สายความเชื่อศาสตร์เครื่องรางอิสลาม (ฏิลัสม์)Islamic talismanic craftطِلَسْم

The scale is not marginal. Belief and practice in magic in Islam has been described by scholars of the subject as widespread and pervasive, and as a vital element of everyday life and practice, historically and now. Sixty-six Qur'anic verses are reported to bear on the subject, and the Qur'an describes magic in a negative light — but does not forbid it or prescribe a punishment for it. Three suras carry protective use in the tradition's own account: al-Falaq (113), used as a prayer to God against black magic and, per hadith literature, revealed to Muhammad to protect him against Jann, the ancestor of the jinn; al-Fatiha (1) and an-Nas (114), held to generate barakah, blessing. Ayat al-Kursi, the Throne Verse at al-Baqara 2:255, is the verse the tradition names as the verse of protection, and it is the one written on amulets more than any other.

The craft has a history with dates in it. Until the ninth century, talismans often reflect pre-Islamic artistry. From the 12th century, for reasons the scholarship does not settle, pre-Islamic designs drop out in favour of the pentagram, the Seal of Solomon and zodiacal signs — and above all the wafq, the magic square. The earliest are 3×3 squares of the numerals 1 to 9 summing to 15 in every line, a square the tradition associated with the four archangels; 6×6 squares are attested by the late tenth century but do not enter the magical vocabulary until the thirteenth. Thabit ibn Qurra, the tenth-century Abbasid mathematician, was treated as the authority: 'The noblest part of astronomy is the science of talismans.' Talismanic shirts survive only from the 15th century, though the tradition is held to predate them.

The argument about whether any of this is permitted is internal, old, live, and conducted by name. This atlas reports it and joins neither side. Tobias Nünlist's summary is that Muslim writers generally distinguished licit from illicit practice rather than condemning the field. Virtually all Muslim scholars are described as permitting a talisman that invokes God or an intercessor — Muhammad, Ali, the saints — while addressing jinn or demons is prohibited as shirk, associating a partner with God. Hadith allow magic for healing so long as it contains no act of shirk. Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780–855) refrained from condemning those who used it to heal. Ibn al-Nadim (932–995) conceded white magic and condemned black, tracing the licit back to Solomon and the illicit to Iblis. Ibn Khaldun separated karamat, miracles, as gifts of God from sihr worked by a person's own psychic power.

On the other side stand scholars who denied the whole thing had any reality. The Hanafi jurist Abu Bakr al-Jassas argued that if magic worked its practitioners would be rich and powerful rather than poor men working a market crowd. The Mu'tazilite rationalists held it to be image-making without reality. Al-Jahiz offered psychological explanations for encounters with jinn. And the modern hard line is named too: Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab treated sorcery as one of the few sins carrying a divinely sanctioned death penalty; Muhammad Nasiruddin al-Albani held that those convinced sorcery has effect of its own accord, rather than by God's decision, will not enter paradise; Salafi authorities hold that amulets are forbidden outright and that wearing one is shirk.

Remke Kruk's fieldwork is where the two sides meet on a stall. She found the handbooks and the pamphlets attacking them sold side by side in North African markets, and recorded how fine the line has become: contacting jinn in an exorcism to threaten them is acceptable, asking their help in a healing is shirk; dissolving Qur'anic text written on paper in water is forbidden, while writing in a bowl with ink the poured water washes off is recommended by the conservative cleric Wahid 'Abd al-Salam Bali. Kruk's own stated worry is that the rise of stricter forms of Islam has produced an attack on healing practices that used to be well integrated into Islamic life. Set against that, a Pew Research Center survey of Muslims worldwide in 2011–2012 found belief in talismans, witchcraft and spiritual healers running from roughly a quarter to a half of Muslims across the Middle East and North Africa, Turkey, South Asia and Southeast Asia.

The argument has a body count in some jurisdictions and this record states that without editorial. Saudi Arabia formalised an Anti-Witchcraft Unit in 2009; in Makkah region alone that year at least 118 people were charged with practising magic or with using the book of God in a derogatory manner, and by 2011 the unit had nine bureaus and had processed at least 586 cases. Human rights workers allege the accused are often foreign domestic workers practising folk medicine from home.

Structure only, which is as far as this atlas goes. A text is chosen — a verse, a name, a square, a combination of letters. It is written by a person the client trusts to write it, in Arabic script, on paper, parchment, metal, cloth or the inside of a bowl. Where it is a packet it is folded small, sealed into a case of lead, silver or leather, and hung, pinned to a child's clothes or sewn into a garment. Where it is a bowl or a shirt it is used rather than worn hidden. Cheap ones were made at scale early: block-printed paper amulets, tarsh, are attested in the medieval Mediterranean Islamic world, sealed into cases so the contents stayed unread. The letter-and-number work that generates some of the texts is ʿilm al-ḥurūf, the science of letters, and the branch called jafr; this record names the technique and prints none of it.

Live everywhere the tradition is, and arguing with itself in print. Handbooks are on market stalls in Marrakesh and Khan el-Khalili with the pamphlets against them alongside; Salafi authorities rule against the objects by name; Pew's 2011–2012 survey found belief in talismans, witchcraft and spiritual healers running from a quarter to a half of Muslims across the regions it covered, and its 2012 figures put belief in the evil eye in the majority in 20 of the 39 countries surveyed. Museum holdings run from a 10th- or 11th-century block-printed Egyptian sheet to Ottoman and Safavid talismanic shirts. Nothing in this record should be read as this atlas taking a view on whether a Muslim should wear one; both sides are named above, and the naming is the whole of the project's contribution.