥirz al-amān min fitan al-zamān (“Amulet of Protection from the Vicissitudes of Fate,” ʿAlī Ṣafī) 268n5, 292 ḥirz Marjāna/ḥirz al-ghāsila (“Marjāna’s/ washerwoman’s talisman”) 329

668 ḥisāb al-jummal (numerical values of prophet’s names and correlations with divine names) 232, 234, 235, 243–245, 256, 259, 386, 392 historiography, Neopythagorean 400–408, 410, 412 history as (occult) science 401, 406–407 as revelation 261 History of the Royal Society of London (Sprat) 21n70 Hoca, Cübbeli Ahmet (Turkish Muslim preacher) 593 Hodgson, Marshall 612, 626, 627 Hogendijk, Jan 108 Holmyard, Eric John 190 Holy Scripture, references in awfāq (magic squares) 75–76 holy sites, destruction of 562 horoscopes, pairing with lettrist analysis of names and events 403, 405 horses, awfāq (magic squares) for bladder problems 76–78, 77ill. Hūd (prophet) 111n138 Ḥulal-i muṭarraz dar fann-i muʿammā va lughaz (Yazdī) 272n20 human beings see also soul, human noetic connection with spiritual beings 208, 212–213, 223–224, 225, 226, 227 human civilization, evolution and progress 21 humanity, definition 214 Hū (name of God) 243 Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq (d. 873) 141, 142, 352 Ḥurūfiyya movement 243, 278, 286 Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī (d. 680) 86, 242, 441 see also Ahl al-Bayt martyrdom of 307 references on talismans/amulets to 444, 445 cloak 290–291 on stamped talismans 555 works 271, 272, 273 hydrostatics/hydrostatic balance 127–128 hypnotic states see illusions Iamblichus 62, 109n133, 140 Iberia, lettrism/kabbalah in 413

index Iblīs/Satan 181, 636, 636n82 Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, Muḥammad (d. 1792), Kitāb al-tawḥīd 5, 561 Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa (d. 1270), ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbāʾ (“The Sources of Information about the Generations of Physicians”) 351 Ibn al-Ādamī (c. 9th/10th c.) 351 Ibn Akhī Ḥizām, The Book of Horsemanship and Horses’ Marks 76–78, 87, 94 Ibn ʿAqīl, Abū l-Wafāʾ (d. 1119) 633 Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥyī l-Dīn (d. 1240) 60, 196, 237, 400n50, 402 al-Insān al-kāmil (“the Perfect Man”) 399 on divine names 244 al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya (“The Meccan revelations”) 230, 234, 259, 341 Kitāb al-ʿiqd al-manẓūm fī khawāṣṣ alḥurūf (“Book of the Arranged Necklace on the Properties of Letters”) 320 Kitāb Tashnīf al-asmāʿ fī taʿrīf al-ibdāʿ (“Book of the Ear Pendants of the Auditions on the Knowledge of the Creation”) 320 lettrism of 71, 144, 232, 233, 250, 260, 261, 289, 390n31, 394, 394n35, 397, 398, 399–400, 409, 412, 459 Neoplatonic-quranic mystical philosophy of 394n35 patron saint of Ottoman Empire 398, 407 Quṭb al-aqṭāb (“Pole of the Poles”) 399 on recitation of God’s names 239 on sīmiyāʾ 341 on time 230, 231 Ibn ʿAṭāʾ (d. 922) 239 Ibn al-Athīr 233 on mujaddidūn 253 Ibn Barrajān 259 Ibn Daqīq al-ʿId (d. 1302) 236n17, 253 Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (d. 1449), Nukhbat alfikr fī muṣṭalaḥ ahl al-athar (“Selection of Thoughts Concerning the Traditionists’ Terminology”) 116 Ibn al-Ḥajj al-Tilimsānī (d. 1524), Shumūs alanwār (“The Suns of Light”) 278, 329

index Ibn Ḥallāj 278–279 Ibn al-Haytham, Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan (d. 1039) 124tab., 125, 130 Fīʿadad al-wafq (“On the Numbers of Harmony”) 112tab. Ibn Kamāl see Kemālpaşazāde, Aḥmed Ibn Kathīr 253 Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406) 14, 19 see also Muqaddīma “science of civilization”/dynastic cycling 401–402 Yazdī vs. 401–402, 411 Ibn al-Khaṭīb, Lisān al-Dīn (d. 1375) 343 Ibn al-Nadīm (d. c. 995), Kitāb al-Fihrist (“The Repertory”) 107, 141, 334, 351, 614 Ibn al-Qifṭī (d. 1248) 107, 131 Kitāb Ikhbār al-ʿulamāʾ bi-akhbār alḥukamāʾ/Tāʾrīkh al-ḥukamāʾ (“The Storybook on Scholars with the Anecdotes of the Sages”) 107n126, 351 Ibn Rabban al-Ṭabari see al-Ṭabarī, ʿAlī b. Sahl Ibn Sabʿīn (d. 1269) 191 Ibn Sāvajī (Abū l-Maḥāsin Muḥammad b. Saʿd b. Muḥammad al-Nakhjuvānī) 295– 296n131–132, 296 Ḥall al-mushkilāt 295–296 Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, d. 1037) 27, 207, 220, 607 De anima in arte alchemica (pseudoAvicenna) 48 Aqsām al-ʿulūm al-ʿaqliyya (“Division of the Intellectual Sciences”) 3–4, 43– 44 al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt (“Pointers and Reminders”) 213, 621–623 Metaphysics 44 Risāla fī al-fiʿl wa al-infiʿāl (“On Action and Passion”) 44–45, 52 theory of imaginational prophethood 213, 225, 227 Ibn al-Tāj, Shaykh Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad 389–390, 390n31 Ibn Ṭalha (d. 1254) 259 Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1318) 5, 194–196, 197 Bayān talbīs al-jahmiyya 195 al-Nubuwwāt (“Prophecy”) 195 Ibn Tūmart (d. 1130), Kanz al-ʿulūm wa-l-durr al-manẓūm […] (“The Treasure of Science of the Well Arranged Pearls […]”) 342

669 Ibn Turka (d. 1432) 272, 272n21, 277, 282n71, 292, 394n35, 399, 400, 410n86, 412, 412n89 attempt on Shāhrukh’s life 287 lettrist oeuvre 397–398, 397n44 Munāẓara-yi bazm u razm (“Debate of Feast and Fight”) 402n56 Risāla-yi ḥurūf 284n82 Suʾl al-mulūk (“Query of Kings”) 403 see also New Brethren of Purity Ibn Waḥshiyya 16 al-Filāḥa al-nabaṭiyya (“The Nabatean Agriculture”) 191 Shawq al-mustahām fī maʿrifat rumūz alaqlām (“The Desire of the Distraught: the Knowledge of the Symbols of the Alphabets”) 353–354 Ibn al-Zarqālluh 61, 125, 143 Maqāla fī ḥarakāt al-kawākib al-sayyāra (“Treatise on the Movements of the Wandering Stars”) 96–98, 99, 101, 105, 113tab. Ibrāhīm ʿĀdilshāh II (Deccani ruler, r. 1579– 1629) 437, 438n67 al-Īḍāḥ fī asrār al-nikāḥ (al-Tabrīzī) 325 ʿĪd al-Fiṭr (“Feast of Breaking the Fast”) 579–580 idiotētes arrētoi (indescribable properties), medicine and 617–618 idiotētes (physical qualities/properties influencing other forms of matter) 617 idolatry Indians/Indian religion 219 planetary idols (of Sabians) 195, 216– 217, 222–223, 227 Idrīs Idrīs-Hermes-(Enoch) identification 240, 245, 246 Kanz al-asrār wa-dhakhāʾir al-abrār fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf 240 as lettrist/relation with letters 240, 241 millennium and planet of 235, 236 on perfected inner nature 246 İhsanoğlu, Ekmeleddin 107 ijāza (authorization to transmit) 270 Ikhtiyārāt al-nujūm/Lavāyiḥ al-qamar (work on elective astrology, al-Kāshifī) 267 Ikhwān al-Ṣafā see Brethren of Purity

670 Īlkhānid Khanate/Īlkhānid period 65–66, 255, 295, 396 illicit magic 175, 184, 192, 528n4, 584, 614, 620, 622–623 Illuminationist philosophy 248, 294, 394n35, 398 illusionism (ʿilm-i khayālāt) 28, 275 illusions/illusory magic (wahm) 168, 170, 186–187, 225 healing power of 169 in Indian religion 168–169, 209, 219– 220 soul-enabled magic vs. 187 ʿilm al-ghayb (knowledge of the unseen) 610 ʿilm-i khayālāt see illusionism imaginal entities, science of see sīmiyāʾ imaginational prophethood 213, 225, 227 imamate, intellectual magic of 180–181 Imamism, occult sciences and 271, 272 Imamophilia 25, 28 Imams 270 see also mujaddidūn assignment of millennia to 235, 236, 236n17, 249, 252 as privileged repositories of occult knowledge 307 Shiʿi 5, 444 imperial ambitions, use of lettrism for see lettrist imperialism imperial historiography 401 imperialism see also lettrist imperialism kabbalist scientific 385 occult-scientific 380, 381, 394, 396 post-Mongol 410 in Quran verses 386 imprisonment, talismans for protection from 300–301 incantations, (science of) see nīranjāt incense see fumigation/suffumigation India/Indians 6, 219, 324, 392 astral rituals and meditation 226 authors 331 see also Kanakana/Kankah al-Hindī; Ṣaṣah al-Hindī; Sharāsīm/Ishrāsīm al-Hindiyya; Ṭumṭum al-Hindī

index talismanic objects/symbols awfāq (magic squares) and “Indian letters” 61, 68–69, 70, 71, 72, 346– 350 calligrams 468, 470, 473, 490 Dhū l-Fiqār 441 talismanic weaponry 420, 421, 424ill., 426ill., 427, 428, 429ill., 433ill., 436ill., 438n69, 448 “Indian letters” (numbers) 346–350 see also awfāq (magic squares) Indian occult knowledge 8, 28 Indian Ocean Ottoman-Portuguese rivalry 447 transregional network 470, 471 Indian religion al-Shahrastānī on 218–220 illusions/illusory magic (wahm) 168– 169, 209, 219–220 Indian subcontinent 539 Indic cultures 208, 209 Indic religions 626, 636–637 Indic vocabulary 631 Indonesia 448 artistic interconnections between Ottoman Empire and 447 Dutch occupation of 446–447, 486 talismanic motifs in 441, 446 (Lion of ʿAlī) calligrams 468, 471 ingredients, mixing and processing see nīranjāt/nīranj inscriptions, textual content vs. gestalt 463 Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris), Un art secret (exhibition, 2013) 9 Intellect 172, 177, 179, 196, 215 intellectual magic (siḥr ʿaqlī) of caliphate 180–182 soul-enabled magic vs. 179–180, 182, 185–186, 195 intercession (tawaṣṣul) of ʿAlī/Ahl al-Bayt 441, 448 of the Prophet and his relics 31, 541, 588, 594 of spirits 211, 212–213, 227 of talismans/amulets 460, 539, 553, 560, 562, 588, 594 interrogational astrology 54, 54n29 Intikhāb-i Ḥall al-mushkilāt (“Selections from The resolution of difficulties”) 295

index Introduction to the History of Science (Sarton) 62, 62n9 Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity (Netton) 162 Iran 118, 125, 267, 412 Islamic reform 6 Safavids in 286, 307, 404, 445 talismanic motifs/symbols in 441, 465 arms and armor 420, 421, 424ill., 426ill., 427, 428, 430, 436ill., 438n69, 448 (Lion of ʿAlī) calligrams 454, 456, 466–468, 466n57, 468n65, 473 Iranian vocabulary 631 Iraq 125, 191, 292 conquest of 390–391, 446 al-ʿIrāqī see [al-]Sīmāwī, Abū l-Qāsim Aḥmad ʿirfān (wisdom), parallels between gnōsis and 611 iron 47, 66, 67 fig., 67n27, 80, 420, 429 fig., 430, 436, 500, 620. Irwin, Robert 402n59 Isfahan 298, 305 awfāq literature from Seljuk 60, 113tab., 124–125tab., 126–128, 131, 143 Iṣfahānī, Fażl Allāh Khunjī see Khunjī Iṣfahānī, Fażl Allāh Iṣfahānī, Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Turka see Ibn Turka al-Isfarāʾīnī (d. 1027–1028) see al-Isfizārī al-Isfizārī, Abū Ḥātim al-Muẓaffar 113tab., 124tab., 126–128, 130, 253 Isḥāq b. Ḥunayn (d. c. 910) 141, 141–142 al-Ishārāt wa-l-tanbīhāt (“Pointers and Reminders,” Ibn Sīnā) 213, 621–623 Ishtar 330–331, 331n42 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 43 Iskandar Beg, Tārīkh-i ʿālamārā-yi ʿabbāsī 306n178 Iskender (pseud. for restaurant holder) 583–584 Islam Christianity vs. 22n71, 587 Islam proper vs. non-authentic Islam 613, 625–627 mystification and orientalization 382 purification of 561, 594, 625–627

671 reform/rationalization 5–7, 560–561, 625–627 Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur) 505, 506ill. Al-Tibb (exhibition, 2018) 10 Islamicate occult sciences see occult sciences “Islamicate” (term) 612–613 Islamic esotericism 5, 7, 78, 250, 252, 254, 271, 513, 610 see also Brethren of Purity Islamic learning/scholarship 609–610, 628 “Islamic Occultism in Theory and Practice” (conference, 2017, University of Oxford) 1, 2 Islamic reform 5–7, 560–561, 625–627 “Islamic” (term), “Islamicate” vs. 613 Ismāʿīl I (Safavid shah, r. 1501–1524) 296, 297n135 Ismail (Kelantan sultan, r. 1920–1944) 503– 504 Ismail (prophet) 555 Isou, Isidore (d. 2007) 396n42 Istanbul 110, 442 blessing cards in restaurant 580–584, 581ill. Eyüp tomb complex 572, 573ill., 574– 575, 576ill., 586ill., 588, 589ill., 591–592, 592ill. Naqshbandiyya order in 561 souvenir shops in 572, 591, 600, 601ill. tourism in 602 Izmir 598 Jābir b. Ḥayyān (d. c. 815) 16, 78, 196, 272, 274, 347 Jābirian Corpus 87, 91, 94 Kitāb al-khawāṣṣ al-kabīr (“Great Book of Occult Properties”) 81–84, 86 Kitāb al-mawāzīn al-ṣaghīr (“Small Book of Balances”) 78–80, 99n112, 109–110, 347, 349 Kitāb al-nukhab (“Book of Selections”) 84–86, 95 Kitāb ikhrāj mā fī l-quwwa ilā l-fiʿl (“Book of the Passage of Potentiality into Actuality”) 80–81 Jacobs, Adam 269n12

