Islamic Occultism

“Muslims” and “Dungeons & Dragons” are rarely discussed in the same sentence. However, one of the earliest fantasy role‐playing games, which left a lasting impact on the industry, was the brainchild of Muhammad Abd al‐Rahman (Phillip) Barker (1929‐2012), a professor of South Asian Studies, an expert in Native American languages, and an American convert to Islam. Like Tolkien, Barker created an enormous fantasy world; however, unlike Tolkien, his world was redolent with Native American and South Asian cultural and religious influences. Through this world, he shared with his fans a nuanced understanding of non‐Western societies, cultures, and beliefs – the facets of the human experience that truly constitute multiculturalism. While fictional religion in role‐playing games has been feared and condemned, fictional religion (and occultism) plays a pivotal role in Barker's work; an exploration of his approach towards fictional religion also sheds more light on the question of why fantasy role‐playing games came across as competitors towards religion. Barker's fantasy world brought people of diverse backgrounds together in a beautiful demonstration of how fantasy and science fiction can bring about intercultural and interreligious tolerance in an otherwise intolerant world. Given the centrality of games such as Dungeons & Dragons to American popular culture, an exploration of Barker's legacy can also be seen in the light of the study of the history and contributions of Muslims in America.

A detailed commentary and analysis of the Medieval Islamic philosopher Al-Kindi’s magical treatise ‘On Rays’ (also known as ‘On The Stellar Rays’ and ‘The Theory of The Magical Arts’). In this independent research project, I have attempted to describe and explain the content of the treatise in depth, and also explore its connections with other esoteric traditions, from Islamic mysticism and Sufism, to Hermeticism and Western occultism. My aim in producing this work is to revive this fascinating yet generally unknown text, as this has not been done in full since Zoller and Hand’s full English translation of the text in 1993. It has also been an opportunity for me to practice and develop my own research skills and academic writing before I begin my undergraduate degree later this year.

24Hrs Love Spell Casting // Instant death spell to kill enemy. Call or WhatsApp Dr IYEUMAH now+2348119136705. Best Africa voodoo spell Caster that work faster.
Call & WhatsApp Dr IYEUMAH +2348119136705. For Instant Love Spell, Death Spell, Revenge Spell, Divorce Spell, Online Get Lost Love Back Astrologer IN UK USA AUSTRALIA INDIA NORWAY GERMANY TURKEY ITALY SPAIN FRANCE.UK,UAE, DUBAI, CANADA, ENGLAND,{+2348119136705} SINGAPORE, NEWZEALAND, MALAYSIA.. Get back your lost love, how to get my ex- back, how to get my love back, Fertility/Pregnancy Spell, Spells for Divorce, Marriage Spell, Divorce Psychic, Love spells, Lost Love spells, Breakup spells, Protection, Reunite us, Attraction spells, Psychic, herbalist, Traditional healers, Sangoma, Native healers, Herbalist healers, Herbalist Doctors, Witch doctor
Online Revenge on Ex,
Get Ex-lover Back Online,
Love Spell Specialist
Spell to Win All Court Cases.
Work Spell
Attraction spells
Election Winning Spell
Promotion Spell
Business Boom Spell
Revenge Spell Specialist
Death Spell
Fertility Spell
EX Removal
Reunite us
Break-Up Spell
Fertility/Pregnancy Spell
Reach Out For Help via:
Call & Whatsapp+2348119136705
Email: driyeumah14demons@gmail.com

غالبًا ما تسمّى معتقدات الشّعوب البدائيّة عن الطّبيعة بـ (الخرافيّة أوالأسطوريّة)، وتوصف ممارساتهم السّحريّة بـ (الدّجل والشّعوذة)، خاصّة مع ارتباطها الواضح بالمعتقدات الدّينيّة، ولمّا كانت الأديان التّوحيديّة رافضة لهذه المعتقدات ومحاربة تلك الممارسات، حُسِب لها فضل كبير بتخليص البشريّة من التّفكير الخرافيّ، ودفعه خطوات إلى الأمام نحو التّفكير العقليّ والعلميّ، فهل هذا صحيح؟ وهل لعبت الأديان هذا الدّور فعلًا؟ أم إنّ العكس هو ما حدث؟ نناقش في هذا البحث الدّور المهمّ الّذي لعبه السّحر في تاريخ العلم، والعلاقة السّيئة الّتي كانت بينه وبين الدّين، خاصّة، الدّين الإسلاميّ الّتي انعكست سلبًا على مسيرة العلم.

