เครื่องรางฮัมซา (มือกันภัย)Hamsaخمسة

The open hand is old in the Near East and the line back from the modern object is argued rather than established. Amulets of the hand of Ishtar were used in Mesopotamia and Babylon to keep evil or disease out of a building. An Iron Age tomb at Khirbet el-Qom in Judah carries an engraved hand beside an inscription, generally read as protective in a funerary setting, though the exact meaning is debated. Another line runs to the Mano Pantea, known to ancient Egyptians as the Two Fingers, where the two fingers are Isis and Osiris and the thumb is Horus, used to call a parent's protection over a child.

Eva-Maria von Kemnitz traces the medieval route in one sentence: "the Berbers brought the khamsa to al-Andalūs. Later, the expelled Muslim and Jewish population took it back to North Africa, introducing different motifs and techniques." In al-Andalus its use as an amulet is well documented from the thirteenth century on. Among the Moriscos of Granada, khamsa pendants were described as large engraved medals with a hand inscribed with letters — likely Qur'anic verses. A reform council banned them as Islamic symbols in 1526 and ordered crosses in their place; the Synod of Guadix renewed the prohibition in 1554. Christians wore them anyway, and a Nasrid-period gold pendant survives inscribed Ave Maria gratia plena.

The disagreement is live and it is not between insiders and outsiders. Von Kemnitz, citing Bruno Barbatti, calls the hamsa the most important apotropaic sign in the Islamic world. Salafi authorities reject it: one fatwa states that hanging the khamsa is impermissible, and another lists hands of Fatima among prohibited amulets. In Shia Islam the five fingers are read as the panjtan — Muhammad, Ali, Fatimah, Hasan, Husayn — with invocations written on the fingers, and the open palm became an emblem in Muharram processions and on ʿalams. In Judaism the hand doubles as the letter shin, first letter of Shaddai; Shalom Sabar suggests Jews exiled from Spain in 1492 carried it as protection into the countries they reached, while noting the assumption is hard to prove.

What people say while using it is the plainest evidence of what they take it for. Khamsa fi ainek — 'five [fingers] in your eye' — said while raising the right palm, fingers slightly apart, to blind the aggressor. Khamsa wa-khamis, 'five and Thursday'. Or the whole formula with the spitting sound: "Khamsa, Khamsa, Khamsa, tfu, tfu, tfu."

The hamsa is one of Algeria's national symbols and appears in its emblem. In Egypt it is the most popular amulet against the evil eye, ahead of the eye itself and the hirz; women in baladi quarters make khamaysa, five objects — peppers, hands, circles, stars — hung from hooks on a child's hair or black apron. Its use fell away in some places during periods of modernisation and came back as a secular good-luck charm: necklaces, keychains, postcards, lottery cards, advertisements, tilework, wall decorations. It was added to Unicode as U+1FAAC in 2021.