1 Introduction
In an anecdotal essay published in 1952 in The Bulletin, Ethel Anderson, a prominent figure in Australian modernism, recalls a failed love story she witnessed during her stay in India.1 From November 1910 to April 1911, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm Victor August Ernst of Prussia visited British India. During his stay in India, he met Princess Limbin Hteiktin Ma Lat, the niece of the last Burmese king, Thibaw Min, at the Allahabad Club. Upon first sight, Prince Wilhelm developed a passion for the Theravada Buddhist princess.2 Later, when he had a chance to meet her at the Winter Palace in Allahabad, the prince tried to impress princess Ma Lat by flirting with her and gifting her jewellery. Unfortunately, her aunt, Suphayalat, who was accompanying the princess along with King Thibaw, discouraged the prince’s advances. At the dinner, King Thibaw, who was drunk, in his conversation about numerous topics also attempted to explain Indian and Burmese magic and wonders to Prince Wilhelm. To strengthen his credibility, King Thibaw mentioned that his court magicians hailed from Kamrup in Assam, a region that had long been under the rule of Turco-Persian rulers, where magicians were known to be very powerful.3 But the prince wasn’t convinced. Seeing that the prince was sceptical, King Thibaw tried demonstrating the power of magic with a real example. He took a book from a nearby cabinet and opened the first page with a spell, kabīkaj, written on it. The king explained that the kabīkaj was the king of cockroaches and that when its name was written on the pages of a book, the book would be protected from pests, and that it was the palace librarian that had written the spell inside the book. When the prince attempted to dismiss King Thibaw’s explanations, the king mocked him in response by criticising German practices of sorcery.
This interaction between the disenchanted German prince and the enchanted Burmese king offers a small glimpse into the dynamic Islamic manuscript preservation practice of kabīkaj invocation, its practitioners, its association with magic and occult practices, and its Islamicate genealogy.4 This article looks at the practice of kabīkaj invocation in Islamicate manuscripts as a technology rather than as a religious magic practice. Divided into three discussions, the first part addresses how kabīkaj invocation can be understood as a technology rather than as a talisman and how such a conceptualisation helps to transcend the “religion versus science” binary. The second part explores the diverse religious, linguistic, philosophical, and spatial worldviews embedded within kabīkaj and discusses how such discussions can contribute to two important debates within the fields of Islamicate occult studies and codicology. The third part argues that the technological imagination and acknowledgement of plural worldviews of kabīkaj will contribute to the attempts to decolonise the field of Islamicate manuscript studies and put forward a reinterpretation of Olly Akkerman’s concept of “social codicology” as “sociotechnical codicology.”
2 Technological Assemblages: Technical Skill, Organic Networks, and Cosmological Forces
2.1 Kabīkaj: Aura, the Occult, and Botany
In Islamicate cultures, texts are highly valued and revered objects that provide the possessing person or institution with social status, financial benefit, religious authority, and a sacralised aura.5 These values attributed to the materiality of texts, in addition to their conceptual—regarding the content and reverence associated with kitāba (writing)—value, paved the way for the development of diverse manuscript preservation practices across Islamicate cultures from the early medieval period. Like the extension of binding boards beyond the text blocks in Southeast Asia, the usage of nāg kechli (snake slough) in India (fig. 11.1) and the inscription of spells like ʿazīmat al-sāriq (spell against theft) for protection against theft in Yemen, many manuscript preservation techniques have been practised across Islamicate cultures.6 One such technique associated with Islamicate manuscript preservation is the invocation of kabīkaj.
Figure 11.1
Nāg Kechli (snake slough) kept inside a bookshelf to repel termites, posted by Rana Safvi
The word kabīkaj, or its various forms, is a talismanic formula inscribed once or several times on the first or final folios of Islamicate manuscripts to protect them from human and floral-faunal agents that destroy them.7 The spell was very popular, appearing in manuscripts written in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Sanskrit, and other vernaculars, spanning a vast geography from Morocco and Anatolia to Ethiopia, Iran, Yemen, India and Indonesia.8 Its usage can be traced back at least to the twelfth–thirteenth centuries, a time which roughly coincides with the conclusion phase of the “book explosion” period in the medieval Islamic world.9 The practitioners of the manuscripts, including authors, scribes, librarians, owners, book sellers, and readers, either casually inscribed this talisman into the texts or did so out of obligation.10 Although the word is used to protect manuscripts from diverse factors like the evil eye, uninitiated readers, monsoon weather, humidity, censorship, and so on, the most popular usage of the spell is to protect manuscripts from al-ḥasharāt (vermin) and al-araḍ/al-sūs (termite/worm) attacks.11
Kabīkaj is variously interpreted as the name of the jinn king of reptiles, the king of cockroaches, and the name of a termite repellent plant known as Ranunculus Asiaticus.12 While the first two interpretations seem valid in specific contexts, most scholars who have worked on the word emphasize the botanical interpretation of kabīkaj as the name of a plant.13 According to Adam Gacek, the tradition of using kabīkaj, or Ranunculus Asiaticus, in manuscripts was started by pressing the plant specimens against the folios or placing their leaves between bifolios of the manuscripts. Due to several reasons, like the unavailability of the plant type in certain geographical areas, these practices evolved over time into the occultic invocation of kabīkaj by just inscribing its name.14 The kabīkaj plant contains the chemical compound protoanemonin (C5H4O2). When the plant is dried and comes into contact with air, protoanemonin synthesizes to anemonin (C10H8O4), which has strong toxic characteristics that can repel insects and control fungal contamination in manuscripts.15 The plant was used in the production of paper and ink in the Safavid empire to ensure the longevity of manuscripts, something that also emphasises the botanical interpretation of the word.16
Scholarship on kabīkaj has mainly focused on the spell’s origin, etymology, and talismanic features.17 The material foundations and social life of the word have received less attention. Studies that concentrate on those aspects restrict kabīkaj entirely to the context of magic, a perspective which overlooks the plural possibilities of engagement with manuscripts offered by the spell.18 The concept of “technology,” adopted from Bruno Latour, allows us to capture the diverse possibilities of engagement kabīkaj offers with the manuscripts and the multiple worlds in which they are embedded. This article argues that understanding the practice of kabīkaj invocation as a technology can illuminate the interconnectedness of social lives, material foundations, and occult-talismanic qualities of the concept without confining it only to the category of the supernatural or a normal marginal text.19