In recent years, we have witnessed an efflorescence of research on Islamic esoteric traditions and occult thought. Such scholarly activity established that occultism is a part of Islamic intellectual history that cannot be overlooked; rather it illuminates an essential aspect of the way people thought about the hidden, the extraordinary, and their potential for partaking in the divine and wondrous. Occult beliefs are embedded in philosophical, scientific, and religious discourses and in this chapter I consider the adaptations and modifications of the metaphysical elements that underpinned occult practices in medieval Islam (eighth to thirteenth centuries), particularly in their relation to the ways whereby nature and the divine were perceived and experienced. I argue that medieval Islamic occult philosophy distinguished the practices it supported from forbidden siḥr or sorcery by identifying legitimate conditions of acquiring power based on two paradigms: association with natural philosophy, and/or an affiliation with mysticism. A shift of emphasis occurred in the medieval period: from the eighth to the eleventh centuries, legitimisation of occult practices derived mainly from natural philosophy, stressing causation and knowledge of signs as the core principles of magical efficacy. Towards the thirteenth century occult practices began to derive their justifications from Sufi doctrines. In the first case, by and large, magic was deemed natural as it functioned according to a causality proven empirically and understood rationally; however, later, the power of extraordinary acts, including magic, became the prerogative of mystics achieved through non-rationalised revelation and contact with the divine, all of which undermined natural causality and transformed the signs from indicators of natural links to tokens of God and supernatural agents that mediate between Him and the mystic.

The Arabic original of the ninth-century pseudo-Platonic Kitāb al-Nawāmīs (The Book of Sacred Secrets) has not been discovered save for fragments from Paris arabe 2577 ff. 104-5, containing only three chapters.  Through a Latin translation completed in twelfth-century Spain we have access to a fuller version of the work. One of the titles given to this translation is the Liber Vaccae (The Book of the Cow) derived from its most notorious experiments that involve the gruesome slaughtering and mutilation of a cow to magically produce a rational animal or bees.  The work contains recipes or experiments for causing extraordinary transformations such as splitting the moon in half, causing the appearance of incredible giants, and prestidigitation. Recent scholarly research on the Liber Vaccae has focused mostly on its reception in medieval and early modern Europe.  This article explores the Indo-Arabic tradition to which Kitāb al-Nawāmīs belonged by associating it with a cluster of related works: Kitāb al-Tajmīʿ (The Book of Assembling) attributed to Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (c. 721-815), Ġāyat al-Ḥakīm (The Goal of the Wise) of  Maslama al-Qurtubī (d. 964), Kitāb al-Sumūm (The Book of Poisons) by Ibn Waḥshiyya (fl. 10th century), and finally ʿUyūn al-Ḥaqāʾiq wa Īḏāḥ al-Ṭarāʾiq (The Quiddities of Truths and the Explication of Paths) of Abu al-Qāsim al-ʿIrāqī (d. c. 1260) . The first two texts have been studied in relation to the Liber Vaccae by David Pingree, MaaikeVan der Lugt, Sophie Page, and William Newman; their findings will be re-evaluated under the light of the aforementioned texts of Ibn Waḥshiyya and al-ʿIrāqī which offer new links that inform us further about the prevalence and influence of the ideas contained in Kitāb al-Nawāmīs.

