Magic in Islam: The Material Life of the Unseen
The study of Islam within anthropology has long wrestled with the categories of “religion,” “magic,” and “science.” Classical ethnographies tended to treat “Islamic magic” as a residue of pre-Islamic belief or as evidence of local syncretism. More recent scholarship, however, argues that so-called magical practices are integral to how Muslims engage the unseen (al-ghayb)—not as superstition, but as embodied theology.
Across the Islamic world, practices involving amulets (ḥijāb), talismans (ṭilasm), spirit communication, and Qurʾānic healing operate within the same cosmological framework that grounds prayer and revelation. In West Africa, marabouts inscribe Qurʾānic verses on metal or paper to create portable charms for protection or fertility. In Morocco and Sudan, faqīhs and Sufi healers perform exorcisms combining recitation, smoke, and rhythmic invocation. South Asian pīrs and ʿālims produce numerological talismans (wafq squares) based on the Abjad letter system, invoking both divine names and celestial correspondences. These practices share an epistemology in which words, numbers, and substances carry metaphysical potency—the cosmos itself conceived as a text written in divine signs.
Texts such as Aḥmad al-Būnī’s Shams al-Maʿārif al-kubrā (13th century) exemplify an Islamic occultism that merges Qurʾānic recitation, mathematics, astrology, and angelology. For practitioners, these acts are not siḥr (sorcery) in the Qurʾānic sense, but ʿilm (knowledge)—a disciplined engagement with the divine order. Authority is often grounded in barakah (blessing), piety, or lineage, and the boundary between licit spiritual science and forbidden sorcery remains locally negotiated rather than universally fixed.
From an anthropological standpoint, Islamic magical practice demonstrates how Muslims render metaphysics tangible. The written verse folded into an amulet, the numerical diagram inscribed with saffron ink, or the recited divine name repeated in ritual isolation are all attempts to make divine speech efficacious in material form. “Magic,” then, is less a heretical deviation than a modality of Islamic material religion—a way of transforming text, sound, and intention into agents of healing, protection, and meaning.
To study magic in Islam is therefore to trace how revelation becomes practice, how scripture becomes object, and how believers inhabit a universe where the sacred and the technical are never entirely apart.
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