Arabic Magic & Witchcraft

The vocabulary

• Sihr — the broad Arabic word for magic or sorcery. In religious usage it is condemned; in folk usage it covers everything from a love working to a knot tied against an enemy.
• Ruqyah — recitation used for cleansing and protection, drawing on Qur'anic verses. Widely practised and regarded as lawful, unlike sihr.
• Taweez / hijab — a written amulet, usually folded and worn or hung. The text may be divine names, verses, letter squares, or a combination.
• 'Ilm al-huruf — the science of letters: Arabic letters carry numerical values, and those values build the squares and names used on amulets.
• Jinn — a created order of beings, neither angels nor spirits of the dead, in older lore organised under names and seals. Much of the operative literature is about contract and boundary with them.
• Nazar / 'ayn — the evil eye: harm carried by envious attention, the single most common complaint folk practitioners are consulted about.

The texts

The Arabic magical corpus is large and mostly untranslated, but three works matter for anyone tracing the lineage:

• Ghayat al-Hakim — the tenth or eleventh century "Aim of the Sage", known in Latin Europe as the Picatrix. Planetary talismans, spirit addresses, timing, and suffumigation: the backbone of later Western talismanic magic.
• Shams al-Ma'arif — the "Sun of Knowledge" attributed to al-Buni, the great compendium of letter magic, divine names, and squares. Feared and famous in equal measure.
• Kitab al-Bulhan and related manuscripts — divinatory and astrological material, including the illustrated jinn kings that so much modern imagery borrows from.

When European grimoires speak of planetary hours, sigils drawn on virgin parchment, and spirits addressed by name and seal, they are very often repeating Arabic material passed through Toledo and Latin translation. The Hermetic Qabalah described in Kabbalah in magic sits in the same confluence.

How the work is structured

Method differs from Western candle-and-petition habits in a few consistent ways. Writing carries more weight than speech: the operative object is usually a written thing, drawn in a specific ink at a specific hour. Timing is astrological, not merely lunar — mansions of the moon and planetary hours are taken seriously. Purity precedes everything; washing, abstention, and a fixed number of recitations are the frame, not an optional flourish. And the same practitioner who writes an amulet is normally the one consulted to undo one.

Respect, and what we do not do

This is living religious material for millions of people, and much of what circulates online as "Arabic witchcraft" is either invented or scraped from manuscripts nobody involved can read. We work within the Mediterranean and Egyptian currents we were trained in and are open about the borders of that training. We do not sell Qur'anic ruqyah as a product, we do not claim scholarly authority in Islamic sciences, and we will say so if a request needs a practitioner from inside that tradition instead.

If your concern is envy, the evil eye, or a lingering heaviness in the home, cleansing and warding is the usual first step — see spiritual cleansing and protection spells.