MSR XX 2017 Gardiner

Noah Gardiner
University of South Carolina
The Occultist Encyclopedism of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī
In modern scholarship, the Antiochene muḥaddith, occultist, and littérateur ʿAbd

al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī (d. 858/1454) is better known to Ottomanists than Mam-
lukists, thanks to the influence his voluminous writings exerted in Ottoman
courtly milieux during and after his lifetime.1 In what follows, however, he is
discussed mainly in a Mamluk context, with regard to an account he penned of
his education and initiation into the occult “science of letters and names” (ʿilm al-
ḥurūf wa-al-asmāʾ) as a young man traveling in Cairo, Alexandria, and Damascus
and environs during the first decades of the ninth/fifteenth century; and with
reference to his book on that science entitled Shams al-āfāq fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-al-
awfāq. It is argued that Shams al-āfāq is an “encyclopedic” work similar in spirit to
much Mamluk-era literary production, and was an effort to make the forbiddingly
The bulk of the work on this article was completed during the 2015–16 academic year while the
author was a Junior Fellow at Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Uni-
versität Bonn, a setting that provides a wonderful environment of scholarship and camaraderie.
The paper benefitted greatly from feedback received during a fellows’ seminar at the Kolleg in
July 2016, as well as from being presented at the Renaissance Society of America meeting in Bos-
ton in April 2016. The author would also like to thank Cornell Fleischer, Nasser Rabbat, Evrim
Binbaş, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Bink Hallum, and Liana Saif for their generous help at vari-
ous stages of the writing process, as well as Alexander Knysh for overseeing the dissertation in
which elements of the paper were initially developed.
1
The major scholarship on al-Bisṭāmī includes İhsan Fazlıoğlu, “İlk Dönem Osmanlı İlim ve Kül-
tür Hayatında İhvanu’s Safâ ve Abdurrahman Bıstâmî,” Dîvân İlmî Aras̨tırmalar Dergisi (1996):
229–40; Denis Gril, “Ésotérisme contre hérésie: ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī, un représentant de la
science des lettres à Bursa dans la premiere moitié du XVe siècle,” in Syncrétismes et hérésies dans
l’Orient seldjoukide et ottoman (XIVe–XVIIIe siècle): Actes du Colloque du Collège de France, octobre
2001 (Paris, 2005), 183–95; Cornell Fleischer, “Shadow of Shadows: Prophecy in Politics in 1530s
Istanbul,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 13 (2007): 51–62; idem, “Ancient Wisdom and
New Sciences: Prophecies at the Ottoman Court in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries,”
in Falnama: The Book of Omens, ed. M. Farhad and S. Bağcı (Washington, D.C., 2009), 231–44;
İlker Evrim Binbaş, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf Al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī and the Islami-
cate Republic of Letters (Cambridge, 2016), 104–14. See also Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “The Quest
for a Universal Science: The Occult Philosophy of Ṣāʾin Al-Dīn Turka Iṣfahānī (1369–1432) and
Intellectual Millenarianism in Early Timurid Iran” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2012), 240–47;
Jean-Charles Coulon, “Building al-Būnī’s Legend: The Figure of al-Būnī through ʿAbd al-Raḥmān
al-Bisṭāmī’s Shams al-āfāq,” Journal of Sufi Studies 5, no. 1 (2016): 1–26; and Noah Gardiner, “For-
bidden Knowledge? Notes on the Production, Transmission, and Reception of the Major Works
of Aḥmad Al-Būnī,” Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 12 (2012): 114ff.
©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

DOI: 10.6082/M14Q7S48. (https://doi.org/10.6082/M14Q7S48)
DOI of Vol. XX: 10.6082/M1J10184. See https://doi.org/10.6082/P36S-EH02 to download the full volume or
individual articles. Th is work is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
(CC-BY). See http://mamluk.uchicago.edu/msr.html for more information about copyright and open access.
4NOAH GARDINER, THE OCCULTIST ENCYCLOPEDISM OF AL-BISṬĀMĪ
esoteric science of letters more accessible to the cosmopolitan learned classes and
political elites of the period. Its occult content, however, imposed special require-
ments on the author regarding his qualifications to synthesize such knowledge—
requirements he attempted to satisfy through an account of his occult training
that combines attention to formal book-transmission practices and descriptions of
various visionary encounters with the Prophet and other spiritual figures. More
broadly, it is argued that al-Bisṭāmī’s writings indicate that the Mamluk cities
of the late eighth/fourteenth and early ninth/fifteenth centuries were home to a
thriving occult scene that recently was being transformed by elite patronage and
increased interest among cosmopolitan intellectuals, and that his account of his
own readerly initiation into lettrism reflected the new, decidedly bookish occult-
ism that had been taking root in the learned culture of the period. The conclusion
discusses the importance of these developments in relation to other trends in the
late-Mamluk intellectual scene, particularly with regard to manuscript culture,
and to the longer history of the occult sciences in Islam.
The place of the occult sciences in Mamluk-era thought and culture has been
explored only a little in recent decades. Writing in the 1950s, the Belgian Orien-
talist Armand Abel argued that a widespread embrace of occultism by Mamluk-
era learned elites—particularly of the works of the controversial Ifriqiyan cum
Cairene Sufi Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad al-Būnī (d. 622/1225 or 630/1232–33)—was
symptomatic of a general intellectual decline in the period, an assessment typical
of the dim view of the occult sciences taken by many mid-century scholars.2 The
field of Mamluk intellectual history has since largely moved on from the nar-
rative of “postclassical” Islamic decline that underpinned Abel’s thesis, but his
observations on the prominence of learned occultism in the period seem to have
been abandoned along with it. On the rare occasions Mamluk occultism has been
addressed since, it is usually relegated to the ill-defined realm of “popular” cul-
ture—astrologers casting horoscopes for women in city sūqs, unscrupulous Sufis
dealing in talismans, etc.3—and, contra Abel, it is often implied that critiques of
occultism by figures such as Ibn Taymīyah, Ibn Khaldūn, and Ibn Qayyim al-
Jawzīyah were representative of the majority view on such matters among edu-
2
Armand Abel, “La place des sciences occultes dans la décadence,” in Classicisme et déclin cul-
turel dans l’histoire de l’islam (Paris, 1957), 291–318. The dim view of occultism among twentieth-
century scholars has been the topic of a number of recent scholarly works, among the most
important of which are Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern
World (Oxford, 2004), and Wouter Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in
Western Culture (Cambridge, 2012).
3
Yahya Michot, “Ibn Taymiyya on Astrology: Annotated Translations of Th ree Fatwas,” in Magic
and Divination in Early Islam, ed. E. Savage-Smith (Aldershot, 2004), 279ff; Stefan Wild, “Jugglers
and Fraudulent Sufis,” in Proceedings of the VIth Congress of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Visby 13–16
August, Stockholm 17–19 August, 1972, ed. Frithiof Rundgren (Stockholm, 1975), 58–63.

MAMLŪK STUDIES REVIEW Vol. 20, 20175
cated Muslims of the time.4 George Saliba, for example, in his influential study of
the social status of astrologers in the medieval Muslim world, repeats as fact Ibn
Khaldūn’s tendentious assertion that, in his time, “[o]ne could study [astrology]
only in ‘a secluded corner of his house.’”5 Similarly, John Livingston proffers Ibn
Taymīyah disciple Ibn Qayyim’s attacks on astrology and alchemy as evidence
contrary to Abel’s assertion that religious scholars of the era largely approved
of occultism, though he limits his observation of anti-occult sentiments to the
Hanbali ulama rather than extending it to scholars generally.6 Historians of sci-
ence such as David King and Abdelhamid Sabra routinely reassert the notion that
“religious scholars” of the period were opposed to astrology. King’s assessment
of celestial sciences in the Mamluk period posits a growing distinction between
mathematical astronomy and astrology in the period, the former being put to
the service of “religious” concerns such as the calculation of prayer times while
the latter languished, particularly as it was “frowned upon” by “religious schol-
ars” such as, once again, Ibn Qayyim.7 Sabra builds on this dichotomy in putting
forward his influential notion of the late-medieval rise of the “jurist-scientist”
over the “philosopher-scientist” of previous periods, with the implication that this
entailed a rejection of the “foreign” elements of the rational sciences, including
occultism, in favor of placing science and mathematics in the service of more “re-
ligious” concerns.8 Some recent work by Ottomanist and Timuridist scholars has
strongly countered this tendency to marginalize occultism’s role in learned soci-
ety. Cornell Fleischer, İ. Evrim Binbaş, and Matthew Melvin-Koushki have noted
that the Mamluk cities were important centers of occult learning in which figures
such as al-Bisṭāmī, the Timurid philosopher Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Turkah (d. 835/1432), and
the Timurid historian and poet Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī (d. 858/1454) studied oc-
cult subjects.9 While their efforts have been directed primarily at the careers of
those figures in their Timurid or Ottoman contexts, the present paper maintains a
focus on the Mamluk intellectual scene, with special attention to the intersection
of occultism and Mamluk manuscript culture.
4
See Livingston citation below. Cf. Mushegh Asatrian, “Ibn Khaldun on Magic and the Occult,”
Iran and the Caucasus 7 (2003): 73–123; Michot, “Ibn Taymiyya on Astrology,” 279ff.
5
George Saliba, “The Role of the Astrologer in Medieval Islamic Society,” Bulletin d’études ori-
entales 44 (1992): 51; the quote is from Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History,
trans. Franz Rosenthal (New York, 1958), III/263.
6
John Livingston, “Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah: A Fourteenth-Century Defense against Astrologi-
cal Divination and Alchemical Transmutation,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 91 (1971):
96–103.
7
David King, “The Astronomy of the Mamluks,” Isis 74 (1983): 551.
8
Abdelhamid Sabra, “The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Me-
dieval Islam: A Preliminary Statement,” History of Science 25, no. 3 (1987): 240–42.
9
See footnote 1, supra.

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad—al-Ḥanafī
madhhaban al-Bisṭāmī mashraban, as he often styled himself—was a child of Antioch
who sought an education in the cities of Bilād al-Shām and Egypt, beginning
in Aleppo. As a young man he joined the ṭarīqah Bisṭāmīyah, less a formal Sufi
order than a network of Sufi shaykhs and urban (largely Aleppan) intellectuals
from notable families,10 and it is from this association that ʿAbd al-Raḥmān took
the nisbah by which he is best known. Al-Bisṭāmī claims to have begun his oc-
cult education under the tutelage of Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn
Muḥammad al-Ḥalabī al-Aṭʿānī (d. 807/1405), a leader of the group, and occultism
may have been a regular topic of interest to members.11 In addition to acquiring
much in the way of hadith, theology, Sufism, Hanafi fiqh, and mathematics, al-
Bisṭāmī vigorously pursued further knowledge of the occult sciences, particularly
from teachers in and around Damascus, Alexandria, and Cairo during the first
part of the ninth/fifteenth century, as discussed below.
In the second decade of the ninth century hijrī, al-Bisṭāmī answered the invi-
tation of fellow Hanafi scholars to live and teach in the Ottoman principalities
of Anatolia as the relatively young Ottoman state was regrouping in the wake of
Tīmūr’s depredations. He would reside there in one city or another for most of the
rest of his life, though he also traveled regularly in the Mamluk territories until at
least the late 820s, and was an important link between Anatolian and Syro-Egyp-
tian learned and courtly societies.12 Indeed, al-Bisṭāmī was a key participant in
a translocal network of intellectuals with shared interest in lettrism and related
topics who sometimes referred to themselves as the ikhwān al-ṣafāʾ wa-khillān
al-wafāʾ (brethren of purity and friends of sincerity), a reference to the fourth/
tenth-century intellectual provocateurs whose Rasāʾil are an important source on
“classical” Islamic occultism, as well as one of the major examples of pre-Mamluk
encyclopedism. As has been most extensively discussed by Binbaş, this network
also included such notables as the aforementioned Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Turkah Iṣfahānī
and Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī, as well as the Ottoman judge and rebel Badr al-Dīn
al-Simāwī (d. 818/1416), each of whom had significant impacts on succeeding gen-
erations of thinkers across Ottoman and Timurid cum Safavid territories.13
Al-Bisṭāmī was a prolific author. Ismail Paşa credits him with forty-three
works, and Brockelmann with thirty-six,14 but in his Durrat tāj al-rasāʾil wa-
10
Binbaş, “The Aṭʿānī-Bisṭāmī Network of Syria and Late Medieval Intellectual Networks,” un-
published (2016).
11
Chester Beatty MS 5076, fol. 3b.
12
Fleischer, “Ancient Wisdom,” 232.
13
Binbaş, Intellectual Networks, passim.
14
Fazıoğlu, “Ilk dönem Osmanlı ilim,” 230.

ghurrat minhāj al-wasāʾil—an intellectual autobiography al-Bisṭāmī penned in

845/1441–42—he claims to have authored more than 180 texts.15 Several of these
must have been short treatises, though some of his surviving works are quite
lengthy. No doubt all were written in the intensely florid, sajʿ-dominated Arabic
interspersed with verse for which he was well known and admired. While he
wrote on topics ranging from hadith, to poetry, to mathematics, to the manāqib
of various Sufi figures, to medicine and the Black Death,16 he was best known
during and after his lifetime for his works on the science of letters and names,
eschatological predictions, and calendrics and historical cycles—topics that were
deeply interrelated in the minds of al-Bisṭāmī and many of his contemporaries.
As Fleischer has demonstrated, his writings on the latter topics would prove in-
fluential in Ottoman milieux well into the tenth/sixteenth century, particularly
regarding attempts to ideologically position the Ottoman sultan Süleyman the
Lawgiver (r. 926–74/1520–66) as a millennial sovereign destined to rule the world
at the end of time.17
Shams al-Āfāq fī ʿIlm al-Ḥurūf wa-al-Awfāq as an