The Ifrīqiyan cum Cairene Sufi Aḥmad al-Būnī is a key figure in the history of the Islamic occult sciences, particularly with regard to the “science of letters and names” (ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-asmāʾ). This paper examines his lettrist treatise Laṭāʾif al-ishārāt fī al-ḥurūf al-ʿulwīyāt (The Subtleties of the Allusions regarding the Superior Letters) to argue that parts of it amount to an esotericist unveiling of the hidden realities underlying “profane” astrology. In doing so al-Būnī identifies the world-shaping efflux of forces from the celestial spheres with the continuous flow of the letters of God’s creative speech, and implies a central role for Sufi saints and adepts in mediating these astral-lettristic radiations, adding a uniquely occult-scientific twist to views deeply embedded in Sufi tradition of the saints as key executors of God’s word and will on earth. In the conclusion, al-Būnī’s approach to astrology is discussed as part of a transconfessional wave of esotericism in the late-medieval Mediterranean, one that heralded shifting ideas about the order of nature and the relationship between divine and human agency.

Keywords:
Al-Būnī, astrology, esotericism, occultism, science of letters, Ibn al-ʿArabī, Arabic manuscripts, Kabbalah, 13th century, Mediterranean, intellectual history

The divinatory art of geomancy (ʿilm al-raml), Arabic answer to the I Ching, was third in popularity only to astrology and oneiromancy throughout the premodern Islamo-Christianate world, and is still widely practiced today from Iran and Yemen to west Africa and Madagascar. Despite its ubiquity among scholarly and ruling elites, however, the reflexive scholarly elision of occultism from Islamicate intellectual and cultural history means that this science has been very poorly studied beyond its reception by Europe. This holds especially true for the early modern Persianate world: in the wake of the occultist renaissance that swept the Islamicate heartlands from the late 8th/14th century onward, geomancers emerged as influential fixtures at Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman courts, and geomancy, offering detailed knowledge of past, present and future, was widely lionized as a means for controlling history—yet the subject remains almost untouched. And despite its status as a mathematical occult science predicated on a neoplatonic-neopythagorean system and animated by the twin principles of correspondence and secondary causation, its importance to the history of science has likewise only been recognized in its European context. Extending the work of Emilie Savage-Smith, Marion B. Smith and others, I therefore provide the first survey, necessarily tentative, of the development of geomantic theory and practice in the persophone world from the 7th/13th century onward, when Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (d. 672/1274) inaugurated a specifically Persianate geomantic tradition for the benefit of his Mongol patron Hülegü. With Ṭūsī as precedent, geomancy went on to exercise some of the best minds of the early modern Persianate world as a mainstream occult-scientific tradition, and enjoyed a crescendo of popularity in the 10th/16th century with the approach of the Islamic millennium. After sketching the development of the eastern geomantic tradition, then, I identify the philosophical-scientific reasons for its great vitality and cultural prestige down to the present, with particular attention to authors on geomancy like Luṭf Allāh Nīshāpūrī Samarqandī (fl. 812/1409), Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī (d. 858/1454), Shams al-Dīn Khafrī (d. 942/1535) and Hidāyat Allāh Munajjim-i Shīrāzī (fl. 1001/1593), court geomancer to Emperor Akbar at the turn of the millennium.

The Antiochene occultist, littérateur, and professional court intellectual ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī (d. 858/1454) is best known as someone whose writings influenced Ottoman thought and ideologies of rule during and beyond his lifetime. It is argued here that al-Bisṭāmī’s writings shed important light on Mamlūk intellectual history as well, particularly regarding the rising interest in occultism in the Mamlūk cities of the late-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—including at the court of the sultan al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Barqūq. Attention is paid to al-Bisṭāmī’s major work on the occult “science of letters and names” (ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-al-asmāʾ), Shams al-afaq fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-al-awfāq, which is approached as an “encyclopedic” work structurally reflective of major trends in Mamlūk thought and literature despite its seemingly obscure topic. The focus is on al-Bisṭāmī’s account of his initiation into the science of letters and names among various teachers in Cairo, Damascus, and Alexandria, and what this account reveals not only of the bustling occult scene in these cities, but also of broader changes that were afoot in Mamlūk learned society, especially with regard to issues of manuscript culture.

