Kalamazoo Medieval Congress Blog: Sunday 8:30

Session 515 - Islamic Magic: Texts and/as Objects

• Sponsor: Research Group on Manuscript Evidence; Societas Magica
• Organizer: Liana Saif, Univ. catholique de Louvain
• Presider: Liana Saif

Books as Robots: Authorship and Agency in Islamicate Alchemical Manuscripts - Nicholas G. Harris, Univ. of Pennsylvania

Books are an object that, while not possessing sentience, may act on their own and in some cases outwit their owner/reader. When books speak of books, it’s as if they talk among themselves. (paraphrase from Umberto Eco) The presenter has been studying al-Jildaki, a 14th c. Arabic alchemist working in Alexandria, Cairo, Damascus, and Sefad. 16 books attributed to him.

Story of how his search for the authorship of one of the books he collected raises the confusion between authorship and ownership. Can a book stand in for its author in a sort of substitution? Discussion of a book distinguishes the compiler, the scribe (who set it down), and its composer.

Compilation derives from the specificity of knowledge while composing is more general. Compiling is bringing forth knowledge while composer brings together the speech of others and does not create the words. But how can compilation be more original than composition?

Arabic lexicographers use “compose” to indicate a physical bringing together, to bring into harmony, a reconciling. (I can’t manage to transcribe all the Arabic.) Book composition is to bring together words and text in a grammatically acceptable meaning. “Compile” means to distinguish something from another, to arrange into categories. Thus books are compiled when the contents are arranged into a meaningful organization. From linguistic texts “books of differences” discuss the semantic nuances of words that appear to have similar meanings. But even with all this, the Arabic terms don’t make sense for al-Jildaki’s insistance on a particular book’s writer as a compiler rather than a mere composer.

From a book on jurisprudence, we see a distinction that the compiler adds interpretation to another’s speech, while a composer simply records it. Thus Al-Jildaki “defends the authorial originality and integrity of an anonymous author”.

(We now get an abstract diagram comparing book creation with particle physics. This is intended humorously.) In this era, authors begin to drop the word “kitab” (book) from their books’ titles and start titling them metaphorically as “keys” or “lamps”. The books are attributed agency of a sort, but an agency that still requires humans (readers) to operate. An interesting feature of alchemical literature is the reluctance of alchemists to take ownership of their own textual creations. Side by side with this is the repeated admonishment that one shouldn’t learn only from books, but should have a human teacher. Al-Jildaki straddles this by suggesting that one could learn alchemy solely from his book.

Approaching Shams al-maʿārif al-kubrá through Early Manuscripts: MSS Arabe 2650–51 in the Bibliothèque nationale de France - Edgar Francis, IV, Univ. of Wisconsin–Stevens Point

The book’s 13th century author is known for grimoires and books of knowledge. The titular work will be referred to simply as the Kubra (the “big one”). This paper will be a brief introduction to this work and a discussion of what the speaker has learned from it. There is no scholarly published edition of it.

The Kubra is attibuted to al-Buni but as in the previous paper, the question of “authorship” is tricky. Textual study of the cited manuscript of the Kubra indicates it could be composed (compiled?) no earlier than the 16th c while the attributed author is 3 centuries earlier. Study of the work is made difficult by the many variant texts, meaning that differences in interpretation between scholars may reflect differences in the acutal text versions they’re working with. It exists in at least 53 manuscripts and has been greatly popularized in printed form.

Results: Many texts have circulated under this name, so is this actually the Kubra? The text has the appropriate length in pages and chapters. There are some differences in phrasing and order of the chapter headings but it generally matches the printed version. The colophon indicates it was written in 1648 CE. As a side note: the text is now available free online from the BnF manuscript site.

There are aspects of the book the online (b&w) version can’t show. Color is important in the text, not simply for ornamentation, but for picking out key names and elements, as well as disambiguating when words are written across each other. There are further examples of aspects of the book that are not available from the online facsimile, such as the writing across the edges of the pages, the paper watermarks.

The paper’s conclusions are about the importance of the original object, even just in photographic facsimile, but better in person, for detailed interpretation.

Legible Signs? Cyphers, Talismans, and the Theologies of Early Islamic Sacred Writing - Travis Zadeh, Yale Univ.

(Presented by a reader for the absent author)

The title has been amended to “...Cyphers, Talismans, & Islamic Technologies of Writing.” Focuses on the power of writing, not simply for transmission of information, but as a powerful act in itself. Books had a mixed attitude toward the occult: supernatural, magic, trickery, etc. Critiques included a focus on physical practices such as cyphers and talismans, arguing for removal of an understanding of supernatural power. Talismans, incantations, charms, etc. could include incomprehensible text. Text should convey usefulness from meaning, not from the influence of meaningless performance.

(There’s a lot of detail on what various people said on various topics and I’m having a hard time abstracting it.) We’re now talking about “animal magnetism” and “mesmerism” so I’m not sure what era we’re in. OK, 19th century, but this must be talking generally about Islamic traditions of commentary on occult practices. These 19th century writers are talking about medieval texts, so there’s the connection. In this context, charms and incantations stimulate the power of “animal magnetism” to achieve their ends.

Western explorations of mesmerism used colonial spaces such as India as an experimental context for “scientific” studies of mesmeric influence for things such as painless surgery. But these western “scientific” experiments were contrasted with “native fakirs” which were deemed to use mere superstition. (It is promised we’ll get back to textual stuff.) Western publications were then translated back, e.g., into Urdu under the rubric of “licit magic” with the authority of western colonialist structures.

These also included traditional textual forms, such as horoscopes, talismans, and lettrism, but also alongside an interest in western typography and engineering. Thus we have a (fairly traditional style of) compilation of various fields on inquiry, combining Arabic material filtered through western interpretation along with traditional Arabic material and purely western material.

There is general discussion of the political uses of occult texts, concepts, and practices, as well as Islamicized versions of western sciences. Archival curation of historic Arabic texts have been affected by these issues, as the past is sifted and either presented or concealed according to attitudes regarding the validity and acceptability of the contents. (This is all about modern interactions with historic texts and sources.)

Respondent: Noah D. Gardiner, Univ. of South Carolina–Columbia

(Mostly fairly specific questions about the choice of subject matter and research direction.)