Magical thought has always attracted human imagination. In this course we will introduce you to the Middle Ages through a wide conception of magic. Students will have an approach to medieval culture, beliefs and practices from the perspective of History and History of Science. Popular magic, as well as learned magic (alchemy, geomancy and necromancy) will be addressed. Moreover, we will also deal with how eastern practices and texts influenced western culture. In July 2016, the course will contain a brand-new module devoted to astrology. Magic in the Middle Ages offers a captivating overview of medieval society and promotes reflection about certain stereotypes associated with this period. At the end of the course, the students: a) will have overcome the usual prejudices about the Middle Ages, b) will be able to analyze historical documentation from the Middle Ages and recognize the most common patterns of juridical documents regarding witchcraft, and c) will be capable of distinguishing between popular magic and the magic of the learned people; will have a notion of which spiritual practices were allowed in medieval Europe and which ones were related to the devil, and will be aware of the link between a cultural product and the society that produced it. This course is taught in English, although subtitles in English, Catalan and Spanish will also be provided. COURSE SYLLABUS Week 1. Introduction to medieval magic (Pau Castell). Week 2. Magic & Heresy (Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel). Week 3. From Magic to Witchcraft (Pau Castell). Week 4. Magic in Islam (Godefroid de Callataÿ and Sébastien Moureau). Week 5. Astrology & Geomancy (Theo Loinaz, Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel, Godefroid de Callataÿ and Blanca Villuendas). © Gemma Pellissa Prades (coord.), Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel and Joana Palau Mumany Magic in the Middle Ages by Gemma Pellissa Prades (coord.), Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel and Joana Palau Mumany is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Weekly Video 4 (2015)
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From the course by Universitat de Barcelona
Magic in the Middle Ages
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From the lesson
UNIT 4: MAGIC IN ISLAM
Meet the Instructors
Godefroid de Callataÿ - University of LouvainProfessor
Oriental Institute (University of Louvain)
Dr Pau Castell GranadosResearch and Teaching Scholar at University of Barcelona
Sébastien Moureau - University of LouvainChargé de recherches du F.R.S.-FNRS
Institut Orientaliste (CIOL)
Dr Gemma Pellissa PradesVisiting Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of the Classics, Harvard
Delfi I. Nieto-IsabelBSc, BA, MA
Dept. of Medieval History, Palaeography & Diplomatics, Institute for Research on Medieval Cultures, University of Barcelona
Blanca VilluendasPhD Candidate
Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo y Oriente Próximo, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
Welcome back to the UCL for the weekly video of about magic in Islam.
We have been quite impressed so
far by the quality of your answers and questions on the forums.
And we also have seen that some of you have been
expecting a bit more explanations.
Because indeed when coming to the east and
to the Islamic world with a culture from the West.
It is sometimes difficult to understand each purpose and
each subject we have been dealing with.
So what we will try to do is to explain you a bit more easily and
to give you a bit more context about the Islamic magic and
the magic in the Arab Muslim world.
How shall we do? We will do that in a quite old fashioned
way.
Let's say by using this wonderful and
beautiful map and explaining you where the people were.
Who the people were.
What was the context of the production of the writings.
What was the context of the general Islamic world
on the specific topic of magic.
Now I will let Gutra introduce you to some basic points of
the Islamic and Arab Muslim culture.
>> Well yes, I shall start with very basic and
very well-known facts about the beginning of Islam.
It all started as you all know in
the Arab peninsula around the city of Medina and Mecca.
That's the place where the prophet was born.
That's the place where the Quranic revelation came and
that's also the place just after the death of the prophet.
From where a gigantic movement of conquest
spread well over the borders of the Arab peninsula.
We have to realize how fantastic these conquests were,
since in less than 100 years, we have to
bear in mind that Islam extended over three continents.
Going from Al-Andalus in the west to the north of India,
cities in the north of India including as well.
Large parts of north Africa, the Middle East of course, and even Central Asia.