This article investigates the role of magic in the confessional identity of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā as it is articulated in the 52nd epistle on magic, and informed by the rest of their Rasāʾil (Epistles). To achieve this, the author revisits the long scholarly tradition of speculation about their denominational commitment that has seen them affiliated one way or the other to Ismailism, seeing its esoteric foundations as the platform onto which their magic and astrology were cultivated. Rather this article argues that the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ aimed with their Rasāʾil to establish an anti-sectarian religio-political reform that they refer to as the Third Way. Its strategy comprises: reconciling revelation and philosophy; valuing the message of religions other than Islam (Christianity, Judaism, Brahmans, and Sabians); and addressing some Shiʿa specific practices and doctrines which it scrutinizes. The Ikhwān mitigate the doctrinal boundaries between Shiʿism and other denominations by adopting a more equable position which is consonant with Zaydi and Ibadi attitudes toward the contentious issues of imamate, caliphate, and wilāya/walāya. So, the Ikhwān see magic as the conceptual and practical pivot of the Third Way, since it is the culmination of philosophy and revelation, becoming a suitable concept to signify the self-enlightenment of the accountable imam achieved through knowledge of the Divine and Nature and the abandonment of physical attachment, which constitute the only conditions of legitimacy. It is also an appropriate tool for regulating state guardianship and sublimating the temporal state itself into a sacred city instead of investing sacral power into a single person.

The genre of the plague treatise, still little studied, testifies to the cultural transformations that swept western Eurasia after the Black Death apocalypse of the mid-fourteenth century, with recurrent outbreaks for centuries thereafter. Ottoman contributions to this genre are exemplary: they allow us to track the emergence of an imperial-scientific early modernity. This article presents the most comprehensive and innovative Islamicate plague treatise extant, Taşköprīzāde Aḥmed’s (d. 1561) Treatise on Healing Epidemic Diseases. Therein the celebrated Ottoman polymath makes a strong case, advanced by arguments both religious and rational, for occult science as the most empirical method for preventing and curing the plague. To this end, he devotes the theoretical first half of the treatise to a critique of fatalist scholars and sufis, who prefer tawakkul to tasabbub, or blind faith to “scientific method”; the practical second half is devoted to what he considers to be the most medically effective scientific discipline of his era, lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf)—a Neopythagorean science encapsulating the new “cosmological imaginary” of Western early modernity generally, wherein the world was seen by many thinkers and doers as a mathematical and hence magically tractable text. Our distaste for occult science notwithstanding, Taşköprīzāde must here be named another early modern empiricist.

Spiritism reached the Ottoman Empire very quickly via the European and Levantine communities in Istanbul in the 1850s. At the outset of 1910, spiritism had become a very popular topic in the press. Spiritist publishing burst in Ottoman Turkish is connected to the environment of a more or less liberal press in the aftermath of the Young Turk revolution of 1908. As was the case in the history of spiritism elsewhere, in the Ottoman Empire reactions against spiritism came mainly from two intellectual circles: the positivistic (or scientific and materialist) ones and the non-positivistic (or religious-spiritual and anti-materialist) ones. Besides, all this spiritist, para-spiritist and anti-spiritist publishing activity involved a respective translation activity into Ottoman Turkish, which enhanced cultural transfer processes.

This brief monograph is a close examination of the chapter dealing with the occult “science of letters and names” (ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-l-asmāʾ) in the sixth faṣl of Ibn Khaldūn’s (d. 808/1406) famous al-Muqaddimah. It is argued that his views on this Sufi occult discourse are best understood in light of a rising tide of interest in lettrism, other occult disciplines, and millenarianism among the learned classes of eighth/fourteenth century Cairo, especially at the court of his patron, the Mamluk sultan al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Barqūq. On the basis of multiple recensions of the work, the text is approached as one that the author adapted over time according to his shifting personal situation and contentions with various interlocutors. Particular attention is paid to Süleymaniye MS Damad Ibrahim 863, the recension prepared for donation to Barqūq’s sultanal library. A critical edition of the chapter on lettrism as it appears in that manuscript is included, as well as a new translation of the chapter.

