In Islamicate intellectual history generally, and the history of science specifically, occultism remains a “wretched subject,” and hence studiously avoided by modern scholars.1 Post-Enlightenment scientistic positivism notwithstanding, however, the occult sciences (al-ʿulum al-khafiyya or al-ghariba)—astrology, alchemy, and various forms of magic and divination—constituted at least a full half of the natural and mathematical sciences, which is to say the rational sciences, in the premodern Arabo-Persian encyclopedic tradition; they were heavily patronized by ruling and scholarly elites as such. The “occult” in occult science need therefore not be a stumbling block: it simply designates a discipline in which the scientist extrapolates from visible data to invisible, from zahir to batin. Thus medicine, for example, was often classified as an occult science, in contrast to surgery; indeed, the modern sciences of psychology or astrophysics are by this premodern definition largely occult. At the same time, in the post-Mongol Islamicate world, the occult sciences as an epistemologically coherent subset of the rational sciences were progressively sanctified through association with the sacral power (walaya) of the Shiʿi imams, and by extension Sufi saints, as well as the text of the Qurʾan itself—such that Islam became synonymous with magic for a majority of Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal scholarly and ruling elites. This occultism-Sufism-Alidism tripod served in turn as the basis of a shared, if contested, Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal universalist imperial culture and its theories of millennial sovereignty.
In the first essay, Matthew Melvin-Koushki takes as a representative example the Safavid occultist Mahmud Dihdar Shirazi (fl. 1576) to suggest the robustness of this imperial tripod by the sixteenth century. This aspiring Safavid courtier was the most prolific Persian author on lettrism (ʿilm-i huruf) of that century; his oeuvre, produced for patrons in Iran and India alike and influential for centuries thereafter, is thus indispensable to any study of the occult-scientific imperialism so fundamental to and distinctive of Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal early modernity. A taste of his authorial range and didactic and eulogizing style is provided through translated excerpts from three of his most popular manuals: Keys to All Locks (Mafatih al-Maghaliq), Choicest Secrets (Zubdat al-Asrar), and Choicest Talismans (Zubdat al-Alvah). Most significantly, in the last work Dihdar expressly presents letter magic as a scientific means of shiʿizing Iran—a scholarly-imperial project that was indeed successfully accomplished by Safavid sages and mages by the seventeenth century.
The sixteenth century was thus a pivotal era for the vernacularization of Arabic occult-scientific literature within the Persophone world—as well as the Turkophone parts of the Ottoman Empire. In the particular case of alchemy and related chemical technologies, the second and third quarters of the sixteenth century witnessed the composition of numerous texts by Ottoman scholars in Arabic. Most notably, alchemical writings of the jurist Bostan Efendi of Tire (d. 1569) and the enigmatic ʿAli Chelebi of Iznik (d. after 1575) constituted the foundation upon which later Ottoman alchemist-authors would base their own theoretical and practical works. By the turn of the seventeenth century, a number of widely circulating alchemical texts in the Turkish vernacular had already appeared. The vast majority of these Turkish texts were written in verse, which form a veritable cycle of poems concerning alchemy. These poems are, for the most part, of a technical nature and appropriately use an “artless” language, but one of them, Sırr-ı Ta-Ha (The Secret of Ta-Ha), is distinguished by its seemingly inscrutable imagery and the diachronic transformation of its author in the manuscript tradition.
In the second essay, Tuna Artun examines and translates this poem. The work’s authorship is attributed to a certain Shaykh Safi, whose real identity cannot be fully verified. In the later manuscript tradition, however, this figure often morphs into Shaykh Safi al-Din of Ardabil, the ancestor of Shah Ismaʿil and the eponymous founder of the Safavid dynasty. The title of the poem appears to promise the revelation of the secrets of the two letters ta and ha, which are among the so-called huruf muqattaʿat (unconnected letters) that open certain Qurʾanic suras. It is important to note that the twentieth sura of the Qurʾan, which begins with these two letters, held a special relevance for the alchemists of the Islamicate world, because it contains the narrative of Moses’s encounter with Pharaoh and his court magicians. It is during this encounter that the staff of Moses is transformed into a serpent and the hand of Moses turned a brilliant white, which were both frequently used as alchemical imagery. The title thus works on multiple levels, referring to lettrist, alchemical, Sufi, and even astrological doctrines, all of which are further explored in a related prose text.
The popularity of the Sırr-ı Ta-Ha is apparent not only from its ubiquitous presence in Ottoman manuscripts but also from a lengthy Turkish commentary written to explain its hidden meanings. This commentary, excerpted and translated here, was among the most frequently copied alchemical texts in prose in the Ottoman world from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, but like the Sırr-ı Ta-Ha itself, it has never been edited, translated, or even been the subject of a serious study. The authorship of the prose text is attributed to Shaykh Eşrefoğlu ‘Abdullah Rumi, the eponymous creator of the Eşrefiyye subbranch of the Qadiri Sufi order. While many members of the Eşrefi-Qadiri order played an important role in the production of alchemical knowledge in the Ottoman Empire, the attribution of this commentary to ‘Abdullah Rumi is almost certainly spurious. The commentary is a unique “alchemical” text that brings together numerous fields of learning, including Sufism, lettrism, astrology, geography, and medicine. As is common in Islamicate alchemical discourse, these diverse branches of knowledge are deemed necessary for the study of the supreme science—that is, the science of alchemy.
In the third essay, Eva Orthmann investigates the role of the occult sciences in the sixteenth-century Mughal court through the study of Muhammad Ghawth Gwaliyari’s The Five Jewels (al-Jawahir al-Khams). Gwaliyari is considered to be one of the most important Sufi shaykhs of the Shattari order and a prime example of a scholar immersed in lettrism, including lettrist cosmological speculations, and astral-magical practices. His invocations of the planets and the sun (the latter translated here), for instance, were well known among the Mughal literati. Another influential Mughal occultist, Muhammad Fazil Samarqandi, also wrote on planetary and solar invocations, although using a different approach than that of Gwaliyari. He illustrates his alternative method of sun-invocation in his encyclopedia, The Jewels of Humayuni Sciences (Jawahir al-ʿulum-i Humayuni) (excerpted and translated here), in which he also elaborates on various occult traditions and practices. Finally, through the analysis of relevant passages of the famed chronicle Akbarnama, wherein its author Abu l-Fazl discusses Emperor Akbar’s nativity and the casting of his horoscope, Orthmann demonstrates the application of lettrist and astrological speculations in daily life at the Mughal court.
FIGURE 8.1 Agate amulet
An agate pendant from Iran bearing the 99 names of God (Asma’ al-Husna) surrounded by the sura Ya Sin from the Qurʾan. The sura and the Divine Names are believed to harbor talismanic powers, providing the owner of the pendant with protection and strength in times of need.
Date: Mid-eighteenth century
Place of origin: Iran
Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Elizabeth S. Ettinghausen Gift, in memory of Richard Ettinghausen, Louise E. and Theresa S. Seley Purchase Fund for Islamic Art and Persian Heritage Foundation Gift, 2013. 2013.170