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Underground > Temple >

Islamic magic

  
 
Sax
14:10 / 20.05.04
Does anyone know of any Islamic magic systems? Apologies if this has been covered before; I did a search but didn't turn much up.
 
 
grant
14:50 / 20.05.04
Well, bear in mind that Islam is a religion... one that (sort of) follows the Torah, with its injunctions against magic and divination.

So what you might be looking for is "Arabic" magic, maybe?

I bet if you went to google, did "site:www.barbelith.com djinn" you'd find something.
 
 
illmatic
15:05 / 20.05.04
Hey Saxster,

I don't know much about the subject beyond a couple of references which I'll give in a second but I would be very surprised if there's not a system of popular/folk type magic in Islam, as there is in every other culture in the world including Christianity. All cultures seem to have something like this - a folk magick which involves healing, cursing, spells for sex, money and the like.

Actually, as I was typing in this I remembered something else - Brion Gysin, William Burroughs compadre, describes being cursed by some local Islamic magicians in the ReSearch book of interviews with him, Burroughs and Genesis P. Orridge. They placed a curse object in his chimmey to drive him out of his business - it featured a grid like system of arabic caligraphy, and he later used designs like this in his painting. You can find the same material in Terry Wilson's book "Here to Go: Planet R101".

First port of call though should probably be Hakim Bey/Peter Lamborn Wilson - he's written a couple of stunning books on Sufism - "Sacred Drift" and "Scandal:Essays in Islamic Heresey", both focusing on heretical or surpressed parts of the Islamic Sufi traditon. They're pretty complex, but very good, and as much a "magical path" as anything else - probably a bit harder to get your teeth into, as it's not been stripped down, popularised and marketed in the same way as a lot of other magicial systems have. Bey/Wilson - spent 7 years in the East (Iran?) so knows his stuff backward. Also, he was iniated into a weird spin off to a Black Islamic temple founded in the States in the 1920s, by the "Noble Drew Ali", the Moorish Orthodox Church, which gives the whole subject another freaky, cross cultural spin. As he puts it here:

In searching for the origin or seed of this vision return to 1965 when Walid al Taha - brilliant junky 350-pound jazz saxophonist poet - inducted us into the Moorish Orthodox Church, gave us a copy of al Ghazzali's "Confessions, & told us about the Assassins. "Passions are equal to Destinies" as Fourier's calculus teaches - & these krazy-bricks laid the foundation of a temple of desire - of an imaginal Egypt 2-dimensional as a cigarette-packet design from 1913 but also n-dimensional - emerald gate to Jabulsa & Jabulqu the no-where Cities. Pyramids, palms, sphinxes, roses crescent-&-star, minaret -- the orientalismo of a child's reverie. Why shouldn't "Truth" take the form of our obsessions?

I love this, it's taking all those Orientailist (mis)understandings of Arabia, and using them as fuel for the inspired imagination. "Sacred Drift" has a full history of the MOC.

The only other reference that comes to mind off the top of my head is from a book called "Shamans, Mystics and Doctors" by Sudhir Kakir, which is an account of medical traditions in India. He spent some time with a dirt poor Islamic healer, who existed quite happily alongside his Hindu contemparies, practising a form of healing magic which involving the exorcising of disease and madness in the form of malevolent djinns, calling on the healing power of Allah, blessing potions and drawing complex caligraphic sigils. Well worth a look. (I'm thatintrigued by my recollections I'm going to dig that one out when I get home).
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
15:20 / 20.05.04
Illmatic, all that stuff sounds fascinating. Where can I get ahold of the Lamborne Wilson essays. I'm very interested in this subject at the moment, for various reasons. It dovetails into the stuff about Waldo Jing and Fez Magic, which I think may be connected to Moorish Temple Science in some way. Certain commentators have linked the material from Jing's exceptionally difficult to find pamphlets to concepts that are explored in Sun Ra's later work, so reading between the lines...
 
