สัญลักษณ์ฝ่ามือเปิด (ฮัมซา)The open palmخمسة

Five is the count and the name. The standard Arabic term is khamsa, five, with Maghrebi khmisa beside it. Hand of Fatima is a French colonial nickname, popularised by Europeans in North Africa rather than used in Arabic; in colonial-era French, fatma meant a Muslim or Arab woman. Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews say hand of Miriam. Levantine Christians say kef Miryam, hand of Mary. Berber afus just means hand.

Inside the Islamic world the amulet's documented use sits in the west — the Maghreb and historic al-Andalus — and is sparse in the Mashriq, where a hand in ritual use more often belongs to Shi'i iconography and not to this tradition. Von Kemnitz traces the route: Berbers brought the khamsa to al-Andalus; the expelled Muslim and Jewish population carried it back to North Africa with new motifs and techniques. In al-Andalus its use as an amulet is well documented from the thirteenth century.

The sign has an Egyptian claimant too. One account connects the khamsa with the Mano Pantea, an amulet Egyptians knew as the Two Fingers, where the two fingers stand for Isis and Osiris and the thumb for their child Horus, invoking a parent's protection over a child. Inference — that is a theory of origin, offered as one among several, and this atlas prints it as a theory.

In Jewish use the hand doubles as the letter shin, first letter of Shaddai, a name of God — one sign carrying two readings at once. It decorates ketubot and Torah pointers. It largely dropped out of Ashkenazi use by the mid-twentieth century and stayed in Sephardi and Mizrahi practice throughout.

Sold everywhere on the Mediterranean rim and online, in silver, in enamel, on phone cases and on keyrings, worn by people with no tie to any of the five naming communities. Whether a mass-produced khamsa is the same object as a Moroccan silversmith's is an argument with named people on both sides; this atlas reports it and does not settle it.