86 pages.
ISBN 978-3-86893-290-4.
Available from EB Verlag: https://www.ebv-berlin.de/epages/15494902.sf/de_DE/?ObjectPath=/Shops/15494902/Products/%22ISBN%20978-3-86893-290-4%22

While the study of Safavid philosophy has burgeoned in recent decades, and its heavily Neoplatonic and antiquarian-perennialist tenor is widely recognized, few specialists have acknowledged its equally notable Neopythagorean turn. Due to endemic scholarly occultophobia, moreover, that the primary mode of applied Neoplatonic-Neopythagorean philosophy as a Safavid imperial way of life was precisely occult science has been ignored altogether, making impossible a history of its practice. To begin to fill both of these major lacunae, I here take Mīr Dāmād (d. 1631) as a representative case study: for the Third Teacher (muʿallim-i sālis) was largely responsible for this Neopythagoreanization of Safavid philosophy, and like his equally influential Safavid colleagues Shaykh Bahāʾī (d. 1621) and Mīr Findiriskī (d. 1640) famed down to the present as an occult scientist. He was likewise responsible for the remarkable transmogrification of Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037) himself—no booster of the occult sciences—into a Neopythagorean-occultist. To this end, the Astarabadi sage-mage espoused a peculiarly Timurid-Aqquyunlu brand of philosophical lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf), developed first by Ibn Turka (d. 1432) and seconded by Davānī (d. 1502), in at least three of his many works; this includes in the first place Firebrands and Meeting Places (Jaẕavāt u mavāqīt), commissioned by Shah ʿAbbās I (r. 1587-1629), an ornate Persian summa of his philosophical system as whole. Davānī, of course, is known to be a major source for Safavid philosophy, though never yet as a lettrist; and Ibn Turka, foremost occult philosopher of Timurid Iran, has been almost entirely elided from the historiography to date. Most importantly for the purposes of his Safavid heirs, nevertheless, the latter in particular, an outspokenly Sunni imamophile, was responsible for systematizing and recasting lettrism in both Alid and perennialist terms in a way that made it immediately utilizable by Twelver Shiʿi scholars: simultaneously a patrimony of Pythagoras, chief disciple of the prophet-king Solomon, and ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, sole vector of sacral power (walāya) during the Islamic dispensation—and hence epitome of occult-scientific, mathematical genius.
    The example of Mīr Dāmād thus suggests we cannot hope to understand the intellectual and religiopolitical history of Safavid Iran, its reverberations to the present or the nature of its continuity with Timurid-Aqquyunlu precedent without understanding the crucial role of occultism generally and lettrism specifically in the construction of a new Safavid imperial culture, and indeed in the transformative—and paradoxically perennialist and Sunnizing—Shiʿization of Iran. As for its place in Western intellectual history and history of science more broadly, facile colonialist-orientalist narratives of Islamo-Christianate rupture aside: Mīr Dāmād and his fellow neopythagoreanizing lettrists must now be restored to the master mathesis narrative, whereby scientific modernity is but the upshot of the (occult-)philosophical penchant, peculiar to early modern Western thinkers, for reading the world as a mathematical text.