So this is more or less what this map actually represents,
these are the conquest by the dynasty called the Mayas.
Then from the middle of the eighth century, another dynasty came into power,
perhaps the most famous dynasty in the entire history of Islam.
They were the Abbasids, they were those who created a new city Baghdad,
let's say almost a new culture.
And more or less coinciding with the coming to power of the Abbasids.
We have the starting of an enormous movement, but another one,
a movement of translation in Baghdad and in other places of the Abaya.
Many people started to translate it, works from coming from ancient culture and
civilizations especially the Greek, ancient Greek civilization.
But also there were translations from Persian, from Sanskrit and
from various other languages.
Who were the translators?
It's important to say that they were not all Muslim,
there were Christians among them, there were Jews as well.
So it's a very broad enterprise and
this enterprise was not to end before another 200 centuries.
That's a phenomenon which is almost unique in the history of mankind let's say.
What was translated in fact?
Here again, it's important to say that essentially but it's enormous.
It's the birth of what in Islam was called the rational sciences.
It includes the mathematical sciences,
philosophy of course, logic, physics, metaphysics and
also for a good deal of it, what we call occult sciences.
That's astrology, alchemy and magic.
>> Maybe some of you have remarked that we have been speaking
a lot in our videos about Al-Andalus, namely the one in Spain.
Which is a crucial place in the Islamic world, because it is
a place of transfer of knowledge and of sciences from the east to the west.
Indeed, in the 12th and 13th centuries, a large movement of translations
from Arabic into Latin raced in Al-Andalus.
And this is why we have been focusing on this.
And also, magic and alchemy were two of the important sciences which were
transmitted from the east to the West during this movement of translation.
We will now focus on the figures we have been [INAUDIBLE] and
explaining in our video.
The first of them is Jabir ibn Hayyan.
It is quoted mainly about alchemy, because to this,
we think legendary figure is ascribed a corpus of
around more than hundreds of text.
Mainly dealing with alchemy but also with magic and other so-called occult sciences.
Jabir ibn Hayyan, the legendary figure, we don't know whether he exist or not.
If Sater lived in the 8th century and could have been dying in Cuxhaven.
We don't know anything really
well founded about this figure.
So we have a corpus of arguments of texts attributed to him,
that's what you must know about this person.
He is one of the most influential chemical figure in the Arab Muslim world.
>> Well, we shall remain in the east with my much beloved Ikhwan al-Safa.
Who were the Ikhwan al-Safa or bringer of purity?
Well, that's a big question for me and for many other callers now.
They were a group of philosophers who wrote a kind of encyclopedia.
A very important encyclopedia about why diversity of
subjects in the form of epistles, rasa'il in Arabic.
So we know next to nothing about them, but we suppose they
were from Iraq, so I shall place them here in Iraq.
It's a little bit like the weather forecasts here.
They wrote this encyclopedia about a great number of sciences.
And what is interesting is that there is a kind of progression in knowledge.
And what is remarkable is that the last epistle and there are 50 or
52 epistles, the last one is a very long one.
And is entirely dedicated to magic.
Now from the Ikhwan al-Safa, we shall move to the west, the Muslim wells.
With a figure which we have also mentioned and is a figure of Ibn Masarra.
Who was Ibn Masarra?
He was an author, a very mysterious scholar.
And until the 70s of last century,
it was believed that everything he had written had been lost.
But then all of a sudden,
two of his texts were rediscovered in a single manuscript in Dublin.
And now we have a better way to know about his work and
he's a very important figure for Islamic mysticism.
He wrote, one of these two texts is a text about the ledgers, the famous ledgers.
Quranic ledgers that we find at the beginning of a certain surahs,
there is a lot of mystic about that.
And he was perhaps the first one to introduce this from the east to
Al-Andalus.
And it's quite possible that he was inspired for
parts of his works by the Ikhwan al-Safa.
And that's why we have also mentioned him in this context.
Now I will leave Sebastian for another figure.