672 jade, in talismanic weaponry 423, 424, 436ill., 438n69 Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (6th Shiʿi Imam, d. 765) 272, 399, 425 Jafr khāfiya 272 jafr see letter divination Jafr-i abyaḍ (work) 272 Jafr-i aḥmar (work) 272 Jahāngīr (Mughal Emperor, r. 1605–1627) 430n34, 437 al-Jāḥiẓ, Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr b. Baḥr (d. 868– 869) Kitāb al-awfāq wa-l-riyāḍāt (“Book of Awfāq and Mathematics”) 106–107, 106n124, 142 Kitāb al-tarbīʿ wa-l-tadwīr (“Book of Circling and Squaring”) 106 Jainism 69, 630 Jakarta 446 Jalāl al-Din ʿAlī b. Naṣīr see Qāsim-i Anvār Jalālī calendar 127 Jalāl Munajjim Bāshī (Jalāl al-Din ʿAlī b. Munajjim Yazdī, court astrologer, d. 1619–1620) 301–306 Tārīkh-i ʿabbāsī yā Rūz-nāma-yi Mullā Jalāl 305 Tuḥfat al-munajjimīn (“The Gift of the Astrologers”) 302 James Reinish Gallery (New York), Divine Protection: Talismanic Art of Islamic Cultures (exhibition, 2019) 456 Jāmiʿa (“Compendium”) 272–273 Jāmī, Nūr al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, Nafaḥāt al-uns 288n97–98, 294n124 Jāmiʿ al-ʿulūm (al-Rāzī) 632 Janissary corps (elite corps of Ottoman infantry) 444, 445 jargon, as linguistic strategy to affirm scientific authority 613 jasad see body jasper 423 jātaka tales (Buddhism) 474 Java 457, 468 see also Cirebon shahāda in 479 Javāhir al-tafsīr li-tuḥfat al-Amīr (“The Jewels of Qurʾan Exegesis Presented as a Gift to the Amir,” al-Kāshifī) 267, 285 al-Jawbarī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (d. 1222) 639

index al-Mukhtār fī kashf al-asrār (“The Selected Pieces on the Unveiling of Secrets”) 330–331, 334, 340 al-Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm fī ʿilm al-rūḥāniyya wa-ṣināʿat al-tanjīm (“The Right Way in the Science of Spiritual [Forces] and the Art of Astrology”) 330 al-Jazūlī, Dalāʾil al-khayrāt (“Guides to Happiness”) 557 Jeremiah, as lettrist/relation with letters 242 Jerusalem 259, 389 Jesus/ʿĪṣā 259 as lettrist/relation with letters 242, 244 millennium and planet of 235, 236 Jewish writings/literature 99n112, 610 Jews 245, 252, 626 mandal 638–639 al-Jīlanī, Qandīl Nūranī Sayyid Muḥyī al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Qādir (d. 1166) 537ill., 539 on stamped talismans 549ill., 551, 552, 552ill. al-Jildakī, ʿIzz al-Dīn Aydamir (fl. 14th c.) 274 Kitāb Durrat al-ghawwāṣ […] (“Book of the Pearl of the Diver […]”) 328– 329 al-Jīlī, Kitāb ʿUyūn al-ḥaqāʾiq […] (“Book of True Sources […]”) 324–325 jinn 167, 614 duʿāʾ (“supplication”)/summoning 542– 545, 614 mandal for protection against/expulsion of 633 jism see body John of Seville 49 John Tradescant the Elder 20n67 Johor (Malaysia) 513–514 Jonah/Yūnus, relation with letters 244 Joseph/Yūsuf 241 relation with letters 244 Judgment, Day of 253 references on talismans/amulets to 549ill., 551 judicial astrology 628 Jupiter 223n47 assignment to Idrīs 235 Justice and Development Party (AKP, Turkey) 31, 573

index

673

al-Juwaynī, ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn (Ilkhanid statesman, Kashf ḥaqāʾiq al-asrār […] (“Revelation of the d. 1283) 620n38 Truths […]”, al-Tustarī) 75n54, 105n121, jyotiṣa (Hindu tradition of astral science) 636 110, 114 Kashf al-ẓunūn (Ḥājjī Khalīfa) 4n7, 43, Kaʿba 240, 540 298n141, 322, 327, 410n86 references on talismans/amulets to Kāshgharī, Mawlāna Mīrzā Jān (unidentified) 535ill., 555–556, 556ill., 578 301 Kabbalah 29, 242, 381, 384, 385, 396n42, Kāshgharī, Saʿd al-Dīn (Naqshbandī Sufi mas413, 459 ter, d. 1456) 268, 286n88 Kad kalacan Singa Baruang Dwajalullah al-Kāshifī, Fakhr al-Dīn ʿAlī b. Ḥusayn Wāʿiẓ (“The Singa Barong is the Emblem of the see ʿAlī Ṣafī, Fakhr al-Dīn Flag of God”) 485 al-Kāshifī, Kamāl al-Dīn Ḥusayn Wāʿiẓ Kajen (Central Java) 494 (d. 1504–1505) 267, 284, 291, 298, 307, Kamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Yūnus (d. 1242) 342 70n38 see also ʿAlī Ṣafī, Fakhr al-Dīn; Asrār-i Kamāl b. Jalāl (son of Jalāl Munajjim), Zubqāsimi dat al-tavārīkh 306n178 confession 268–271, 307 Kamummuqé/Kamoemoe-e (“The purple Futuvvat-nāma-yi sulṭānī 271, 289n104, one”) flag (Luwuq) 510, 511 290 Kanakana/Kankah al-Hindī 331, 350–352, Ikhtiyārāt al-nujūm/Lavāyiḥ al-qamar 354 (work on elective astrology) 267 Kitāb Asrār al-mawālīd (“Book of Secrets of Javāhir al-tafsīr li-tuḥfat al-Amīr (“The Nativities”) 351 Jewels of Qurʾan Exegesis Presented as Kitāb fī l-ṭibb (“Book on Medicine”) 351 a Gift to the Amir”) 267, 285 Kitāb al-Namūdār fī l-aʿmār (“Book of the Marṣad al-asnā fī istikhrāj al-asmāʾ alNamūdār for the Ages”) 351 ḥusnā (treatise on manipulation of Kitāb al-Qirānāt al-kabīr (“The Great Book of Divine Names) 267–268 Conjunctions”) 351 Mavāhib-i ʿaliyya (“Gifts presented to Kitāb al-Qirānāt al-ṣaghīr (“The Small Book ʿAlī”) 268n4, 285–286, 307 of Conjunctions”) 351 Rawḍat al-shuhadāʾ (“The Garden of Kangjeng Kyai Paré Anom (“The green and the Martyrs”) 268, 269n12, 271, 272, yellow one,” banner) 487 307 Kangjeng Kyai Tunggul Wulung (“The al-Risāla al-ʿaliyya 286 blue-black banner,” royal banner of Risāla dar ʿilm-i aʿdād (treatise on numerYogyakarta) 487 ology and magic squares) 268 Kanz al-asrār wa-dhakhāʾir al-abrār fī ʿilm Sabʿa-yi kāshifiyya (septet on astrology) al-ḥurūf (Idrīs) 240 267 Kanz al-asrār wa-lawāqiḥ al-afkār (“The Tuḥfa-yi ʿaliyya (treatise on lettrism) Treasure of Secrets and Fertile Ideas,” 268, 292 al-Ṣanhājī) 341 al-Kāshī, Ḥājjī b. Jamāl al-Kātib 118 al-Kanz al-bāhir fī sharḥ ḥurūf al-malik alKashmir 488 Ẓāhir (al-Kūmī) 251, 256 al-Kashnāwī, Muḥammad al-Fullānī Kanz al-ʿulūm wa-l-durr al-manẓūm […] 633n76 (“The Treasure of Science of the Well Kaywān see Saturn/Kaywān Arranged Pearls […],” Ibn Tūmart) Kedah (Malaysia) 513 342 Kelantan (peninsular Malaysia) 468, 471, Karbala 446 472n80, 485, 496–497 Battle of 271, 290 Lion of ʿAlī calligrams from 497–506, Kashan 301 504ill., 506ill.

674 Kemālpaşazāde, Aḥmed (d. 1534) 29, 380, 391–393, 398, 405, 406, 407, 411, 413 court appointment in Istanbul 383, 383n9, 386 as imperialist Neopythagorean historian 408–409 lettrist call for conquest of Cairo see Fetḥ-i Miṣir ḥaķķinda īmā ve işārāt scholarship on 384 works 409 Risāla fī l-Ṭāʿūn (plague treatise) 409, 409n81 Tevārīḫ-i āl-i ʿOsmān 400, 406, 409 treatise on talismans and astral magic 384, 409 Kepler, Johannes (d. 1630) 411 “khafiyya” (“hidden”) 615 Khafrī, Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad (d. 1535) 297n136 Khaĭretdinova, N. 108n130 Khalīfa, Ḥājjī, Kashf al-ẓunūn 298n141, 322, 327 Khalili Collection (London) 532ill. see also stamped talisman (Khalili collection) Khāliṣa (servant of Hārūn al-Rashīd) 329– 330 Khaljī dynasty (1290–1320) 69 Khalvatiyya Sufi order 287 Khalvatī, Ẓahīr al-Dīn 287n96 khamsa see “hand of Fāṭima”/“hand of ʿAbbās” Khānaqāh-i Jadīdī 287n96 al-Kharaqī, Jamāl al-Zamān (d. 1138–1139), Talkhīṣ fī l-ʿadad al-wafq (“Epitome on the Harmonious Number”) 113tab., 130 Kharjird-i Jām 289 khawāṣṣ (occult properties, mysterious forces) 169 of awfāq (magic squares) 80, 82, 84, 86, 87, 88, 88n81, 95, 103, 105, 114, 120, 143 equation of term with idiotētes 617 Khaybar, Battle of (628) 464 al-Khayyāmī al Nīsābūrī, ʿUmar b. Ibrāhīm (d. c. 1123) 125tab., 126–128 al-Khāzinī, Abū l-Fatḥ ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (d. after 1130–1131) 125tab., 126–129, 139, 142 Kitāb Mīzān al-ḥikma (“Book of the Balance of Wisdom”) 127–128

index Zīj for Sanjar (al-Zīj al-muʿtabar alSanjarī) 129 al-Khiḍr (patron of the Sufis) 241, 245, 251, 477 khilāfa see caliphate Khunjī Iṣfahānī, Fażl Allāh (d. 1521) 403, 405, 407, 412 Tārīkh-i ʿālam-ārā-yi amīnī (“Aminian World-Adorning History”) 404 Khurasan 104, 125, 286, 287, 292, 458 al-Khuttulī, Abū Yūsuf Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb b. Akhī Ḥizām see Ibn Akhī Ḥizām Khūzānī, Faḍlī Beg, Afḍal al-tavārīkh 305n173 Khvāfī, Majd al-Dīn Muḥammad (Timurid vizier) 267n3 Khvāja ʿUbaydallāh Aḥrār 288n96–97 Khwāndamīr, Ghiyāth al-Din (d. 1535) 634 Kılıç, Mustafa 383, 385 kīmiyā see alchemy al-Kindī, Abū Yaʿqūb ibn ʾIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ (d. c. 873) 16 On the rays/The Book of Magical Theory 54 Kipchak (Golden Horde) Khanate 65–66 al-Kirmānī, Tāj al-Dīn ʿAlī b. ʿUmar al-Turka 270n15 Kitāb ʿAjāʾib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharāʾib almawjūdāt (“The Wonders of All Creation and the Rarities of All Existence,” alQazwīnī) 619–624 categories for strange phenomena in 620–621, 622, 623 circulation of 624 on gharīb 619 Kitāb al-Akhbār al-dākhila (“Book of Internal Reports”) 141 Kitāb al-Iʿdād fī wafq al-aʿdād (“Book of Numeration on the Harmony of Numbers,” Anon.) 112tab., 114 Kitāb al-Ishārāt wa-l-maqālāt fī ʿilm al-sīmiyāʾ (“The Book of Clues and Speeches in the Science of Sīmiyāʾ”) 344 Kitab al-Khawāṣṣ al-kabīr (“Great Book of Occult Properties,” Jābirian Corpus) 81– 84, 86 Kitāb al-Mawāzīn al-ṣaghīr (“Small Book of Balances,” Jābirian Corpus) 78–80, 99n112, 109–110, 347, 349

index Kitāb al-Milal wa-l-niḥal (“The Book of Religions and Sects,” al-Shahrastānī) 27, 208 on delusion of divinity 216–218, 219 on idolatry 216–217, 222 on imitation of spiritual beings/mimesis 213–214, 215 on Indians/Indian religion 218–220 on meditation 219–220 on perfection of the soul 214 on Sabians 209–218, 226, 227 Kitāb al-Namūdār fī l-aʿmār (“Book of the Namūdār for the Ages”) 351 Kitāb al-Nukhab (“Book of Selections,” Jābirian Corpus) 84–86, 95 Kitāb Asrār al-mawālīd (“Book of Secrets of Nativities”) 351 Kitāb Firdaws al-ḥikma (“Book of the Paradise of Wisdom,” al-Ṭabarī) 71–76, 80, 87, 88n81, 91, 94, 101, 142, 348–349 Kitāb al-Qirānāt al-kabīr (“The Great Book of Conjunctions”) 351 Kitāb al-Qirānāt al-ṣaghīr (“The Small Book of Conjunctions”) 351 Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya (“Book of Sharāsīm the Indian,” Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya) 28–29, 194, 317, 327, 331 associations with Kitāb al-Uṣṭūṭās 327, 331, 335, 353 conclusion (text) 364–371 on cryptographic alphabets 334, 353– 354 dating 334–335 full-text of introduction 356–363 on fumigations 353 manuscripts 354 Cambridge, University Library, Or. 25 321–322, 326, 356, 364, 372– 373tab. Dublin, Chester Beatty Library, 4353 325–326, 332, 372–373tab. Istanbul, Hacı Beşir Aǧa 659 319–321, 326, 356, 364, 372–373tab. Istanbul, Hamidiye 189 317–319, 326, 356, 364, 372–373tab. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 2577 353 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 2595 324–325, 326, 332, 339–340, 364, 372–373tab.

675 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 2634 322–323, 372– 373tab. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 2635 323–324, 372– 373tab. tables of contents of 372–373tab. overview of discourses (maqāla) in 345 parallels with ʿUyūn al-ḥaqāʾiq 332 on properties of letters and numbers (“Indian letters”) 346–350 on sīmiyāʾ 336–354 as source for Medieval Arabic texts 330–334, 354 sources of inspiration 345–354 Kitāb Sirr al-asrār (unidentified) 280 knowledge (ʿilm) 8 classification of 607–608 ʿilm al-ghayb (knowledge of the unseen) 610 occult 28, 220–221, 255 production of 640 propaedeutic 171, 175, 344–345 rational vs. irrational 5 of the stars see astrology; astronomy theoretical vs. practical 31, 607–608 Kraton Kanoman (“Junior Palace”) 495 Kraton Kasepuhan (“Senior Palace,” Cirebon) 481, 481ill., 485, 488, 489, 489ill., 493 Kraus, Paul 12 Kuala Besut (Terengganu) 505 Kuala Lumpur 497 Kufic script 547 al-Kūmī, Abū ʿAbdallāh (d. early 15th c.) al-Kanz al-bāhir fī sharḥ ḥurūf al-malik al-Ẓāhir 251, 256 Risālat al-Hū 243 Kurdistan 17 Kusodono (Indonesian artist) 495, 495n171 labor see childbirth La Galigo Museum (Makassar) 511n222 lām-alif ligature 242–243 Lane, Edward 11, 639 languages lettrism and 237–238 origins of 238 Lārī, Muḥyī al-Dīn, Futūḥ al-ḥaramayn (“Revelations of the Two Sanctuaries”) 557

