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Adam Bursi on Sorcery, Idolatry, or Sunna
— Defining Magical Healing in Early Islam
Written on August 20th, 2021 by Adam Bursi
Within collections of ḥadīth, we find “often divergent and even contradictory”
reports about the ritual practices of the Prophet Muḥammad, his Companions,
and their Successors from the first/seventh and second/eighth
centuries.1 Modern scholars suggest that these variant reports “reflect
differences in the opinions of various circles of Muslim scholars and indicate
that in the early period of Islam many ritual prescriptions were not yet firmly
established.”2 Among such contested practices, medicinal and apotropaic
rituals seem to have offered a notable sphere of disagreement, with varying
opinions recorded for different Companions, Successors, Shīʿī Imams, and
even for the Prophet Muḥammad himself.3 Many reports label the usage of
verbal incantations (often called ruqya in Arabic), amulets, and talismans as
idolatry (in Arabic, shirk) or sorcery (siḥr), and thus outside the bounds of
properly Islamic practice. For example, the Companion ʿAbd Allāh ibn Masʿūd
(d. 32/652-3) reports that he had heard the Prophet Muḥammad say,
“Incantations, amulets, and love spells are idolatry.”4 The Successor al-Ḥasan
al-Baṣrī (d. 110/728) similarly reports that the Prophet warned, “If someone
ties a knot with a ruqya in it, he has performed sorcery; and if someone
performs sorcery, he disbelieves.”5 Elsewhere, however, many of these same
practices appear to be considered licit, or at least permissible in certain
specific circumstances. Thus, several reports find the Prophet and other
authorities explicitly allowing some limited usages (or versions) of ruqyas,
with the most commonly cited situations being when one is healing and/or
protecting someone from animal venom or the evil eye. However, an even
broader ambit of acceptability is implicitly suggested by a ḥadīth in which the
Prophet, when he is asked if a particular ruqya to heal scorpion stings should
be performed, responds: “If one of you can do something to help your brother,
then do it!”6
These variant traditions point to disputes over what healing rituals early
Muslims were allowed to perform, as well as how they defined what was and
was not considered acceptable. Opinions on ruqyas ranged from labelling
their usage as makrūh, sorcerous, idolatrous, to considerably more forgiving
attitudes. Yet even when various stipulations were included by the Prophet or
others, ruqyas clearly occupied a tenuous position in the early Islamic period
in terms of their legality and acceptability as Islamic practice. This ambiguity
is well illustrated by a Prophetic ḥadīth found in some Sunnī collections (but
no Shīʿī texts, to my knowledge): “There is no problem with the ruqyas in which
there is no idolatry,” i.e., no shirk.7 The question is: what constituted “shirk” in
this context? The polemical nature of this label, which was (and is) continually
contested and prone to negotiation, complicates drawing clear lines of
demarcation.8 Indeed, the existence of this ḥadīth perhaps points to the
liminal status of ruqyas, which were already near the edge of unacceptability
in many early Muslims’ eyes. A similar perspective appears in another
statement from the Prophet: “The nearest ruqyas to shirk are the ruqyas of the
snake and of the possessed (al-majnūn).”9 This ḥadīth does not state that
these ruqyas actually constitute shirk, but it implies that they are certainly
close to that category, and suggests that ruqyas in general skirt the line
between Islam and shirk. The boundary between ruqya and shirk was seen as
quite thin, it would seem, even in the cases of ruqya practices that were
characterized as acceptable.
By examining these scattered reports in early Islamic texts regarding the
parameters of appropriate ruqya performance, we can reconstruct the
debates about what early Muslims considered to be appropriately Islamic
incantations. These reports thus offer us a glimpse into the efforts in
constructing the outlines of a ritual practice prevalent in early Muslims’
everyday lives: the performance of rites for medical healing and for protection
from unseen evil forces. Such debates among early Muslims parallel other
late antique groups’ discussions, in which the question of how to pursue
healing and protection was similarly related to issues of religious identity and
purity. Regarding the deliberations about such practices that appear in
rabbinic Jewish texts, Galit Hasan-Rokem writes: “Medical conditions push
people to their limits … practices that … may be considered marginal and thus
traditionally categorized as folk medicine, including magic, are often sites of
abstruse transgressions of boundaries, of individual as well as of group
identity.”10 Healing rituals thus functioned as sites of both boundary
maintenance and transgression, with participation in them either affirming or
calling into question one’s status in one’s religious community. Such practices
likewise held powerful social connotations among early Muslims, as Aisha
Geissinger has recently noted: “Discourses about ruqya were one way to
express anxieties about the stability of ‘proper’ religious and social
hierarchies, while also reiterating and affirming the latter.”11 Studying the ways
that religious elites—in this case, largely Muslim ḥadīth scholars and jurists—
understood the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable
incantations offers a useful view into the performative outlines of early
Islamic identities, at least insofar as these elites saw them and attempted to
construct them.