>> Yes, another important figure,
our beloved I would say Maslam ibn Qasim al-Qurtubi.
Why I say beloved because Gutra and
I are actually working at the moment on Maslam ibn Qasim al-Qurtubi.
He was born in Cordoba and
we have put him here on a camel because he made what is called a [FOREIGN].
Which is a travel to the east to gain, to acquire knowledge.
Mainly about [FOREIGN] that is prophetic tradition, but
also about what we wil seek so called occult sciences.
And he came back then to Cordoba.
[FOREIGN] I paste him.
>> In Cordoba.
>> Maslama ibn Qasim al-Qurtubi is famous because he has
a very important role of importer of sciences from the East to the West.
He is indeed the first to have introduced the [INAUDIBLE] Ikhwan
al-Safa into Al-Andalus.
But also, he seems to have been the first to introduce some parts of
the Jabirian Corpus into Al-Andalus.
And he wrote two very important treatises, which are called the [FOREIGN],
the great of the sages and the [FOREIGN], the aim of the sages.
Maybe some of you already know the [FOREIGN],
which have been translated in the 13th century.
Into Castilian and Latin and
which is known as Picatrix, which maybe some of you know.
We shall now proceed to the last three figures that we will explain you today.
>> Yes, so in one or two of our videos, we also mentioned the name of Ghazali.
Who was Ghazali?
Ghazali is a very important figure of Islamic thinking.
He was a theologian.
He was also a Sufi, but as a theologian he was a very strong
defender of Sunni orthodoxy.
And this is of course, the reason why when it comes to
deal with alchemy, magic and the other occult sciences,
Ghazali was a very severe critic about all these.
And he condemns and says that all these sciences were blamable.
Right, I shall put it in the east because Ghazali
is someone who have traveled a lot between Cairo and
Damascus and other places in the east.
>> Our next figure is Ibn Al-Arabi who lived from the middle of
the 12th century to the middle of the 13th century.
And he was born here under Ibn Masara in [FOREIGN] in Al-Andalus.
He is known as one of the most important mystic figures of the Islamic world.
He made a very important, that a very influential doctrine,
which was studied for centuries after him,
which is called the Akhbari movement.
And Ibn Al-Arabi traveled to the East, also just as Maslama,
but he never came back actually to Al-Andalus.
And travelled in the east and
died in Damascus, here.
He is also well-known and
he was quoted in our videos because he has made a very important reflection,
very important thinking about the [FOREIGN], the science of the letters.
And about letters of Quran and the letters we have
been talking about at the beginning of some surahs.
>> So our last author is none other than Ibn Khaldun.
So Ibn Khaldun was the subject of the test
we proposed to resolve as part of our activities.
Who was Ibn Khaldun?
He is an historian, a very, very important historian.
He's perhaps the greatest historian in the history of Arabic literature.
He is also very often presented as the father of modern sociology,
which is not incorrect to a certain extent.
Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis, but
he was of Andalusi descent.
But then he moved and traveled a lot as well due to east and
he's very well-known for having compound works on history.
But above all, a big introduction to history
which is the very famous [FOREIGN], which means the introduction.
It's a very large introduction, almost three books just for the introduction.
It appears like a kind of classification of sciences
of whatever an historian needs to know.
And it's about this science that he makes this very important distinction
between the rational sciences and the traditional sciences.
And of course, magic, alchemy, astrology are put
together with the rational sciences and he seems to
condemn them as not good sciences.
Because this is the kind
of science that makes the believer away from the Muslim convictions.
I will put it here because [FOREIGN] was written on his way to the orient.
So that's it, we have here seven figures.
We hope that these elements are helpful that they have help to clarify a little
bit the videos that we have proposed this week.
And that some doubts have been removed, if you have still
doubts, don't hesitate to use the forums.
And we'll try to answer your queries,
your questions, also via the handout that we will have next week.
Thank you very much for your attention.
>> Thank you.
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