676 al-Laṭīf (name of God) 244 Latin-European occult sciences, scholarship on 381–382 leadership, use of magic for 180–184 Lemay, Richard 13, 16 Leoni, Francesca 1, 20n66, 23, 30, 456, 624–625 Lesser Sunda Islands 457, 468 letter divination ( jafr) 251, 271, 272–273, 386, 390n31, 398 letter magic see lettrism letters/letter combinations alif 243 ALM 386n21, 403, 405n70 Arabic 346 association with lunar mansions 346– 348 disconnected letters 250–251 distribution of 347 fāʾ 244 hāʾ 243 “Indian letters” 346–350 lām-alif 242, 243 muqattaʾāt (unique letter combinations) 259 nūn 259 power of see lettrism properties (hot, cold, wet, dry) of 346– 347 qāf 259 lettrism (science of letters, ʿilm al-ḥurūf ) 4–5, 28, 59, 88–89n81, 196, 230, 232, 243, 271, 307 see also awfāq (magic squares); [al]Bisṭāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān; [al-]Būnī, Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad; Fetḥ-i Miṣir ḥaķķinda īmā ve işārāt; ḥisāb al-jummal; Ibn ʿArabī, Muḥyī l-Dīn; lettrist imperialism; sīmiyāʾ astrology and 403, 406, 412, 412n89 in al-Bisṭāmī’s life time 252–260, 262 calligrams and 459–460 definition 275, 459–460 languages and 237–238 Neopythagoreanism and 4, 29, 384, 395, 399, 410n87 opponents of see Ibn Khaldūn origins, history and rise of 71, 71n40, 238–240, 242, 243, 396 for political and military purposes see

index lettrist imperialism production of letters 231n4 Prophets and the 238–245 quranic prognostication and lettrist analysis 386–393 relation with awfāq 71, 83, 89n81, 101, 102, 114, 144 scholarship on 234n10 as science of saints 289, 341 talismanic motifs and 446, 547–548, 547ill. temporality and 231–233, 260 ummat al-ḥukamāʾ (sages, philosophers) and 242, 245–249 Western 396–397, 396n42 works on 240, 267, 267–268n4, 292 lettrist imperialism 25, 29, 385, 393, 396, 401n55, 403, 412 Aqquyunlu 404 fusion of astrology and lettrism 403, 406, 412n89 Mamluk 255–257, 398 Mughal 413 Ottoman 397, 398, 405, 407 Safavids 406n71 Timurid 397, 398, 403 Lettrist International 396, 396n42 Leverhulme Trust 20n66 Levi, Eliphas 2 Liber Theysolius 53 licit magic (siḥr ḥalāl) 178, 179, 184, 584, 614, 622–623 ligatures 242–243 līmiyā see talismans, science of linguistic strategies, jargon used by scholars 613 Lion of ʿAlī calligrams 24, 30, 454, 463–468, 467ill. from Cirebon 478, 480–495, 489ill., 492ill., 493ill., 503, 513 composed of shahāda 457, 478, 479– 495, 496, 505, 507, 511 composed of Sūrat al-Ṣaff (Q 61:13) 30, 457, 476, 478, 495–512 dating of 465, 468–469 disconnection with ʿAlī in Southeast Asian context 457, 476–477 from Rote/Roti (Lesser Sunda Islands) 506–508

index function and use of 477–478 for bull- and buffalo-fighting 478, 497–500, 498ill., 507 for healing 475, 478, 483ill., 486–487 protection against misfortune 500– 502, 501ill. identity of animal (lion vs. tiger) 30, 457, 473–476, 499, 500, 503, 509, 511– 512, 513 see also Macan Ali; Sima Ngali from Kelantan (peninsular Malaysia) 496, 498ill., 501ill., 506ill. language/script 481, 488 from Luwuq (Sulawesi) 508–511, 509ill. origins of 465–466, 469 from Patani (southern Thailand) 497, 500, 501ill., 502, 505, 506ill. in present times 495 smoking of 478, 502 text 462–463 transmission into Southeast Asia 24, 30, 468–473, 469ill. ways of appearance/media used 456, 477–478 in conjunction with Dhū l-Fiqār 446, 470, 476, 483–484, 486–487, 495, 511 in conjunction with Gaṇeśa 487– 490, 489ill. on flags and banners 482–487, 483ill., 490, 502–504, 507, 508–511, 509ill. in glass-paintings 511–512 on Meḥmed II scroll (1458) 457, 465– 466 on merchandise 495, 495n174 in mosques 478, 492–495, 493ill. over doorways/on doorway hangings 505–506, 506ill. paired mirror forms 504–506, 504ill., 506ill. in Qurʾan 490, 491ill., 494 on talismanic shirts 506–508 variations in iconography, motif and style 462, 475–476, 490–492 on wood panels 480, 481–482, 481ill., 487–490, 489ill., 492n165, 504–505, 504ill. from Turkey 467ill. from Yogyakarta 468, 479, 511–512

677 lion imagery 462, 464–465, 467ill., 474, 484, 513, 558 Chinese lion 482 European coats of arms 504 tiger vs. lions (in calligrams) 473–476, 484, 499, 500, 513 Lisān al-Dīn b. al-Khaṭīb see Ibn al-Khaṭīb living beings, depiction of 457–459, 473, 478, 494, 503, 513–514 Lombok 494 Lord of the Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān, astrological title) 403, 405, 408 Lory, Pierre 13, 164, 298n143 lunar mansions 168, 169, 193–194, 198, 335 association of letters with 346–348 talismans of 187, 189, 192 Luo River Chart (Luoshu) 64 Luwuq (Bugis kingdom, Sulawesi) 468, 485 flag of 508–511, 509ill. Macan Ali (“Tiger of ʿAlī”) calligrams 476, 480, 481ill., 482, 483, 483ill., 485– 486, 487, 488, 489ill., 490–491, 492ill., 493ill., 494–495, 495n174, 513 see also Lion of ʿAlī calligrams Macangngé/Matjang-e (“The tiger”) flag (Luwuq) 508–511, 509ill. MacDonald, Duncan Black (d. 1943) 625 McDonald, Peta 461–462 Macrocosmic Man 180 madrasas 621, 624 mages 186, 196, 197 Maghrib 392, 539 lettrism/kabbalah in 413 al-Maghribī, Abū ʿAbdallāh 278, 279, 282, 294 Siḥr al-ʿuyūn (“The Bewitchment of the Eyes”) 278, 282, 284–285 al-Maghribī, Aḥmad b. ʿIwaḍ, Qaṭf al-azhār fī khaṣāʾiṣ al-maʿādin wa-l-aḥjār […] (“The Picking of Flowers on the Properties of Minerals and Stones […]”) 333–334 magical formulas combination with pious/religious texts 528 see also stamped talismans magical images, performative vs. talismanic 461–463 magical papyri, Greek 461–462, 462n40

678 magical scripts/writing 194, 275, 460, 547 see also calligrams; lettrism Magic and Divination in Early Islam (SavageSmith) 15, 14n43 magicians, saints vs. 527–528 “Magic and the Occult in Islam and Beyond” (conference, 2017) 8n19 magic (siḥr) 16 see also Epistle on Magic (Brethren of Purity); sīmiyāʾ apocryphal magic 353 astral magic 28, 183, 207–227, 274, 294, 294n125, 341–342, 345, 384 astrology as 171–174, 183 classification/categorization of 31, 608– 610, 614–615 colonialist outlook on occult sciences and 31, 382, 394, 609 definitions/different meanings 170–171, 174, 178, 189, 198–199, 207n2 disciplines unrelated to 341–342 divisions of 27, 43, 53 eschatological meaning of 174–176, 184 illusory magic 168, 186–187, 225 intellectual vs. soul-enabled magic 179– 180, 182, 185–186, 195 letter magic see lettrism licit vs. illicit magic 178, 179, 184, 528n4, 584, 614, 622–623 as medicine 184–186 merger with devotion 528, 542–545, 549–550, 563–564, 574–575, 584– 585 see also eye beads; stamped talismans modern scholarship on 609, 631 naturalization of 621, 622 place in religious and legal discourse 18, 19 polemicization of 19, 19n62 political implications of 180–184 prohibited magic 188–189 of prophets vs. sages 178–180, 182, 186, 195 relevance to medieval physics and metaphysics 27 as salvation 174–178, 184 term/etymology 630 women at origin of 336 magic squares see awfāq (magic squares)

index Magic Squares in the Tenth Century (Sesiano) 58–59, 111–113tab. magnets, amuletic 580, 581ill., 582, 601ill. Mahābhārata 479 al-Māhānī, Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā (d. 888) 139, 141 Mahdī, coming of the 253, 259 mail shirts (armor) see body armor Majālis al-muʾminīn (Shushtarī) 298 Majālis al-nafāʾis (ʿAlīshīr Navāʾī) 289 Majd al-Dīn al-Amīr b. Abī Naṣr Manṣūr b. Muḥammad b. ʿAlī (d. early 12th c.) 124tab., 129–130n180 al-Majlisī, Muḥammad Bāqir (d. 1699) 425 al-Majrītī, Maslama (d. 1007) 190, 191, 196, 274 makara (sea monster) 494 al-Mālaqī, Abū al-Walīd (d. 1135) 125, 143 The Treatise on the Existence of the Cause of Amicable Numbers and Square Figures with Numerical Planes […] 99–102, 105, 111 Malay literature 470, 474 Malay peninsula, Lion of ʿAlī calligrams in 457, 468 Malay society tiger spirit in 474–475 veneration of sacred figures from other traditions 477 al-Malik al-Ashraf (d. 1296), Kitāb al-Tabṣira fī ʿilm al-nujūm 192–193 al-Malik al-Masʿūd (Arṭuqid ruler, r. 1222– 1232) 330 al-Malik (name of God) 244 Malikshāh I (Jalāl al-Dīn Malikshāh, Great Seljuk sultan, r. 1073–1092) 60, 113tab., 124–125tab., 127, 143 al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Barqūq (Mamluk sultan, r. 1382–1389/1390–1399) 255–257, 395–396, 402, 412 Mamluk Empire/Mamluks 29, 262 see also Egypt lettrist imperialism 398 al-Maʾmūn (Abbasid caliph, r. 813–833) 241, 254–255, 257 mandal/máṇḍala (“[sorcerer’s] circle”) 637ill. Arabic and Persian writings on/use of 630, 632, 635

index attraction of deities and spirits 631, 636–637 creation and directions of use 631–632, 633–634, 635–636 expulsion of jinn 633 history/origins 631–632, 636–637, 636n82, 638 in incantations/nīranj 630, 632 in Indic religions 630, 631, 636–637 Qurʾan verses in 636 Sogdian writings 631 term/etymology 628, 630, 638–639 Mangkunegaran (Central Javanese princedom) 486–487, 487n149 Mangkunegaran Palace (Surakarta, Java) 505–506 Mangqala (Prince of Anxi, enthroned 1272) 66 the manifest (ẓahir), the hidden (bāṭin) vs. 610–611 al-Manṣūr (Abbasid caliph, r. 754–775) 351 manuscripts Cambridge University Library, Or. 25 321–322, 326, 356, 364, 372– 373tab. Dublin, Chester Beatty, 4353 325–326, 332, 372–373tab. Dublin, Chester Beatty, IN2 634, 634n77, 636n81, 637ill. Dublin, Chester Beatty, IN54 634, 634n77 Epistle on Magic (Brethren of Purity) 164, 165–167tab., 168 Istanbul, Haci Beşir Aǧa 659 319–321, 326, 356, 364, 372–373tab. Istanbul, Hamidiye 189 317–319, 326, 356, 364, 372–373tab. Istanbul, MS Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Arşivi E. 4796 408 Konya, MS Mevlana Müzesi, 2315 385 Kuala Lumpur, Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia, MSS 2778 500–502, 501ill. Kuala Lumpur, private collection 497– 500, 498ill. Leiden, University Library, CB 141 490– 492, 492ill. London, British Library, Add. MS 7713 (Anon. Pers. BL) 105n121, 114

679 London, British Library, Delhi Arabic 110 116–126, 123ill. see also Dīwān al-ʿadad al-wafq London, British Library, Delhi Collection 115–116 London, Nasser D. Khalili Collection, MSS 1179 529ill., 533–534, 535ill., 537ill., 547ill., 549ill., 552ill., 554ill., 556ill., 557ill. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 2577 335, 353 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 2595 324–325, 332, 339–340, 364, 372–373tab. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 2596 193–194 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 2634 322–323, 372–373tab. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 2635 323–324, 372–373tab. Princeton University Library, Third Series, no. 591 118 Sumedang, Prabu Geusan Ulun Museum, no. I2 490, 491ill., 494 Surakarta, Mangkunegaran Palace, MS Reksa Pustaka I 8 505–506 Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi, MS 1597 233 Maqāla fī l-aʿdād al-mutaḥābba (“Discourse on Amicable Numbers,” Abū Maʿshar) 351 Maqāla fī ḥarakāt al-kawākib al-sayyāra (“Treatise on the Movements of the Wandering Stars,” Ibn al-Zarqālluh) 96–98, 99, 101, 105, 113tab. Maqāla fī istikhrāj al-awtār fī l-dāʾira (“Treatise on the Derivation of the Chords in a Circle,” al-Bīrūnī) 107–108 Maqāla fī wujūd ʿillat al-aʿdād al-mutahābba […] (“The Treatise on the Existence of the Cause of Amicable Numbers and Square Figures […],” al-Mālaqī) 99–102, 105, 111 Maqālāt (“Statements,” al-Suhravardī) 280 Maqālāt-i sīzdahgāna (“The Thirteen Chapters,” al-Rāzī) 280 al-Maqrīzī, Taqī l-Dīn (d. 1442) 402 marcasite 333 Maritime Museum (Istanbul), silk banners in 441

680 Marjāna (legendary servant of Hārūn alRashīd) 329, 330 Marj Dābiq, Battle of (1516) 393n33 Markiewicz, Christopher 401 Marquet, Yves 164 Les Frères de la Purité, pythagoriciens de l’ Islam 163, 181, 188 La philosophie des alchimistes et l’ alchimie des philosophes 163 La philosophie des Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ 163, 179–180 Mars 67n27, 170, 223n47, 224 alchemy and 47 assignment to Noah 235 Marṣad al-asnā fī istikhrāj al-asmāʾ al-ḥusnā (treatise on manipulation of divine names, al-Kāshifī) 267–268 Martin Hernández, Raquel 461 Marw, awfāq literature from 60, 72, 113tab., 125tab., 126–128, 130, 131, 143 Maryam (mother of Jesus) 85, 86 Mary the Jewess 331, 331n43 Masjid Agung (“Great Mosque”) Sang Cipta Rasa (Cirebon) 478, 492–495, 493ill. Masjid al-Ḥarām (Sacred Mosque, Mecca), on stamped talismans 535ill., 540, 555– 556, 556ill. al-Masjid al-Nabawi (Prophet’s Mosque, Medina) 588, 589ill. Mashhad 268, 271, 303, 305n175 al-Masʿūdī, Abū l-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī, Murūj aldhahab (“The Fields of Gold”) 195 al-Maṭālib al-ilāhiyya fī mawḍūʿāt al-ʿulūm allughawiyya (encyclopedia on linguistic sciences, Mollā Lüṭfī) 405, 408 material culture, intellectual history and 23, 25–26 mathematical astronomy 125, 126, 128, 135– 136, 143, 302n161, 411 mathematics 58, 59 see also awfāq literature; awfāq (magic squares) astrology and 172, 411 mathematics of awfāq (magic squares) 27, 58–59, 70, 71, 105–106, 105n121, 120 matter 212, 215 Mauchamp, Émile, La sorcellerie au Maroc 16

index Mavāhib-i ʿaliyya (“Gifts presented to ʿAlī”, al-Kā̄shifī) 268n4, 285–286, 307 Mazdaism see Zoroastrianism/Zoroastrians Māzyār b. Qārīn (governor of Tabaristan) 72 Mecca 111n138, 303, 389, 463, 471, 497 awfāq (magic squares) 241 representations of 557 mediation 210 see also intercession medical treatises, awfāq literature 71–86, 87, 92 medicine 3, 46, 53 Galenic 628, 629 idiotētes arrētoi (indescribable properties) and 617–618 spiritual medicine/magic as 184–186, 344 works on 72, 617 Medina 389, 390, 463, 471, 497 Prophet’s migration to 496 Prophet’s Mosque in 588, 589ill. representations of 557 meditation ( fikr) 209, 219–220, 226 Meḥmed II (Fātiḥ Meḥmed, Ottoman sultan, r. 1444–1446) 110, 405, 405n70 Meḥmed scroll (1458) 457, 465–466 Melville, Charles 304 Melvin-Koushki, Matthew 1, 15, 26n80, 29, 71n40, 274–275, 287, 292, 302n161 merchandise see also blessing cards; eye beads amulet-inspired 572, 586n26, 593, 595, 599, 600–602 Dhū l-Fiqār on 495, 495n174 Lion of ʿAlī calligrams on 495, 495n174 Mercury 223n47, 247, 248, 359 alchemy and 47 assignment to Jesus 235 Mesopotamia 207, 628 messiah 259 see also Jesus/ʾĪṣā; Mahdi metals, magical/esoteric/medicinal properties of 422 metaphysics, relevance of magic to medieval 27 Metaphysics (Ibn Sīnā) 44

index Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) 29 Iznik ceramic vessel in 445 Power and Piety (exhibition, 2016–2017) 9, 420 silk banners in 441, 442ill. talismanic weaponry in 424–427, 424ill. barong (type of sword) 446 helmets 428 mail shirts 429ill., 430–434, 433ill. patch boxes 439 swords in 424–427, 424ill., 426ill., 436ill. M.I.A. (British rapper) 607 Michael/Mikāʾīl (archangel) 499, 508 Michot, Yahya 194 micrography (ghubār) 455n2, 458 Middle East, lion imagery in 464 Miftāḥ al-jafr al-jāmiʿ (“Key to the Comprehensive Prognosticon,” al-Bisṭāmī) 398, 399 Miftāḥ al-saʿāda wa-miṣbāḥ al-siyāda (“Key to Felicity and Lamp to Mastery,” Ṭashköprüzāde) 4n7, 410n86 Mihailović, Konstantin (d. c. 1501) 445 military matters see also talismanic weaponry use of occult sciences/magic/divination in 182, 380, 381 millennia see also astral-prophetic cycles; mujaddidūn ruling planets/major prophets for earth’s seven 232, 235–236 mimesis 213–214, 215, 227 miniature painting 458 miracles, see also licit magic miracles, Prophetic 225, 284n79 see also Kitāb ʿAjāʾib al-makhlūqāt wagharāʾib al-mawjūdāt juxtaposition with magic 4, 163, 178, 185, 186, 195, 241, 527, 620, 623, 627 naturalization of 327, 621, 622 Mīr Dāmād (d. 1631) 413 mirror writing 455n2, 458, 466, 502, 552 modernists 6, 625–626 modern scholarship on lettrism 231, 232 on magic 609, 631

681 Mollā Lüṭfī (d. 1494) 409–410, 410n84, 411 al-Maṭālib al-ilāhiyya fī mawḍūʿāt al-ʿulūm al-lughawiyya (encyclopedia on linguistic sciences) 405, 408 Risālat Taḍʿīf al- (“On the Doubling of the Altar”) 110, 409n84 Mongol Empire/Mongols 65–67, 255 Mongol invasions 65, 390–391 monotheism 216 pure vs. compromised 222 Moon 186, 223n47, 303, 635n80 alchemy and 47 assignment to the Prophet 235 influence on magical squares 90, 92, 93, 94, 96, 100–102, 108n130, 301, 350 lettrism and 348 twenty-eight mansions of 335, 346, 365 Morgan, David 463 Morimoto, Kazuo 273 Moschopoulos, Manuel 63 Moses/Mūsā lettrism of/relation with letters 241, 244 millennium and planet of 235, 236, 252 references on talismans/amulets to 425, 540, 548 Mosque of Jamhuriah (Kuala Besut, Terengganu) 505 Mosque of Kajen (Central Java) 494 mosques Ayl al-Bayt imagery in Ottoman imperial 445 Lion of ʿAlī calligrams in 478, 492–495, 493ill. Moureau, Sébastien 191, 196 al-Mufaḍḍal b. Thābit al-Ḥarrānī see Abū lKhaṭṭāb al-Mufaḍḍal al-Ḥarrānī al-Mufaḍḍal b. Thābit b. Qurra 131 Mughal Empire/Mughals 29, 393, 396 lettrist imperialism 413 Mughal Imperial Library (Delhi) 115, 118, 119 al-Muhallabī, Abū Muḥammad (vizier, d. 963) 124tab., 134, 136, 141 Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb see Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb Muḥammad al-Bāqir (5th Shiʿi Imam, d. 732) 236n17, 254 Muḥammad Beg Māklū 301 Muhammad II (Sultan of Kelantan, 1838– 1886) 497n183

682 Muḥammad b. Isḥāq al-Nadīm see Ibn alNadīm Muhammad IV (Sultan of Kelantan, r. 1899– 1920) 502–503, 504 Muḥammad al-Mahdī (12th Shiʿi Imam, occ. 874) 441 Muḥammad (the Prophet, d. 632) 66, 238, 250, 405n70 awfāq (magic squares) and 103 blessing power (baraka) of 582, 584, 585–595 descendants of see Ahl al-Bayt; sayyids Dhū l-Fiqār and 439, 470, 549ill., 550– 551 intercessory powers of 31, 541, 561–562, 588, 594 as lettrist/relation with letters 242, 243, 250, 252, 262, 273 migration to Medina 496 millennium and planet of 235, 236, 236n17 physical description of (ḥilya) 541– 542, 545, 572, 575, 577–579, 580, 585, 587n29 prognosticative powers of 252, 260 references/invocations on talismans/ amulets to 31, 427 on arms and armor 428, 430, 434, 441, 444 on blessing cards/magnets 577–579, 577ill., 581ill., 582, 585–594 in calligrams 456 foot- and sandalprints 561, 582, 585, 588, 589ill., 590–594, 592ill. “seal of prophecy” and “noble seal” 458, 563, 572, 577ill., 578, 585–587, 586ill., 586n26, 588 on stamped talismans 538, 540, 549ill., 552, 552ill. relics 541n37, 561–562, 563, 572, 585, 588 (semi-)precious stones and 422–423, 425 use of talismanic weaponry 421 Muḥyī l-Dīn 398 Muʿizz al-Dawla (Buyid amir, r. 945–967) 124tab., 134 mujaddidūn (renewers [of religion]) in epicycles of religious and civilizational renewal 236, 236n17, 238, 249–250

index hadith on 252–253 nature and identity of 253–254 ruler-mujaddid vs. scholar-mujaddid 253–260 ruler’s status as 404 see also lettrist imperialism al-Mukhtār fī kashf al-asrār (“The Selected Pieces on the Unveiling of Secrets,” alJawbarī) 330–331, 334, 340 Müller, Friedrich Max 607 al-Munāẓarāt (al-Rāzī) 209 Munāẓara-yi bazm u razm (“Debate of Feast and Fight,” Ibn Turka) 402n56 al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl wa-l-muwaṣṣil ilā dhī l-ʿizza wa-l-jalāl (“Deliverer from Error”, al-Ghazālī) 102–106 Muqaddīma (“Prolegomena,” Ibn Khaldūn) 54, 263, 276, 390n31, 396 on evil eye 597 influences of and parallels with Epistles on Magic (Brethren of Purity) 196– 197, 198 on “lion seals” 465 on rīmiyā 276n38 on sīmiyāʾ 275n34, 336, 343–344 Muqaddima (Yazdī) 401n52 muqaṭṭaʿāt (disconnected quranic letters) 259, 307 Murād V (Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, r. 1876), sword of 424, 424ill. Murshid Qulī Khān Ustajlū (Safavid military commander, 1632) 296 Murūj al-dhahab (“The Fields of Gold,” alMasʿūdī) 195 Muş, Battle of (1467) 405 Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (Darwin) 509ill. Museum of Asian Arts (Kuala Lumpur) 504–505, 504ill. museum exhibitions 9–10, 23n76, 420, 455– 456 Museum Nasional Indonesia (Jakarta) 506 Museum of National History (Oxford) 21 Museum Tekstil (Jakarta) 446, 482, 483ill. Muṣḥaf-i Fāṭima (“The codex of Fatima”) 272 Muṣḥaf al-qamar (Anūdāṭīsh) 340 music, magical squares and 91, 94 Muslim fatalism 261

index Muslim scholarship 609–610, 628 al-Muṣṭafā 242 al-Muʿtaṣim (Abbasid caliph, r. 833–642) 72 al-Mutawakkil (Abbasid caliph, r. 847–861) 72 Muʿtazilīs 254 al-Muṭīʿ (Abbasid caliph, r. 946–974) 134 Myanmar calligrams in 472 tiger imagery in 475 mysticism, categorization of 611 mythical creatures, depiction of 494 nād-i ʿAlī 30, 466–468 Nafaḥāt al-uns (“Fragrances of Intimacy,” Jāmī) 288n97–98, 294n124 nafs (soul, psyche) 44 see also soul, human nāga serpent 494 Najaf 446 names of God see divine names names of prophets, numerical values and correlations with divine names 232, 234, 235, 243–245, 256, 259, 386, 392 Naqshbandiyya Sufi order 268, 287, 288n96, 561 Nārāyaṇa Paṇḍita, Gaṇitakaumudī 69 Naṣāʾiḥ-i shārukhī (“Advice for Shāhrukh,” Jalāl al-Dīn al-Qāyinī) 270–271 al-Nāṣir Muḥammad b. Qalāwūn (Mamluk sultan, r. 1294, 1299–1309, 1309–1340) 255–256 naturalistic psychology 213 natural magic (siḥr ṭabīʿī) see soul-enabled magic natural philosophy 17, 27, 71n40, 72, 81, 226, 227, 619, 621, 623 natural sciences 3–4, 43, 45, 341, 354, 410n86 al-Nawbakhtī, al-Ḥasan b. Mūsā (d. between 912 and 922) 139, 141 Nawbakht (Persian astrologer, fl. 8th c.) 141 Nazarköy (“village of eye beads,” Turkey) 598–599 naẓar (term) 639 Naẓm al-sulūk fī musāmarat al-mulūk (“Regulation of Conduct: On the Edification of Kings,” al-Bisṭamī) 28, 232–233, 262–263 contents and style 233–234

683 on divine names 244–245 introduction 234–238 on lettrism and ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib 249–252 on lettrism in al-Bisṭāmī’s lifetime 252– 260, 262 on lettrism and the prophets 238–245 on lettrism and the ummat al-ḥukamāʾ (sages, philosophers) 245–249 on nature and identity of mujaddidūn 253–260 sources of inspiration 231–232, 234, 237, 248, 253 Near East 65, 539 lion imagery in 464 necromancy 53, 189 neo-Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ see New Brethren of Purity neo-Ottomanism 573, 594–595 Neopythagorean cosmology 408, 410n87, 411 Neopythagoreanism see also Brethren of Purity; New Brethren of Purity awfāq (magic squares) and 62, 79, 140 Islamic (occultist) 395n39, 401, 409n84, 413 lettrism and 4, 29, 384, 395, 399, 410n87 naturalized lettrist 410n87 renaissance of 407n74, 408n79, 413 Neopythagorean(-occultist) historiography 400–408, 410, 412 see also Kemālpaşazāde, Aḥmed Nepal 488 nērang see nīranjāt Nestorianism 631 Netherlands, occupation of Indonesia 446– 447, 486 Netton, Ian, Introduction to the Thought of the Brethren of Purity 162 New Age practices 7 New Brethren of Purity 197, 198, 256, 395– 399, 397n44, 400, 406 see also [al-]Akhlāṭī, Sayyid Ḥusayn; [al]Bisṭāmī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān; Ibn Turka; Yazdī, Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Newton, Isaac (d. 1727) 411 Nichomachus of Gerasa 352n105 Arithmetical Introduction 62, 138, 140 Niʿmatallāhiyya Sufi order 287 Nimrod 218, 283n74

684 Nine Directions of space (Chinese philosophy) 64 “nine-palace diagram” ( jiugong tu, 3 × 3 magic square) 64 nīranj/nīranjāt (incantation/ritual formula/magical procedures) 27, 50–52, 54, 170, 188, 620, 621 see also fumigation/suffumigation aim of (science of) 44, 52, 632 body vs. spirit in 44, 45, 52, 54 categorization of 628–630 figurines 51 for making rulers favorable 51–52 mandal and 630, 632 procedures being 51–52 term/definition 43, 52, 628–630 in Zoroastrianism (nērang) 628–630 Nishapur 268, 281 Njoto, Hélène 494 Noah 222 as lettrist 240–241 millennium and planet of 235, 236 reference on talismans/amulets to 540 Noble, Michael 27 “noble seal” see sacred seals noetics, noetic connection between human and spiritual beings 212–213, 223–224, 225, 226, 227 North Africa 15, 54, 539 North America 8 al-Nubuwwāt (“Prophecy,” Ibn Taymiyya) 195 Nujūm al-ʿulūm (“The Stars of the Sciences,” Persian encyclopedia) 634–637, 634n77, 636n81, 637ill. Nukhbat al-fikr fī muṣṭalaḥ ahl al-athar (“Selection of Thoughts Concerning the Traditionists’ Terminology,” Ibn Ḥajar alʿAsqalānī) 116 numbers see also awfāq (magic squares) amicable 109, 109n133, 351 combination of number and form/figure 87–89 harmonious relationships 91–94 harmonious 109, 109n134, 139 “Indian letters” 346–350 properties of 348–350

index numerology 268, 351 nūn (letter) 259 observation 608–609 action vs. 608 “the occult,” definition 610 occultism 2, 7, 394, 396, 401, 410 “occultist” (adjective) 2, 60, 144, 189, 193, 197, 231, 256, 271–272, 276, 278, 281, 286–292, 296, 298, 307, 381, 384, 385 395–396, 400, 402, 406, 409–412, 425, 621, 623, 639 occult knowledge 220–221 occult learning see occult sciences occult objects exoticization and vilification of 22 functioning of 22–23, 24 occult properties (khawāṣṣ) 29, 59, 78, 241, 292, 318, 320, 321, 329, 341, 427, 431, 591, 617 of awfāq (magic squares) 80, 82, 84, 86, 87, 88–89, 88n81, 95, 103, 105, 114, 120, 143 occult sciences 408 ambiguity and uncertainty in prominence and acceptance 2, 5, 25, 28, 624–627 beneficiaries of 292 classification/categorization of 3–4, 26, 26n80, 28, 31, 53, 273, 273n27, 407n73– 74, 408n79, 410n86, 608–610, 615 semantics 609–619 colonialist outlook on 31, 382, 394, 609 definition/term 2, 273 history/origins 273n27, 628, 638 interpolations of works on 297–298, 381, 383–385 manuals on, see also Asrār-i qāsimī material dimensions 19–20, 21, 23, 28, 29 meaning in Islamicate context 3–7 social dimensions 25 suppression/marginalization/denunciation of 5–6, 11, 15, 21, 196, 197 theory vs. practice in 31, 607–608 visual dimensions 19–20 Occult Sciences in Pre-Modern Islamic Cultures, The (El-Bizri and Orthmann) 17 occult-scientific imperialism 8, 380, 381, 394, 396

index occult soteriology 207, 208, 209 see also salvation Oe Laba (settlement, Rote) 507 Ohrmazd (Supreme Lord, Zoroastrianism) 629 On the rays/The Book of Magical Theory (alKindī) 54 orientalism/orientalists 11, 14, 16, 261, 322, 382, 625–627, 639 Orthmann, Eva 18 The Occult Sciences in Pre-Modern Islamic Cultures 17 Osman, Hafez (d. 1698) 541 Osman, Mohd. Taib 477 Otlukbeli, Battle of (1473) 405, 409 Otto, Bernd-Christian 18, 19 Ottoman culture arabicization and mediterraneanization of 393–394 revival of 573, 594–595, 602 Ottoman Empire/Ottomans 260, 262, 396, 468 conquest of Egypt/Cairo 29, 381, 383, 385, 386–393, 389n26, 394, 398, 399, 407, 412 imperialism/imperial ideology 29, 381, 401, 407, 410, 412 lettrist imperialism 397, 398, 405, 407, 408, 412 occult scholarship at court 381, 383– 385, 404 Persian historiography of 400, 404– 406 relations with Southeast Asia 447, 470– 472 Safavids vs. 381, 444, 445 talismans from 471, 532ill. Turkish historiography of 406 Ottoman scholarship 381, 383–385, 404, 410n86 pagan cultures see also Sabians learned 207, 209 Pajajaran (Hindu kingdom, 1482–1579) 480, 485 Pakistan 468, 490 Pañcatantra (“Five Topics/Books,” India) 474

685 Papus (Gérard Encausse) 2 papyri, Greek 461–462, 462n40 paranormal causation 621 Parikh, Rachel 23, 29 Patani region (Malay peninsula, now Thailand) 472n80, 496–497 calligrams in 468, 471, 472–473, 478 Lion of ʿAlī calligrams from 497, 500, 501ill., 502, 505, 506ill. patch boxes, Solomonic/talismanic motifs on 438, 439 Pazarlama, Semazen 593 pearls, in talismanic weaponry 424–425, 424ill. pedestal/divine footstool, day of the 236– 237 People of the Cave see Aṣḥāb al-Kahf Pepela (settlement, Rote) 507 performative images, talismanic vs. 461– 463 perfume, awfāq (magic squares) to determine proportions of ingredients 68 Peripatetic philosophy 45, 394n35, 397–398 see also Aristotelianism Perk, Halûk 534n15 Persianate scholarship 410, 410n86 Persian culture, influence on Southeast Asian societies 469–470 Persian language 454 translation of occult-scientific works into 279 see also Asrār-i qāsimī Persian Neopythagorean-occultist historiography 400 Persian occult knowledge 8 Persians 238, 246, 357, 359 personal transformation, occult sciences for 28 Peta Naṣr (“Drawing of Naṣr”) 499–500 Peter the Great (Tsar of Russia, r. 1682–1725) 382 Pharaoh 244 divine pretentions and tyranny of 216, 217–218, 217n30, 219 Philippines 441, 446 talismanic motifs in 441 philosophers see also sages; scholars/scholarship lettrism and 242, 245–249

686 (soul-enabled) magic of 178–180, 182, 185–186, 195 Philosophie des alchimistes et l’ alchimie des philosophes, La (Marquet) 163 Philosophie des Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʿ, La (Marquet) 163, 179–180 philosophy 102–103 classification of philosophical sciences 3–4 prophecy and 178, 621 physical action 44 physicians, magic and 185, 186 physiognomomy ( firāsa) 332 Picatrix see Ghāyat al-ḥakīm picture-poems (mudabbajāt) 458 Pielow, Dorothee 18 Die Geheimnisse der oberen und der unteren Welt 17–19 piety superstition vs. 527–528, 574–575, 584– 585, 594 see also eye beads pilgrimage 305, 392, 560, 574 Pingree, David 12, 16, 188, 351 pious texts combination with magic formulas 528 see also stamped talismans Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford) 21 planetary ascent 210, 223–224 planetary idols 195, 216–217, 222–223, 227 see also Sabians planetary spheres, days of 236–237 planets see also Sabians association of awfāq (magic squares) with 86, 92, 96, 98n108, 99, 102, 108, 108n130 astral rituals to imitate 213–214 influence on microcosm 173 power of the 274 role in alchemy 47–48 ruling planets for earth’s seven millennia 232, 235–236 worship of (Sabians) 195, 216–217, 219, 222–223, 227 Plato 109, 248, 249, 274, 354, 628 see also pseudo-Plato Timaeus 53 “Platonic Orientalism” 247–248, 249, 262 Platonism 195

index Plessner, Martin 189–190 Plotinus, Enneads 176–177 pneuma 186 see also soul, human pneumatic magic see illusory magic political predictions in Qurʾan 403 see also Qurʾan verses, 30 (al-Rūm) political theory occult-scientific modes of sovereignty 395–396 post vs. pre-Mongol 394 politics occult sciences and 380, 381 political implications of magic 180–184 popular/vernacular forms of devotion 574, 575, 585, 597 Porter, Venetia 23, 538, 554n85 post-Enlightenment see Enlightenment/postEnlightenment mindset potions 91, 92, 93, 185, 275, 276, 292 pottery, for talismans 74, 75, 79, 90 power see also blessing power; healing/healing power; rulers influence of magic on exercising 180 talismans for achieving and maintaining 48–49, 255, 295, 299, 305n175, 307 Power and Piety (exhibition, 2016–2017, Metropolitan Museum of Art) 9, 420 Power and Protection (exhibition, 2016–2017, Ashmolean Museum) 9–10, 23n76, 455– 456 practical knowledge, theoretical knowledge vs. 31, 607–608 prayer manuals 562–563 prayers on blessing cards/magnets 575, 580 protective prayers see duʿāʾ talismans and 48, 49, 50 precious stones see stones, precious and semi-precious predictions 259–260 lettrism and 259–260 political 403 see also Qurʾan verses, 30 (al-Rūm) Preserved Tablet 260 prestidigitation (shuʿbada) 28, 189, 275 primitivism, non-European 22, 609

index prisoners awfāq (magic squares) for release of 100ill., 101, 101ill. talismans for protection from imprisonment 300–301 prohibited magic 188–189 see also illicit magic propaedeutic sciences/knowledge 171, 175, 344–345 prophecy see also licit magic magic vs. 195 philosophy and 178, 621 prophetic(-astrological) cycles 232, 234, 235, 236, 249–250, 252, 261, 262 al-Rūm prophecy (Q 30) 386, 403, 405, 405–406n70 prophethood denial of 209, 210, 215 imaginational 213, 225, 227 “seal of prophethood” 458 prophetic(-astrological) cycles 232, 234, 235, 236, 249–250, 252, 261, 262 prophetic revelation (waḥy) see revelation prophetic traditions see hadith prophets see also Abrahamic prophets; Muḥammed (the Prophet) encounters with prophets of the past 245 inheritance of sanctity from 244–245 (intellectual) magic of 178–180, 185, 186 see also licit magic lettrism and the 238–245 major prophets for earth’s seven millennia 232, 235–236 miracles of 4, 163, 178, 185, 186, 195, 225, 241, 284n79, 527, 620, 621, 623, 627 monopoly of prophecy/knowledge of unseen world 210, 215 names of 232, 234, 235, 243–245, 256, 259, 386, 392 overviews of 238 Sabian divines’ vs. prophets’ procedure for revelation 210, 213, 215 sages/philosophers/scholars vs. 178– 180, 182, 186, 195 prophylactic devices see talismans

687 protective commodities/objects see talismans protective prayers see duʿāʾ Psalms, in awfāq literature 75, 78, 80, 101 pseudo-Aristotle Hermetica 3, 108, 182, 187–188, 191, 193, 194, 197 Kitāb al-Isṭimākhīs 183, 331 Kitāb al-Ustūṭās/Ashnūṭās 182–183, 187–188, 193, 327, 331, 335, 353 Kitāb al-Hādīṭūsh 331 Kitāb al-Malāṭīs 331 Kitāb al-Siyāsa fī tadbīr al-riyāsa (“The Book of Governance on Managing Leadership”) 183 Theology of Aristotle 177, 178, 180 pseudo-Avicenna, De anima in arte alchemica 48 pseudo-Plato, Kitāb al-Nawāmīs (“The book of laws”) 280, 335, 352–353, 354 pseudo-Rāzī, De aluminibus et salibus 46– 47 Ptolemy 628 punishment, talismans for protection from 303–304 purification of Islam 561, 594, 625–627 Pythagoras 109n133, 194, 248, 410n87 Pythagoreanism 195 see also Neopythagoreanism Qābūs b. Wushmgīr (Ziyārid ruler, r. 978– 1012) 135 Qādiriyya Sufi order 539 qāf (letter) 259 Qajar period (1789–1925), calligrams in 456, 468 Qalfaṭīr alphabet (Filaqṭīr) 354 Qānṣūh al-Gawrī (Sultan of Egypt, r. 1501– 1516) 390–393, 393n33 Qarmatian revolts 254 Qaṣidat al-burda (“The Mantle Ode,” al-Būṣīrī) 561 Qāsim, Amīr Sayyid (commissioner of Asrār-i qāsimī), identity of 274, 280–291 Qāsim b. Ḥasan (d. 680) 290 Qāsim-i Anvār (Jalāl al-Dīn ʿAlī b. Naṣīr, d. 1433) 267, 281, 283n74–75, 283– 284n75–77, 285, 286–291, 289n104, 289–290n106

688 Divān 288 qāsimī (Sufi garment with torn collar) 290– 291 Qaṭf al-azhār fī khaṣāʾiṣ al-maʿādin wa-laḥjār [...] (“The Picking of Flowers on the Properties of Minerals and Stones [...],” al-Maghribī) 333–334 al-Qawī (name of God) 244 al-Qāyinī, Jalāl al-Dīn (d. 1434–1435) 270, 270n15, 271 Naṣāʾiḥ-i shārukhī (advice to Shāhrukh) 270–271 al-Qāyinī, Nūr al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Muḥammad 271 al-Qayyūm (name of God) 244 Qāzān Khān (Khan of the Chagatai Khanate, r. 1343–1346) 255 Qazvin 299 al-Qazwīnī, Abū Yaḥyā Zakariyyāʾ b. Muḥammad (d. 1283) 110 Kitāb ʿAjāʾib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharāʾib al-mawjūdāt (“The Wonders of All Creation and the Rarities of All Existence”) 619–624 Qiṭmīr (dog of Aṣḥāb al-Kahf/Seven Sleepers) 438, 462, 462n38, 548 Qizilbāsh (Shiʿi militant groups) 404 Quantum Mysticism 7 Qubilai Qaghan (Khan of the Mongol Empire, r. 1260–1294) 66 Queen ʿAyna (demon) 636, 636n82, 637ill. Queen of Sheba 437 Qūnavī, Ṣadr al-Dīn (d. 1274) 398 Qurʾan Lion of ʿAlī calligrams in 490, 491ill., 494 predictions in 259 see also Qurʾan verses, 30 (al-Rūm) quranic prognostication, lettrist analysis and 386–393 Qurʾan verses 259 1 (al-Fātiḥa, “The Opening”), 1:102 184 2 (al-Baqara, “The Cow”) 431, 539 2:20 539–540 2:30 180–181 2:102 336, 340 2:255 (Throne Verse) 431, 435n63, 580, 580n14, 582, 599, 600ill.

index 3 (Āl ʿImrān, “The House of Imran”), 3:119 277 5 (al-Māʾida, “The Table”), 5:21 387 6 (al-Anʿām, “Cattle”) 562n107 6:38 391 6:103 484 7 (al-Aʿrāf, “The Battlements”) 7:127 387 7:137 387 7:180 538 11 (Hūd), 11:88 548 12 (Yūsuf, “Joseph”) 12:55 387 12:56 387 12:80 388 13 (al-Raʿd, “Thunder”), 13:61 548 17 (al-Isrāʾ, “The Night Journey”), 17:82 548, 581 18 (al-Kahf, “The Cave”) 438–439, 490 18:1–8 490 18:9–26 438–439, 553n81 20 (Ṭāʾ Ḥāʾ), 20:105–107 397n44 21 (al-Anbiyāʾ, “The Prophets”), 21:105 29, 383, 386, 391–392 24 (al-Nūr, “The Light”), 24:44 277 27 (al-Naml, “The Ant”) 435, 437 27:18–19 434n54, 437n64 27:29–31 437n65 28 (al-Qaṣaṣ, “The Story”) 28:5 387 28:6 387 28:19 388 30 (al-Rūm, “The Greeks”) 386, 403, 405, 405–406n70, 408, 409 30:1–4 406n70 30:1–5 403 33 (al-Aḥzāb, “The Confederates”), 33:38 393 36 (Yāʾ Sīn) 488 40 (Ghāfir, “The Forgiver”), 40:36–37 217 41 (Fuṣṣilat, “Distinguished”), 41:53 260 48 (al-Fatḥ, “Victory”) 435 48:1 551, 555 48:3 405n70 48:7–11 435n61 55 (al-Raḥmān, “The All-merciful”) 424 55:21–22 424n16

index 61 (al-Ṣaff, “The Ranks”) 431, 432, 435, 457, 496 61:13 30, 431n41, 435n62, 457, 476, 478, 484, 495–512, 555 68 (al-Qalam, “The Pen”) 536 68:51 536, 580, 582, 596 79 (al-Nāziʿāt, “The Pluckers”), 79:24 217n30 83 (al-Muṭaffifīn, “The Stinters”), 83:26 162 85 (al-Burūj, “The Constellations”) 543 85:10 543 109 (al-Kāfirūn, “The Unbelievers”) 430–431, 432 109:1–3 431n36 110 (al-Naṣr, “Help” “The Conquest”) 431, 432 110:1–3 431n40 112 (al-Ikhlāṣ, “Sincerity”) 430, 432, 434, 484 112:1–4 430n35 113 (al-Falaq, “Daybreak”) 431, 432, 434 113:1–5 431n41 114 (al-Nās, “Mankind”) 431, 432, 434 114:3–6 431n39 esoteric exegesis of 175–176, 307 on evil eye 536, 580, 582, 596 healing power and 496, 548, 575, 581 on imperialism 386 lettrist analysis of prophecies in 386 references on talismans/amulets to on blessing cards/magnets 575, 580– 582, 581ill. in calligrams 495–512, 513 on eye beads 599–600, 600ill. in mandal 636 on stamped talismans 536, 538, 539– 540, 543, 545, 548, 551, 552ill., 553, 554 talismanic weaponry 430–432, 435– 437, 496 Qurra family 131, 132 fig. al-Qurṭubī, Maslama b. Qāsim (d. 964) 16, 191, 196, 634n76 see also Ghāyat al-ḥakīm; Rutbat al-ḥakīm Qūshjī, ʿAlī (d. 1474) 110, 409, 410n84, 411 al-Raḥīm (name of God) 244 rainmaking ceremonies, mandal for 631

689 Ramadan festivities 579–580, 590 Raphael/Isrāfīl (archangel) 499, 508 Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (“Epistles of the Brethren of Purity”) 3, 27, 131, 334, 395n39 see also Epistle on Magic authorship 46, 190, 191–192, 196 on awfāq (magic squares) 86–87, 86–94, 94, 101, 105, 349–350 dating of 334 Epistle on Geometry 87–94, 94, 95, 136 Epistle on Music 91, 92, 94, 350 Epistle on Talismans and Incantations 90, 92 on medicine 53 on monotheism 619 on prophetical cycles 235–236 as source of inspiration for al-Bisṭāmī’s Naẓm 231–232, 234, 237, 238, 253 Rastika (Indonesian artist, d. 2014) 495, 495n172 rationalization of religion 21–22 Islam 5–7, 626 Rawḍat al-shuhadāʾ (“The Garden of the Martyrs,” al-Kāshifī) 268–272, 307 Raydāniyya, Battle of 388–389 al-Rāzī, Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʾ (Rhazes, d. 925 or 932) 280, 280n61, 618 Maqālāt-i sīzdahgāna (“The Thirteen Chapters”) 280 al-Rāzī, Fakhr al-Din (d. 1210) 236n17, 253, 407n74, 615 see also al-Sirr al-maktūm on classification of gharīb 621–622 Jāmiʿ al-ʿulūm 632 al-Munāẓarāt 209 on science of incantations 632 reason enchantment of see sīmiyāʾ magic operating by see intellectual magic superstition vs. 5, 11, 22 recipes 320, 323, 632, 635 alchemical 46–47 for fumigations 332, 353 for natural amulets 188 Record of Rites by Dai the Elder (Dai De) 64 reform, Islamic 5–7, 560–561, 625–627 regalia, Luwuq 509–510 Regourd, Annick (Anne) 13