 
macrophage
21:56 / 20.05.04
Try looking for stuff by Idries Shah. That's gots all your gene genies and all that mojo.
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
23:17 / 20.05.04
Was Gurdjieff not fairly influenced by Sufism? You might want to check him out. I could be way off, though.
 
 
illmatic
10:09 / 21.05.04
Gurdiefff and Idries Shah are both presenters of Sufism to the West as indeed is Bey/Wilson, though Gurdjieff wove all that stuff into his own system (with various other influences). So none of these are indigenous magic traditons if that's what your looking for, Sax. I supect there might be something folk-magicial there, as shown by my other recollections, but the problem with this stuff is it always occurs on a popular level and often out of site of the academics and ethnographers. Will do some searches and get back to you. Why do you wnat to know anyway?

Gypsy - you can borrow those books off me. I think Waldo Jing might actually be referenced in one of them - I'm not surprised to have him turn up in this discussion...
 
 
illmatic
10:25 / 21.05.04
This page mentions the use of astrology, tailsman and amulets in medieval Islam.

This page gives an orthodox Islamist positon against magick. It has some interesting material on usage of an tailsman written as a charm to protect against magick. Hmm - tailsman? Protection? Sounds suspicously like magic to me, no matter what its provenance...

The general impression I get after having a bit of surf is that, (following Grant), magic as such was frowned upon but there do seem to be practics that could be described as magicial occuring in the name of Allah.
 
 
illmatic
10:28 / 21.05.04
... much as in Christianity. It'd be interesting to know if there was a "cut off point" after which these practices became completly unacceptable.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
11:01 / 21.05.04
On that note, I've been dipping into "Religion and the Decline of Magic" over the last couple of weeks, and the section on the Medeival Church is fascinating. The Church being regarded as a repository of occult power, with parishioners using the elements of the service such as the communion wafer and holy water as amulets. Carrying the wafer for protection, sprinking it over crops to promote a good harvest, etc...

The business of the early church building over older pagan sites, often portrayed in popular occultism as a limiting restrictive endeavour, was seemingly in practice a merging of Christianity with pre-Christian folk magic. Broadly criticised by officials of the high church, but often accepted and embraced by the local priests who were a part of these communities.

Following the Reformation, this popular folk magic of the medeival church was more forcefully supressed, but these practices survived as the stock in trade of cunning folk, active in one form or another till the late 19th century. Interestingly, the kind of popular religiousity that was practiced in England/Europe during the medeival period, with it's reverence of the Saints as masks for older pagan Gods, usage of elements of Catholic ritual in magic, etc.. bears a striking resemblance to religions such as Santeria...
 
 
Sax
13:07 / 21.05.04
That's interesting stuff, folks. Thanks to all, esp Illmatic.

Perhaps you're right, Grand, perhaps I did mean "Arabic magic" as opposed to "Islamic magic". Of course Islam would be opposed to magic. I just wondered if there were any systems or practices which were exclusive to Islamic/pre-Islamic societies.

Out of interest, and our tabloid poet might be able to help here, have there been any "recorded" djinn experiences/sightings in modern times?
 
 
Nalyd Khezr Bey
19:23 / 23.05.04
For info on the Moorish Orthodox Church. That website alone should lead you to all kinds of areas, from Hakim Bey to Austin Osman Spare. Just follow their links.
 
 
Nalyd Khezr Bey
07:09 / 24.05.04
Something else that may be of interest here is a book called The Picatrix. It is an Arabic book of Magick and Astrology. I've heard claims that Lovecraft's Necronomicon may have been loosely based on this book. It is rather expensive to obtain but is worth looking into.
 
 
Sax
07:59 / 24.05.04
You know, you folks are lovely. Don't listen to what they say about you on other fora.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
09:56 / 24.05.04
Saxy - Gypsy's post re: Religion and the Decline of Magic made me think that, as with the Christian church, perhaps it's not so much that Islam is opposed to magic as that it is (or might be, I am v. ignorant about Islam) opposed to magic that it doesn't control... or, in other words, there might be competition between Islam and folk magic over which is a repository of efficacious magic, or efficacious supernatural intervention.

