[MUSIC] Hello, maybe I could start by introducing myself in a few words. My name is Godefroid de Callatay, I'm Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Oriental Institute of the University of Leuven in Belgium. I would like to welcome you to the first video of this unit, devoted to the varieties of magic in Islam. Please, join us, to know more about this topic. Magic in Islam is definitely a subject of a protean nature, and it has often been observed that there are nearly as many attempts at defining what magic is, as there are people writing on this issue. Indeed, a more or less comprehensive overview of the materials and practices related to magic in medieval Islam would require one to deal with disciplines or concepts as diverse as amulets, talismans, trickery and conjuring, sortilege and prestidigitation, magic squares, letter magic, interpretation of dreams, and even physiognomy and astrology, to name but only a few of them. One of the most informative sources we have about magic in Islam is the 14th century historian, Ibn Khaldūn. In the <i>Muqaddima</i> ("The introduction"), Ibn Khaldūn leaves us an exceptionally detailed account about magic and talismans, defined as (quoting from Rosenthal's translation) "sciences showing how human souls may become prepared to exercise an influence upon the world of the elements, either without any aid or with the aid of celestial matters." Talking about the souls that have magical ability, Ibn Khaldūn affirms that they are of three degrees: "The first (kind), he says, exercises its influence merely through mental power. Without any instrument or aid. This is what the philosophers called magic (<i>siḥr</i>). The second (kind) exercises its influence with the aid of the temperament of the spheres and the elements, or with the aid of the properties of numbers. This is called talismans (<i>ṭilasmāt</i>). It is weaker in degree than the first. The third (kind) exercises its influence upon the powers of imagination. This is what the philosophers call prestidigitation." Leaving aside the third level, that of prestidigitation and phantasmagoria, which Ibn Khaldun does not consider as real, we may concentrate our attention on the first two degrees. What the text apparently means is that the highest level of magic, actually the only one which should be called <i>siḥr</i> in the proper sense, is reserved to those able to perform by having recourse to supernatural powers without any instrument or intermediary. This, it will be noted, can be either prophets, whose spiritual power is recognized as a divine quality, or else sorcerers, that is, people able to derive their power from Satanic forces. Whereas the former form of magic Is frequently referred to as high magic, the latter is often described as low magic, a dichotomy that loosely corresponds to the traditional position between white and black magic. As for the other level of magic, the one that implies the existence of a medium to be performed, it is generally meant to correspond to theurgy or natural magic since no supernatural power is required here. A particular form of natural magic is indeed that of talismans, <i>ṭilasm</i> from the Greek word <i>telesma</i> in which inscriptions with a generally astrological significance are used as charms in order to protect someone or some community against perils like storms, wild animals or various manifestations usually understood as resulting from the evil eye. Several centuries before Ibn Khaldūn, in the opening lines of the long version of their <i>Epistle on Magic</i>, the Ikhwān al-Safā’ or brethren of purity, provided the following definition of siḥr: "You must know, my brother, that the essence of magic and its reality is whatever by which intellects are bewitched, and whatever to which souls surrender through speeches and actions that produce astonishment, submission, attention, hearing, consent, obedience or acceptance." The Ikhwānian definition of magic was taken up by the Andalusī author of the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm (“The Aim of the Sage”), a treatise of celestial magic which was to exert an enormous influence in the West, during the Renaissance, thanks to its Latin adaptation, known as the <i>Picatrix</i>. The authorship of the Ghāyat al-ḥakīm, and of another treatise on alchemy, entitled the Rutbat al-ḥakīm (“The Grade of the Sage”), has remained a problem until quite recently. It was Maribel Fierro's merit to demonstrate convincingly in 1996 that the author was, in fact, the esotericist and traditionalist Maslama Ibn Qāsim al-Qurṭubī, who had traveled to the Orient in the first half of the tenth century. There are reasons to believe that this Maslama is also the scholar who introduced the encyclopaedic corpus of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’ to al-Andalus for the first time. The Ghāyat al-ḥakīm presents itself as a curious magic textbook, which, in addition to describing highly elaborated forms of rituals in which the spirits of the planets and other celestial beings are being invoked, strikes the reader by the extreme heterogeneity of its sources, most of them clearly of Oriental preference. As David Pingree once observed, "the sources of this compilation–and the author boasts of having pillaged two hundred and twenty-four books– seem largely to have been Arabic texts on Hermeticism, Ṣābianism, Ismā‘īlism, astrology, alchemy and magic produced in the Near East in the ninth and tenth centuries A.D." Another very important aspect of magic in medieval Islam was the magical interpretation of the Qur’ān’s words and letters, a science usually referred to as ilm al-ḥurūf or sīmiyā’, and which my colleague Sébastien Moureau is going to speak about in greater detail in another video of the present unit. Among the most important contributions in that field, one must mention here, in the East, some of the works ascribed to the famous alchemist Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, a scholar supposed to have lived in the eighth century and to whom a bulky corpus of writings has been assigned in the classical sources. In al-Andalus, one should certainly name Ibn Masarra, a philosopher generally recognized as the first Andalusī scholar with an original form of thinking, and whose Kitāb khawāṣṣ al-ḥurūf (“The Book of the Properties of Letters”) has recently been rediscovered in a single manuscript. Several centuries after Ibn Masarra, Ibn ‘Arabī, the well known mystic thinker also wrote very significant works on the “science of letters”, most notably his "Meccan Revelations." To get a better idea of how important and how ramified the science of magic was in Islam, there is probably no better example than the 17th Century Turkish compiler and encyclopaedist Ḥājjī Khalīfa, also known as Katip Çelebi. His Kashf al-zunūn (“The Removal of Doubts”) includes under the heading “siḥr” an astonishing variety of 14 disciplines, which have been listed by Toufic Fahd as: "divination, natural magic, properties of the Most Beautiful Names, of numbers, and of certain invocations, sympathetic magic, demoniacal conjurations, incantations, the evocations of spirits of corporeal beings, the invocation of the spirits of planets, phylacteries (amulets, talismans, philtres), the faculty of instantaneous disappearance from sight, artifices and fraud, the art of disclosing frauds, spells, and recourse to the properties of medicinal plants." In the next video we shall see how magic was actually received in medieval Islam. [MUSIC]