690 Rejang divinatory calendar 474 relics, Prophet’s 541n37 on blessing cards/magnets/amulets 572, 585, 588, 589ill. intercessory power of 588, 594 religion 5–7, 21–22, 575, 578, 591, 593, 596, 609, 613, 626, 627 see also devotion religiosity see piety religious innovation see also mujaddidūn unwarranted 236, 253 religious life, vernacular forms of 574, 575, 585, 597 religious renewal see also mujaddidūn epicycles of 232, 234, 236, 249–250, 261 religious texts combination with magical formulas 528 see also stamped talismans Renaissance of Islam, awfāq (magic squares) in 131, 143 Latinate 29, 302n161, 384, 394 of Neopythagoreanism 407n74, 408n79, 413 occult 610 Renaudot, Eusèbe 324 renewal (tajdīd) of Islam see Islamic reform; religious renewal renewers of religion see mujaddidūn research see scholars/scholarship restaurants (Turkey), blessing cards in 580–584, 581ill. revelation by Abrahamic prophets 213, 215, 246 history as 261 Sabian divines’ vs. prophets’ procedure for 210, 213, 215 Rhazes see [al-]Rāzī, Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʾ Riḍā, Rashīd 5 Rifāʿī, Sayyid Aḥmad (d. 1181) 537ill., 539, 552 references to Rifāʿī and tomb on stamped talismans 535ill., 545, 549ill., 551, 552–553, 552ill., 557–560, 558 Rifāʿiyya order 539, 545, 552 on stamped talismans 549ill., 551, 552ill.

index Rightly Guided Caliphs 439, 463 references on talismans/amulets to 441–442, 442ill., 445, 476–477, 488, 499, 502, 505, 538 rīḥānī alphabet 354 Riḥla (“Travelogue,” al-ʿAyyāshī) 389–393 rīmiyā see conjuring, science of al-Risāla al-ʿaliyya (al-Kāshifī) 286 Risāla dar ʿilm-i aʿdād (treatise on numerology and magic squares, al-Kāshifī) 268 Risāla fī al-fiʿl wa al-infiʿāl (“On Action and Passion,” Ibn Sīnā) 44–45, 52 Risāla fī l-Ṭāʿūn (plague treatise, Kemālpaşazāde) 409, 409n81 Risālat al-Hū (al-Kūmī) 243 Risāla-yi kanz al-tuḥaf dar mūsīqā (“Treatise of the Treasure of Gifts Concerning Music”) 70n38 Risālat Taḍʿīf al-madhbaḥ (“On the Doubling of the Altar,” Mollā Lüṭfī) 110, 409n84 Risāla-yikhavāṣṣal-ḥurūf (“Treatise on the Properties of Letters,” Baʿalbakī) 280 Risāla-yi ḥurūf (Ibn Turka) 284n82 Ritter, Helmut 189–190 rituals see also nīranjāt astral 208–209, 213–214, 215, 216, 223– 224 planetary ascent ritual 210, 224 preparatory diets 136, 208, 212, 220, 223 violating moral and social taboos 224 Roberts, Alexandra M. 136 Roger Bacon 27 Opus maius 45 Rome 259 “Roots of Combinatorics, The” (Biggs) 63 Rosenfeld, Boris A. 107–108 roses, on blessing cards/magnets 578 Rote/Roti (Lesser Sunda Islands, Indonesia) 468 talismanic shirt from 506–508 Royal Society (London) 21 Rudolf II (Holy Roman Emperor, r. 1576–1612) 382 rūḥāniyya/rūḥāniyyāt see spirits/spiritual powers rulers see also lettrist imperialism as mujaddid 253–260, 404

index nīranj for making rulers favorable 51–52 occult-philosopher rulers 381–382 see also Selim I talismans and awfāq (magic squares) of/for 48–49, 255, 295, 299, 305n175, 307 Rum 288n97 Ruqiyā/Rūqiyāʾīl (name/term) 328 Rutbat al-ḥakīm (“The Rank of the Sage,” alQurṭubī) 45, 194, 196, 199 authorship 191, 196 influence of and parallels with Epistle on Magic (Brethren of Purity) 190–192 on sīmiyāʾ and alchemy 337–339 Saadetüʾd-Dareyn 594 sabers see swords Sabians, Sabeans (astrolatrous religious group) 136, 207–227, 238, 240, 245, 246, 273n27 on ascent 210–211 Avicennism and 210 belief and practice 210–214 angelo-astrolatrous belief 210 denial of prophethood 209, 210, 215 naturalistic psychology 210, 213 delusion of divinity 210, 216–218 Ḥanīfs vs. 216–218, 226 Harranian-Sabian community (Baghdad) 131–134, 132 fig., 140, 141, 141n209, 142 magic and rituals of 188, 195 astral/planetary ascent rituals 208– 209, 210, 213–214, 215, 216, 223– 225 noetic connection between human and spiritual beings 212–213, 223–224, 225, 227 on perfection and angelic nature of soul 214, 215, 221, 222 al-Rāzī on 220–227 al-Shahrastānī on 209–218, 226, 227 worship of planets/planetary idols 195, 216–217, 219, 222–223, 227 Sabzavar (town, Bayhaq) 268 sacred images, interaction with 556–557 Sacred Mosque (Mecca) see Masjid al-Ḥarām sacred seals

691 on blessing cards 572, 577ill., 578, 585– 587, 586ill., 588 “seal of the eye upon God” 563 “seal of the Great Name of God” 563 “seal of Prophecy”/“noble seal” 458, 563, 572, 577ill., 578, 585–587, 586ill., 588, 586n26 “seal/ring of Solomon” 435, 438, 441, 446, 448, 483, 486, 550 on stamped talismans 50, 550 Saʿd Allāh b. Ṣadr al-Dīn 111n138 Saʿd b. Waqqāṣ (Companion of the Prophet, d. 674) 540 Safari, Achmad Opan 485 Safavid Empire/Safavids (1501–1736) 30, 267, 287, 393, 396, 404 see also Asrār-i qāsimī calligrams in 456, 466 lettrist imperialism 406n71 occult sciences in 292 see also Tuḥfa-yi khānī Ottomans vs. 381, 444, 445 Persian historiographies 406n71 Ṣafaviyya Sufi order 286 Ṣafī al-Dīn, Shaykh (d. 1334) 286 sages see also philosophers; scholars; ummat al-ḥukamāʾ lettrism and 242, 245–249 prophetic status of ancient 249 prophets vs. 178–180, 182, 195 (soul-enabled) magic of 178–180, 182, 185–186, 195 Said, Edward 627 Saʿīd b. Yazīd (Companion of the Prophet) 540 Saif, Liana 1, 23, 27, 624–625 Saint Germain des Prés (monastry and library) 324 saints see also Sufi saints/sainthood encounters with saints from the past 245 in epicycles of religious and civilizational renewal 232, 234, 236, 249–250 inheritance of sanctity from prophets 244–245 magicians vs. 527–528 wonders 620

692 al-Sakkākī, Sirāj al-Dīn Abū Yaʿqūb (d. 1229) 634–635, 634n78 al-Shāmil fī l-baḥr al-kāmil (“The Comprehensive Compendium on the Entire Ocean") 635 see also al-Ṭabasī Salafism 5, 594 Ṣāliḥ (Prophet) 243–244 Salleh, Nik Mohamed Nik Mohd. 497, 498ill. salvation see also soteriology magic as 174–178, 184 Samarqand, Samarkand 110, 411, 631 Samarkand Observatory 411 Samarra 72 Sām Mīrzā (Safavid prince, d. 1566) 291n111 al-Samnūdī, Shaykh Ibrāhīm (d. 1897), Kitāb Saʿādat al-dārayn […] (“The Bliss of the two Abodes […]”) 594 Ṣamṣām al-Dawla (Buyid amir, r. 983–987) 124tab., 135 sanctity see also saints; Sufi saints/sainthood inheritance of 244–245 of writing 476 sanctuaries, on stamped talismans 540, 555–556, 556ill., 557ill. sandalprints (of the Prophet), on talismanic objects 582, 585, 588, 589ill., 590–594, 592ill. al-Ṣanhājī, Azammūr ʿAbd al-Raḥmāb b. Saʿīd (d. 1392), Kanz al-asrār wa-lawāqiḥ alafkār (“The Treasure of Secrets and Fertile Ideas”) 341 Sanjar (Great Seljuk sultan, r. 1118–1157) 60, 113tab., 125tab., 127, 129 Sanskrit literature/writings 351 on awfāq (magic squares) 61, 68, 69, 72, 75 on mandal making 631 Sanskrit terms 474, 628, 629, 630, 636 Sarandīb (Sri Lanka) 175 Sarton, George, Introduction to the History of Science 62, 62n9 Ṣaṣah al-Hindī 331, 331n45 Satan/Iblīs 181, 636, 636n82 Saturn/Kaywān 223n47 alchemy and 47

index assignment to Adam 235 influence on magical squares 96, 98, 108n130 Savage-Smith, Emilie 19n64, 23, 528n4 Magic and Divination in Early Islam 14– 15, 14n43 Savory, Roger 287 Sayf Khān (Mughal officer) 430n34 sayyids (descendants of the Prophet) 270, 271, 272, 273, 281–282, 289 see also Qāsim-i Anvār scholars/scholarship 7–19 see also philosophers; sages Arabo-Persian 381, 401, 403, 410, 410n86 Babylonian 195, 273n27, 340, 635n79 change in scholarship 13, 14, 26 international mobility of scholaroccultists 396 modern scholarship on magic and lettrism 231, 232, 609, 631, 640 Muslim 609–610, 628 Ottoman 381, 383–385, 404, 410n86 (soul-enabled) magic of scholars 178– 180, 182, 185–186, 187, 195 Western/European 7–8, 14, 61, 328, 410, 609–610, 611, 625 science of cosmic cycles, lettrism and 231n4 science of heavenly bodies, lettrism and 231n4 science of letters see lettrism science of properties 345 sciences, classification of see classification of (occult) sciences scientific authority, through use of jargon 613 scorpions, on stamped talismans 549–550 seafaring, awfāq (magic squares) for 100ill., 101, 101ill. seal-makers (guild) 563, 563n115–116 seals (as talismanic motifs/symbols) see sacred seals seals (tool) see also stamped talismans for application of stamps on talismans 532–533, 532ill., 533ill., 534–536, 535ill., 538 secret of nature see sīmiyāʾ secret of wisdom see sīmiyāʾ

index Sefer ha-razim (“Book of Secrets”) 240 self-transformation 174, 209 fable of ailing king and vizier (Epistle on Magic, Brethren of Purity) 174–176, 184 Selīm I (“the Grim,” Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, r. 1512–1520), see also Kemālpaşade, Aḥmed; lettrist imperialism Selīm I (“the Grim”, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, r. 1512–1520) 382n5, 404, 408, 411, 425 astrology and lettrism at court of 29, 380–381, 385, 412, 413 conquest of Cairo 381, 383, 386–393, 389n26, 394, 398, 399, 400, 407, 412 conquest of Damascus/Syria 385, 390– 391, 394, 398, 400, 407 defeat of Safavids at Chaldiran 381, 385, 394, 408 reliance on occult scientists for strategic purposes 381–382, 385, 391 Selimiye mosque (Edirne) 445 Seljuk Empire, awfāq literature from 60, 113tab., 124–125tab., 126–128, 131, 143 semantics, categorization and conceptualization of (occult) learning and 609–624 semi-precious stones see stones, precious and semi-precious Şen, Ahmet Tunç 384 serpents, on stamped talismans 558, 559 Sesiano, Jacques 60, 63, 109, 114, 125, 130, 131 Magic Squares in the Tenth Century 58– 59, 111–113tab. “Une Compilation Arabe” 113tab., 130 Seth/Shīth identification with Agathodaimon 240, 245 identification with Zoroaster 246 as lettrist/relation with letters 240, 241 Sifr Shīth 240 seven planets see also planets association of awfāq (magic squares) with 86, 92, 96, 99, 102, 108, 108n130 in Islamicate literature 86 operation of the 299–300 spiritual essence (rūḥāniyya) and enslavement (istikhdāmi-hā) of 345, 361 Seven Sleepers of Ephesus see Aṣḥāb al-Kahf

693 Seyāḥat-nāme (“Book of Travels”, Evliyā Ç elebi) 43 Sezgin, Fuat, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums 11–12 Shaanxi History Museum (Xi’an) 66n25 shadow puppets (wayang kulit) 459n22, 461, 475–476, 503 al-Shāfiʿī (jurist, d. 820) 236n17, 253 shahāda (“There is no god but God. Muḥammad is the messenger of God”) 30 references on talismans/amulets to on blessing cards 587 in Lion of ʿAlī calligrams 476, 478, 479–495, 496, 505, 507, 511 on stamped talismans 548, 552, 553– 554 special powers of 479, 487 Shāh Jahān (Mughal emperor, r. 1628–1658) 60, 118, 119, 430 Shāh Maḥmūd Nishāpūrī album (c. 1560) 467 al-Shahrastānī, Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbd alKarīm (d. 1153) 27, 208, 209–220 see also Kitāb al-Milal wa-l-niḥal Shāhrukh b. Temür/Tīmūr (Timurid ruler, r. 1405–1447) 270, 278, 286, 287, 401n52, 403 shāh (title) 282 al-Shajara al-nuʿmāniyya fī l-dawla alʿUthmāniyya (“The Crimson Tree: On Ottoman Glory,” cryptic jafrī text) 398, 399 Shāmil-i akbar (“The Great Comprehensive Book”) 280 al-Shāmil fī̄ l-baḥr al-kāmil (“The Comprehensive Compendium on the Entire Ocean,” al-Sakkākī/al-Ṭabasī) 623, 632, 634–635 Shams al-āfāq fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-awfāq (“The Sun of Horizons on the Science of Letters and Magic Squares,” al-Bisṭāmī) 197–198, 233, 240, 248, 252, 256, 258, 262, 331 Shams al-maʿārif al-kubrā see Shams almaʿārif wa-laṭāʾif al-ʿawārif Shams al-maʿārif wa-laṭāʾif al-ʿawārif (“The Sun of Knowledge and the Secrets of Gnosis,” [pseudo-]al-Būnī) 290n107, 328