It is noteworthy, then, that some of the most critical positions
regarding ruqyas and related practices are ascribed to early Muslim scholars
from Iraq. In a recent study of early Muslims’ usage of Qurʾānic amulets and
their drinking dissolved verses of the Qurʾān, Travis Zadeh observes that the
majority of traditionists who contested such practices were Iraqis, and Zadeh
suggests that second/eighth controversies over these issues “may well have
been entirely focused on Iraq.”12 Within our sources, voices expressing
discomfort with the usage of ruqyas also come largely from Kūfa and Baṣra,
and much of the debate on this issue does appear to center on Iraq. Leor
Halevi has argued that in the Iraqi garrison cities of Baṣra and Kūfa, a distinct
effort was made over the course of the first/seventh and second/eighth
centuries to distinguish Islamic from non-Islamic ritual practice. Halevi points
in particular to Iraqi jurists’ definition of funereal rituals “that would signal the
divergence of their religious community from others.”13 It may be that early
Muslims’ interests in the formation of distinctly Islamic ritual practices
extended also into healing practices like incantations and amulets, and that
these too were a point of communal identification like prayer and other
religious rituals that Iraqi jurists were eager to define.14
Author bio
Adam Bursi (PhD, Cornell University) is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Utrecht
University in the European Research Council-funded project “SENSIS: The
Senses of Islam.” His research studies early Islam in dialogue with other late
antique religions, focusing on the ways that rituals related to relics,
pilgrimage, and healing were interwoven with the formation and performance
of communal identity among early Muslims. His articles have been published
in the journals Studies in Late Antiquity, the Journal of the International Qur’anic
Studies Association, Arabica, among others, and many of them can be found
on his academia.edu page.
Copyright Adam Bursi, 2021.
1. M. J. Kister, “On ‘Concessions’ and Conduct: A Study in Early Ḥadīth,”
in Studies on the First Century of Islamic Society, ed. G.H.A. Juynboll
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 89. ↩
2. Ibid. ↩
3. Ibid., 92, 94. G.H.A. Juynboll, Encyclopedia of Canonical Ḥadīth (Leiden:
Brill, 2007), 642 suggests that the debate over ruqyas “surely is very old”
given the large number of opinions attributed to Companions and
Successors. On these issues generally, see: Lawrence I. Conrad, “ArabIslamic Medicine,” in Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine,
2 vols., ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993),
1:676-727. ↩
4. Abū Dāwūd al-Sijistānī, Kitāb al-Sunan, ed. Muḥammad ʿAwwāma, 5 vols.
(Jeddah: Dār al-Qibla li-l-Thaqāfa al-Islāmiyya, 1998), 4:328-29; Ibn
Mājah, Sunan Ibn Mājah, ed. Muḥammad Fuʾād ʿAbd al-Bāqī, 2 vols.
(Cairo: ʿĪsā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1972), 2:1167. ↩
5. ʿAbd al-Razzāq b. Hammām al-Ṣanʿānī, al-Muṣannaf, ed. Ḥabīb alRaḥmān al-Aʿẓamī, 11 vols. (Beirut: al-Maktab al-Islāmī, 1983), 11:17. ↩
6. Ibn Abī Shayba, al-Muṣannaf, eds. Ḥamad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Jumʿa and
Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm al-Laḥīdān, 16 vols. (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Rushd,
2004), 8:29; ʿAbd Allāh b. Wahb b. Muslim al-Qurashī al-Miṣrī, al-Jāmiʿ fī
l-ḥadīth, 2 vols., ed. Muṣṭafā Ḥasan Ḥusayn Muḥammad Abū al-Khayr (alDammām: Dār Ibn al-Jawzī, 1996), 2:781; Muslim b. al-Ḥajjāj alQushayrī, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, ed. Muḥammad Fuʾād ʿAbd al-Bāqī, 5 vols.
(Cairo: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Kutub al-ʿArabiyya, 1955), 4:1726-27. Notably, these
same words (“If one of you can do something to help your brother, then
do it!”) are ascribed to the famous Medinan jurist Saʿīd b. al-Musayyab
(d. circa 94/712-3) when he is asked about helping “a man who has
been bewitched” (rajulun ṭubba bi-siḥrin). Ibn Abī Shayba, al-Muṣannaf,
8:27. ↩
7. ʿAbd Allāh b. Wahb, al-Jāmiʿ fī l-ḥadīth, 2:792; Muslim, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim,
4:1727; Abū Dāwūd al-Sijistānī, Kitāb al-Sunan, 4:330. ↩
8. Gerald Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of
Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Regarding the
“incredibly porous” boundaries exhibited by the category “magic” within
Islamic discourses, see: Travis Zadeh, “Magic, Marvel, and Miracle in
Early Islamic Thought,” in The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft
in the West: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. David J. Collins, S. J.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 235-267. ↩
9. ʿAbd al-Razzāq, al-Muṣannaf, 11:18. This presumably refers to ruqyas
used to treat snakebite and possession/madness. ↩
10.
Galit Hasan-Rokem, Tales of the Neighborhood: Jewish Narrative
Dialogues in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2003), 79-80. ↩
11.
Aisha Geissinger, “‘Will You Not Teach ruqyat al-namla to This
(Woman) …?’: Notes on a Hadith’s Historical Uncertainties and Its Role
in Translations of Muḥammad,” in Islam at 250: Studies in Memory of
G.H.A. Juynboll, ed. Petra M. Sijpesteijn and Camilla Adang (Leiden: Brill,
2020), 227. ↩
12.
Travis Zadeh, “An Ingestible Scripture: Qurʾānic Erasure and the
Limits of ‘Popular’ Religion,” in Material Culture and Asian Religions: Text,
Image, Object, eds. Benjamin J. Fleming and Richard D. Mann (New
York: Routledge, 2014), 105. ↩
13.
Leor Halevi, Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of
Islamic Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 159. ↩
14.
For a more extended discussion of the topics examined here, see:
Adam Bursi, “Holy Spit and Magic Spells: Religion, Magic and the Body
in Late Ancient Judaism, Christianity, and Islam” (PhD diss., Cornell
University, 2015), chap. 3, available online. ↩
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