“Encyclopedic” Work
Several of al-Bisṭāmī’s works survive in manuscript, though a full survey of the
manuscript corpus has yet to be done. That he sometimes promulgated variant
versions of the same title will inevitably complicate this task when it is under-
taken. The work with which the present article is primarily concerned, Shams
al-āfāq fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-al-awfāq, itself has a slightly complicated textual his-
tory. The initial recension of the text is likely best represented by Süleymaniye
MS Hekimoğlu 533, an authorial holograph completed near the end of Rabīʿ II
826/1423; it also contains an ijāzah written by al-Bisṭāmī in Shawwāl of 837/1434.18
Al-Bisṭāmī records in Durrat tāj al-rasāʾil that he completed Shams al-āfāq in 826 in
the Anatolian town of Larende (now Karaman), south of Konya, and Hekimoğlu
533 may be the fair copy of the recension to which he is referring.19 A second re-
15
This figure is based on the sixth bāb of Tāj al-rasāʾil, in which al-Bisṭāmī provides a roughly
year-by-year account of his activities as an author and as a transmitter of works written by oth-
ers; “Durrat tāj al-rasāʾil wa-ghurrat minhāj al-wasāʾil,” Süleymaniye MS Nuruosmaniye 4905,
fol. 21bff, but particularly 24b–37b. At present, the Süleymaniye MS is the only known copy of
this work. Cornell Fleischer is preparing an annotated facsimile of it, to be published with Brill.
16
An edition of al-Bisṭāmī’s plague tractate, Kitāb waṣf al-dawāʾ fī kashf āfāt al-wabāʾ, is currently
under preparation by Jean-Charles Coulon of Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes,
Paris.
17
Fleischer, “Mahdi and Millennium” and “Ancient Wisdom,” both passim.
18
For the colophon and the ijāzah see Hekimoğlu 533, fol. 151b.
19
Al-Bisṭāmī, “Durrat tāj al-rasāʾil,” fol. 31a–b.

cension is also extant, as found, for example, in Chester Beatty MS 5076 (copied in
Rabīʿ II 844/1440 by one ʿAlī ibn Muhannā al-ʿAṭṭār al-Atharī). Much of this recen-
sion overlaps with the earlier one, but the introduction (muqaddimah) has been
significantly expanded, as has the list of occult works al-Bisṭāmī claims to have
read and synthesized (see Appendix). In Durrat tāj al-rasāʾil, al-Bisṭāmī also refers
to a second work titled Shams al-āfāq fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-al-awfāq that he com-
posed in Bursa in 830/1426–27, which he states “is not the book that I completed in
Larende which was mentioned previously” (wa hadhā al-kitāb huwa ghayr al-kitāb
alladhī faraghtu minhu fī Lārandah alladhī taqaddama dhikruhu).20 It is possible
that he is referring here to the recension represented by CB 5076, assuming he
considered the expansions therein substantial enough to justify calling it a differ-
ent book than the Larende recension; however, he provides no further details that
confirm or falsify this hypothesis. For reasons discussed below, it is certain that
the second recension was penned sometime after Dhū al-Ḥijjah 826/1423, which is
to say at least eight months after the initial version. It is with the expanded intro-
duction to the second recension that this article is primarily concerned.
The subject of Shams al-āfāq fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-al-awfāq is the science of let-
ters and names, or “lettrism,” as scholars recently have come to call it. Similar in
ways to Jewish Kabbalah, lettrism was a cosmologically-oriented discourse on the
powers of the Arabic alphabet and the names of God that, in certain iterations,
including al-Bisṭāmī’s, also encompassed occult practices such as divination and
the making of talismans. Though descended from the theological speculation of
early Shiʿi “exaggerators” (ghulāh) and Ismaʿili Neoplatonist thinkers, the lettrism
al-Bisṭāmī was working with largely had taken shape at the hands of Sunni Sufis
in the Islamic West between the fourth/tenth and seventh/thirteenth centuries,
and was most famously promulgated by figures such as al-Būnī and the great An-
dalusian mystic Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), who helped introduce it
to the central Islamic lands as they migrated eastward at the turn of the seventh/
thirteenth century.21 In both recensions, the text of Shams al-āfāq is divided into
an introduction followed by five chapters (fuṣūl). The five chapters of the main
body of the work discuss a range of topics concerning the occult qualities of the
letters, the making of talismans based on mathematical “magic” squares, and the
description of a quasi-Neoplatonic cosmology in which the letters, understood as
the continuous flow of God’s creative speech, are implicated in the revolutions of
the celestial spheres and thus in the ongoing production of the manifest world.
Ibid., fol. 32a.

20
For recent scholarship on the relationship between the Shiʿi and Sufi iterations of lettrism, see
21
Michael Ebstein, Mysticism and Philosophy in Al-Andalus: Ibn Masarra, Ibn Al-ʿArabī and Ismāʿīlī
Tradition (Leiden, Boston, 2014).

These elements are familiar from earlier lettrist writings, particularly al-Būnī’s,
on which al-Bisṭāmī draws heavily.22
Much as in Kabbalah, esotericism had been central to the Western-Sufi lettrism
of Ibn al-ʿArabī and al-Būnī’s generation as both a bāṭinī hermeneutics and a so-
cial practice, and both those masters had stressed the need for utmost discretion
in transmitting what they viewed as initiated understandings of scripture and
powerful praxes for spiritual achievement and transformation of the manifest
world that would be destructive in the hands of the vulgus.23 The present author
has argued elsewhere that, in Egypt and Bilād al-Shām, early readers of al-Būnī’s
works—which were far more explicit than Ibn al-ʿArabī’s with regard to occult-
practical aspects of lettrism such as talismans—heeded al-Būnī’s wishes by mostly
restricting the circulation of his texts to secretive circles of Sufi adepts for roughly
a century after his death, such that only in the eighth/fourteenth century did his
writings begin to become available to other communities of readers, becoming
increasingly popular through the ninth/fifteenth.24 The writings of Ibn al-ʿArabī,
in which lettrism is a persistent theme, of course became immensely popular and
influential during the same period.25 This gradual emergence of lettrism from the
confines of esotericist Sufi reading communities was an important condition of
possibility for the creation of Shams al-āfāq, and indeed for al-Bisṭāmī’s career as
a courtier-occultist. It cleared the way for him to undertake the project of refram-
ing lettrism for the cosmopolitan learned and courtly classes of the later Mamluk
period, a project that entailed realignments of both the epistemic and social bases
of lettrism.
That the proliferation of lettrist texts in the Mamluk cities in the lead-up to
al-Bisṭāmī’s time was not limited to al-Būnī and Ibn al-ʿArabī’s writings is clear
from a major list of books on lettrism that al-Bisṭāmī includes in the introduc-
tion to Shams al-āfāq. The list includes 238 titles of books he claims to have read
on the science of letters and names or matters related thereto (see Appendix).26
It comprises numerous works by figures al-Bisṭāmī cites frequently throughout
Shams al-āfāq, such as al-Būnī and the turn-of-the-ninth/fifteenth-century shaykh
22
On elements of al-Būnī’s lettrist cosmology, see the present author’s “Stars and saints: The eso-
tericist astrology of the Sufi occultist Aḥmad al-Būnī,” forthcoming in 2017 in the journal Magic,
Witchcraft, and Ritual.
23
Ibn al-ʿArabī, Le Livre du mim, du waw, et du nun, trans. Charles-Andre Gilis (Beirut, 2002), 56ff.
24
Noah Gardiner, “Esotericist Reading Communities and the Early Circulation of the Sufi Oc-
cultist Aḥmad al-Būnī’s Works,” in Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives, ed. Matthew Melvin-
Koushki and Noah Gardiner, special issue of Arabica 64, nos. 3–4 (2017): 405-41.
25
Alexander Knysh, Ibn ʿArabī in the Later Islamic Tradition: The Making of a Polemical Image in
Medieval Islam (Albany, 1999), 49–140.
26
Al-Bisṭāmī, “Shams al-āfāq,” Chester Beatty MS 5076, fol. 1a. Wa-qad waqaftu ʿalá kutub kathīrah
jalīlat al-burhān fī hadhā al-shān qalīlat al-wujūd fī hadhā al-zamān.

Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Kūmī al-Tūnisī (about whom more below); famous works on
magic such as Ghāyat al-ḥakīm (Picatrix) and the book of Tum-Tum al-Hindī;27
pseudo-Aristotelian hermetica like Kitāb al-Isṭimāṭīs and Kitāb al-Istimākhīs;28
works attributed to luminaries of the early Islamic period such as Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq
and Thābit ibn Qurrah, and of the Hellenistic past such as Plato, Alexander the
Great, et alia; several books (asfār) attributed to prophets, e.g., Sifr Ādam, Sifr Idrīs,
Sifr Nūḥ, etc.; and scores of other titles. These works were “little to be found” at
the time, al-Bisṭāmī asserts, but however rare the individual volumes, their sheer
number suggests that there was already a considerable audience in the Mamluk
cities for occult-scientific literature.
The list is invaluable as a bibliography of late-medieval lettrism. It is also an
important indicator of the “encyclopedic” nature of al-Bisṭāmī’s work, which,
though not massive in size, seeks to distill, organize, and otherwise make accessi-
ble to learned readers the large, messy, and difficult body of lettrist teachings the
list represents. Modern scholarship has long recognized the Mamluk period as
one in which an encyclopedist ethos held sway, giving rise to such massive works
as al-Nuwayrī’s (d. 733/1333) Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab, al-Qalqashandī’s (d.
821/1418) Ṣubḥ al-aʿshá, and al-ʿUmarī’s (d. 749/1349) Masālik al-abṣār fī mamālik
al-amṣār, as well as “a wide range of compilatory texts—including biographical
dictionaries, literary anthologies, universal and specialised lexicons, and profes-
sional manuals—all dependent upon the fundamental processes of collecting and
ordering knowledge.”29 Some twentieth-century scholars, such as Charles Pellat,
held that this surge of compilatory and synthetic activity was a fearful response
to the threat posed by the Mongols to the intellectual and belletristic patrimony
of Islamic civilization, and furthermore that the seemingly derivative nature of
Mamluk literature was a symptom of intellectual lassitude and postclassical de-
cline.30 Elias Muhanna argues convincingly, however, that the encyclopedism of
the period is better conceived as the product of a cosmopolitan, universalist out-
27
On Ghāyat al-ḥakīm see Maribel Fierro, “Bāṭinism in al-Andalus: Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qu rṭubī
(d. 353/964), Author of the Rutbat al-Ḥakīm and the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm (Picatrix),” Studia Islamica 84
(1996): 87–112. The book of Tum-Tum al-Hindī is briefly mentioned as a well-known book on mag-
ic by Ibn Khaldūn in al-Muqaddimah, in the section on “The sciences of sorcery and talismans.”
28
On Kitāb al-Istamātis see Charles Burnett, “Hermann of Carinthia and Kitāb al-istamātis: Fur-
ther Evidence for the Transmission of Hermetic Magic,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 44 (1981): 167–69. On Kitāb al-Istimākhis see idem, “Arabic, Greek and Latin Works on
Astrological Magic attributed to Aristotle,” in Pseudo-Aristotle in the Middle Ages, ed. Jill Kraye,
W. F. Ryan, and C. B. Schmitt (London, 1986), 84–96.
29
Elias Muhanna, “Why Was the Fourteenth Century a Century of Arabic Encyclopaedism?,” in
Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Jason Konig and Greg Woolf (Cambridge,
2013), 347.
30
Charles Pellat, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., s.v. “Mawsūʿa.”

look fostered by “[t]he stability and security provided by a rapidly consolidating

imperial [Mamluk] state,” where previously there had been “several centuries of
fractiousness and political turmoil.”31 Encyclopedic works were never direct out-
comes of state initiatives, however, but rather were products both of and for the
“professionalized and bureaucratized” scholarly class—the “adab-ized” ulama, as
Thomas Bauer would have it32—that was taking shape in the increasingly diverse
and literate Mamluk cities, and that demanded news ways to organize and con-
sume the massive bodies of learning available to them.33 Contrary to the notion
that such works are evidence of an intellectual decline, recent scholarship has
come to recognize these acts of compilation, classification, abridgement, etc. as
considerable and highly original intellectual accomplishments in their own right,
as al-Bisṭāmī’s certainly was.
Lettrism had not been entirely overlooked by encyclopedist writers prior to
al-Bisṭāmī, thanks in large part to the growing availability of al-Būnī’s works.
Ibn Manẓūr briefly praises al-Būnī in the introduction to Lisān al-ʿarab, and even
claims to have successfully experimented with lettrist procedures. Writing within
esotericist restraints, however, he refrains from going into detail, on the grounds
that the secrets of the letters are too dangerous for those whose minds are not
prepared.34 Al-Nuwayrī includes in Nihāyat al-arab some brief excerpts from al-
Būnī’s major lettrist opus Laṭāʾif al-ishārāt fī al-ḥurūf al-ʿulwīyāt, though he rel-
egates them to the final subsection of the fourth out of five books that comprise
his work. The primary topic of the fourth book is plants, and the excerpts from
al-Būnī appear as part of a subchapter on “What can be done using occult prop-
erties” (fīmā yufʿal bi-al-khāṣīyah).35 The Bunian material—instructions for a few
simple talismans—is entirely denatured, divorced from the elaborate Sufi cosmol-
ogy that it grows out of in the original, and is treated as little more than a curios-
ity. Al-Būnī is also mentioned by al-Bisṭāmī’s older contemporary al-Qalqashandī,
in a subchapter of Ṣubḥ al-aʿshá on “The knowledge of book collections and the
types of sciences” (maʿrifah bi-khazāʾin al-kutub wa-anwāʾ al-ʿulūm), and under the
further subheadings of “The sciences current among the learned, the best-known
books regarding them, and their authors” (dhikr al-ʿulūm al-mutadawwalah bayna
al-ʿulamāʾ wa-mashhūr al-kutub al-muṣannafah fīhā wa-muʾallifuhā), “the natural
31
Muhanna, “A Century of Arabic Encyclopaedism,” 348.
32
Thomas Bauer, “‘Ayna Hādhā min al-Mutanabbī!’: Toward an Aesthetics of Mamluk Literature,”
Mamlūk Studies Review 17 (2013): 5–22.
33
On these macro developments in Mamluk culture and reading practices see the aforemen-
tioned Bauer article; also Konrad Hirschler, The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A
Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices (Edinburgh, 2012).
34
Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿarab (Beirut, 1990), 1:14ff.
35
Al-Nuwayrī, Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (Cairo, 1935), 12:217ff.

science” (al-ʿilm al-ṭabīʿī), and “the science of sorcery and the science of the letter
and magic squares” (ʿilm al-siḥr wa-ʿilm al-ḥarf wa-al-awfāq). He names three of
al-Būnī’s works alongside Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s Al-Sirr al-maktūm, the Ghāyat
al-ḥakīm, a Kitāb al-Jamharah attributed to one al-Khawārazmī, and the Timaeus
(which he attributes to Aristotle rather than Plato).36 That al-Qalqashandī associ-
ates lettrism so closely with sorcery (siḥr)—typically a term of severe disapproba-
tion in Sunni discourse—suggests that he may have had a rather low opinion of
the topic.
Al-Nuwayrī and al-Qalqashandī’s mentions of lettrism via al-Būnī can be seen
as attempts to discipline a potentially disruptive discourse by subsuming it with-
in their own conceptions of the hierarchy of the sciences (taṣnīf al-ʿulūm) and oth-
erwise assigning it relatively little importance in the grand scheme of things that
their massive works sought to encompass and order. Al-Bisṭāmī’s approach to the
topic in Shams al-āfāq shares the encyclopedic prerogatives of synthesizing and
ordering a large body of material from past authorities. It could hardly be more
different, however, with regard to the status he assigns lettrism, which he posi-
tions as the veritable queen of the sciences. In describing the sources from which
the knowledge of lettrism conveyed in Shams al-āfāq is taken, he avows:
From the books of the prophets I took it. From the speech of the
saints I gathered it. From the scrolls of the select I set it down. From
the records of the God-fearing I recorded it. From the treasures of
the listeners I extracted it. From the riddles of the philosophers I
solved it. From original thought I devised it. Among the secrets of
the pious ones I discovered upon it. From the epistles of the people
of mysteries I deduced it. And by the lamps of the people of lights
I sought it.37
And regarding the excellence of the science of letters, and of his own book, he
asserts:
It [Shams al-āfāq] is among the most outstanding of books in its
utility and the greatest of them with reference to the compilation
of that which is most excellent and dearly sought in one precious
location. For in it is the greatest science of God, His most lumi-
nescent mystery, His most radiant law, and His most magnificent
36
Al-Qalqashandī, Ṣubḥ al-aʿshá (Cairo, 1908–19), 1:465. Incidentally, the Kitāb al-Jamharah is no.
198 on al-Bisṭāmī’s list of books on lettrism. He does not list the other works al-Qalqashandī
mentions, though no. 20, Al-Sirr al-manẓūm fī al-Sirr al-maktūm, is likely a commentary on al-
Rāzī’s work.
37
Hekimoğlu 533, fol. 2b.

name—and these are but a drop of its superabundant sea, a driblet

from the raincloud.38
Taken on its own terms, the lettrism al-Bisṭāmī reveals in Shams al-āfāq is
indeed the greatest of the sciences and a powerful body of techniques as well,
the “red sulfur” (al-kibrīt al-aḥmar) through which the highest spiritual visions
and states are realized, but also the “magnificent antidote” (al-tiryāq al-abhar) to
all life’s ills, from plague to poverty to the pangs of unrequited love. All this is
presented not as a mere collection of magical recipes, but as material theorized
within a quasi-Neoplatonic cosmological framework built on the ideas of Ibn al-
ʿArabī, al-Būnī, and others, combining Sufi theosophical concepts such as the pre-
existent Muḥammadan light (nūr muḥammadī) and the invisible hierarchy of Sufi
saints with discourses on astrology, humoral medicine, the physics of the four
elements, and the “occult properties” (khawāṣṣ) of stones, plants, the planets, etc.
As for his own intellectual role in compiling this body of learning, al-Bisṭāmī
claims to have produced his work on this famously difficult and obscure topic:
only after I untangled the knots of its symbols, broke the talismans
concealing its treasures, removed through gnostic eloquence the
envelope of its meanings, and described with the tongue of clarifi-
cation the marvels of its keys, so that one who did not understand
their [the lettrists’] symbols will understand them, and one who
did not grasp their terms of art will grasp them, so that it [the
book] will be the guide to achievement among novices and the end-
goal among adepts.39
The book indeed does strive toward clarity on matters that previous lettrist au-
thors had left obscure. For example, al-Bisṭāmī explains methods for constructing
mathematical magic squares (awfāq, sing. wafq)—a key element of many of the
talismans employed in lettrism—that others, such as al-Būnī, had not divulged.40
Al-Bisṭāmī does not take all the credit for these accomplishments, but rather as-
serts that the Prophet Muḥammad—“in whose hand are the keys to the [divine]
commands and upon whom rests the authority of all men of great character and
eloquence” (man bi-yadihi maqālīd al-umūr wa-ilayhi masānīd al-furūd jalīl al-shān
jamīl al-bayān)41—helped bestow them through “the tongue of realization” (lisān
38
Ibid.
39
Hekimoğlu 533, fol. 2b–3a.
40
For al-Būnī’s most explicit discussions of talismans based on mathematical magic squares see
his Laṭāʾif al-ishārāt fī al-ḥurūf al-ʿulwīyāt (as found in numerous MSS, e.g., BnF MS arabe 2657,
BnF MS arabe 2658, Berlin MS or. Fol. 80, and others), passim.
41

al-taḥqīq), which is to say inspired knowledge.42 As discussed below, he grounds

the general claim of Muḥammadan inspiration in a series of specific events and
spiritual experiences in the narrative of his initiation into lettrism included in
the second recension of the work. The claim is important insofar as it grounds a
theme that runs through Shams al-āfāq of book-learning and mystical inspiration
as the twin pillars of occult knowledge, an innovative notion relative to prior
lettrists such as al-Būnī and Ibn al-ʿArabī. The prophetic agency that he claims
propels the project also points to the eschatological implications of the unveiling
of lettrist knowledge that al-Bisṭāmī aims to achieve in his work.
As mentioned above, lettrists of prior centuries had exercised some degree of
caution in disseminating lettrist knowledge, on the grounds that such secrets
were too powerful to be subject to the whims of anyone but spiritual elites with
the wisdom and self-restraint to wield them. Al-Bisṭāmī is obviously willing to
contravene these restrictions, but he is insistent that doing so is a response to the
nearly terminal spiritual immiseration of society. The times in which he lives,
he asserts at length, mark a nadir of post-Muḥammadan human relations to the
divine:
In this age the remains of the sciences of wisdom and metaphysical
gnosis are effaced, the paths of the laws of the prophets are wiped
out, the paths of the way of the saints are fallen into oblivion, the
relations of mercy have been severed and the lights of wisdom blot-
ted out. Shameful scandals are revealed and the good counsels of
the hidden worlds are eclipsed. The abode of honesty is muddied
and the garden of salvation is dried up. The star of the babble of the
idiots is risen as is that of the lies of the ignorant. And no wonder!
For the people have become evil and Islam is become a stranger
as it was when it began. The gnostic fundamentals are trickery
so far as they’re concerned, and the Quranic creed is among them
unbelief. […] Lettrist subtleties are jugglery and numerological in-
sights are heresy. Indeed, they dispense with right action in favor
of bootlicking and with wholesome knowledge in favor of polemic
and suspicion. Neither do the verses [of the Quran] remind them
nor the sermons restrain them, for the mantles of darkness and
the radiance of the ego have obscured the lights of true vision and
shrouded [men’s] innermost beings from witnessing the wonders
of the Malakūt and the subtleties of the effects of the Jabarūt. Even
if they were to hear the lordly realities and the merciful dispen-
sations and the luminescent names and the spiritualistic secrets
Ibid.
42

and the healing invocations and the all-encompassing remedies,

it would be as if it were shouted from a distant place and behind a
curtain of iron.43
This theme of spiritual decline is hardly unfamiliar in medieval Islamic
thought; the well-known hadith “The best people are my generation, then those
who will follow them, then those who will follow them”44 was widely understood
to imply that the ummah only got worse as time went on. As Eerik Dickinson has
discussed, some scholars of the late-medieval period were so convinced of the
degeneracy of their peers as to despair of meaningful personality criticism (ʿilm
al-rijāl) in evaluating recent muḥaddiths, such that figures such as Abū ʿAmr al-
Murābiṭ (d. 752/1351) and al-Dhahabī (d. 748/1348) disagreed mainly with regard
to whether the last transmitters worthy of the task had died by the end of the
fourth/tenth century or the fifth/eleventh.45
Of course, the age was not exclusively prone to theologies of despair; theories
of mujaddids—periodic “renewers” of Islam sent by God to restore the vitality of
the faith—flourished in the late-medieval period, as did claims to mahdī-ship and
related millennial reverberations. Al-Bisṭāmī’s interest in these topics is indicated
by his citations in Shams al-āfāq of the Damascene scholar, bureaucrat, and apoc-
alyptic seer Ibn Ṭalḥah (d. 652/1254);46 his discussions of mujaddids and methods
for divining the date of the eschaton in his work on calendrics and related topics
Naẓm al-sulūk fī musāmarat al-mulūk, completed in 833/1429–30; and his Miftāḥ al-
jafr al-jāmiʿ wa-miṣbāḥ al-nūr al-lāmiʿ, completed the year before Shams al-āfāq in
825/1421–22, which Fleischer describes as “[a] compendium of apocalypses current
during the rule of the Mamluk dynasty in Egypt and Syria… with some materials
drawing on Crusade-era traditions… [and] several prophetic works attributed to
Ibn Arabi, to which Bistami gave definitive literary form.”47 It is in the context of
this climate of perceived spiritual decline and reciprocal millennial expectation
that al-Bisṭāmī’s project in Shams al-āfāq—of reconfiguring lettrism as a science
accessible to the learned class rather than just a secretive spiritual elite—should
be understood.
43
Chester Beatty MS 5076, fol. 7a.
44
Numerous transmissions and variants of the hadith can be found. See, for example, Ṣaḥīḥ al-
Bukhārī, nos. 3650 and 3651 (the second and third entries in Bāb faḍāʾil aṣḥāb al-nabī).
45
Eerik Dickinson, “Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ Al-Shahrazūrī and the Isnād,” Journal of the American Oriental
Society 122 (2002): 481–505.
46
On whom see Mohammad Ahmad Masad, “The Medieval Islamic Apocalyptic Tradition: Divi-
nation, Prophecy and the End of Time in the 13th Century Eastern Mediterranean” (Ph.D. diss.,
Washington University in St. Louis, 2008).
47

Al-Bisṭāmī on the Mamluk Occult Scene

Al-Bisṭāmī’s efforts were a crucial part of the transitioning of lettrism from the
confines of esotericist Sufi reading communities into a broader readership among
the Mamluk era’s new class of scholar-bureaucrats—who often also were involved
in Sufism as well, whether from standpoints of literary curiosity or active involve-
ment in then-consolidating Sufi ṭarīqahs such as the Shādhilīyah or Qādirīyah—
and even into the courts of ruling military elites. It is important to note, however,
that Shams al-āfāq represents a culmination of that process rather than its incep-
tion. It is clear from al-Nuwayrī and al-Qalqashandī’s mentions of al-Būnī and
lettrism that the science had already gained a degree of visibility among learned
audiences. As for ruling elites, al-Bisṭāmī himself testifies to the sultan al-Malik
al-Ẓāhir Barqūq’s (r. 784–801/1382–99, with a brief interruption in 791/1389) inter-
est in lettrism, noting that a number of lettrists at the sultan’s court had dedicated
books on the topic to the sultan, presumably in return for his patronage. In Naẓm
al-sulūk fī musāmarat al-mulūk, al-Bisṭāmī states:
A group from among the Sufis and a coterie of the most skillful
of the lettrists put down books in his [Barqūq’s] name… In them
were effective prayers, healing medicines, lordly names, Quranic
secrets, luminescent magical squares, and Solomonic charms of
which none have need save kings, nobles, and the leaders of the
scholars, the gems [of society]. In them is that regarding the out-
comes of actions, the extension of the reigns of kings, and other
such things that are made manifest to the people of luminous vi-
sion and luminescent inner-selves.48
He then briefly discusses three of these luminaries and their works for Barqūq,
including two titles that seem to have been specifically concerned with Barqūq
and his reign as sultan, and were likely lettrist analyses of his political destiny:
Among them [the books] were Kitāb al-Kanz al-bāhir fī sharḥ ḥurūf
al-Malik al-Ẓāhir by our shaykh and imam, the shaykh, the imam,
the master of his age and singular one of his time Abū ʿAbd Allāh
Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb al-Kūmī al-Tūnisī al-Mālikī,
may God sanctify his innermost being. Kitāb Lawāmiʿ al-burūq fī
salṭanat al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Barqūq by the shaykh, the imam, the mas-
ter Abī Muḥammad Makhlūf ibn ʿAlī ibn Maymūn al-Ḥintawī(?) al-
Jannātī al-Mālikī,49 may God enlighten his innermost being. And
Al-Bisṭāmī, “Naẓm al-sulūk fī musāmarat al-mulūk,” Topkapı MS 1597, fol. 132a–b.

48
The vocalization of al-Ḥintawī is uncertain. The present author has been unable thus far to
49
locate this figure in the standard biographical sources, even despite the unusual combination of

the shaykh and great master Sayyid ʿIzz al-Dīn Ḥusayn al-Akhlāṭī,
may God enlighten his innermost being, wrote for him [Barqūq] a
comprehensive book [kitāban jāmiʿan], though I never examined it
with satisfactory care despite the length of my stay in Cairo and
my familiarity with many of its exquisite qualities. Among them
[Akhlāṭī’s books] were Kitāb al-Kanz al-makhzūn and other such
among so many that if I mentioned them all the book would grow
in length and we would abandon brevity for length and logorrhea.50
Al-Bisṭāmī himself was not present at Barqūq’s court, as he seems to have ar-
rived in Egypt only in 805/1402–3—the earliest date he mentions having been in
Egypt in Durrat tāj al-rasāʾil. The legacy of the lettrist coterie at Barqūq’s court
nonetheless must have shaped and helped facilitate his aspirations toward recon-
figuring lettrism for the literate upper classes. Certainly, the prestige afforded by
Barqūq’s apparent fascination with lettrism would have helped generate wider
interest in it, notwithstanding the stern disapproval of the topic on the part of Ibn
Khaldūn (d. 808/1406), another of Barqūq’s courtiers.51
Two of the lettrist authors al-Bisṭāmī mentions as having been at Barqūq’s
court are of particular interest. The first is Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Kūmī (fl. 810/140752),
a Sufi lettrist from Tunis a number of whose works are still extant in manuscript.53
As we will see below, al-Bisṭāmī is particularly at pains to affiliate himself with
al-Kūmī, whom he discusses and praises at length in Shams al-āfāq. The second
is Sayyid Ḥusayn al-Akhlāṭī (d. 799/1397), a physician, alchemist, and lettrist who
loomed large in the occult scene of late eighth/fourteenth-century Cairo, but who
is not much discussed in Shams al-āfāq, and whom al-Bisṭāmī seems to distance
himself from somewhat in the excerpt above from Durrat tāj al-rasāʾil.
names Makhlūf ibn ʿAlī ibn Maymūn.
50
Al-Bisṭāmī, “Naẓm al-sulūk,” fol. 132b.
51
For Ibn Khaldūn’s discussion of lettrism see The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans.
Franz Rosenthal (New York, 1958), 3:171ff. For discussions of his views on occultism generally
see Mushegh Asatrian, “Ibn Khaldun on Magic and the Occult,” Iran and the Caucasus: Research
Papers from the Caucasian Centre for Iranian Studies, Yerevan 7 (2003): 73–123; James Morris, “An
Arab Machiavelli? Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Politics in Ibn Khaldun’s Critique of Sufism,” Har-
vard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 8 (2009): 242–91. The present author is currently preparing
a new analysis of Ibn Khaldūn’s anti-occult polemic in the Muqaddimah in light of this occultist
coterie at Barqūq’s court, and taking into consideration certain codical and textual details of
autograph copies of the work. It will appear shortly as part of the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg
Working Papers series.
52
Per Carl Brockelmann, Geschichte der Arabischen Litteratur, S2:358.
53
See, for example, al-Kūmī’s “Taysīr al-maṭālib wa-raghbat al-ṭālib” (Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi
MS Laleli 1594/1); “Risālat al-Hū” (Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi MS Resid efendi 608/3); “Al-Īmāʾ ilá
ʿilm al-asmāʾ fī sharḥ asmāʾ Allāh al-ḥusná (Dār al-Kutub MS 1524 Taṣawwuf).

Al-Akhlāṭī lived in Cairo in the latter part of the eighth/fourteenth century,

having come to the city at the behest of Barqūq in order to treat (unsuccessfully)
the sultan’s ailing son. He is dealt with only tersely in the Arabic biographical
dictionaries, but is considered at greater length in Persian and Ottoman-Turk-
ish sources, which Binbaş discusses in detail.54 Nothing is certain regarding al-
Akhlāṭī’s early life. Ibn Ḥajar states that he was raised in Iran, and Binbaş raises
the possibility that he was related to the Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Ḥusayn
al-Akhlāṭī who attended some audition sessions for Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Al-Futūḥāt al-
Makkīyah that were presided over by the great shaykh himself in Damascus in
633/1235–36. Ibn Ḥajar reports that after arriving in Cairo al-Akhlāṭī never left
his house on the Nile but received many visitors there, including Barqūq himself,
who spoke from atop his horse while al-Akhlāṭī responded from his rooftop—a
shockingly informal exchange judging by Ibn Ḥajar’s tone. He further claims that
al-Akhlāṭī was involved in alchemy and associated with Shiʿism (al-rafḍ), that he
did not attend the Friday prayer, and that some of his followers believed he was
the mahdī.55 Among al-Akhlāṭī’s disciples in Cairo were such visitors to the city
as the aforementioned Ṣāʾin al-Dīn Turkah, Sharaf al-Dīn ʿAlī Yazdī, and Badr al-
Dīn al-Simāwī—the latter of whom he seems to have had a particularly significant
impact on. Though al-Bisṭāmī arrived too late to have studied with al-Akhlāṭī,
he certainly would have known of him—and other occultists at Barqūq’s court—
through his own relationships with al-Akhlāṭī’s students, his fellow ikhwān al-
ṣafāʾ.
A few works in Persian by al-Akhlāṭī on lettrism and alchemy survive in manu-
script, which Binbaş describes as “rather short and instructive treatises instead of
long theoretical pieces.”56 Among them is Risālah-yi jafr-i jāmiʿah, “a short manual
on how to write a book of jafr,” a prophetic-divinatory text that would be com-
missioned of a practitioner by a ruler to enable him to have knowledge of things
to come. The crafting of such a powerful book was no small affair. Only a sayyid
(a descendent of the Prophet Muḥammad) could accomplish it, per al-Akhlāṭī, and
doing so required “one thousand and one days in seclusion” and a strict regimen
of fasting and writing.57 The kitāban jāmiʿan that al-Bisṭāmī refers to al-Akhlāṭī
having written for Barqūq indeed may have been such a book of jafr, though per-
haps it was merely a rendition of the instructions for making one. In either case
it seems strange, at first glance, that al-Bisṭāmī goes out of his way to mention
that he never took the time to truly read this book, despite his lengthy stay(s) in
54
Binbaş, Intellectual Networks, 114–40.
55
Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, Inbāʾ al-ghumr bi-abnāʾ al-ʿumr, ed. ʿAbd al-Muʿīd Khān (Deccan, 1967),
3:336–38.
56
Binbaş, Intellectual Networks, 152.
57
Ibid.

Cairo. The explanation may lie in the fact that al-Akhlāṭī’s star pupil, Badr al-Dīn
al-Simāwī, who at one time was chief judge for the Ottoman army, was a spiri-
tual leader of a millenarian rebellion against the Ottoman state, resulting in his
execution in 818/1416.58 Fleischer suggests that al-Bisṭāmī’s close association with
Badr al-Dīn necessitated that he retreat to the Mamluk territories during these
troubles to escape any negative repercussions.59 A similar sense of caution may
have inspired him to de-emphasize his relationship to al-Akhlāṭī, and to instead
favor a narrative of himself as an inheritor and interpreter of al-Kūmī and other
Sufis’ teachings on the science of letters and names.
The best sense of the Mamluk occult scene as al-Bisṭāmī experienced it is con-
veyed in his account of his own education and initiation into lettrism. In what
amounts to a performance of the theme of book-learning and mystical inspiration
as the twin pillars of occult knowledge, this account takes the form of a record
of al-Bisṭāmī’s formal readings of various lettrist texts—i.e., of his having read
or heard texts in the presence of either their authors or shaykhs in direct lines
of transmission from their authors (qaraʾa ʿalá or samiʿa ʿalá)—interspersed with
his visionary encounters with the Prophet and other spiritual authorities. The
implication is that these events are linked, the readings somehow precipitating
the visionary experiences. This relationship is made explicit at the climax of the
narrative, where a reading of the great Maghribī Sufi master Abū al-Ḥasan al-
Shādhilī’s (d. 656/1258) Ḥizb al-baḥr triggers a dream-encounter with the Prophet
in which the Prophet bestows complete knowledge of lettrism upon al-Bisṭāmī.
The section of the introduction to Shams al-āfāq in which al-Bisṭāmī details the
chains of transmission (isnāds) that vouchsafe his knowledge of lettrism begins
with a chain stretching from himself, through al-Kūmī, and back to the Prophet.
It is similar to chains—accompanied by brief biographical/hagiographical ac-
counts—he provides later in the text for a number of authorities from earlier gen-
erations whom he draws on in the book, including al-Būnī, al-Shādhilī, and Ibn
Ṭalḥah, along with the Western Sufi-lettrist Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ḥarāllī (d. 638/1240),
the illuminationist mystic-philosopher al-Suhrawardī al-Maqtūl (d. 587/1191), the
famous Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazzālī (d. 505/1111), the great Sufi martyr al-Ḥallāj (d.
309/922), and others.60 The vocabulary of transmission employed is familiar from
the hadith sciences and other discourses, and implies the oral/aural imparting of
knowledge:
58
For a recent and detailed discussion of these events, see Dimitri Kastritsis, “The Şeyh Bedreddin
Uprising in the Context of the Ottoman Civil War of 1402–1413,” in Political Initiatives “ from the
Bottom Up” in the Ottoman Empire: Halcyon Days in Crete VII, a Symposium Held in Rethymno 9–11
January 2009, ed. Antonis Anastasopoulos (Rethymno, 2012), 221–38.
59
60
Chester Beatty MS 5076, fol. 16bff.

I took [knowledge of] the science of letters and magic squares,

through the tongue of wisdom and tastings, from the teacher of
the horizons, the shaykh, the imam, the knower of God and sign
unto God, Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb
al-Kūmī al-Tūnisī al-Mālikī, may God give him to drink from the
pools of kindness and make him to dwell in the gardens of Para-
dise. He took from the shaykh Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Duhhān. He took
from the shaykh Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Khāmī [or al-Jāmī], and he took
from the shaykh Abū al-ʿAzāʿim Māḍī. He took from the shaykh, the
pole, the helper, the unique one, the gatherer … Abū al-Ḥasan al-
Shādhilī. He took from the shaykh, the pole, the helper, the unique
one, the gatherer Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Salām ibn Mashīsh al-
Ḥasanī al-Nārimī(?). He took from the shaykh Abū Muḥammad
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Madanī. He took from pole after pole to the
Imam Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī. He was the first of the poles, and he took
from his grandfather the Messenger of God (God’s blessings and
peace be upon him).61
Following this initial statement of al-Kūmī’s credentials, al-Bisṭāmī then re-
counts his arrival in Alexandria in 811/1408–9, and three meetings in which he
“read” (qaraʾa ʿalá) some of al-Kūmī’s works with someone who had read them in
the presence of al-Kūmī:
When I arrived on the scene in Alexandria in the year 811 I read
the book Taysīr al-maṭālib in the presence of the shaykh the imam
Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Maghribī, the imam of the al-
ʿArabī Mosque there. He read it in the presence of its author the
shaykh, the imam, the gnostic, the learned one, the teacher of his
age and the tongue of his time Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh [ibn]
Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb al-Kūmī al-Tūnisī, may
God consecrate his innermost being.62
The fact that al-Bisṭāmī places these two different types of transmission state-
ments one after the other—the first involving a line of face-to-face meetings
between past masters reaching back to the Prophet, and the second document-
ing the transmission of books—is important, as it implies the passage of lettrist
knowledge from primarily oral/aural transmission into books. The passage is not
Ibid., fol. 9a.

61
Ibid., fol. 9b. Though al-Bisṭāmī’s use of akhadhtu implies face-to-face contact with al-Kūmī, it
62
is possible that his claim to have “taken” from al-Kūmī “through the tongue of wisdom and tast-
ings” implies that their meeting was spiritual rather than physical.

absolute, of course, as al-Bisṭāmī is still highlighting his participation in book-

transmission practices featuring the circulation of texts between human and
written media, but it marks a transition from an ancient way of transmitting
knowledge to a more recent one, a transition that renders legitimate al-Bisṭāmī’s
further acts of appropriation and written synthesis in Shams al-āfāq.
Al-Bisṭāmī’s narrative then jumps to 815/1412–13 in Damascus, where he again
reads al-Kūmī at one step of remove. This time the transmitter is Musāʿid ibn Sārī
al-Ḥawārī (d. of the plague 819/1416–17), an ascetic shaykh and muḥaddith who
spent the last part of his life in a village outside Damascus, where he received
many visitors. Ibn Ḥajar notes that he also specialized in ʿilm al-mīqāt, the science
of timekeeping attuned to Islamic ritual needs that Sabra associates especially
with the allegedly anti-occult “jurist-scientists” of the period.63 In this case, no-
tably, the readings precipitate a sighting—perhaps visionary—of “the Pole of the
Levant,”64 as well as dream-sightings of the Prophet:
In the year 815 when I entered the city of Damascus (may God
protect it) I heard—from the shaykh, the imam, the gnostic, the
jurist, the trustworthy one, the continuator of the scholars, Abū
ʿAbd Allāh Musāʿid ibn Sārī ibn Masʿūd ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn
Raḥmat al-Ḥawārī al-Ḥimyarī, in the village of Shaʿbā in the south-
ern pastures—the book Taysīr al-maṭālib and the book Al-Īmāʾ ilá
ʿilm al-asmāʾ and the book Sirr al-jamāl and the book Al-Kanz al-
bāhir fī sharḥ ḥurūf al-Malik al-Ẓāhir and the book Iẓhār al-rumūz
wa-ibdāʿ al-kunūz and the treatise Al-Hū. He [Musāʿid] had read
them in the presence of their author the shaykh the imam Abū
ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad al-Kūmī. In it [the reading session, the vil-
lage?] I saw the Pole of the Levant. And I saw the Messenger of God
(God’s blessings and peace be upon him) in the year 815 in a dream
in Damascus: he was standing, combing his beard (God’s blessings
and peace be upon him). I also saw him a second time that night
in a dream.65
The coinciding of the readings and visions seems intended to signal that the read-
ings of al-Kūmī, properly conducted under the authority of shaykhs who had
63
Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī, Inbāʾ al-ghumr, 7:248–49. For Sabra see footnote 8 supra.
64
The hierarchy of the saints, of which the Pole is the living head, is “invisible” in the sense that
its members and their rank are unknown to anyone who is not himself or herself high in the
hierarchy; according to some theories none but the highest-ranking members are even certain of
their own membership. For him to have seen the Pole, then, might indicate either that he recog-
nized him in person as such, or that he had a vision of him.
65

studied directly with the author, were instigating a deeper connection between
al-Bisṭāmī, the invisible hierarchy of saints of which the Pole is the living head,
and the Prophet.
Al-Bisṭāmī seemingly gives priority to mentioning his readings of al-Kūmī’s
works in order to emphasize his closeness to the shaykh. That accomplished,
the account then moves back in time to Cairo in 807/1404–5 and two readings
he undertook there with the shaykh ʿIzz al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Jamāʿah (d.
819/1416–17). One is a work by an author named Jamāl al-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Aḥmad
ibn Muḥammad al-Nadrūmī (d. 807/1404–5).66 The other is al-Būnī’s collection of
astrologically-timed duʿaʾs for accomplishing a variety of material and spiritual
ends, Al-Lumʿah al-nūrānīyah fī awrād al-rabbānīyah:
When I was in Cairo (may God Most High protect it from His over-
powering punishment) in the year 807 I read, in the presence of
the shaykh the imam Abū ʿAbd Allāh ʿIzz al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn
Jamāʿah al-Kinānī al-Shāfiʿī al-Dimashqī (may God have mercy on
him), the book Qabs al-anwār wa-jāmiʿ al-asrār. He read it in the
presence of its author the shaykh the knower of God Jamāl al-Dīn
Yūsuf al-Nadrūmī. I also read, in the presence of the shaykh ʿIzz
al-Dīn ibn Jamāʿah, the book Al-Lumʿah al-nūrānīyah fī al-awrād
al-rabbānīyah and others like that of the wondrous sciences and
strange subtleties.67
The identity of the shaykh who presided over the readings is noteworthy. ʿIzz
al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Jamāʿah (d. 819/1416–17) was a scion of the Ibn Jamāʿah
scholarly dynasty, and his immediate forebears had served for three generations
in some of the highest civilian offices of Mamluk Cairo and Jerusalem, and also
were known for their devotion to Sufism. ʿIzz al-Dīn Muḥammad’s great-grand-
father, Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad (d. 733/1333), served as the Shafiʿi grand qadi of
Cairo and shaykh al-shuyūkh of the Sufi associations on and off between 690/1291
and 727/1327, and his grandfather, ʿIzz al-Dīn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (d. 767/1366), and pater-
nal uncle, Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm (d. 790/1388), had similarly illustrious careers.68
He was also an important teacher of the noted historian Ibn Ḥajar al-Asqalānī
(d. 852/1449). Although the Ibn Jamāʿah family’s power in Cairo waned during
ʿIzz al-Dīn Muḥammad’s lifetime, the Syrian branch of the family maintained a
high standing in Damascus and Jerusalem well into the Ottoman period under
66
On whom see Ḥājjī Khalīfah, Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asāmī al-kutub wa-al-funūn, ed. Muḥammad
Sharaf al-Dīn Yāltaqāyā and Rifʿat Bīlga (Istanbul, 1941–43), no. 1315.
67
68
Kamal Salibi, “The Banū Jamāʿa: A Dynasty of Shāfiʿite Jurists in the Mamlūk Period,” Studia
Islamica 9 (1958): 97–103.

the nisbah al-Nābulusī. ʿAbd al-Ghānī al-Nābulusī (d. 1143/1731), one of the great
interpreters of both Ibn al-ʿArabī and the mystic poet Ibn al-Fāriḍ, was in fact a
distant relation of ʿIzz al-Dīn Muḥammad.69 Notably, as Knysh has document-
ed, Badr al-Dīn Ibn Jamāʿah once issued an extremely harsh condemnation of
Ibn al-ʿArabī’s esotericist masterpiece Fuṣūs al-ḥikam, denying the author’s claim
that the text was divinely inspired, declaring that Iblīs was its true source, and
“advis[ing] the ruler that all copies of the Fusus and other writings containing
similar statements be destroyed in order to protect the community from a great
temptation.”70 The contrasting attitudes of the two Ibn Jamāʿahs—over the space
of a few generations—is credible evidence of a shift during that time toward the
wider acceptance of al-Būnī and Ibn al-ʿArabī’s teachings.
Lest it be assumed that al-Bisṭāmī was only receiving knowledge and texts
during this period, it is important to note that he was also composing and trans-
mitting new works on lettrism, often at the behest of various military and schol-
arly elites, as is recorded in Durrat tāj al-rasāʾil. In Cairo in 805/1402–3, for ex-
ample, he composed what he refers to as “a book on the occult properties of a 100
by 100 square”—which is to say a mathematical magic square with 100 rows and
100 columns—for an atabeg by the name of Yashbak.71 And at the behest of various
shaykhs and qadis he presides over a number of readings of the two works that
ʿIzz al-Dīn Ibn Jamāʿah licensed him to transmit, al-Būnī’s al-Lumʿah al-nūrānīyah
and al-Nadrūmī’s Qabs al-anwār wa-jāmiʿ al-asrār.72 This role as a lettrist author-
ity making the rounds of various elite households—an authority he constantly
supplemented by gaining ever more credentials through participating in further
readings—is key to understanding al-Bisṭāmī’s professional career.
When al-Bisṭāmī’s account in Shams al-āfāq proceeds to 808/1405–6, we find
him, presumably still in Cairo, reading four works with the shaykh Abū ʿAbd
Allāh Yaʿīsh ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Yūsuf ibn Sammāk al-Umawī al-Andalusī, Kayfīyat
al-ittifāq fī tarkīb al-awfāq, Lawāmiʿ al-taʿrīf fī matāliʿ al-taṣrīf, Al-Mawahhib al-
rabbānīyah fī asrār al-rūḥānīyah, and Al-Istinṭāqāt; he also notes having heard
Kayfīyat al-ittifāq with Yaʿīsh’s disciple Abū Ṭāhir Muḥammad al-Miṣrī. Again
marking the transition between oral/aural and book-transmission, he traces the
isnād from Yaʿīsh back through a classic Iraqi Sufi line that includes such figures
as ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī, Junayd, Maʿrūf al-Karkhī, al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, ʿAlī ibn Abī
Ṭālib, and of course the Prophet. Though the Andalusī Yaʿīsh serves as al-Bisṭāmī’s
69
Elizabeth Sirriyeh, “Whatever Happened to the Banū Jamāʿa? The Tail of a Scholarly Family in
Ottoman Syria,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 28 (2001): 55–64.
70
Knysh, Ibn ʿArabī in the Later Islamic Tradition, 123–24.
71
Al-Bisṭāmī, “Durrat tāj al-rasāʾil wa-ghurrat minhāj al-wasāʾil,” Süleymaniye MS Nuruosmani-
ye 4905, fol. 28a.
72
Ibid., fol. 25a, for example.

point of entry to this chain, its function in terms of al-Bisṭāmī’s attempts to posi-
tion himself as an inheritor of Sufi knowledge may be to establish his bona fides
with regard to the “sober,” shariʿah-minded Sufi tradition associated with figures
such as Abū Ḥafṣ ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī (d. 632/1234) and al-Junayd al-Baghdādī
(d. 298/910). This tradition had long been dominant in Egyptian Sufism, and by
the ninth/fifteenth century existed in an sometimes-uneasy relationship with
the western strain of Sufism represented by figures such as Ibn al-ʿArabī and al-
Shādhilī, with which lettrism was most strongly associated.
Al-Bisṭāmī goes on to list a welter of further books and authorities with whom
he interacted in 808/1405–6, giving the impression of ceaseless learning and initi-
atic activity.73 He seems to claim to have taken a number of books from Tāj al-Dīn
Ibn al-Durayhim: Ghāyat al-mughnim fī al-ism al-aʿẓam, Kanz al-durar fī ḥurūf awāʾil
al-suwar, Sayr al-ṣarf fī sirr al-ḥarf, and Tāʾ al-taṣrīf wa-ḥallat al-taʿrīf. This assertion
is problematic, however, given that Ibn al-Durayhim—who indeed is remembered
as a master of lettrism, among other topics—is commonly recorded to have died
in 762/1361;74 such that perhaps he means to say that he took these books from
one of Ibn al-Durayhim’s students. With one Sharaf al-Dīn al-Baghdādī he reads
three books by Sharaf al-Dīn’s teacher Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Minkalī
al-ʿAlamī, Kashf al-bayān fī maʿrifat ḥawādith al-zamān, Al-Bāqīyāt al-ṣāliḥāt fī
burūz al-ummahāt, and Al-Sirr al-maṣūn wa-ʿilm al-maknūn. He furthermore reads
the aforementioned work written for Barqūq by Abū Muḥammad Makhlūf ibn
ʿAlī ibn Maymūn al-Ḥintawī, Al-Lawāmiʿ al-burūq fī salṭanat al-Malik al-Ẓāhir
Barqūq, which he reads with its author. Finally, on the authority of the shaykh
Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ḥāmid al-Dimashqī, he reads
two works by al-Dimashqī’s teacher Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm
al-Ḥanafī al-Qudsī, Kashf al-ishārāt al-ṣūfīyah wa-nashr al-bishārāt al-ismīyah al-
muḥammadīyah and Al-Manḥ al-wahhābīyah al-rabbānīyah fī al-milḥ al-ismīyah al-
muḥammadīyah.
At this juncture, al-Bisṭāmī again complicates his chronology by returning to
807/1404–5. Here the jump in time has a dual narrative purpose. On the one hand,
the story he unfolds is clearly the dramatic culmination of the long-term initiatic
process he is describing throughout this discourse. On the other, the initial and
concluding events in this final story are themselves separated in time, with the
climax occurring at the end of 826/1423. The events to hand are a series of initiatic
book-transmission experiences, three of which occur in the mundus imaginalis of
dreams, and one in the world of flesh. Notably, all four occur in Cairo, that city of
books and initiations.
Chester Beatty MS 5076, fol. 10a–b.
73
For example, the tarjamah in Khayr al-Dīn Ziriklī, Al-Aʿlām: Qāmūs tarājim li-ashhar al-rijāl wa-
74
al-nisāʾ min al-ʿarab wa-al-mustaʿribīn wa-al-mustashriqīn (Beirut, 1980), 5:6.

In the first event, in 807/1404–5, al-Bisṭāmī dreams that he attends a reading of

al-Shādhilī’s great supererogatory liturgy, Ḥizb al-baḥr, which has long been cred-
ited with having various powers of healing and benediction. The reading is presid-
ed over by the shaykh Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Kūrānī (d. 768/1367)—a
Sufi of Kurdish origin who was an important figure in Egyptian Sufism many de-
cades before al-Bisṭāmī arrived75—and occurs at a site in dream-Cairo parallel to
the waking city, the miḥrāb at Qanāṭir al-Sabāʿ. When he awakes al-Bisṭāmī finds
he has memorized the poem and “witnessed the power of its secrets.” From that
point forward his soul longs to audition the poem in a line of transmission back to
al-Shādhilī. It seems that he remains nineteen years in this state of longing, until
“the hand of divine wisdom and eternal gnosis” guides him to a meeting with
one Tāj al-Dīn Ibrāhīm ibn Muḥammad al-Miṣrī al-Shādhilī. Al-Bisṭāmī broaches
the subject of auditioning the Ḥizb with this master, and the shaykh produces
for him a codex bearing a certificate in the hand of Abū al-ʿAbbās al-Mursī (who,
al-Bisṭāmī has told us elsewhere in the book, took the science of letters from al-
Būnī), recording his having read/heard the work with al-Shādhilī. He “hears” the
work from that codex and thus joins the chain of transmission:
In the year 807 when I was in Cairo I saw in a dream the shaykh
of the wayfarers and imam of the ascetics, the scholar, the learned
one Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Kūrānī. He was sitting in
the prayer niche in Qanāṭir al-Sabāʿ and surrounding him was a
group and they were reading Ḥizb al-baḥr by the shaykh Abū al-
Ḥasan al-Shādhilī. I awoke from the dream and verily I had memo-
rized it [the Ḥizb] and verily I had witnessed the beneficent powers
of its secrets, the wonder of wonders… For a very long time my soul
was in anticipation of acquiring it by means of audition [through
a line of transmission leading back] to Abū al-Ḥasan al-Shādhilī,
until the hand of divine wisdom and eternal gnosis guided me to
a meeting with the shaykh Tāj al-Dīn Ibrāhīm ibn Muḥammad al-
Miṣrī al-Shādhilī. I asked him about the Shādhilī chain [silsilah],
and about Ḥizb al-baḥr and other such things, and he showed me a
book upon which was the signature [i.e., on an audition certificate]
of the shaykh Abū al-Ḥasan al-Mursī in Cairo [who had auditioned
the work] in the presence of the shaykh Abū al-Ḥasan al-Shādhilī.
I was joined to the chain with it [the book, or with him, Ibrāhīm]
through audition, and he licensed me with a comprehensive license
On whom see Ahmed El Shamsy, “Returning to God through His Names: A Fourteenth-Cen-
75
tury Sufi Treatise,” in Essays in Islamic Philology, History, and Philosophy, ed. William Granara et
al. (Berlin, 2016), 204–28.

for everything that he could transmit. To God belongs grace and

charity.76
Soon thereafter, in the final month of 826/1423, he has a dream in which he
sees the Prophet sitting in a house in dream-Cairo. He asks the Prophet to speak
to him about Ḥizb al-baḥr. The Prophet points to the letter bāʾ, and in that mo-
ment al-Bisṭāmī comprehends the Mystery of union with divine, and loses him-
self in the beauty and luminosity of the Prophet’s face. He then separates from
the Prophet, and—still in the dream—encounters “one of the Shādhilī shaykhs,”
and informs the shaykh that the Prophet has given him permission to speak on
behalf of the Shādhilīs. The shaykh replies: “I shall write for you a proclamation
[manshūr],” which is to say a certificate, a license to transmit. Only then does
al-Bisṭāmī awake, in flesh and stone Cairo, and in that moment realizes he has
taken complete knowledge of the science of letters and names, a knowledge he
explains in an ecstatic series of paired rhymes, culminating in the assertion that
his knowledge of the science was transmitted on the authority of the Prophet,
“he who unveiled the structure of the letters prior to the coming into being of the
cosmic conditions of existence”:
In the wake of my auditioning of that mighty ḥizb I saw the Mes-
senger of God (God’s blessings and peace be upon him). It was in
Cairo in the last part of Dhū al-Ḥijjah of 826. He was seated promi-
nently in a house, and when I saw him I said, “O Messenger of God,
speak of the discourse [lisān] of the Shādhilīs [i.e., Ḥizb al-baḥr].”
He pointed to [the letter] bāʾ emphatically, and it was as eloquent
an explanation as if he had spoken. I understood that he alluded
to bāʾ as the union of the mystery of being and the mystery of the
logos. And my breast opened and my heart expanded from the sub-
lime beauty of his delicate brow and the luminosity of his splen-
did complexion that is the qiblah of all desires and the kaʿbah of
all fervent prayers. When I parted from him (God’s blessings and
peace be upon him) I saw one of the Shādhilī shaykhs and I said to
him, “Verily the Prophet (God’s blessings and peace be upon him)
has given me leave to speak on behalf of the Shādhilīs [adhana lī
bi-al-kalām ʿalá lisān al-Shādhilīyah].” And he said to me, “I shall
write for you a proclamation.” I awoke from the sleep blameless.
God had made of it [the dream] a genuine taʾwīl and a truthful
discourse. And those sublime sciences and beautiful mysteries—
verily I took [the knowledge of] their lettrist subtleties, numeri-
cal cryptograms, combinatory benefits, isolated and combinatory
76

workings [i.e., working with single letters or conjoined ones], and

other such things from among the advantageous uses and greater
goals. [All this] by means of the letters of their speech, the clues to
their puzzles and the signposts to their treasures, and the chapters
of their verses and the forms of their outermost limits. [All this]
on the authority of the shaykh of shaykhs, the basis of the firmly-
rooted foundations (al-thābit li-qawāʿid al-rusūkh), He who unveiled
the structure of the letters prior to the coming into being of the
cosmic conditions of existence (wujūd kawnīyat al-ẓurūf).77
Thus al-Bisṭāmī, through his readings in authorized lines of transmission of books
by al-Kūmī, al-Būnī, and the other shaykhs and gnostics, achieves a beatific vision
of the beauty of the Prophet’s face, and with it comes the complete knowledge of
lettrism, the basis of his authority to write Shams al-āfāq.
The spiritual experiences al-Bisṭāmī claims in his account of his initiation into
lettrism—encounters with discarnate Sufi shaykhs of centuries past, a beatific
vision of the Prophet, a dramatic experience of kashf—are noteworthy, but are
hardly unprecedented in Sufi thought. What is extraordinary, however, is al-
Bisṭāmī’s intertwining of these tropes with the rituals of book-transmission and
their accompanying bureaucracy of licenses to transmit texts—an admixture that
manifests most fully in his dreaming and waking readings of Ḥizb al-baḥr, and
in the figure of the dream-shaykh who promises to write a license declaring al-
Bisṭāmī’s authority to represent the knowledge of the Shādhilīyah following his
climactic encounter with the Prophet.
Conclusion
In the phenomenology of revealed religions, there are inevitable eschatological
implications to the disclosure of sacred knowledge that formerly had been held
back from all but the most elect among the believers. In the Zohar and the cul-
ture of readers that surrounded it, for example, the secret Kabbalistic teachings
of the great sages were represented as having been passed down covertly for a
thousand years, such that, as Rachel Elior notes, “their revelation in the end of
the thirteenth century and their dissemination in the following period signified
the emergence of the messianic era.”78 Al-Bisṭāmī likewise invokes the impend-
ing end of time as licensing his encyclopedic project of synthesizing and making
available teachings on the science of letters and names, a tradition represented as
having been passed down in secret from the prophets and thence through lines
Chester Beatty MS 5076, fol. 10b–11a.
77
Rachel Elior, “Not All Is in the Hands of Heaven: Eschatology and Kabbalah,” in Eschatology
78
in the Bible and in Jewish and Christian Tradition, ed. Henning Ravenlow (Sheffield, 1997), 49–61.

of Sufi adepts. That this redounded to his benefit as someone who made a career
of advising on lettrism and related topics to Mamluk and Ottoman elites speaks
only to his divine election to the role of revelator, or so al-Bisṭāmī would have us
think. In a period replete with mahdīs, and with the hijrī millennium an impend-
ing—if not quite near—event, this was his small but significant part in the closing
acts of the cosmic drama.
I would argue that al-Bisṭāmī’s efforts to authorize his synthesis and disclo-
sure of lettrism are reflective not only of the rising millenarian sentiments of
his time, but also of shifts taking place over the course of the Mamluk period in
Muslim learning and Arabic-Islamic manuscript culture. The Arabic book, which
throughout the earlier medieval period had been something of a material epi-
phenomenon of the teacher-student/master-disciple relationship, seems by the
latter part of the Mamluk period to have gained a new integrity as a standalone
source of knowledge. The great encyclopedias of the age, Mamluk-era copies of
which typically were arranged for ease of use through nested arrays of headings
and subheadings and by new habits of mise-en-page that allowed the eye to more
quickly navigate the page, facilitated quick access to vast volumes of information
for a reading public of busy scholar-bureaucrats.79 Likewise, the ever increasing
production of digests, commentaries, and anthological codices devoted to par-
ticular mystical, theological, and philosophic topics and viewpoints helped break
the spell of the authoritative old codex filled with transmission certificates.
One area where this shift in the status of the book is most evident is with
regard to the use of “audition” (samāʿ) and related practices of formal text-trans-
mission. While such practices had their roots in early methods of hadith trans-
mission, their use peaked in popularity between the sixth/twelfth and eighth/
fourteenth centuries—particularly in the Bilād al-Shām and Egypt, where audi-
tion sessions became popular events attended not just by scholars, but by literate
elites, craftspeople, and others wishing to extract some barakah from being read
into lines of transmission linked to great scholars and mystics, and of course to
the Prophet himself.80 The ninth/fifteenth century, however, seems to have wit-
nessed a decline in their use. This was due in part, perhaps, to the rise in popular-
79
Maaike Van Berkel, “The Attitude towards Knowledge in Mamlūk Egypt: Organisation and
Structure of the Ṣubḥ al-Aʿshā by Al-Qalqashandī (1355–1418),” in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts:
Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1–4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden,
1997), 159–68.
80
On the rise and decline of audition practices, see Muʿjam al-samā‘āt al-Dimashqīyah: al-
muntakhabah min sanat 550 ilá 750 H/1155 M ilá 1349 M, ed. Stefan Leder, Yāsīn al-Sawwās, and
Maʾmūn al-Ṣāgharjī (Damascus, 1996); Konrad Hirschler, The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic
Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices (Edinburgh:, 2012), 60–70; Noah Gardiner,
“Esotericism in a Manuscript Culture: Aḥmad Al-Būnī and His Readers through the Mamlūk
Period” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 2014), 125–31.

ity of the issuing of various types of ijāzah that relaxed the necessity for hearing
books in their entirety, and that could license a student or disciple to teach whole
corpora of their masters and masters’ masters at the tic of a pen—a loosening of
the more rigorous forms of transmission through which al-Bisṭāmī claims to have
taken the science of letters and names from his earthly teachers.81 Nonetheless,
his assent to this more relaxed model of knowledge transmission with regard to
his own works is evidenced by the ijāzah he wrote on the final leaf of Süleymani-
ye MS Hekimoğlu 533, in Shawwāl 837/1434, for one Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad al-
Ḥusaynī al-Shāfiʿī al-Tirmidhī, granting him a license not only for Shams al-āfāq,
which he had read in al-Bisṭāmī’s presence, but for “all of my works and what
is mine through knowledge and transmission (mālī min dirāyah wa-riwāyah), in
accordance with the usual rules of the scholars (ʿalá al-shurūṭ al-maʾlūfah bayn al-
ʿulamāʾ),” which is to say a license for the entirety of his corpus.82
As a key text in al-Bisṭāmī’s larger project, Shams al-āfāq helps marks a crucial
point in the history of lettrism, and indeed of Islamic occultism more broadly,
wherein a science that had formerly been the reserve of small and discreet com-
munities of practitioners was being mainstreamed, i.e., being made available to a
much wider audience of literate and devout readers, as well as Turkish military-
political elites. His lettrism might thus best be characterized as “post-esotericist”
in the sense that its secret history—which is to say its history of having long been
secret—was what rendered its exposure so significant. The encyclopedic nature of
Shams al-āfāq was an indispensable element of this transition, a rendering limpid
and accessible in book-form of what previously had been obscure, hidden, and
scattered. As scholars such as Fleischer, Binbaş, and Melvin-Koushki have begun
to show, lettrism and other of the occult sciences would go on to be essential to
the “sacral power”83 many early modern rulers sought to claim in constituting
their authority to rule in a new, apocalyptic age. More broadly, they were key
elements of what Shahab Ahmed describes as the “Sufi-philosophical amalgam”
that characterized much early modern Islamic thought,84 an emerging conviction
of the accessibility of the powers of the visible and invisible worlds to human
knowledge and agency.
81
On various types of ijāzah see George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in
Islam and the West (Edinburgh, 1981), 140–52; Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in
Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton, 1992), 31–33. The gradual (and by
no means total) replacement of the audition certificate (sometimes called ijāzat al-samāʿ) with
these broader, looser forms of ijāzah is an area of inquiry that remains to be explored in detail.
82
83
Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “Astrology, Lettrism, Geomancy: The Occult-Scientific Methods of
Post-Mongol Islamicate Imperialism,” The Medieval History Journal 19, no. 1 (2016): 142–50.
84
Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, 2016), 31 and passim.

Appendix: Al-Bisṭāmī’s Occult Booklist in Shams al-āfāq fī

ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-al-awfāq
The following is the list of 238 occult works that al-Bisṭāmī claims to have read
during his studies in Egypt and the Shām. The versions of the list given in the
two recensions of Shams al-āfāq vary in length, with only the first 128 titles be-
ing given in the earlier recension, as represented by Süleymaniye MS Hekimoğlu
533, and the last 100 titles being added in Chester Beatty MS 5076, for a total of
238. Some variations in the titles themselves also occur between the two versions
of the list, probably arising from the errors of copyists. As such, for the first 138
titles preference has been given to the spellings in Hekimoğlu 533—an autho-
rial holograph—and variants from CB 5076 have been included in parentheses.
The final 100 titles are given as they appear in CB 5076. Footnotes address in-
stances where the author of a work is known to the present author or indicated
in the title. It should be noted that several of these works are mentioned in Ḥājjī
Khalīfah’s Kashf al-ẓunūn; however, given the dearth of additional information in
these listings, it is quite likely that Ḥājjī Khalīfah simply copied the titles from
Shams al-āfāq.85 Nota bene that another lengthy list of works on occult subjects
appears at fol. 14b–17b of Süleymaniye MS Nuruosmaniye 4905, the unicum MS
of al-Bisṭāmī’s “Durrat tāj al-rasāʾil wa-ghurrat minhāj al-wasāʾil.” Many of the
titles overlap, but the list in “Durrat tāj al-rasāʾil” differs to the degree that it will
require a separate study.
1. Shams maṭāliʿ al-qulūb wa-badr ṭawāliʿ al-ghuyūb
2. Nūr anwār al-qulūb wa-asrār al-ghurūb (al-ghuyūb)
3. Kaʿbat al-asrār wa-ʿArafāt al-anwār
4. Al-Sirr al-khafī wa-al-jawhar al-ʿalī
5. Sajanjal al-arwāḥ wa-nuqūsh al-alwāḥ
6. Al-Washy al-maṣūn wa-al-luʾluʾ al-maknūn fī maʿrifat ʿilm al-khaṭṭ alladhī
bayn al-kāf wa-al-nūn
7. Al-Sirr al-khafī fī ʿilm al-ātá (al-ʿilm al-ālī)
8. Qāf al-anwār wa-jīm al-asrār
9. Ṭilsam al-ashbāḥ fī kanz al-arwāḥ
10. Laṭāʾif al-asmāʾ fī ishārāt al-musammá
11. Sitr al-asrār wa-nūr al-anwār (Sīn al-asrār wa-nūn al-anwār)
12. Al-Sirr al-bāhir fī ramz al-fākhir (Al-Sirr al-fākhir fī ramz al-bāhir)
13. Ḥall al-rumūz fī fatḥ al-kunūz
14. Al-Sirr al-makhzūn fī al-ʿilm al-maknūn
15. Laṭāʾif al-āyāt wa-nuqūsh al-bayyināt
16. Nayl al-ishrāq fī ʿilm al-awfāq
85
Confusingly, however, he mistakenly notes for many of them that they are mentioned by al-
Būnī, by which he almost certainly means al-Bisṭāmī!

17. Kanz al-alwāḥ fī sirr al-afrāḥ

18. Laṭāʾif al-khafīyah fī al-asrār al-ʿĪsawīyah
19. Ḥadāʾiq al-asmāʾ fī ḥaqāʾiq al-musammá
20. Al-Durr al-manẓūm fī al-sirr al-maktūm
21. Asrār al-adwār wa-tashkīl al-anwār
22. Tanzīl al-arwāḥ fī qawālib al-ashbāḥ
23. Sirr al-asrār wa-baṣāʾir al-anwār
24. Yāʾ (Tāʾ) al-taṣrīf wa-hullat al-taʿrīf
25. Sirr al-jamāl fī anwār al-jalāl
26. Al-Nasamāt al-fāʾiḥah fī asrār al-Fātiḥah
27. Fakk al-rumūz al-suryānīyah fī fatḥ al-kunūz al-furqānīyah
28. Al-Saʿd al-akbar fī al-sirr al-anwar
29. Al-Sirr al-rabbānī fī ʿālam al-jismānī
30. Tuḥfat al-abrār fī daʿawāt al-layl wa-al-nahār
31. Al-Sirr al-asná fī asmāʾ Allāh al-ḥusná
32. Kaʿbat al-jamāl wa-ʿArafāt al-kamāl
33. Bahjat al-asrār fī sharḥ lumʿat al-anwār
34. Al-Adwiyah al-shāfīyah wa-al-adʿiyah al-kāfīyah
35. Barqat al-anwār wa-lumʿat al-asrār
36. Kanz al-asrār wa-dhakhāʾir al-abrār
37. Al-ʿIlm al-akbar wa-al-sirr al-afkhar
38. Rawḍat al-asrār wa-nuzhat al-abṣār
39. Qabs al-anwār wa-jāmiʿ al-asrār
40. Al-ʿIqd al-manẓūm wa-al-sirr al-maktūm (second title-element missing
in CB 5076)
41. Al-Bāqiyāt al-ṣāliḥāt fī burūz al-ummahāt
42. Salāsil al-anwār fī natāʾij al-afkār (al-adhkār)
43. Al-Kibrīt al-aḥmar wa-al-tiryāq al-akbar
44. Al-Laṭāʾif al-abjadīyah fī asrār al-aḥmadīyah
45. Al-Kanz al-bāhir fī sharḥ ḥurūf al-Malik al-Ẓāhir86
46. Nūn (Nūr) anwār al-maʿārif wa-sīn (sanan) asrār al-ʿawārif
47. Qalam al-asrār wa-lawḥ al-anwār
48. Sirr (Sayr) al-ṣarf fī sirr al-ḥarf
49. Washy al-asmāʾ wa-luʾluʾ al-musammá
50. Al-Ism al-aʿẓam wa-al-nūr al-aqwam
51. Ramz al-ḥaqāʾiq al-ʿibrānīyah wa-kanz al-maʿārif al-suryānīyah
By Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad al-Kūmī al-Tūnisī; see p. 17 supra.

86

52. Qabs al-iqtidāʾ ilá wafq al-saʿādah wa-najm al-ihtidāʾ ilá sharaf al-
siyādah87
53. Kayfiyat al-ittifāq fī tarkīb al-awfāq
54. Ḥall al-rumūz fī fatḥ al-kunūz
55. Sawātiʿ al-anwār fī lawāmiʿ al-asrār
56. Manbaʿ al-farāʾid (al-fawāʾid) wa-ʿuyūn al-fawāʾid (al-farāʾid)
57. Al-Sirr al-abhar fī al-qamar al-anwar (al-azhar)
58. Ṣuwar al-arwāḥ (al-riyāḥ) al-nūrānīyah fī suwar al-ashbāḥ al-ẓulmānīyah
59. Mawāqif al-ghāyāt fī asrār al-riyāḍāt88
60. Hidāyat al-qāṣidīn wa-nihāyat al-wāṣilīn89
61. Kanz al-qāṣidīn ilá asrār al-saʿādah wa-ramz al-wāṣilīn ilá anwār al-
siyādah
62. Fatḥ al-kunūz al-ḥarfīyah wa-fakk al-rumūz al-ʿadadīyah
63. Laṭāʾif al-wafqīyah al-nūrānīyah wa-al-maʿārif al-ʿadadīyah al-rūḥānīyah
64. Al-Lumʿah al-nūrānīyah fī awrād al-rabbānīyah90
65. Al-Barqah al-rabbānīyah fī al-asrār al-furqānīyah
66. Mashriq al-anwār fī maghrib al-asrār
67. Fawātiḥ al-jamāl wa-rawāʾiḥ al-kamāl
68. Miftāḥ al-kunūz fī ḥall al-rumūz
69. Majmaʿ al-aqlām al-rasmīyah wa-manbaʿ al-asrār al-ḥikmīyah
70. Mawāhib al-Raḥmān wa-ʿaṭāyā al-Mannān
71. Washy al-jamāl wa-luʾluʾ al-kamāl
72. Rawḍ al-maʿārif wa-riyāḍ al-laṭāʾif
73. Shams al-saʿādah wa-qamar al-siyādah
74. Ghāyat al-maghnam fī al-ism al-aʿẓam
75. Kanz al-anwār wa-ramz al-asrār
76. Rawḍ al-asrār al-ʿadadīyah wa-hawḍ al-anwār al-ḥarfīyah
77. Lawāmiʿ al-burūq fī salṭanat al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Barqūq91
78. ʿArūs al-āfāq fī ʿilm al-awfāq
79. Al-Nūr al-lāmiʿ wa-al-sirr al-jāmiʿ
80. Al-Hayʾah al-jāmiʿah wa-al-barqah al-lāmiʿah
81. Shams al-asrār al-rabbānīyah wa-qamar al-anwār al-ʿirfānīyah
87
A work commonly, though falsely, attributed to Aḥmad al-Būnī. See Gardiner, “Esotericism in
a manuscript culture,” 26; Jean-Charles Coulon, “La magie islamique et le «corpus bunianum»
au Moyen Âge” (Ph.D. diss., Paris IV - Sorbonne, 2013), 1:500ff.
88
By Aḥmad al-Būnī. See, for example, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi MS Aya Sofya 2160/2.
89
By Aḥmad al-Būnī. See, for example, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi MS Aya Sofya 2160/1.
90
By Aḥmad al-Būnī. See, for example, Chester Beatty MS Ar. 3168/5.
91
By Abī Muḥammad Makhlūf ibn ʿAlī ibn Maymūn al-Ḥintawī al-Jannātī al-Mālikī. See pp. 16–17
supra.

82. Mishkāt al-asrār wa-misbāḥ al-anwār

83. Sirr al-uns wa-al-jamāl wa-nūr al-basṭ wa-al-kamāl
84. Falak al-saʿādah wa-quṭb al-siyādah
85. Al-Ramz al-aʿẓam wa-al-kanz al-muṭalsam
86. Kashf al-sirr al-maṣūn (al-maknūn) fī waṣf al-nūr al-makhzūn
87. Narjis al-asmāʾ wa-yāsmīn al-musammá
88. Shawāriq al-anwār wa-bawāriq al-asrār
89. Taysīr al-maṭālib wa-sakhīr(?) al-maʿārib
90. Fakhr al-asmāʾ wa-ṣubḥ al-musammá
91. Al-Durr al-munaẓẓam fī sharḥ al-ism al-aʿẓam92
92. ʿUmdat al-ishrāq fī ʿilm al-awfāq
93. Al-Ṭilsam al-maṣūn wa-al-luʾluʾ al-makhzūn
94. Al-Laṭāʾif al-ʿulwīyah fī al-asrār al-ʿĪsawīyah
95. Miftāḥ al-raqq al-manshūr wa-miṣbāḥ al-bayt al-maʿmūr
96. Badr riyāḍ al-maʿārif wa-shams samāʾ al-laṭāʾif
97. Al-Nafhah al-qudsīyah wa-al-fayhah al-miskīyah
98. Shams ruqūm al-dawāʾir wa-qamar rusūm al-baṣāʾir
99. Mustawjibat al-maḥāmid fī sharḥ khātim Abī Ḥāmid
100. Al-Īmāʾ ilá ʿilm al-asmāʾ93
101. Kanz al-durar fī ḥurūf awāʾil al-suwar
102. Lawāmiʿ al-taʿrīf fī maṭāliʿ al-taṣrīf
103. Al-Kashf al-bayān fī maʿrifat ḥawādith al-zamān
104. Risālat al-khafāʾ fīmā ẓahara wa-baṭana min al-khulafāʾ
105. Sirr al-jamāl wa-laṭāʾif al-kamāl
106. Al-Lawḥ al-dhahab fī asrār al-ṭalab
107. Sirr al-ṣawn fī ḥawādith al-kawn
108. Al-Ism al-maktūm wa-al-kanz al-makhtūm
109. Lumʿat al-anwār wa-barakat al-aʿmār
110. Al-mabādīʾ wa-al-ghāyāt fī asrār al-ḥurūf al-ʿulwīyāt
111. Al-??? (al-Manḥ) al-wahbīyah al-rabbānīyah fī al-??? (al-milḥ) al-ismīyah
al-muḥammadanīyah al-nūrānīyah
112. Al-Sirr al-amjadī fī al-durr al-aḥmadī
113. Shifāʾ al-ṣudūr wa-al-abadān(?) (wa-al-aydhān) fī manāfiʿ al-Qurʾān
114. Badr riyāḍ al-maʿārif wa-shams ʿiyāḍ (ghiyāḍ) al-ʿawārif
115. Miftāḥ asrār al-ghuyūb wa-miṣbāḥ anwār al-qulūb
116. Ḥullat al-kamāl wa-hilyat al-jamāl
117. Iẓhār al-asrār wa-ibdāʾ al-anwār
92
Perhaps the work by Ibn Ṭalḥah, on whom see Masad, “The Medieval Islamic Apocalyptic
Tradition.”
93
By Abū ʿAbd Allāh Kūmī. See, for example, Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣrīyah MS Taṣawwuf 1954.

118. Shams al-arwāḥ wa-qamar al-ashbāḥ

119. Mabhaj(?) al-jamāl wa-manhaj al-kamāl
120. Al-Laṭāʾif al-laṭīfah
121. Kanz al-saʿādah al-ʿirfānīyah fī ramz al-siyādah al-rūḥānīyah
122. Al-Sirr al-jāmiʿ fī al-durr al-lāmiʿ
123. Sirr al-saʿādah fī ʿālam al-ghayb wa-al-shahādah
124. Al-Sirr al-khafī al-maknūn wa-al-nūr al-ʿalī al-makhzūn
125. Sirr al-jamāl al-bāhir (al-zāhir) wa-durr al-kamāl al-ẓāhir
126. Shams al-jamāl wa-badr al-kamāl
127. Al-Sirr (al-ism) al-afkham fī al-ism (al-sirr) al-aʿẓam
128. Nasīm al-ishārāt al-ṣūfīyah wa-sirr al-ʿibārāt al-kashfīyah
(LIST IN HEKIMOĞLU 533 ENDS HERE)
129. Al-Ḥadīqah al-sundusīyah wa-al-rawḍah al-narjisīyah
130. Al-Laṭāʾif al-khafīyah fī al-asrār al-muḥammadīyah
131. Rawḍat al-asrār al-zāhirah wa-dawḥat al-anwār al-bāhirah
132. Al-Adwiyah al-shāfīyah al-ṭāhirah wa-al-adʿiyah al-kāfīyah al-ẓāhirah
133. Shams al-asrār wa-ins al-abrār
134. ʿIlm [ʿAlam?] al-hudá fī asrār asmāʾ Allāh al-ḥusná
135. Qalam asrār al-maʿārif wa-lawḥ anwār al-ʿawārif
136. ʿAlam al-hudá wa-asrār al-ihtidāʾ fī fahm sulūk maʿná asmāʾ Allāh al-
ḥusná94
137. Al-Durr al-munaẓẓam fī al-sirr al-aʿẓam
138. Kanz al-alwāḥ al-rūḥānīyah wa-sirr al-afrāḥ al-nūrānīyah
139. Ḥall rumūz al-asmāʾ wa-fakk kunūz al-musammá
140. ʿIlm [ʿAlam?] al-hudá fī sharḥ asmāʾ Allāh al-ḥusná
141. Al-Taraqqī ilá manāzil al-abrār fī kayfiyat al-ʿamal fī al-layl wa-al-nahār
142. Washy al-asrār al-jamālīyah wa-naqsh al-āthār al-jalālīyah
143. Maʿārif al-qulūb al-nūrānīyah wa-laṭāʾif al-ghuyūb al-rabbānīyah
144. Al-asrār al-shāfīyah al-rūḥānīyah wa-al-āthār al-kāfīyah al-nūrānīyah
145. Shams al-wiṣāl wa-ghurūs al-jamāl
146. Al-Ḥaqāʾiq al-subbuḥīyah wa-al-daqāʾiq al-quddūsīyah
147. Al-Barqah al-nūrānīyah fī al-asrār al-sulaymānīyah
148. Baḥr al-fawāʾid al-ḥarfīyah wa-sirr al-fawāʾid al-adadīyah
149. Zayn al-āfāq fī ʿilm al-awfāq
150. Bahjat al-āfāq fī ʿilm al-awfāq
151. Al-Sirr al-afkhar wa-al-kibrīt al-aḥmar
152. Mawāqīt al-baṣāʾir wa-laṭāʾif al-sarāʾir
153. Al-Laṭāʾif al-farīdah fī al-maʿārif al-mufīdah
154. Al-Kanz al-bāhir fī asrār ḥurūf al-ism al-Ẓāhir
By Aḥmad al-Būnī. See, for example, Süleymaniye MS Hamidiye 260/1.
94

155. Durrat tāj al-saʿādah wa-barqat minhāj al-siyādah

156. Iẓhār al-rumūz wa-ibdāʾ al-kunūz
157. Sirr al-jalāl
158. Al-Asrār al-khāfīyah wa-al-risālah al-murḍīyah fī sharḥ duʿāʾ al-
Shādhilīyah
159. Sirr al-asrār wa muntahá ʿulūm al-abrār
160. Jāmiʿ al-laṭāʾif fī asrār al-ʿawārif
161. Lawāmiʿ al-anwār al-ʿirfānīyah wa-jawāmiʿ al-asrār al-rabbānīyah
162. Durrat al-āfāq fī asrār al-ḥurūf wa-al-awfāq
163. Munyat al-ṭālib li-aʿazz al-maṭālib
164. Risālat al-hū95
165. Al-Laṭāʾif al-rabbānīyah fī sharḥ al-asmāʾ al-nūrānīyah
166. Fawātiḥ al-asrār al-ilāhīyah wa-lawāʾiḥ al-anwār al-rabbānīyah
167. Asās al-ʿulūm
168. Kanz al-maʿānī fī asrār al-mathānī
169. Kashf asrār al-maʿānī wa-waṣf anwār al-maghānī
170. Shifāʾ al-qulūb bi-liqāʾ al-maḥbūb
171. Kanz al-saʿādah fī sharaf al-siyādah
172. Shams al-jamāl
173. Kīmīyāʾ al-saʿādah al-rabbānīyah wa-sīmīyāʾ al-rūḥānīyah
174. Laṭāʾif al-asmāʾ
175. ʿAjāʾib al-ittifāq fī gharāʾib al-awfāq
176. Durrat al-maʿārif fī asrār al-ʿawārif
177. Ḥadāʾiq al-iḥdāq fī ʿilm al-awfāq
178. Al-Mabādīʾ wa-al-ghāyāt fī asrār al-ḥurūf wa-al-asmāʾ wa-al-daʿawāt
179. Al-Ghāyah al-faṣwī(?) fī asrār al-ḥurūf wa-al-asmāʾ
180. Al-Maṭlab al-asná fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-al-asmāʾ
181. Ghāyat al-adhwāq fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-al-awfāq
182. Al-Sirr al-ismī fī ʿilm al-ḥurūf wa-al-asmāʾ
183. Al-Sirr al-akbar fī al-ʿilm al-afkhar
184. Zubdat al-muṣannafāt fī al-asmāʾ wa-al-ṣifāt
185. Al-Durr al-naẓīm fī al-Qurʾān al-ʿaẓīm
186. Kitāb al-Malakūt
187. Jawāhir al-asrār fī bawāhir al-anwār
188. Baḥr al-wuqūf fī ʿilm al-awfāq wa-al-ḥurūf
189. Durrat al-asrār li-fakhr al-amṣār
190. Yawāqīt al-asrār fī mawāqīt al-anwār
By Abū ʿAbd Allāh Kūmī. See, for example, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi MS Resid efendi 608/3.
95

191. Al-Tawassulāt al-kitābīyah wa-al-tawajjuhāt al-ʿaṭāʾīyah96

192. Shifāʾ al-maʿānī bi-laṭāʾif al-mathānī
193. Dhawāt al-dawāʾir wa-al-ṣuwar
194. Kitāb al-Lawḥ wa-al-qalam
195. Kitāb al-Ajnās
196. Kitāb Shādhān
197. Kitāb Sirr al-sirr
198. Kitāb al-Jamharah
199. Kitāb al-Muṣḥaf al-khafī
200. Kitāb al-ʿAhd al-kabīr
201. Kitāb Ghāyat al-ḥakīm97
202. Kitāb al-Zurqān(al-Zaraqān?)
203. Kitāb Muṣḥaf al-qamar98
204. Kitāb Kīnāss(Kanāʾis?) al-rūḥānī
205. Kitāb al-Ushūṭās99
206. Kitāb al-Hādīṭūsh100
207. Kitāb al-Afālīq(?)
208. Kitāb al-Ṭawāliq(?)
209. Kitāb al-Malāṭīs101
210. Kitāb Ṭumṭum al-Hindī102
211. Kitāb Ṣaṣah(?) al-Hindī
212. Kitāb Iṣṭimākhīs103
213. Kitāb Tankalūshā al-Bābilī104
96
A work probably falsely attributed to Aḥmad al-Būnī; see Gardiner, “Esotericism in a man-
uscript culture,” 39; Coulon, “La magie islamique,” 506ff. See, for example, Süleymaniye MS
Hamidiye 260/2.
97
The famous Picatrix, by Maslamah ibn Qāsim al-Qu rṭubī. See footnote 25 supra.
98
Manfred Ullmann discusses two works by this name; Die Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften im
Islam (Leiden, 1972), 380 and 402.
99
Probably Kitāb al-Ustuṭās (also known as Kitāb al-Ustūwaṭas); see Burnett, “Arabic, Greek and
Latin Works,” 86. As discussed by Burnett, this is part of a complex of pseudo-Aristotelian Her-
metic works on astrological magic that includes Kitāb al-Istimakhīs, Kitāb al-Istimṭatīs, Kitāb al-
Malātis, Kitāb al-Hadīṭush (al-Hadīṭūs), and perhaps the work attributed to Thābit ibn Qu rrah, all
of which appear in al-Bisṭāmī’s list, infra.
100
See previous footnote.
101
On which see Burnett, “Arabic, Greek and Latin Works,” 86.
102
See footnote 25 supra.
103
See footnote 25 supra.
104
Tankalūshā = Teukros of Babylon (in Egypt). See Ullmann, Die Natur- und Geheimwissen-
schaften, 278-79; David King, A Survey of the Scientific Manuscripts in the Egyptian National Library
(Winona Lake, 1986), Author 23A and Plate LXXVIIa.

214. Kitāb al-Qamar li-Baṭlīmūs105

215. Kitāb Tafsīr al-rūḥānīyah li-Buqrāṭīs106
216. Kitāb Kazkah(?) al-Hindī
217. Kitāb Arsmīdis107
218. Kitāb Wazdāsht(?) al-Fārisī
219. Kitāb Balīnās108
220. Kitāb Samʿūn(?)
221. Kitāb Thābit ibn Qurrah al-Ḥarrānī109
222. Kitāb Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq al-ʿIbādī110
223. Kitāb Sharāshim al-Hindī111
224. Kitāb al-Isṭimāṭīs112
225. Kitāb al-Sirr al-khafī li-Qālīs(?)113
226. Kitāb Ḥayāt al-nufūs
227. Kitāb al-Idhn
228. Kitāb Kharqīl114
229. Kitāb Khafīyat al-Aflāṭūn115
230. Kitāb Khafīyat Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq116
231. Khafīyat Hirmis117
232. Sifr Ādam
233. Sifr Shīt118
234. Sifr Idrīs
105
Baṭlīmūs = Ptolemy.
106
Buqrāṭīs = Hippocrates.
107
Arsmīdis (usually Arshmīdis) = Archimedes.
108
Balīnās = Pseudo-Apollonius of Tyana. This may refer to Kitāb Sirr al-khāliqah wa-ṣanʿat
al-ṭabīʿah.
109
Thābit ibn Qu rrah.
110
Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq.
111
Almost certainly the work more commonly known as Kitāb Sharāsīm al-Hindīyah, an edition
of which is currently under preparation by Jean-Charles Coulon of Institut de Recherche et
d’Histoire des Textes, Paris.
112
On which see footnote 25 supra.
113
Qālīs should perhaps be Wālīs, i.e., the astrologer Vettius Valens, on whom see Ullmann, Die
Natur- und Geheimwissenschaften, 281ff.
114
Kharqīl = Dhū al-Kifl, i.e., Ezekiel.
115
Aflāṭūn = Plato. This may be Kitāb Nawāmis Aflāṭūn/Liber Vaccae, on which see Liana Saif,
“The Cows and the Bees: Arabic Sources and Parallels for Pseudo-Plato’s Liber Vaccae (Kitāb Al-
Nawāmīs),” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 79 (2016): 1–47.
116
Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq.
117
Hirmis = Hermes.
118
Shīt = Biblical Seth.

235. Sifr Nūḥ

236. Sifr Ibrāhīm
237. Sifr Irmiyā119
238. Sifr Dhī Qarnayn
119
Irmiyā = the prophet Jeremiah.


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Noah Gardiner

University of South Carolina

The Occultist Encyclopedism of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī

In modern scholarship, the Antiochene muḥaddith, occultist, and littérateur ʿAbd

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

ghurrat minhāj al-wasāʾil—an intellectual autobiography al-Bisṭāmī penned in

Shams al-Āfāq fī ʿIlm al-Ḥurūf wa-al-Awfāq as an

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

Ibid., fol. 32a.

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

look fostered by “[t]he stability and security provided by a rapidly consolidating

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

name—and these are but a drop of its superabundant sea, a driblet

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

al-taḥqīq), which is to say inspired knowledge.42 As discussed below, he grounds

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

and the healing invocations and the all-encompassing remedies,

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

Al-Bisṭāmī on the Mamluk Occult Scene

Al-Bisṭāmī, “Naẓm al-sulūk fī musāmarat al-mulūk,” Topkapı MS 1597, fol. 132a–b.

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

Al-Akhlāṭī lived in Cairo in the latter part of the eighth/fourteenth century,

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

I took [knowledge of] the science of letters and magic squares,

Ibid., fol. 9a.

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

absolute, of course, as al-Bisṭāmī is still highlighting his participation in book-

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

al-nisāʾ min al-ʿarab wa-al-mustaʿribīn wa-al-mustashriqīn (Beirut, 1980), 5:6.

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

In the first event, in 807/1404–5, al-Bisṭāmī dreams that he attends a reading of

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

for everything that he could transmit. To God belongs grace and

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

workings [i.e., working with single letters or conjoined ones], and

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

Appendix: Al-Bisṭāmī’s Occult Booklist in Shams al-āfāq fī

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

17. Kanz al-alwāḥ fī sirr al-afrāḥ

By Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad al-Kūmī al-Tūnisī; see p. 17 supra.

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

82. Mishkāt al-asrār wa-misbāḥ al-anwār

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

118. Shams al-arwāḥ wa-qamar al-ashbāḥ

©2017 by Noah Gardiner.

al-taḥqīq), which is to say inspired knowledge.42 As discussed below, he grounds

191. Al-Tawassulāt al-kitābīyah wa-al-tawajjuhāt al-ʿaṭāʾīyah96

214. Kitāb al-Qamar li-Baṭlīmūs105