694 authorship 19n63, 102, 193n128, 297 lunar mansion list 193, 198 Shani, Raya 456 Sharaf al-Dawla (Buyid amir, r. 983–988/9) 111tab., 124tab. Shaʿrānī, Āyatallāh Ḥājj Shaykh Abū l-Ḥasan 269–270 Sharāsīm/Ishrāsīm al-Hindiyya 317 see also Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya identity and status 328–330, 333, 334, 338, 354 importance in medieval Arabic texts/ occult sciences 330–334 name 327–328 sharīʿa 102, 240, 561 Shaṭṭāriyya Sufi order 490 Shawq al-mustahām fī maʿrifat rumūz alaqlām (“The Desire of the Distraught: The Knowledge of the Symbols of the Alphabets,” Ibn Waḥshiyya) 353–354 Sheba, Queen of 437 Shïbani Khan (Uzbek leader, r. 1500–1512) 404 Shick, İrvin Cemil 458 Shiʿi imagery, in Sunni talismanic objects 444–445, 447, 448 Shiʿi Imams 5, 444 see also Imams Shiʿism/Shiʿis 269–270 mitigation of boundaries between other denominations 182n82 position of ʿAlī among 463 Shiʿi-Sunni divide see Sunni-Shiʿi divide Shīrāzī, Maḥmūd Dihdār (fl. 1576) 297 Shīrāzī, Mīr Ghiyāth al-Dīn Manṣūr alDashtakī (d. 1542) 296–297 Shīrāzī, Mīrzā Muḥammad 207n2 shirts, talismanic Dhū l-Fiqār on 444 Lion of ʿAlī calligrams on 506–508 shops of devotional goods (Turkey) 572, 591 shrines see also Eyüp tomb complex (Turkey) on stamped talismans 540, 555–560, 556ill., 557ill. Shumūs al-anwār (“The Suns of Light,” Ibn al-Ḥajj al-Tilimsānī) 278, 329 Shushtarī, Qāḍī Nūrallāh (d. 1610–1611), Majālis al-muʾminīn 298

index Sifr Ādam 240 siḥr see magic Siḥr al-ʿuyūn (“The Bewitchment of the Eyes,” al-Maghribī) 278, 282, 284–285 Siliwangi, Prabu (King of Pajajaran, West Java, r. 1482–1521) 485 silver 44, 47, 101–102, 127 Sima Ngali (“Tiger of ʿAlī”) calligram 476, 511–512 al-Sīmāwī, Abū l-Qāsim Aḥmad (al-ʿIrāqī) 279, 291, 294, 324 see also Asrār-i qāsimī ʿUyūn al-ḥaqāʾiq wa-īḍāḥ al-ṭarāʾiq (“The Sources of Truths and the Exposition of the Methods”)/Kitāb Ibn Ḥallāj 278, 282, 284–285, 291, 325, 326, 332, 344 sīmiyāʾ (classical occult science) 28, 29, 274–280, 293, 298, 305n173, 321, 322, 328–331, 325, 336–345, 354, 363 see also Asrār-i qāsimī; Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindiyya; lettrism condemnation of 276, 343–344 definitions/term 336–345, 354 “enchantment/bewitchment of reason” 29, 336, 337, 339 enhanced type of illusionism 275, 278 magic related to knowledge of Qurʾān 340–341 “science of imaginal entities” 274 “science of magical letters and squares” 343 “secret of nature” 336, 337, 338, 341 “secret of wisdom” 336, 337 identification of/association with lettrism 274–275, 275n34, 277–278, 340, 342–344 Sufis 343–344 talismanic art 343 a woman 336 operations and formulas 275 origins 279 parallels with alchemy (kīmiyāʾ) 337– 338 parallels with conjuring (rīmiyā) 276 practitioners of 276–277 as propaedeutic science 344–345 spiritual vs. terrestrial sīmiyāʾ 340

index talismans as means of action of 29, 338– 339 works on 278–279 Sinān (imperial architect, d. 1588) 445 Sind 351 singa barong/singhabarwang (elephant/lion/ eagle composite animal) 485 sīn (letter) 244 al-Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm fī ʿilm al-rūḥāniyya waṣināʿat al-tanjīm (“The Right Way in the Science of Spiritual [Forces] and the Art of Astrology,” al-Jawbarī) 330 Sirr al-asrār (“The Secret of Secrets,” dialog between Aristotle and Alexander the Great) 327 Sirr al-ḥikam wa-jawāmiʿ al-kilam (“The Secret of Judgments and the Compilation of the Sentences,” al-Būnī) 325 al-Sirr al-maktūm (“The Hidden Secret,” alRāzī) 27, 207–227, 274, 621–622 on creating talismanic idols 224 on illusions (wahm) 220, 225 on Indians/Indian religion 226–227 on noetic connection with spiritual beings 213, 223–224, 225 on occult knowledge 220–221 on planetary ascent ritual 210, 223– 224 on Sabians 220–227 sources of inspiration 207, 209 on talismanic magic 224–225 Siyāqī Niẓam (d. 1603), Futūḥāt-i humāyūn (“Imperial Conquests”) 406n71 Sloane, Sir Hans 22n73 Smaradahana (“Burning of Smara,” Old Javanese poem) 484–485 Smith, J. Kristen 462n40 Smith, Marian B. 19n64 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell 627 smoking of sacred objects see fumigation/suffumigation Socrates 50 Sogdania 631 Sogdian literature, on mandal construction 631 Solomon 184, 434–435 prophetic mastery over jinn 633 “seal/ring of” 435, 438, 441, 446, 448, 483, 486, 550

695 Solomonic motifs on talismanic weaponry 421, 434–439, 436ill., 448 Umm Ṣubyān and 542, 543n44 Sorcellerie au Maroc, La (Mauchamp) 16 sorcerer’s circle see mandal/maņḍala sorcery/sorcerers 196, 197 Quraʾnic denunciation of 184 soteriology, occult 207, 208, 209 soul-enabled magic (sīḥr nafsī) illusory magic vs. 187 intellectual magic vs. 179–180, 182, 185– 186, 195 in state administration 182–183 soul, human see also spirits/spiritual powers ascent of 177, 210–211 illnesses of the 185 intellectual potential of 215 perfection and angelic nature of 214, 215, 221, 222 science of emancipation of (al-tajrīd) 3 training for mediation with God 210 transformation of the 180 South Asia 454, 456 Southeast Asia influence of Persian culture on 469– 470 integration with rest of Islamicate world 513 relations with Ottoman Empire 447, 470–472 smoking of sacred objects in 478, 502 Sunnism 476–477 talismanic motifs 448, 472 see also Lion of ʿAlī calligrams on arms and armor 420 calligrams 454, 461, 473–478 Dhū l-Fiqār in 441, 446 souvenirs talismanic items as 572, 600–602 see also blessing cards; eye beads Spat, Claas 510 Speculum astronomiae 54n29 Spiritism 7 spirits/spiritual powers (rūḥāniyya/rūḥāniyyāt) 54–55 see also nīranjat/nīranj; planets in alchemy 47–48 astral vital agents 172–173

696 authority over/governance of/interaction with sublunary/terrestrial world 173–174, 211–212, 216–217, 221 celestial powers 223–224 conjuring/summoning/invocation of spirits 633–634 with mandal 631, 636–637 eschatological return 214 hierarchy of spiritual beings 211 imitation of/mimesis 213–214, 215 intercessory power 210, 211, 212–213, 227 noetic connection of humans with spirits 212–213, 223–224, 225, 227 operation of spirit on body 43, 53 operation of spirit in/on spirit (niranj) 43, 52, 54 references to archangels in talismans/amulets 499, 508, 548, 552 terrestrial spirits vs. celestial spirits 337 spiritual beings see spirits/spiritual powers spiritual discipline see asceticism spiritual medicine/magic as medicine 184– 186, 344 Sprat, Thomas, History of the Royal Society of London 21n70 stamped talisman (Khalili collection, London) 23, 30, 528–533, 529ill. analysis of contents 533–536, 560 impressions with calligrams 553– 555, 554ill. impressions combining letters and numbers 547–548, 547ill. impressions combining text and images 548–553, 549ill., 552ill. impressions with sanctuaries and shrines 540, 555–560, 556ill., 557ill. impressions with text only 536–547, 537ill. context of appearance 560–565 dating of 530, 530n8, 560 efficacy of 560 nature, producers, application and use of 545–547 production and media used 533–534 seal marks 534–536, 535ill. Sufi content in 564 stamped talismans 430, 432–434, 433ill., 528, 529ill., 530–533, 531ill.

index see also stamped talisman (Khalili collection) healing power of 553, 563 protective signs 548–550, 549ill., 551, 552ill. seals/stamps 532–533, 532ill., 533ill., 534–536, 535ill., 538 Stapleton, H.E. 62 stars, knowledge of the see astrology star worshippers 246 state administration, use of magic and divination in 182–183 statues, vivification of 53 Steingass, Francis Joseph 327 Stern, S.M. 191 stones, precious and semi-precious magical, healing and protective properties of 29, 333, 422, 423–424, 424ill., 448, 631 in talismanic weaponry 423, 424–427, 424ill., 426ill., 448 strange (gharīb) phenomena, classification of 620–623 sublunary world see also terrestrial world authority/governance of spiritual beings over 173, 211, 216–217, 221 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 382 Subtelny, Maria 28 suffumigation see fumigation/suffumigation Sufi saints/sainthood 25, 104, 289, 552, 553 depiction of saints 489–490 (invisible) hierarchy of 236, 236n17, 250, 254 Sufis/Sufism see also lettrism association with lettrism 343–344 guilds 563, 563n115–116 in Ottoman Empire 30, 445 position of ʿAlī among 464 references on talismans/amulets to calligrams 455, 459 on stamped talismans 539, 553 role in realization of devotional products 563 al-Suhravardī, Shihāb al-Dīn (d. 1191) 248, 280, 293–294, 294n124 Maqālāt (“Statements”) 280

index al-Sulamī, Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (d. 1021) 236n17, 242 Sulawesi 457, 468 Sulaymān I (Safavid shah, r. 1666–1694) 437, 437n67 Suleman, Fahmida 456 Suléngkaé (“The kitchen tripod”) flag (Luwuq) 510 Süleymān I (Ottoman sultan, r. 1520–1566) 381, 398, 411, 425, 437, 437n67, 438, 441 astrology and lettrism at court of 412 Süleymaniye complex (Istanbul) 445 Suʾl al-mulūk (“Query of Kings,” Ibn Turka) 403 Sultān-Ḥusayn-i Bayqara (Timurid sultan, r. 1469–1506) 269, 271 Sumatra 471 Sumedang (Java) 468, 490, 494 Sun 223n47 alchemy and 47 assignment to Abraham 235, 236 association with awfāq (magic squares) 67n27, 108n130 talisman of the (ʿamal-i shams) 299 Sunan Abī Dawūd (hadith) 252 Sunan Gunung Jati (Syarif Hidayatullah, Sufi saint, d. 1570) 446, 479, 480 Sunni-Shiʿi divide 25, 28, 270, 444 blurring of 30, 476–477 talismanic motifs/iconography and 30, 421, 444–445, 448 Sunnism/Sunnis 269–270, 271, 444 Hanafi 268, 269 on mujaddidūn 236, 250 Ottoman 444, 445 pro-amulet position 593, 594, 595 in Safavid period 307 in Southeast Asia 476–477 talismanic motifs imagery evoking Dhū l-Fiqār 441 Shiʿi imagery in talismanic objects 444–445 superstition categorization of 608–610 piety vs. 527–528, 574–575, 584–585, 594 see also eye beads reason vs. 5, 11, 22 Supplementary History (al-Taʾrīkh al-mulḥaq) 141

697 supplications see duʿāʾ Surakarta (Java) 468 suras see Qurʾan verses Sür, Mahmut 598–599, 600 Sürūrī Musliḥaddīn Muṣtafā (d. 1562) 624n50 Suter, Heinrich 108 al-Suyūṭī, Jalāl al-Dīn 543n41 Sweeney, Amin 460n25 swords of Murād V 424, 424ill., 426ill. talismanic motifs/symbols on 427–428 Dhū l-Fiqār 438, 440ill., 446 Quranic inscriptions 435–437 (semi-)precious stones/metals 423, 424ill., 426ill. Solomonic symbols/inscriptions 435–437, 436ill., 448 Syria 255, 262, 286 Ottoman conquest of 385, 390–391, 394, 400, 407 Syriac language/script 133, 237, 239, 323, 324, 349, 367 Syriac texts 74, 80, 141, 183, 349 al-Ṭabarī, Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. Jarīr (d. 923), Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk (“The Annals of the Prophets and Kings”) 464 al-Ṭabarī, ʿAlī b. Sahl (d. 850) 71–72, 78, 80, 233, 236n17, 254 Kitāb Firdaws al-ḥikma (“Book of the Paradise of Wisdom”) 71–76, 80, 87, 88n81, 91, 94, 101, 142, 348– 349 al-Ṭabarī, Rabban Sahl (father of ʿAlī b. Sahl al-Ṭabarī) 72 Ṭabaristan 72 tabarruk (obtaining blessings from sacred objects and sites) 562 al-Ṭabasī, Abū l-Faḍl Muḥammad (d. 1089), al-Shāmil fī l-baḥr al-kāmil (“The Comprehensive Compendium on the Entire Ocean”) 280n58, 623, 632, 634–635 al-Ṭabasī, Tāj al-Dīn Ibrāhīm b. ʿUmar alQaṣṣāʿ 270n15 Tabriz 73n44, 272, 286, 305n175, 396, 404 al-Tabrīzī, Jalāl al-Dīn Abū l-Najīb ʿAbd alRaḥmān b. Naṣr b. ʿAbdallāh al-Shirāzī, al-Īḍāḥ fī asrār al-nikāḥ 325

698 Tadhkirat al-shuʿarāʾ (Dawlatshāh) 288– 289 Tadhkirat ūlī l-albāb (“Memorandum for Men of Intelligence,” al-Anṭākī) 344 Tahāfut al-falāsifa (“The Incoherence of the Philosophers,” al-Ghazālī) 4 Tahānsarī, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Shams-i, Tarjuma-yi kitāb-i Barāhī 68n30 Tahmāsp I (Safavid shah, r. 1524–1576) 296, 297n135, 297n137, 445 Taj Mahal 118, 410n87 al-tajrīd (science of emancipation of the soul) 3, 215, 273n27 Taksim Square (Istanbul) 583 taksīr al-ḥurūf 89n81, 298, 298n141, 386 Talḥa b. ʿUbaydallāh (Companion of the Prophet, d. c. 657) 540 talismanic arts/operations/practices 15, 185, 302–303, 345 association of sīmiyāʾ with 343 boom in 573 clients/targets of courtiers and power elite 299, 300– 301 rulers (achieving/maintaining power) 48–49, 255, 295, 299, 305n175, 307 wider audience 295 talismanic garments 444, 506–508 talismanic magic theory (al-Rāzī) 225 talismanic scrolls 531ill. talismanic weaponry 23, 29–30, 420, 420– 421 see also body armor coins in 425–426, 426ill. history/origins 421–422 invoking Allāh/Prophet/pious figures 427, 428, 430 materials used 421, 422–427 motifs/symbols/references on Ahl al-Bayt imagery 445 ʿAlīd references on 445 orientation/placement of protective inscriptions/motifs 421, 427–434, 447–448 Quran verses 424, 430–432, 435–437, 496 Solomonic symbols 434–439, 436ill., 448

index physical and metaphysical protection of 421–422 (semi-)precious stones in 423, 424–427, 424ill., 426ill., 448 talismans (ṭilasm) see also (awfāq) magic squares; blessing cards; calligrams; eye beads; stamped talismans; talismanic weaponry aim of 44 body vs. spirit in 48, 49, 50 commercialization of 572, 586n26, 593, 595, 599, 600–602 construction of 24, 48–50, 92, 93, 96, 167, 185, 187, 224, 564, 564n119 astrological conditions 50, 83–84, 98 materials used 74, 75, 79, 90, 101–102, 421, 422–427 efficacy of 560, 563 formulas and motifs 30–31, 49 individual interventions and interaction 23, 27 letter and number symbolism in 114, 275 lions in 465 orientation of motifs 427–434, 447– 448 performative vs. talismanic images 461–463 talismanic vocabulary 30, 421, 447 history/origins/foundation 28, 174, 273n27, 293 intercessory power of 539, 553, 560, 562, 588, 594 invoking Allāh/Prophet/pious figures 427, 428, 430 for love and friendship 48, 49–50 of lunar mansions 187, 189, 192 as means of action of sīmiyāʾ 29, 338– 339 prayer and 48, 49, 50 printed talismans 478, 502, 527–565, 529ill., 531ill., 574–595, 576ill., 577ill., 581ill., 586ill., 589ill. see also blessing cards prohibition of use 594 protective properties 427, 449 protection at battlefield see talismanic weaponry

index science of (līmiyā) 44, 294–296, 342 categorization of 27, 46, 621 socio-political/cultural/religious significance 444–446, 448, 449 survived talismans 24 talisman of the sun (ʿamal-i shams) 299 term 43, 628 vivification of 53 for women’s spells 328–329 Talkhīṣ fī l-ʿadad al-wafq (“Epitome on the Harmonious Number,” al-Kharaqī) 113tab., 130 Tamil region (India) 488 Tan, Huism 505 Tankalūshā al-Bābilī (Teucros) 331–333, 635n79 Tanman, M. Baha 557 tantra/tantric traditions (India) 69, 632, 637 Taşköprīzāde/Taşköprüzāde, Aḥmed b. Muṣṭafā (d. 1561) 4n7, 89n81, 405n70, 407n73, 408n76, 410n86 Miftāḥ al-saʿāda wa-miṣbāḥ al-siyāda (“Key to Felicity and Lamp to Mastery”) 4n7, 89n81, 410n86 tawaṣṣul see intercession taʿwīz (using images for talismanic and auspicious purposes) 562, 564 taxonomy see classification of (occult) sciences temporality 230, 231–232 lettrism and 260 Tengku Bongsu Bachok bin Tengku Temenggung Long Tan (d. 1887) 497n183 Terengganu (peninsular Malaysia) 468, 505 terrestrial world, governance by celestial world 173, 211 Tevārīḫ-i āl-i ʿOs̱mān (“Annals of the Ottoman House”, Kemālpaşazāde) 400, 406, 409 textiles, talismanic motifs/symbols on 441, 442ill., 444, 446, 447, 471, 475, 477–478, 482–487, 483ill., 495, 502–511, 506ill., 509ill. Thābit b. Qurra (Abū l-Ḥasan Thābit b. Qurra al-Ḥarrānī, d. 901) 48, 53, 107, 109, 131, 132 fig., 133, 133n185, 134, 134n186, 139, 140, 142, 352n105 Book on Amicable Numbers (Kitāb al-aʿdād al-mutaḥābba) 109