2.2 Latour and Hybrid Technologies
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger conceptualises technology as both a means to an end and a human activity.20 For Heidegger, the use of technology should involve the mastery of body and mind over the tools to ensure that the tools do not control humans. Criticising the anthropocentrism in Heidegger’s argument, which presumes unilateral agency of humans over tools, Bruno Latour contends that technology operates as multiple and heterogenous assemblages. For Latour, just as the acts of human beings influence technology, the networks of technology also influence human beings. He asserts that it is the combined potential of these multiple actors that enables a “working piece of technology.”21 When humans and tools come together, a third “hybrid” is formed that has properties different from the separate properties of its individual components, the human beings and tools. For example, a hammer’s existence and operation are only activated by diverse actors such as carpenters’ accumulation of resources, motivation, and abilities, factories for their assembly, mines for ores, forests for woods, and even the antiquity of the planet that originally enables everything. Only within this assemblage—where human beings are just one among several actors—can a “nail-hitting hammer” come into being.22 Finally, in a criticism of Heidegger’s idea of mastery, Latour discusses the notion of “technical skill,” which refers to specialized skills that only produce actions when combined with specific tools in an assemblage arrangement, rather than having supremacy over the technology.23
The practice of kabīkaj invocation in Islamicate manuscript preservation shares several features with Latour’s concept of technology. Scholars working on Islamicate talismanic practices and objects have already employed the term of technology to define them. Finbarr Barry Flood uses the idea of “devotional technology,” while Liana Saif has taken a more Foucauldian direction by employing the expression “technology of self.” Likewise, Matthew Melvin-Koushki uses the more precise term of “occult technologies.”24 While these works point to the creative conceptualization of talismanic or occult practices as technology, they do not address their networks or the way they operate. By critically engaging with the diverse elements in Latour’s technological imagination, this article elaborates on the networks and the processes through which Islamicate talismanic practices and objects, and thereby kabīkaj, operate.
2.3 Chemical kabīkaj: Science, the Occult, and Organic Unfolding
In the pre-modern Greco-Arabic scholarly tradition, there were no strict boundaries between science and the occult, or between technologies and talismans. The occult sciences were conceptualized as a subcategory of the Hellenic natural and mathematical sciences. Features like causality, empiricism, and artificiality were all shared by occult sciences as well as by the natural and mathematical sciences. Following Ibn Sīnā, Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm b. al-Akfāni (c. 1286–1348) in Irshād al-Qasīd ilā Asnāʾ al-Maqāsid classifies occult sciences as natural sciences.25 These sciences were theorized as apparatuses that marry spirits to bodies and bodies to spirits to reach the bāṭin (non-visible) through the zạ̄hir (visible).26 For Yaʿqūb b. Isḥāq al-Kindi (c. 801–873), rather than metaphysical powers, talismanic objects work through astral rays that build up the fabric of the cosmos like gravity and other natural forces.27 These astral rays were conceptualized as material energies that cause the effects of the talismans on intended objects. Also, Abū Maʿshar al-Balkhī (c. 787–886) explains how occult sciences are founded on the methodological principles of rational sciences like qiyās (analogical reasoning), taḥqīq (independent verification), and tajriba (experience), with tajriba entailing the methodologies of muʿāyana (observation) and al-wujūd al-ḥāḍir (direct discovery).28 Talismans, according to Jābir b. Ḥayyān (c. 721–815), reproduce the very act of creation and imitate natural phenomena.29 Like modern laboratory scientific practices aimed at creation and imitation, occult sciences could thus only be reproduced in highly controlled and artificial settings where the potentials of technology, human and non-human combine together to form an affect.30 For example, practitioners of kabīkaj used to catch their breath while inscribing the word in the manuscripts, and it was only upon the combination of this breathing practice and the formula that the repellent function of the talisman were believed to manifest its properties.31 In short, during the pre-modern period, “science” and “the occult” were not two mutually exclusive entities, but were rather adjacent disciplines serving to understand and engage with the universe.
This connection between science and occult practices in the pre-modern world and the combinational network of acts and objects in occult practices offer a template to juxtapose Latour’s idea of technology, which is mostly used in modern techno-scientific contexts, with the domain of Islamicate talismanic practices—specifically with the practice of kabīkaj invocation. As discussed, kabīkaj invocation is commonly employed to repel termite and fungal attacks on pre-modern Islamicate manuscripts, which were produced from materials such as paper, parchment, papyrus, and textiles. These materials were bound using organic substances like nashāʾ (plant-based starch), ghirāʾ al-ḥūt (fish-glue), muḥḥ al-bayḍ (egg yolk) and ʿasl (honey).32 Made up of organic particles, these materials contain cellulose, an organic chemical compound that forms the primary cells of plants and some fungi. Termites and certain types of fungi are able to feed on cellulose by utilizing the enzymes produced by bacteria and protozoa in their digestive systems. Likewise, animal skins used for parchment production contain collagen, which is composed of protein molecules known as amino acids. Protease enzymes found in the digestive systems of insects and fungi break down the proteins that make up the organic materials into amino acids, which serve as necessary nutrients for their survival and reproduction.33 That is, dialectically, kabīkaj is operating as an antidote to these diverse processes of complex chemical synthesis that form around—and thereby bring into existence—Islamicate manuscripts. Drawing upon the idea of “hybrid technology,” it is these entanglements of diverse actors like insects, organic materials, chemical compounds, protozoa, reverence for manuscripts, and other elements that enable the existence of the technology of “termite-repelling kabīkaj.” Outside these heterogenous actors, networks, and processes, the practice of kabīkaj invocation as a preservation technique and the underlying cosmology that determines its effectiveness would not have been able to unfold—that is, it would have remained an inoperative word and not a functional piece of talisman or repellent.
2.4 Consequential Networks: Practical Knowledge, Technical Skill, and Scribal Politics
Another important aspect in the context of technological imagination of kabīkaj is “mutual affect.” For Latour, just like human beings, non-human beings also have the same potential to engage and make impacts on networks.34 Latour refers to both the human and non-human entities in networks as “actants.” This is because, for him, ontology is fundamentally relative and positionality is purely defined by the relative situation between actors in their networks.35 Irrespective of biotic or abiotic, agency or subjectivity is something purely determined by the ability of an existence to create affect in its network. Anything that makes an impact could become an actant. This allowed Latour to propose that there is a “symmetrical” agency between humans and non-humans in a network, where both affect each other, rather than the traditional conception of unilateral influence of human beings on non-humans.36 However, while agreeing with Latour’s idea of mutual affectivity in networks, this article does not follow his conception of a flattened human and non-human ontology where human beings and non-human beings are equal in their potential for affect. Instead, it aligns more with Alf Hornborg’s concept of “consequences.” For Hornborg, non-humans have consequences over humans and humans have agency over non-humans in mutually impacted networks. He defines agency as the capacity to act, driven by purpose.37 When purposes are attributed to humans, they fall under the category of intentions, and attributing these purposes or intentionality to non-humans is theoretically a form of fetishism. The purposes that drive living beings presuppose a certain potential for communication and sentience, and this capacity for sentience and communication defines a subject.38 While biotic entities register specific aspects of their environment and respond to them, abiotic entities lack these capacities and are thus objects. However, the absence of sentience or communication does not preclude them from making impacts in their surroundings. As objects in networks, they can constrain, prompt, or mediate between humans, other non-humans, and networks. It is these relations that Hornborg calls “consequences.”39 Thus, consequences allow us to understand the mutual affects of tools, humans, and contexts that enable the operation of technologies without suspending the fundamental differences between subjects and objects. In context of kabīkaj, the idea of consequence offers a more nuanced understanding about the theological context of its practice and affect.
Etymologically, the term “talisman” encompasses the idea of mutuality. The word talisman is derived from the Arabic ṭillasm. Jābir b. Ḥayyān’s Kitāb al-Nukhab traces the origin of the word ṭillasm to the reversal of another Arabic word, musallaṭ, which means something that is authorized to have an impact over something else.40 Emilie Savage-Smith notes that, in the pre-modern Islamicate world, the textual and practical traditions of talismans were operating differently. Savage-Smith notes that the designs and inscriptions on talismanic artifacts were different from the designs and inscriptions that were mentioned in the contemporary talismanic literature. For her, then, rather than adhering to the talismanic literature, the practitioners of talismans were following the traditional approach based on their generational and experiential practical knowledge.41
Talismanic practices were practical knowledge, because apart from their para-literary existence they were also codified and expected to cause external and real-world effects with a fair degree of reliability.42 In her discussion of practical knowledge, Pamela H. Smith notes that practical knowledge is not something that operates in isolation but is always structured by diverse factors. Among those factors is the materiality of objects.43 For example, the vulnerability of manuscripts to destruction, which is a material condition, is one of the fundamental aspect that enable the kabīkaj invocation technique. In the absence of this material condition of manuscripts, the practice of kabīkaj invocation would probably not have emerged. Similarly, it is also the material condition of kabīkaj as a body capable of receiving metaphysical powers and radiating material energy that led to the practice of the inscription of the word, as will be discussed in the next part.44 Therefore, without considering the material conditions of the object, their mutual conditioning, and their role in making consequences in a network, the operation of a talismanic technology cannot be understood.
Since occult sciences are the recreation of natural laws, highly artificial contexts are very important for these practices. The most significant of these artificial settings is the technical skill that the practitioners of the talismanic technologies must maintain. As previously mentioned, technical skills are specialized skills that produce actions or outputs when combined with specific tools or technologies in an assemblage.45 Similarly, talismanic objects, although believed to operate with their astral radiations, require human skills such as speech or sacrifices, in addition to their craft part of talismanic objects or images.46 There are several practices associated with occult sciences, such as the observation of total seclusion, maintaining a vegetarian diet, astrological obedience, etc. It is only when they are combined with these practices that the talismanic objects and practitioners can expect the affect.47 Discussing the consequences, Smith notes that these specific bodily labours, be they mental imaginations or bodily flexions, can influence practical knowledge and structure the operation of technologies in the future.48 The practice of holding one’s breath while writing kabīkaj on texts in Java, Indonesia noted by Ginanjar Syaʿban’s is an example of that.49
But there’s a problem with Syaʿban’s historical analysis of kabīkaj in the Malay world. Like in King Thibaw’s story of the magicians of Kamrup, Syaʿban notes that practitioners of kabīkaj in the Malay world see the practice as a marker of their entangled histories with the Persianate cosmopolis.50 Syaʿban notes the existence of kabīkaj invocation in Indonesia only as historical evidence for the Southeast Asian connection with the Persianate cosmopolis, and he fails to highlight the explicit role of the Arabic cosmopolis across the Indian Ocean in popularizing the technique in Indonesia. Practiced across the Indian Ocean littorals of Yemen, the Swahili coasts, Gujarat, Malabar, and Java, the intellectual and material mobility within the Arabic cosmopolis facilitated by the Indian Ocean monsoons also enabled the circulation of kabīkaj technology across the Oceanic Islamicate world. During a visit to the Dār al-Iftāʾ al-Azhariyya Library in Cāliyam, Kerala in March 2023, I could find the invocation yā kabīkaj inscribed on the folio of a multiple-manuscript copy of Sabʿat al-Kutub, a traditional anthology text popular in Malabar and Coromandel coasts for teaching Arabic grammar and syntax, belonging to the private collection of the Shāfiʿī jurist Shaykh Shihābuddīn Aḥmad Kōya al-Shāliyātī (c. 1884–1954). Although I was not allowed to take photos of the manuscript or even the compound of the library because of the strict fatwā (legal ruling) issued by al-Shāliyātī prohibiting the practice of photography in Islam, which is still strictly adhered by the custodian of the library, the historical evidence for the practice of kabīkaj invocation in Malabar points to the shared technological imagination of kabīkaj invocation within the Arabic cosmopolis across the Indian Ocean networks.51
Olly Akkerman refers to this complex of sociality, tools, and technical skills in manuscript cultures as “scribal politics.” Akkerman indicates two dimensions of copying in manuscript cultures, referred to the “scribal” and the “scriptural.” In this framework, the social dimension of manuscript copying is referred to as the “scribal.” Akkerman includes various practices related to the scribe’s social setting, such as dress codes, posture, ritual purity, and the reciting of Qurʾanic verses as examples of the scribal dimension. The technical and aesthetic practices, such as the material, tools, and designs associated with manuscript cultures, are called the “scriptural.” It is the entangled assemblage of these scribal and scriptural cultures that she refers to as “scribal politics.” It is these socio-technical networks that shape the material aspects of specific manuscript cultures.52 Akkerman’s scribal politics offers a critical perspective to address the diverse consequential networks like practical knowledge, technical skill, and artefactual materiality that affect and get affected by talismanic technology within Islamicate manuscript cultures—particularly the technique of kabīkaj invocation.
2.5 Organic and Cosmological Assemblages of Rūḥāniyyāt
Another important characteristic of technology is its ontological configuration as networks. Latour emphasizes that for technologies to be effective, their heterogenous actors should come together and operate as a network. However, this paper discusses Latour’s concept of networks in light of the idea of “assemblage,” popularized by Gilles Deleuze. Although there are theoretical discussions of the difference between network analysis and assemblage thinking, Latour in several contexts uses “networks” interchangeably with “assemblages” and cites directly from Deleuze.53 For Deleuze, assemblages are multiplicities that consist of many heterogeneous terms and establish relations horizontally over space and categories as well as vertically across time. Assemblages are never linear successions or determined patterns, but rather offer infinitely possible unexpected filiations.54 To understand the operation of talismanic technologies or mechanisms in general, “assemblage” offers wider possibilities. In Islamicate mechanisms, particularly in talismanic technologies, the output or the effect of the composition is left to the qudra (omnipotence) of God even when heterogenous components are properly combined. Therefore, unexpectedness or non-predictability is always an ontological part of them.55 To contain the inherent unexpectedness or the theological act of tawakkul (trust in God’s decision) in Islamicate mechanisms, assemblage offers a better theoretical framework.
Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubi (d. 964) states that the efficacy of talismanic objects is the result of complex assemblages of multiple influences. He identifies four rūḥāniyyāt that are essential for the operation of talismans. Rūḥāniyyāt are agents of astral influences. The four rūḥāniyyāt are: the rūḥāniyyāt of the world, which acts through astral rays; the rūḥāniyyāt of the instruments; the rūḥāniyyāt of the niyya (intention); and the rūḥāniyyāt of manual labour.56 Assemblage of these rūḥāniyyāt encompasses both the celestial and terrestrial worlds and activate the will of God and humans in the universe. In other words, it is the combination of metaphysics, technology, technical skill, and mentality, each with their own heterogeneous histories, that constitutes the primary assemblage of an operating talismanic technology. Like the hammer, it is the assemblage of the organic actants like human beings, insects, fungi, bacteria, collagen, and cellulose; affective actants like the respect for and veneration of books, and the fear of losing knowledge; and cosmological actants like the faith in the qudra of God, and the ability of objects to receive spiritual elevation that enact an effective talismanic technology by exerting consequences across time and space. Conceptualising the practice of kabīkaj invocation as a technology of organic and cosmological assemblages with both agencies and consequences in operation, rather than as a magical ritual, allows us to understand the interconnected social lives, material foundations, and metaphysics of the phenomena without falling into the trap of the religion versus science binary or anthropocentrism.
3 Entangled Ontologies: Linguistics, Theology, Cosmology, and Animalscapes
3.1 Jurisprudence of Linguistics and Hermeneutics of Etymology
Hugh McDiarmid, a prominent figure during the Scottish Renaissance, refers to kabīkaj in his 1955 poem In Memoriam James Joyce:
And the word Kabikaj, constantly recurringIn manuscripts from India, and said to beAn invocation to the King of the CockroachesOr an angel concerned with the repressionOf exuberant Cockroaches and other insectsWhich destroy books.57
McDiarmid discusses kabīkaj in the context of Sanskrit. He associates kabīkaj with the quest for a universal lingua franca, challenging the dominance of English by exploring Eastern languages and orthography. Interestingly, the Islamic jurisprudential rulings surrounding kabīkaj were developed around these non-Arabic roots of the formula. According to Aḥmad al-Bīrūnī (c. 973–1048), the word kabīkaj derived from the Sanskrit word kāpi, meaning monkey. The logic of the nomenclature is argued to be either a reflection of the plant’s restless character, akin to that of a monkey, or the fact that monkeys are fond of the plant. In Indic cultural beliefs, kāpi is an epithet of the Hindu god Vishnu.58 This etymological genealogy has resulted in the issuing of fatāwā (sing. fatwa) prohibiting the practice of kabīkaj. For example, in a recent online fatwa, Shaykh Bakr b. ʿAbdullah Abī Zayd, citing Shaykh Naṣīruddīn al-Albānī, opined that the invocation of kabīkaj in manuscripts is an act of shirk (polytheism), since al-ruqaʾ (incantation) is deemed unreligious in Islamic teachings. Another reason he cites is the ʿajamī (non-Arabic) genealogy of the term.59 The legal ruling of shirk pertaining to the invocation of kabīkaj is not just influenced by the polytheistic etymology and the hermeneutics associated with the term, but also by the more popular understanding about the invalidity of non-Arabic languages in divinatory practices as well as the conception of Arabic as the only valid language of Islam and faith. Another recent fatwa by a contemporary Shāfiʿī scholar from Kerala, India, Shaykh ʿAbdul Qādir Musliyār Ponmaḷa, discusses the topic in detail.60 In discussing the difference between riyāḍa al-asmāʾ (spiritual treatment using the divine names of Allah) and talismanic practices, Shaykh ʿAbdul Qādir in his Fatāwa Muḥyussunna cites the Ottoman polymath Kātip Çelebī and Ibn Khaldūn:
Asmāʾ is the discipline that practices the divine names of al-asmāʾ al-ḥusna and the secrets to make them work […] It is by merging and detaching the forces of heaven [with or from the forces of earth] the practices of talismanic experts work […] [while] the universe submits to the power of the experts of asmāʾ. For the experts of asmāʾ, neither the heavenly forces nor other things are needed for their practice. What matters to them above those forces is the help from Allah.61
Quoting this, Shaykh ʿAbdul Qādir writes that there is no prohibition of the practice of asmāʾ, while the practice of talismans is theologically and jurisprudentially contested.62 The only discussion he brings in to elaborate on the ambiguity is the linguistic one. Citing the fifteenth-century Shāfiʿī jurist and hadith scholar Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī (1372–1449), Shaykh ʿAbdul Qādir writes:
Regarding written amulets and uttered spells, this is the opinion of our jurisprudential school. Writing and uttering words whose meanings are unknown is ḥarām. The Mālikī scholar Ibn al-Rushd and the Shāfiʿī scholar Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām are among the scholars from our and other schools who ruled that spells with unknown non-Arabic words are ḥarām.63
Agreeing to this line of thought, Shaykh ʿAbdul Qādir shows his dismissal of amulets and talismanic practices in non-Arabic words in Islam. Kabīkaj, having either a Sanskrit or a Persian root, also with a known etymological connection with Hindu gods, comes under this legal prohibition of using non-Arabic words in talismanic practices for many people across the Islamic community. But interestingly, Samastha Kerala Jem-iyyatul Ulama, the official forty-member scholarly body of one faction of Sunni Muslims in Kerala in which Shaykh ʿAbdul Qādir holds the secretary position, claims their scholarly affiliation to al-Shāliyātī, who used the formula kabīkaj in his texts. So, although there were legal opinions prohibiting the use of non-Arabic words in talismanic practices, there were always diverse hermeneutical interpretations and conceptualisations (like seeing kabīkaj not as a talisman) that facilitated the practice even among communities that textually dismiss it. For example, the Arabic numerical value of yā kabīkaj is the same as that of the word Allāh, namely 66.64 So, conceptualising kabīkaj in this way makes it a mathematical variation of asmāʾ rather than a prohibited non-Arabic talismanic spell. In short, the theological, linguistic, and hermeneutical discourses that shape kabīkaj are fundamental to understanding the legal and practical terrains of the spell’s usage across communities and thus its technological location within the human or community-manuscript assemblage.
3.2 Theology of tawassul and istighātha
As discussed, kabīkaj has been inscribed in diverse forms across Islamicate manuscripts, and among the most popular forms are the ones that are written along with ḥurūf al-nidāʾ (vocative particles) and afʿāl al-duʿāʾ (supplicative verbs), such as yā kabīkaj (oh! kabīkaj) or iḥfaẓ kabīkaj (please protect, kabīkaj!). Kabīkaj with these vocative or supplicative add-words can be seen as either addressing the kabīkaj itself, reminiscent of the practice of istighātha (calling for divine aid) like yā kabīkaj iḥfaẓ al-waraq min al-araḍa ʿadada kurāsa wa-waraq ʿaddahu ʿaddahu (oh kabīkaj! protect the paper from the termite, all the books and papers, all their numbers, all their numbers) (fig. 11.2), or addressing God through kabīkaj like iḥbis yā kabīkaj al-arḍa yā ḥafīẓ yā Allāh yā Allāh yā Allāh (oh! Kabīkaj protect from termites, oh! Protector, oh! Allah oh! Allah oh! Allah) (fig. 11.3), similar to the practice of tawassul (intercession). Ḥurūf al-nidāʾ are normally used for identifying persons or objects in conversations, but are also technically used in the context of istighāsa.65 Also, although the particles are generally used along with living beings, it is often used with non-living beings as majāz (metaphor) or by taqdīr (perceiving something as something else) as per the rhetorical rules.66 Either way, with the use of ḥurūf al-nidāʾ and afʿāl al-duʿāʾ, kabīkaj is transformed into a subject—the capacity to act—or attributed with a certain level of subjectivity—the capacity to be acted through—here by its practitioners.
Figure 11.2
Yā kabīkaj iḥfaẓ al-waraq min al-araḍa ʿadada kurāsa wa-waraq ʿaddahu ʿaddahu’ in Iʿlām al-Nās bi-mā waqaʿa li-l-Barāmika maʿa Banī al-ʿAbbās, fol. 1a. Vollers 622, Universitätbibliothek Leipzig.
Figure 11.3
Iḥbis yā kabīkaj al-arḍa yā ḥafīẓ yā Allāh in Adam Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts: A Vademecum for Readers (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2009), 137.
In technical terms, istighātha is the seeking of aid from God for lifting difficulties and opening paths. A subcategory of duʿāʾ (supplication), istighātha seeks help for an actual or potential difficulty.67 Thus, even when asked directly to some subjects or objects, theologically it is seeking God to create help through or in them.68 While tawassul is seeking help from God through the mediacy of an object or subject, what makes tawassul different from the idolatry practices of polytheists in a theological sense is that while polytheists seek taqarrubun ilā-wāsiṭa (closeness to the mediator), in tawassul it is taqarrubun bi-l-wāsiṭa (closeness through the mediator).69 Although all human acts are implicitly either istighātha or tawassul, technically they are referred to by different terms in the context of al-umūr al-khāriqa, which are things and events that are normally outside the analogical understanding of causality.70 “Consequences” make it possible to incorporate the theological nuances of this discussion. Since in both istighātha and tawassul the subjectivity attributed to kabīkaj by its practitioners is relational to the omnipotence of Allah, and not its own, “consequence,” rather than “agency,” offers the space to accommodate the performativity of the formulae within the Islamicate context without pushing it into polytheism. As discussed above, Hornborg’s “consequence” doesn’t consider abiotic objects to have ontological subjectivity even when affecting their surroundings, while Latour’s “agency” attributes ontological subjectivity to objects, something which is more aligned with taqarrubun bi-l-wāsiṭa.
3.3 Platonic Ontology of ʿilm al-ḥikma
Apart from the theological dimension of istighātha and tawassul, the invocation of kabīkaj is also predicated on the concept of ʿilm al-ḥikma (the science of wisdom). Across Islamicate history, several scholars have identified ʿilm al-ḥikma with al-ʿilm al-ʿaqlī (rational science).71 As discussed above, there were no strict boundaries between occult sciences and natural and mathematical sciences in the pre-modern Islamicate world, and talismanic practices were understood to be based on rational methodologies. So, ʿilm al-ḥikma also applies to all sorts of Islamic talismanic inscriptions in all forms. The concept of ʿilm al-ḥikma is fundamentally Platonic.72 In Platonic ontology, the divine or true nature of realities is ʿālam al-mithāl, which is an aspatial and atemporal essence that provides the formal basis for the material world, and all real world existents are only the corresponding realities of this ideal abstract realm.73 It is because of this ontological foundation of natural philosophy and cosmological laws that Ibn Khaldūn considered talismanic practitioners better than pseudo-asmāʾ practitioners, as for him the former at least have some alignment with the natural phenomena.74
In the specific case of kabīkaj, the philosophical ontology is based on the real essence of the Ranunculus Asiaticus. In the medieval Islamicate Platonic conception, toxicity was an inseparable attribute of the eidetic form of Ranunculus Asiaticus.75 The invocation of kabīkaj was based on the idea that unless it was toxic, the Ranunculus Asiaticus was never the Ranunculus Asiaticus. This is because the actual Ranunculus Asiaticus was inseparable from the idea or form of Ranunculus Asiaticus, and the manifested Ranunculus Asiaticus was nothing but a subsidiary reflection of that reality. Therefore, in the practice of kabīkaj invocation, the word kabīkaj is regarded as being just as real as the actual kabīkaj plant, as both are only different manifestations of a single true form of the Ranunculus Asiaticus. As of ʿilm al-ḥikma, the inscription of kabīkaj can have the same affects of the plant, as the epigraphy too comes under the universal form of the Ranunculus Asiaticus. Thus, the ontology of kabīkaj is grounded in the cosmology that the true essence of the plant lies in its form, rather than in its material attributes, and this form can also be harnessed through the invocation of its name.
These onto-theological and cosmological imaginations also contribute to two important discussions regarding talismans in general and kabīkaj in particular—Savage-Smith’s discussion on the textual-practical gap of medieval Islamicate talismans and Akkerman’s discussion on the transformation of kabīkaj invocation from the usage of the actual plant. As mentioned, Savage-Smith notes that during the medieval period, the literary tradition of Islamicate talismanic discourses did not impact its practical tradition and was thus operating separately. However, although Savage-Smith’s argument about the direct influence of the contemporary talismanic literary production in medieval Islamicate talismanic craft is historical, talismanic craft was not necessarily operating in isolation from the textual world. Smith notes how practical knowledge, although operating at a distance from textual knowledge was still structured by it and vice versa. For example, the vernacular geological knowledge of sixteenth-century miners in German Saxony was influenced by Aristotelian earth science. The idea of miners that it was the growth of minerals inside the earth that stirred up the subterranean air circulation causing the variation in temperature of the earth traces its origin to Aristotle’s Meteorologica.76 Smith and Matteo Valleriani used the term “structure” to describe this relation. “Structure” denotes the social dimensions and conceptual systems in which a knowledge system is embedded.77 In the same way that the German miners’ practical knowledge was structured by Aristotle’s theories, the Islamic talismanic craft was also structured by textual traditions. Although not directly impacted by contemporary literary tradition, pre-modern talismanic practices were still structured by solid theoretical foundations like Platonic ontology, theological discourses around istighātha and tawassul, and jurisprudential debates around language and hermeneutical considerations about etymology, all of which developed elaborate textual corpora across the generations. Shahab Ahmed describes these foundations as “Con-Text.” Con-Text is the entire accumulated collection of ways and meanings of Islam that have been historically developed, practiced, and recorded up to any given moment—the comprehensive historical vocabulary of Islam at a particular moment. Ahmed writes:
[Con-Text] includes all encyclopaedia of epistemologies, interpretations, identities, persons and places, structures of authority, textualities and intertextualities, motifs, symbols, values, meaningful questions and meaningful answers, agreements and disagreements, emotions and affinities and affects, aesthetics, modes of saying, doing and being, and other truth-claims and components of existential exploration and meaning-making in terms of Islam that Muslims acting as Muslims have produced, and to which Muslims acting as Muslims have attached themselves during the process of hermeneutical engagement with Revelation.78
It is this trans-generational Con-Text of textual theories that enabled the context for vernacular talismanic crafts to perform and exist in an Islamically meaningful way even when separated from contemporary literary scholarship on the topic. That is, although separated, the relationship between the literary and practical dimensions of pre-modern Islamicate talismanic practices were never independent or isolated.
Another interesting technological aspect is the historical transition of the practice of kabīkaj preservation—from using real kabīkaj leaves to invoking the name to generate the affect. Akkerman notes that it was the wide unavailability of kabīkaj plants across the Islamicate world that led to the development of the practice of kabīkaj invocation with the formula.79 But such an argument seems reductionistic as it confines the dynamic practice of kabīkaj invocation across a larger geography over the generations to a single utilitarian reason of unavailability. Scholars have noted that the technique of kabīkaj invocation was already in practice at least from the sixteenth century within manuscript cultures of the Safavid empire, where the kabīkaj plant was growing natively.80 Akkerman also mentions an important point in the context of South Asia which contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the technological transition. She notes that the widespread availability of the neem plant in the Indian subcontinent, which has similar repellent qualities to those of kabīkaj plants, like bitterness and anti-fungal and viral toxicity, did not actually stop the practitioners of kabīkaj invocation from copying the formula in their manuscripts. Instead, what happened was that the neem plant was considered to be an additional repellent that reinforced the protective power of kabīkaj formula.81 Here Akkerman points to an important context of the parallel and complicated relation between using real plant specimens and invoking talismanic spells rather than a linear transition where one replaces another. Like this relation between kabīkaj formula and neem plant, the relation between kabīkaj formula and the kabīkaj plant itself could also be layered. Rather than just being due to unavailability, the above-discussed tradition of onto-theologies and cosmologies existing within the Islamicate world could also have encouraged the practitioner communities to adopt the invocation of kabīkaj along with or rather than kabīkaj plants. Instead of understanding the relation between the kabīkaj plant and kabīkaj formula as a linear transition caused by the utilitarian reason of unavailability, their transformation should be understood as a complex process facilitated by an assemblage of diverse ontologies and worldviews along with practical and utilitarian reasons. That is, although maybe for utilitarian reasons, the hermeneutics of etymologies, the jurisprudence of languages, and the theology of divine aid revolving around kabīkaj have all certainly created a context for kabīkaj where its utilitarian practice could gain social validity and moral affirmation.
3.4 Spatial Conception of Animalscapes
Finally, the technique of kabīkaj invocation also offers critical perspectives on human-animal entanglements and the conception of space within Islamicate scribal politics. One of the most imperative occasions where micro-fauna—insects, termites, fungi, bacteria, etc.—mark their presence in human imagination is when they “attack” or “destroy” assets. Manuscripts were among the most valuable possessions in Islamicate intellectual and emotional imaginations. The micro-faunal destruction of manuscripts was thus always a concern that evolved along with the proliferation of texts in the Islamicate world. These acts of “attack” or “destruction” of manuscripts offer a critical point of departure to understand the spatial imaginations underlying the practice of kabīkaj invocation. In Islamicate vocabulary, all micro-fauna comes under the generic category of al-ḥasharāt (vermin). In pre-modern Europe, the category of vermin reproduced the Cartesian duality between creatures that are ethically worthy of consideration and those that are despised as “zoological outcasts.”82 This Cartesian conception was affirmed by the Renaissance-era perception of space as something completely belonging to humans and seeing everyone and everything else as encroachers on human space. It was these binary and the Renaissance-era anthropocentric spatial imagination that built the foundation for the modern human-vermin encounters where humans terminate vermin with tools.
The technique of kabīkaj invocation offers a different perspective on the human-vermin relationship. Rather than eliminating them, the invocation of kabīkaj highlights a context where manuscripts are protected from vermin. That is, in scribal politics the practitioners of kabīkaj prevent vermin from colliding with their space, namely the manuscripts. This prevention, rather than annihilation, is caused by the practitioners’ basic acknowledgment of the omnipresence of vermin around the manuscripts.83 Manuscripts there were not just understood as merely a source of knowledge, but were conceptualised as spaces shared between, or habitus co-inhabited by, human and vermin. Thus, the kabīkaj technique was used to negotiate the spatial configuration between the two. Here, the relation between human and vermin are “co-dwelling without either harmony or conquest.”84 One important thing to note here is that, more than actual human-vermin co-dwelling, the invocation of kabīkaj underlines the “spatial conception” between them. Kabīkaj is not inscribed on manuscripts after they are attacked by vermin to stop them from further destruction. Rather, it is generally seen inscribed on manuscripts that are potentially vulnerable. Obviously, in these contexts the vermin is not always actual, but perceived. That is, manuscripts are often “perceived vermin spaces” where humans come into contact with them. Semih Çelik uses the concept of “animalscape” to identify these perceived animal spaces.85 In short, the technique of kabīkaj invocation establishes a critical Islamicate spatial configuration where manuscripts are also acknowledged as material spaces of diverse life and knowledge forms—animal and knowledgescapes—and it can only be explicated by conceptualizing kabīkaj along with the multiple cosmologies and imaginary configurations that come along with it.
4 Sociotechnical Codicology and the Decolonisation of Manuscript Studies
Conceptualising talismanic practices as technology and acknowledging their diverse cosmologies is important in the context of decolonising manuscript studies. Melvin-Koushky discusses how the “colonialist-orientalist dogma” banished Islamicate occult imaginaries from the global histories of science and how this contributed to creating the religion versus magic narrative within Islamicate intellectual history.86 While scholarship influenced by nineteenth-century scientism negated both Islamic religion and magic as bad, scholarship inspired by the twentieth-century counter-movement of religionism divided religion into true and false where magic and occult imaginations were again relegated to the category of bad.87 For Melvin-Koushky, decolonising Islamicate occult sciences also means escaping the Islamist religionist narratives along with the scientist narratives. This is because Islamist religionism is also based on prioritising a particular form of rationality and cosmology over the diversity of other cosmologies and imaginations that existed in Islamic history. As discussed before, understanding talismanic and occult practices and specifically the invocation of kabīkaj as technologies allows us to transcend the science-occult binary and understand talismanic practices or kabīkaj as techniques aimed at harnessing external results by manipulating material forces just like any other scientific machinery. In this way, a technological understanding of kabīkaj invocation offers the possibility to decolonise the scientist and religionist tendencies prevailing in magical paratextual analysis in the field of manuscript studies.
In her article “Reclaiming Manuscripts: Divination, Social Justice, and Islamic Codicology,” Nur Sobers-Khan discusses the need to appreciate diverse cosmologies, epistemologies, and forms of knowledge embodied by Islamicate manuscripts and the role of this appreciation in enabling a decolonial, non-patriarchal, and post-Enlightenment future of the field.88 She notes that the field of manuscript studies is still almost dominated by approaches that claim to be “empirical,” “objective,” “scientific,” and based on “philology” and “historical context.”89 In an introductory Islamic manuscript codicology course I attended at the Institute for Islamic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin in the winter of 2022–2023, out of the total twenty-seven author-specific course materials, twelve were written by white male scholars and ten were written by white female scholars. Male and female scholars of colour in the field accounted for only the remaining five materials in the syllabus. This anecdote highlights how even in 2023 in an institute long dominated by philological and ethnographic research, courses on Islamicate codicology are still predominantly designed around white Euro-North American scholarship.