This study discusses the work entitled ‘Acebü’l-‘Uccāb (lit. The Most Marvelous among Marvelous Things) written in 1438 by Mahmud bin Kadı Manyas, also known as Manyasoğlu, contextualizing it in the lettrist trends of the Islamic world and Ottoman literary politics of the early fifteenth century. At this time, Ottoman intellectuals translated works from Arabic and Persian, commenting on, excerpting, and rearranging them to instruct Turkophone readers in various sciences and transmit the knowledge from the wider Islamic world. This period also coincided with the dissemination of lettrist practices, as well as proliferation of messianic ideas and movements with different political agendas. The courts, including Ottoman, sponsored occultist cosmopolitan intellectuals who viewed lettrism as a ―queen science‖ of the impending messianic age. It is against this background that the thesis approaches Manyasoğlu‘s work that was compiled and presented to Ottoman sultan Murad II in 1438. The thesis argues that ‘Acebü’l-‘Uccāb differs from contemporary lettrist and occultist works because it largely disregards millennialist, messianic, gnostic and Sufi perspectives, and focuses more on the experimental and replicable nature of the occult practices than a mystical chain of transmission. Moreover, it strives to activate occult properties for the practitioner‘s benefit rather than solve the theoretical problems of the cosmos. By juxtaposing it to the contemporary ―cosmopolitan‖ occult works, the thesis argues that this lettrist text reflected Manyasoğlu‘s vernacular authorial strategies not only in terms of language but practice of the occult as well.

A response to the editors' response to my review essay, in MRW 14/2, on Sebastian Günther and Dorothee Pielow, eds., Die Geheimnisse der oberen und der unteren Welt: Magie im Islam zwischen Glaube und Wissenschaft (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Their response is here:

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/760667 .

My original essay is here:

https://www.academia.edu/41490499/Magic_in_Islam_between_Religion_and_Science .

[This study deals with the nineteenth-century Ottoman Sufi community of the Melâmiyye. It is the history of a social group for which modernization meant a crisis, which it sought to overcome with the help of trance and imaginary self-exaltation. Based on the texts of outstanding Melâmîs and the earliest critical observations, social and intellectual history are combined here in a way that reveals the general situation of Sufism in Turkey at the beginning of the Republican era.]

Diese Untersuchung handelt von der im 19. Jahrhundert entstandenen osmanischen Sufi-Gemeinschaft der Melâmiyye. Sie zeichnet die Geschichte einer Glaubensgruppe, für die die Modernisierung eine Daseinskrise bedeutete, welche sie mithilfe ekstatischer Mittel und imaginierter Selbsterhöhung zu bewältigen suchte. Ausgehend von den Texten herausragender Melâmîs sowie der frühesten Rezipienten wird hier Sozial- und Ideengeschichte auf eine Weise kombiniert, die den Blick auf die allgemeine Situation des Sufismus in der Türkei zu Beginn der Ära Atatürk freigibt.

The successors of Amir Temür (r. 1370-1405), supreme Lord of Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān), developed a distinctive form of saint-philosopher-kingship without precedent in Islamic history. Most notably, as part and parcel of their universalist-imperialist quest to transcend binaries political (caliphate vs. sultanate) and epistemological (ẓāhir vs. bāṭin) in equal measure, they fashioned themselves absolutist astrocrats, capable of talismanically marrying heaven to earth, by means of a personal mastery of astronomy-astrology. Of manifest political utility, the science of the stars had attracted the perennial interest of ruling elites since antiquity, to be sure; but these Timurid rulers were the first to pursue it within an explicitly lettrist-neopythagorean framework—whence the dual astrological-lettrist platform undergirding Timurid claims to imperial universalism, which definitively timuridized the very title ṣāḥib-qirān; and whence the mathematization of astronomy by the members of the Samarkand Observatory, a revolutionary development much feted by historians of science. Thus institutionalized, this same (occult-)scientific platform remained an effective means of performing a specifically Timurid mode of sovereignty throughout the Persianate world until at least the mid-17th century, and especially in Mughal India.