A lot of what Thomas says in Religion and the Decline of Magic is to the effect that the mediaeval Catholic church encouraged belief in the efficacy of magical practices conducted under the auspices of the Church, and then had difficulty making ordinary people distinguish between these and the folk magic which was condemned by the Church. It might be the case that a similar process takes place within Islam. But it might not.
 
 
illmatic
10:52 / 24.05.04
This is kind of what I was trying to get at in my posts above. I'm wondering if the magick of the tribal/indigenous peoples of the area prior to Islam, "negoiated with" or was surpressed by Islamic authority. In one of the links I found the magicial process involved is calling on Allah for protection against an "evil sorceror" - which implies, regardless or not of their actual reality, that sorcerors outside Islamic authority were part of the popular imagination. I bet you could slap a curse on someone in medieval Bagdhad if you knew who to talk to.

Had a look through the Sudhir Kakir book last night. The medical/psychological process of the practioner is also very much framed in terms of fighing evil forces outside of Islamic authority - in this case evil spirits (bala) who're out to DRINK OUR BLOOD.
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
12:20 / 24.05.04
Sounds a bit like the idea of "witchcraft" in medieval europe.
 
 
doctorbeck
14:35 / 25.05.04
plenty of islamic magic going on in the UK, quite often to treat what western empiricists would call mental health problems

at it's most benign it takes the place of amulets containing words from the koran, or drinks made from scrolls containing prayers this stuff is usually to ward off djinns and the like

at it's worse it involves beatings to he point of death of (generally) women thought to have gone bad,
there is also bad islamic magic that can curse or even kill people, practitions quite easily found in big muslim areas, then people who can remove said curses for a fee, tho some work for free

now many imams / priests in the UK preach against this magic (except maybe the amulets) but many practitioners in the UK cite Koranic sources for thie work. i am not sure how the 'baddies' square it with their beliefs but it is certainly true that a massive percentage of the UKs mulsim population believes in this stuff, and that the better mental health workers work with it rather than against it

sorry i don't have links to anything more but hope this is of interest


andrew
 
 
illmatic
07:22 / 26.05.04
Thanks very much for that, that's fascinating. Sounds much the same as the doc ("pir" they're called) I mentioned above. Heard of several cases like that but didn't make the connection - note to anybody in London (especially out East) pick up a free paper, the pages at the back are often stuffed with adverts from various "docs" offering all these kinds of services. I hadn't connected this with Islam before but I don't see why not, bearing in mind the point of origin of the practioners (lots of North African guys). Also, a walk around Brixton Market brings up botanicas and several "docshops" from a different traditon. Magick - alive and well, off the occult scene, it seems. I wonder how long till we see a Kilroy style expose?
 
 
aluhks SMASH!
07:37 / 28.05.04
for a medieval view of arabic/islamic magic, you might want to check out a book called Secret of Secrets. It's a (fake) letter from Aristotle to Alexander that contains tons of magical practices. There's a huge section towards the end about talismanic astrology. It also ended up being one of the most popular books in medieval Europe (600 or so Latin manuscripts remain). The Aristotle part is totally made up though, as the oldest known copies and fragmentary texts are in Arabic, dated to the 8th or 9th century or so.

Something to file along with Picatrix.
 
 
Unconditional Love
20:49 / 06.06.04
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/arabic/astrology2.html

click the above illustration.

http://www.renaissanceastrology.com/picatrix.html

picatrix, with selections from it.above.

http://www.alinaam.org.za/library/sihr.htm

jadoo...... above islamic ideas on black magic,knot tying with hair etc.

http://www.si.umich.edu/CHICO/amulets/home.html

amulets above.

http://www.luckymojo.com/hamsahand.html

http://web.onramp.ca/cadd/723aga.htm

jadoo means magic.
 
 
Sax
12:51 / 07.06.04
Thanks for those links.
 
  
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