Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice

Liana Saif (Ph.D. University of London, 2012) is a research associate at the Warburg Institute (London). She is an intellectual historian specializing in medieval Islamicate occult sciences and Islamic esotericism. She also conducts research on the entanglement and exchange of esoteric and occult ideas and practices between the Latin-West and the Islamicate world in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Francesca Leoni (Ph.D. Princeton, 2008) is Assistant Keeper and Curator of Islamic Art at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. She has published on wide-ranging topics, including Persian manuscript painting, eroticism and the occult in Islamicate visual arts. Matthew Melvin-Koushki (Ph.D. Yale, 2012) 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 philological focus on the theory and practice of the occult sciences in Timurid-Safavid Iran and the broader Persianate world to the nineteenth century, and a disciplinary focus on history of science, history of philosophy and history of the book. Farouk Yahya (Ph.D. SOAS, University of London, 2013) is Research Associate at this university. He has published on Southeast Asian magic, divination and art, including Magic and Divination in Malay Illustrated Manuscripts (Brill, 2016).

List of Illustrations and Tables

Notes on Contributors

Transliteration, Style, and Dates



1 Introduction

 Liana Saif and Francesca Leoni



Part 1 Occult Theories: Inception and Reception



2 The Three Divisions of Arabic Magic

 Charles Burnett



3 New Light on Early Arabic Awfāq Literature

 Bink Hallum



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

 Liana Saif



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

 Michael Noble



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

 Noah Gardiner



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

 Maria Subtelny



Part 2 Occult Technologies: From Instruction to Action



8 The Kitāb Sharāsīm al-hindiyya and Medieval Islamic Occult Sciences

 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

 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

 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

 Travis Zadeh



Index