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 UCL for the weekly video 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's sometimes difficult to understand each purpose.
And each subject we have been dealing with.
So what we will try and do is to explain you a bit more easily and
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 quite an old fashion way let's say,
by using this wonderful and beautiful map.
And explaining you where people were, who the people were,
what was the context of the production of their writings.
What was the context of the general Islamic world,
on the specific topic of magic.
Now, I will let 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 Quran 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 Iraq 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 conquests by the dynasty called the Umayyads.
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, and, 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, another one.
A movement of translation in Baghdad and in other places of the empire.
Many people started to translated works from coming ancient cultures and
civilizations, especially the Ancient Greek civilization.
But also they 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 Muslims they
were Christians among them, there were Jews as well.
So it's kind of 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,
is the bulk of what in Islam was called the rational sciences.
it included the mathematical sciences,
philosophy of course, physics, metaphysics and
also for a good deal of it what we call 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 modern 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 raised in Al-Andalus.
And this is why we have been focusing on this.
And also magic and alchemy where 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 putting and explaining in our video.
The first of them is.
[FOREIGN] It is accorded to many about alchemy.
Because we think legendary figure is a scribe
copies of more than hundreds of texts mainly dealing with alchemy.
But also with magic and other so called actual sciences.
[FOREIGN] the legendary figure, we don't know whether he exist or
not, is said to have lived in the eighth century and could have been dying in Kufa.
But we don't know anything really well founded about this figure.
So we have a caucus of argumental texts attributed to him.
That's what you must know about this person and
he's one of the most influential
alchemical 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 brother of purity?
Well, that's a big question for me and for many other scholars 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, [FOREIGN] 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 forecast here.
And 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 it is entirely dedicated to magic.
Now, from the Ikhwan al-Safa, we shall move to the West,
the muslim world, with a figure which we have also mentioned.
And is a figure of.
Who was he was an author a very illustrious
scholar until the 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 that is a text about the letters,
the famous letters Koranic letters that we find at the beginning of certain surahs.
There is a lot of mystique 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
part of his works by the Ikhwan al-Safa and
that's why we have also mentioned him in this context.
Now, I will leave for another figure.
>> Yes.
Another important figure, our beloved I would say Maslava even [FOREIGN].
When I say beloved because and I are actually working at the moment on Massama.
[FOREIGN] he was born in Kortba.
And we have put him here on a camel because he made what is called
a rehla which is a travel to the east to acquire knowledge.
Mainly about [FOREIGN], that is prophetic tradition but
also about what we will see, called occult sciences.
And he came back then to [FOREIGN].
[FOREIGN] is famous because he has
a very important role of importator
of sciences from the East to the West.
He his indeed the first to have introduced the [FOREIGN] into [FOREIGN].
But also he seems to have been first introduced some parts
of the [FOREIGN] into [FOREIGN].
And he wrote two very important trinities which
are called the [FOREIGN] may be some of you already
know [FOREIGN] which has been translated in the 13th century.
Into [FOREIGN] and Latin and
which is known as [FOREIGN] which maybe some of you know.
We shall now proceed to the last three figures that we'll explain to you today.
>> Yes, so in one or two of our videos we also mentioned the name of [FOREIGN].
Who was [FOREIGN]?
[FOREIGN] is a very important figure of Islam and 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.
Because [FOREIGN] was a very severe critic about all this and
he condemns and says that all these sciences were blameable, right.
I shall put it on anything in the East because [FOREIGN]
is someone who traveled a lot between Cairo,
and Damascus, and other places in the East.
>> Our next video is [FOREIGN].
Who lived from the middle of the 12th century to the middle of the 15th century,
and he was born here under [FOREIGN] 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, very influential doctrine which was studied for
centuries after him and which is called the [FOREIGN] movement.
And [FOREIGN] travelled to the East, also just as [FOREIGN],
but he never came back actually to [FOREIGN].
And travelled in the East and died in Damascus, here.
He was also a well known and he was quoted in our videos,
because he has made a very important reflection.
Very important thinking about the [FOREIGN] science of the letters.
And about the letters of the Quran and the letters we
have been talking about at the beginning of [FOREIGN].
>> So our last author is none other than [FOREIGN].
So [FOREIGN] was the subject of the test we
proposed to resolve as part of our activities.
Who was [FOREIGN]?
He is a historian.
A very, very important historian,
is perhaps the greatest historian in the history of Arabic literature.
He's also very often presented as the father of modern sociology,
which is not incorrect to a certain extent.
Even if Abdul was born in [FOREIGN] but
[FOREIGN] descent.
But then he moved and travelled to [FOREIGN] as well to the East.
And he's very well known for having compiled 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 these signs 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 science
because this is the kind of science that make
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 helped you
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 write, 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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