Magic

On the threshold of the library of the al-Hilli family, Amina al-Sirafi has expectations about what she is going to find inside."A rich family with scholarly tastes would almost certainly boast a decent collection of hadith literature, and Quranic commentaries, biographies of the Prophet and his companions, peace be upon them, and texts of Islamic jurisprudence.Because of Dunya's interest in history and linguistics, there was probably also a prized assortment of translations and ancient scholarly works from Indian, Persian, Chinese, and Greek sages.Maybe a half-dozen or so books on alchemy, astrology, and esotericasomething by Abu Mashar or Jabir ibn Hayyan, names even a commoner like me knew," she muses.The pursuit of occult sciences is marked here as one both niche and elite, but even so, Amina can readily call to mind a few big names of these disciplines.Not a page later, Amina, awestruck by the contents of the library, including "what seemed like the entire body of work by Abu Mashar, Ibn Hayyan, Maslama al-Majriti, and Ibn Wahshiyya," notes that her shock comes not quite from the contents of the library, but from their quantity.She is aware of "...how common the small magics are in everyday life." 1There is so much that I, a reader who is also a historian of medieval Islamic magic, love in this scene.There is the pairing of the elite and the vulgar: charms and cocks and magic squares and celestial calculations, all parts of the enterprise.There is the recognition of who constituted authorities for practitioners of medieval Islamic occult sciences: a diverse and far-reaching roster of sages and ancient thinkers from India, Persia, China, and Greece.There is the sheer disarray of the material, which is played as part of the fantasy of a library of the occult, but which also conforms to a principle enacted throughout numerous historical magical works: dissimulation, whereby no single text contained everything a student needed to achieve the fully-realized extents of their magical practices.Most of all, however, the names of Abu Mashar, Jabir ibn Hayyan, al-Majriti, and Ibn Wahshiyya greet me like old friends.These are indeed key figures of my field, popular and well-studied among my scholarly brethren and hugely influential in their own times.1

Alchemy · Elite · History of Islam · Islam · Mysticism · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices