Magic and Divination in the Medieval Islamic Middle East

Abstract

Abstract For over a hundred years, Western historians have been investigating magic and divination in the Middle East. The earliest scholarship on these topics was written at a time when the scholars in other fields presented magic either as inaccurate science or misplaced, antisocial religion. Even though such approaches have been harshly criticized in history and the other social sciences, historians of the Middle East have ignored these debates and have either persisted in using outdated frameworks or have simply ignored questions of how to define and locate magic and divination altogether. As a result, the study of magic as practiced in the Muslim world validated a certain view of the ‘Orient’ as inherently backward and inferior to the Occident. At the same time, many scholars have also conflated the study of contemporary observed practice with medieval primary sources. This is changing. At the same time that there has been a growing interest in the history of magic and divination in all societies, historians of Middle Eastern magic and divination have started to realize that, far from being some sort of primitive aberration, magic is and has been a very common part of life in all societies.

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