การปฏิบัติการล้างหมึกWashing off the ink

Islamic legal writing draws a fine line through this. Remke Kruk, summarising how close the approved and disapproved practices sit, notes that dissolving Quranic texts written on paper in water is forbidden, while the well-known Wahhabi-oriented cleric Wahid 'Abd al-Salam Bali recommends, in the cited account's words, writing in bowls with ink that is washed off by the water poured into the bowl. The same body of practice records treating a stomach ache by drinking water over which Quranic passages have been recited, and prescribes, for the condition called sihr al-nazif, drinking water over which an incantation has been recited and bathing in it for three days.

The Philippines has a swallowed branch of its own. An agimat can take the form of consumable enchanted mud, putik in Tagalog, and a mutya — described in one account as a drop of liquid taken from the heart of a banana tree at midnight — is ingested rather than worn.

Inference — this practice is the reason a survey of amulets built from museum collections will always undercount written charms. A takrut rolled into metal lasts a thousand years; the same verse written to be washed off lasts a minute and leaves a person, not an object. Where a tradition uses both, the collections show one and not the other.

It is worth marking what this record does not claim. Mesopotamian incantation bowls, which are the other famous case of writing inside a bowl, were buried face down under thresholds in the accounts read here, not washed and drunk, and nothing in those accounts connects the two customs.

Public structure only: a text is written on a surface chosen so the ink will lift — the inside of a bowl, a wooden slate — water is poured on, and the water is drunk or used for washing. Which text is written, and by whom, is the part the traditions govern, and this record does not set it out.

Live and contested inside Islam. The practices of healers who claim to speak with jinn to cure or prevent the evil eye are held by some conservative Muslims to be shirk, a serious sin; the cited account sets out how narrow the difference between approved and disapproved practice can be, with the washing-off method on the approved side of the line drawn by the cleric it names. This atlas reports that disagreement between Muslim authorities and takes no side in it.