699 De imaginibus 27, 108 Epistle on the Harmonious Number (Risāla fī lʿadad al-wafq) 107–108 Thai culture, influence of 497 Thailand calligrams in 468, 472, 478 tiger imagery in 475 Ṭhakkura Pherū, Gaṇitasārakaumudī 69 Thales of Miletus 109, 109n134, 111n138, 137 awfāq (magic squares) and 248–249 lettrism and 248–249 thaumaturgy/thaumaturgical power 209, 225, 226 Theology of Aristotle 177, 178, 180 Theon of Smyrna 62 theoretical knowledge, practical vs. 31, 607–608 Third Way (anti-sectarian religio-political reform, Brethren of Purity) 182n82 “three” books (Qurʾan, human soul and world) 260–261, 263 Throne Verse (āyāt al-kursī, Q:255) 431, 435, 435n63, 438, 580, 580n14, 582, 599, 600ill. Al-Tibb (exhibition, 2018, Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia) 10 al-Tīfāshī (d. 1253), Azhār al-afkār fī jawāhir al-aḥjār (“The Blooms of Thoughts on Precious Stones”) 30, 422–423 al-Tiflīsī, Rabbi Yosef 72n44 tiger imagery see also Macan Ali, Sima Ngali and “Tiger of God” calligrams on banners and flags 484, 485, 487, 503, 509, 510 divination and power of tigers 474– 475 lion vs. tigers (in calligrams) 30, 473– 476, 484, 499, 500, 513 magical associations with tigers 30, 474–475 as talismanic designs 475 white tiger 485, 487 time (dahr) see also days Ibn ʿArabī on 230, 231 Islamic 230–231 Timurid Empire/Timurids 28, 29, 396 Aqquyunlu Empire vs. 403–406

700 lettrist imperialism/universalist claims 397, 398, 401, 403 occult sciences in 267 see also Asrār-i qāsimī princes and military elite (Chaghatay) 289 Tīmūr/Temür (founder of the Timurid Empire, r. 1370–1405) 235, 257–258, 261, 262, 287n96, 401, 401n52, 405, 406n70 al-Tirmidhī (hadith scholar, d. 892) 433, 587, 587n29 Tokat 405n70 Toledo 113tab. Topkapı Palace 233, 234n12, 408, 444, 457n11, 465n53, 562n105, 587n29, 590, 592 traces of the Prophet see foot- and sandalprints transformation external 174 self- 174 of the soul 180 transmission chains 270, 270n15 Transoxania 209, 287n96 Treatise on the Existence of the Cause of Amicable Numbers and Square Figures with Numerical Planes […], The (al-Mālaqī) 99–102, 105, 111 Treaty of Amasya (1555) 445 Trench, Battle of the (627) 421 trickery 181, 189, 275–276 see also illicit magic; necromancy; prestidigitation true magic vs. artificial 178–179 true magic (siḥr ḥaqq), articifical trickery vs. 178–179 Tughluq dynasty (1320–1413) 69 tughrā (official signature of Ottoman sultans), as talismanic motif 471 Tuḥfa-yi ʿaliyya (treatise on lettrism, alKāshifī) 268, 292 Tuḥfa-yī khānī (“A Gift for the Khān”, ʿAlī Ṣafī) 274, 281 see also Asrār-i qāsimī manuscripts 292n115 patron/dedicatee 291–292 Tuḥfat al-munajjimīn (“The Gift of the Astrologers,” Jalāl Munajjim) 302

index Ṭumṭum al-Hindī 219n35, 226, 274, 295, 296, 299–300, 331, 332 Kitāb Ṭumṭum 325 Tunis 256 Tunisia 15 al-Ṭūqātī, Luṭfullāh see Mollā Lüṭfī turbans 301, 438n67, 490, 552 turban hats (kufis) 592–593, 592ill. Turco-Muslim culture 588 Turkey 7n17, 31, 462n38, 572 see also blessing cards; eye beads basmala in present day 582 imagery evoking Dhū l-Fiqār from 441, 442ill., 443ill. islamization of public sphere 573, 602 production of eye beads 598–599 talismans from 527–565, 529ill., 531ill. calligrams 454, 456, 466, 466n57, 467ill., 473 talismanic weaponry 420, 421, 424ill., 426ill., 427, 428, 436ill., 438n69, 440ill. Turkish language/vocabulary 454, 631 Turko-Persianate imperial lettrist historiography 407 al-Ṭūsī, Muḥammad b. al-Muẓaffar, Risāla fīʿilm al-wafq (“Treatise on the Science of Harmony”) 57, 57n1 al-Ṭūsī, Naṣīr al-Dīn (d. 1274) 70n38, 196 al-Ṭūsī, Shams al-Din Muḥammad (d. 1166), Kitāb ʾAjāʾib al-makhlūqāt wagharāʾib almawjūdāt (“The wonders of all creation and the rarities of all existence”) 617, 618–619 al-Ṭūsī, Sharaf al-Dīn al-Muẓaffar b. Muḥammad (d. 1213) 57n1 al-Tustarī, Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. Abī al-Karam (fl. 14th c.), Kashf ḥaqāʾiq al-asrār […] (“Revelation of the Truths […]”) 75n54, 105n121, 110, 114 Twelver Shiʿism 28, 268, 269, 307, 413, 441 tyranny 226–227 of Pharaoh 216, 217–218, 217n30, 219 ʿUbayd Allāh b. al-Jarrāh (Companion of the Prophet, d. 639) 540 ʿUbayd Allāh Khan (Uzbek ruler, r. 1534–1539) 404

index Ūghrī ʿAbbās (demon), on stamped talismans 537ill., 543–544, 543n47 Uğur (glassmaker) 599 Uḥud, Battle of (625) 421, 439, 496 Ujjain (India) 68, 68n29 Ullmann, Manfred 19n63, 328–329 Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im Islam 11, 162, 325 Ulugh Beg observatory (Samarkand) 110, 411 Ulugh Beg (Timurid Sultan and scientist, r. 1409–1449) 411 al-ʿulūm al-gharība (occult sciences) 2, 2n2, 31, 615–616, 615n23–24 equation with occult sciences 615–616 synonyms 615 al-ʿulūm al-khafiyya (occult sciences) 2, 2n2, 3 Ūmahris 195 al-ʿulūm al-nāmūsiyya wa-l-sharʿiyya (Part IV of the Rasāʾil concerned with divine and legal laws) 171 ʿUmar b. al-Khāṭṭāb (2nd Caliph of the Rashidun Caliphate, r. 634–644) 110, 477, 488, 499, 505 ʿUmar II (8th Caliph of the Umayyad Caliphate, r. 717–720) 253 ʿUmar Khayyām see [al-]Khayyāmī al Nīsābūrī, ʿUmar b. Ibrāhīm ummat al-ḥukamāʾ (sages, philosophers) 232, 238 lettrism and 242, 245–249 Umm Ṣubyān (female demon, “child-witch”), on stamped talismans 537ill., 542–543, 545, 545n57 al-umūr al-gharība (“strange phenomena”) see strange phenomena Un art secret (exhibition, 2013, Institut du Monde Arabe) 9 “Une Compilation Arabe” (Sesiano) 113tab., 130 UNESCO 598 universalist imperialism 398–399 see also lettrist imperialism Universal Soul 173, 179 universe, governance by volitional causality 172, 192, 199 Université Catholique de Louvain, “Speculum Arabicum Project” 8n19

701 University of Exeter 8n19 University of London 8n19 University of Oxford 1, 9–10 University of South Carolina 8n19 ʿUthmān b. Affān (3rd Rashidun caliph, r. 644–656) 477, 488, 499 ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbāʾ (“The Sources of Information about the Generations of Physicians”, Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa) 351 ʿUyūn al-haqāʾiq wa-īḍāḥ al-ṭarāʾiq (“The Sources of Truths and the Exposition of Methods,” al-Sīmāwī) 278, 282, 284–285, 291, 325, 326, 332, 344 see also Asrār-i qāsimī parallels with Kitāb Sharāsīm 332 Uzbeks 305, 305n173, 393, 404 Uzun Ḥasan (ruler of Aqquyunlu Empire, r. 1457–1478) 403–404, 405, 405n70 Valī, Shāh Niʿmatallāh (d. 1431) 272, 287, 287n96 Vaṛāhamihira (Indian astronomer), Great Compilation (Bṛhatsaṁhitā) 68 Venus 70n38, 223n47, 224, 331n42, 348 alchemy and 47 assignment to Moses 235 vernacular forms of devotion 574, 575, 585, 597 victory, (semi-)precious stones/metals securing 423 Vinel, Nicolas 62–63, 140 volitional causality, universe governed by 172, 192, 199 Vṛnda (Indian physician) 91 Siddhayoga (Sanskrit Ayurvedic medical compendium) 68, 69, 75 wafq see also awfāq (magic squares) term 94 Wahhabi Islam/Wahhabism 5, 561–562, 594, 595 wahm see illusions/illusory magic waḥy (prophetic revelation) see revelation walāya/wilāya, intellectual magic of 180– 181, 182n82 Walbridge, John 247–248 Walker, Paul E. 169

702 Wallace Collection (London), talismanic weaponry in 438, 440ill. Warburg Institute (London) 8n19 warfare see arms and armor; lettrist imperialism; talismanic weaponry Wāridāt (“Inspirations,” Badr al-Dīn) 397n44 waṣī (“delegate”) see awṣiyā; mujaddidūn Wasit 622 al-Wāthiq (ʾAbbāsid caliph, r. 842–847) 72 Wawacan Sunan Gunung Jati (“Narrative poem of Sunan Gunung Jati”) 479 wāw (letter) 244, 346, 472 weapons see arms and armor; talismanic weaponry West Africa 15, 17, 454 Western early modernity, historiography of 411 Western esotericism 2, 6, 19, 19n62, 611 Westernization of occult sciences 7 Western magic 18, 19 Western occultism 2, 2n3, 7, 410–411n87 Western scholarship 7–8, 14, 61, 328, 410, 609–610, 611, 625 white tiger imagery 485 Wicca 7 Widad Kawar Home for Arab Dress (Amman), Ya Hafeth Ya Ameen (exhibition, 2016) 10 wisdom, classification of 3–4 women occultists 317, 324, 331n43 see also Sharāsīm/Ishrāsīm al-Hindiyya women’s magic 186, 187, 336 women’s spells, talismans used for 329– 330 wonders see miracles wood panels, Lion of ʿAlī on 480, 481– 482, 481ill., 487–490, 489ill., 492n165, 493ill., 504–505, 504ill. writing, sanctity of 476 Xi’an (Shaanxi Province, China) 66 Xugu zhaiqi suanfa (“Continuation of Ancient Mathematical Methods for Elucidating the Strange,” Yang Hui) 65, 67, 67n27

index Xu Yue, Memoir on Some Traditions of the Mathematical Art (Shushu jiyi) 64 Yaḥyā b. al-Biṭrīq 183 Yahya, Farouk 1, 24, 30 yāʾ (letter) 244, 346 Ya Hafeth Ya Ameen (exhibition, 2016, Widad Kawar Home for Arab Dress) 10 Yale University 8n19 Yang Hui, Continuation of Ancient Mathematical Methods for Elucidating the Strange (Xugu zhaiqi suanfa) 65, 67, 67n27 Yasūf b. Aḥmad Ḥallāj 278–279, 280n62 Yazdegird III (Sassanid Shah, r. 632–651) 110 Yazdī, Jalāl al-Dīn Munajjim see Jalāl Munajjim Bāshī Yazdī, Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī (d. 1454) 197, 272, 277, 287, 397n44, 400–403, 401n55, 407, 412, 412n89 cyclical theory of history 401–402 Davānī vs. 403–404 Fatḥ-nāma-yi humāyūn 401n52 Fatḥ-nāma-yi ṣāḥib-qirāni 401n52 on history as an (occult) science 401– 403 Ḥulal-i muṭarraz dar fann-i muʿammā va lughaz 272n20 Ibn Khaldūn vs. 401–402, 411 Muqaddima 401n52 Second Maqāla 401n52 Ẓafarnāma (“Book of Conquest”) 401, 403, 404 yellow amber 333 Yemen 15, 238, 392 Yin and Yang 64 yoga 637, 638n85 Yogyakarta (Java) Brahma Tirta Sari batik studio 509ill. glass-painting 511–512 Lion of ʿAlī calligrams from 468, 479, 511–512 sacred royal banner of 487 Yudhiṣṭhira (character in Mahābhārata) 479 Yürekli, Zeynep 444, 445 Zadeh, Travis 8n19, 31 Ẓafarnāma (“Book of Conquest”, Yazdī) 401, 403, 404

index Ẓāhirī Revolt (1386) 256 ẓāhir (“the manifest”), bāṭin (“the hidden”) vs. 459, 610–611 Zahrūn family 131, 132 fig., 133 Zamzam Well (Mecca) 555n88 Zarcone, Thierry 456 Zhou dynasty (1046–771 BCE) 64 zīj (astronomical tables) 127, 135, 143, 351 Zīj-i Malikshāhī (astronomical observations of al-Isfizārī and al-Khayyāmī) 127 al-Zīj al-muʿtabar al-Sanjarī (“Zīj for Sanjar,” al-Khāzinī) 129 Zīj al-Sindhind 68n29, 351

703 zoomorphic calligraphy 456, 457, 458, 471n79, 472, 480 see also calligrams; Lion of ʿAlī calligrams Zoroaster/Zarādasht 240, 246, 248 identification with Seth 246 Zoroastrianism/Zoroastrians 618, 631 nērang in 628–630 Zosimos 331n43 Zubayr b. al-ʿAwām (Companion of the Prophet, d. 656) 540 Zubdat al-tavārīkh (Kamāl b. Jalāl) 306n178 Zwemer, Samuel Marinus (d. 1952) 625, 626n55