This article discusses the personal scientific output and patronage programs of two Timurid philosopher-kings: Iskandar Sulṭān b. ʿUmar Shaykh b. Temür (r. 1409-14), hugely ambitious (if soon foiled) patron of the sciences of stars and letters, who authored the preface to a state-of-the-art manual of mathematical astronomy (and perhaps the manual itself), the Sultanic Compendium (Jāmiʿ-i Sulṭānī); and his more successful cousin Ulugh Beg b. Shāhrukh b. Temür (r. 1409-49), founder of the Samarkand Observatory and Madrasa complex and co-author of the crucial New Sultanic Star Tables (Zīj-i Jadīd-i Sulṭānī), who was hailed by his astronomer and lettrist patronees as messianic sultan-scientist (al-sulṭān al-faylasūf). Intriguingly, while the intellectual-imperial projects of both men are indeed unprecedented in the Islamicate context, they may be said to islamicize—perhaps consciously—the classical model of Archytas (Arkhūṭas, d. 347 BCE), ruler of the powerful Greek city-state Tarentum and leading pythagorean philosopher, who too was a mathematician-astronomer king. Nor do they seem to have had true successors: no subsequent Turko-Mongol Perso-Islamic sovereign is known to have personally authored scientific texts in the quest to mathematize the cosmos.

Nevertheless, the model established by Iskandar Sulṭān and Ulugh Beg ensured that astronomy-astrology and lettrism in particular would continue to be heavily patronized by subsequent Timurid, and Indo-Timurid, dynasts (as well as their Safavid and Ottoman competitors). This includes in the first place Emperor Akbar’s grandson Shāhjahān (r. 1628-57), self-proclaimed Second Lord of Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān-i sānī), who commissioned upon his accession the Zīj-i Shāhjahānī, an updated and corrected version of Ulugh Beg’s star tables of two centuries prior; tellingly, it features the first preface in the Arabo-Persian astronomical tradition to be explicitly lettrist in tenor. The same feature is shared by the preface to the Supreme Secret (Sirr-i Akbar), a much-celebrated Persian translation of the Upanishads, the first, by Shāhjahān’s son Dārā Shukūh (d. 1659), concordist author of a number of other works. This famed but ill-starred saint-prince, who was executed by his more politically and militarily astute brother Awrangzēb after a failed succession bid, did prefer sufism to astral science; but his casting of Hindu tawḥīd in lettrist terms was similarly calculated, I argue, to signal his performance of Timurid sovereignty.

Such authorial evidence suggests that the neopythagorean worldview of our royal actors must be taken far more seriously than it has been to date; that they held the cosmos itself to be a mathematical text to be riddled by scientists of stars and letters alone explains the contours of their remarkable intellectual-imperial projects. And if the world is indeed a text, it also demands to be written, preferably in marble: may we thus not style Shāhjahān himself author of the unparalleled cosmographical logogriph (muʿammā)—which poetical genre was made a mainstay of lettrist practice precisely by Timurid scholars—that is the Tāj Maḥal?

15th December 2021, 5 pm CET.

The 9th century intellectual Abū Maʻshar al-Balkhī (d. 886) is considered one of the most influential astrologers both across the Islamic world and in Europe, with followers and interpreters amongst the likes of Albert the Great, Roger Bacon and Pico della Mirandola. An exceptional synthesis of Pahlavi, Sanskrit and Syriac philosophical, astronomical and theurgical traditions, Abū Maʻshar's arguments also build on Aristotelian emanationist theories as expounded in contemporaneous Harranian Sabean writings, proving essential for the development of astral magic and talismanic theurgy. This paper explores some of these ideas and their reach through a close analysis of two late 14th century fragments of Abū Maʻshar's Kitāb al-mawālīd ('Book of Nativities') linked to the patronage of Sultan Aḥmad Jalayir (r. 1382-1410). As these represent the earliest illustrated versions of the Kitāb al-mawālīd, particular attention will be given to their pictorial programmes and the ways in which images articulate and communicate knowledge. The paper will also consider the inclusion of both fragments in majmu'a, that is, anthologies of texts, and draw parallels with the princely compilations of occultist knowledge in early 15th century Timurid Iran in order to reflect on the growing importance accorded to the 'ulūm al-gharība in royal circles.

Registration:
https://oeaw-ac-at.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_kCcBj-TaS_2W7G41ZTvCQg