Sobers-Khan notes that the marginalia, paratexts, contents, and materiality of Islamicate manuscripts give access to the diverse cosmologies and epistemologies that are lost due to the reductionistic hermeneutics of colonial modernity and rationalism dominating the field. Classical European Islamic manuscript studies have often focused on comparing Islamicate manuscript practices to contemporary European practices or categorised them using European vocabularies. Studies inspired by archaeology have expanded on these problems, but they have tended to focus mostly on understanding the material aspects of manuscripts. Later, attempts were made to historically situate manuscripts in their contexts and networks. Gacek defines codicology as a discipline that goes beyond the archaeology of the manuscript and embraces aspects like their “history, history of their transmission, collections, collectors, libraries and the like.”90 However, questions concerning Gacek and others were more the when and where of manuscripts, their provenance, practices, and purposes. Questions about the diverse cosmologies and intellectual and emotional worlds those manuscripts encompassed have rarely been asked by codicologists.
For Sobers-Khan, reclaiming the plural visionary landscapes embedded in Islamicate manuscripts opens the possibility of reminding us about the heterogenous and ambiguous histories, layered narratives and creative imaginations that were always marginalised in global histories of cultural and intellectual production.91 Akkerman’s concept of “social codicology” offers a critical perspective to reclaim these marginalised cosmologies and ontologies. Social codicology considers manuscripts from a different angle, surpassing the borders of classical philology, codicology, and palaeography. It emphasises the emotional, intellectual, political, material, and organic contexts of manuscripts like looting, mobility, demise, termites, and human and climate violence that enable the historical embeddedness of the manuscripts.92 For example, Akkerman writes about the social life of kabīkaj. She discusses how codicological features like kabīkaj are constantly in flux and acquire new meanings in different contexts and changing geographies through the introduction of new scribal practices.93 In short, social codicology brings the materiality of the manuscripts and the social and cosmological worlds that give meaning to them to the centre of enquiry.94
All the same, there is a theoretical problem with social codicology. It has a strong anthropocentric foundation to it. In clarifying the confusion around agency in social codicology, Akkerman writes that “it is not the manuscript that has agency, but the agency people attribute to the texts as objects.”95 That is, in social codicology agency is always “given to texts from outside.”96 Although this article also takes a critical stance towards the idea of agency of manuscripts, it does not agree with Akkerman’s idea that agency is given to texts by people. This idea feeds into the Enlightenment rationality of foregrounding human beings as the fundamental propellors of history and ontology. Rather, as discussed before, the present article emphasises the concept of object consequences where the manuscripts are conceptualised as having their inherent potential to impact their networks without the agency being given from outside. Substituting the “social” in social codicology with Latour’s concept of “sociotechnical” can offer a non-anthropocentric version of the concept.
In the second edition of Laboratory Life, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar dropped the word “social” from the book’s subtitle. First published as Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts in 1979, the second edition in 1986 came out as Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts.97 This was because by the time of the second edition, Latour had become a strong believer in the idea that “social” avoided “things” or “objects.”98 According to Latour, any social structure relies on human and non-human actants, and it is this network of humans and non-humans that holds society together as a durable whole.99 The keyword Latour replaces “social” with is “sociotechnical.”100 In On Technical Mediations—Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy, Latour presents the concept of “technical mediation.” Similarly to the concept of “hybrid,” by “mediation” Latour means the co-influence of humans and artefacts.101 That is, in the practice of kabīkaj invocation, the manuscript with the kabīkaj formula at its margins is not the same manuscript it was before. But it is a manuscript with more possibilities—those that made a practitioner write the formula on it, that repel termites, that make a person curious about it, that distract a reader’s eye from the central contents and draw it towards itself, etc. The ontological potential of the manuscript has multiplied. The manuscript is not then a manuscript as such, but a sociotechnical manuscript (artefact) mediated by kabīkaj (technique) and its practitioners (subject). Now, replacing “social” with “sociotechnical” in social codicology will not be a reversal of the concept, but would rather be more aligned with it. This is because Akkerman writes that “socialising codicology … [includes] ritual, mechanical, spatial, and social practices and oral histories of book copying, consuming, collecting, venerating and preserving”—what she calls “scribal politics”.102 That is, similarly to the Latourian conception of the sociotechnical, social codicology conceptualises manuscripts as intersections of the material, emotional, and intellectual.
In this way, the sociotechnical conception of codicology offers a critical framework to decolonise Islamicate manuscript studies in two directions. One, by focusing on the overlooked ontologies embedded in the manuscripts, it situates the various jurisprudential, hermeneutical, theological, ontological, and cosmological worlds of kabīkaj at the centre of inquiry along with technical, literary, and social aspects of the formula. Two, by transcending the anthropocentric foundation of the field and emphasising the heterogenous human assemblages and non-human associations that makes every manuscript possible, it understands the invocation of kabīkaj as networks of human-vermin spatial negotiations, organic-chemical synthesis, relationship between practitioners and tools, manuscript materials and communal emotions, etc. Sociotechnical codicology thus allows us to understand the diverse assemblages and ontologies that manuscripts and their scripts are embedded in which makes them meaningful within their multiple Con-Texts (in Shahab Ahmed’s sense) across time and space. Also, sociotechnical codicology invites us to “engage with, decipher, observe, deconstruct, read, and—if possible—participate […] if we want to understand how texts work” and why their manifold sociotechnical modes of being matter.103
5 Conclusion
Although centred around questions of materiality, the field of codicology is still very much untouched by theoretical and philosophical concepts developed within the field of materiality studies. Giovanni Ciotti highlights this gap and emphasises the need for more theoretical approaches in the field of manuscript studies.104 This article has approached Islamicate manuscript cultures from a new materialistic perspective and explored how such juxtapositions allow us to address different overlooked questions and thereby politically and intellectually decolonise the discipline. Divided into three central discussions, the first discussion argued that understanding the practice of kabīkaj invocation as a technology rather than as magic or a talisman restricted to religion offers the possibility to conceptualise the practice within its heterogenous contexts and cosmologies. Critically engaging Bruno Latour’s concept of “technology,” this part established the preliminary concepts upon which the later arguments in the article were drawn and discussed how kabīkaj invocation operates within its complex material foundations and sociotechnical lives. The second discussion elaborated on the diverse ontologies and cosmologies embedded within the practice of kabīkaj invocation and emphasised how highlighting them furthers two central discussions—theory-practice division in Islamicate talismanic cultures and the unavailability of kabīkaj plants theory—within Islamic occult studies and codicology. The final discussion theorised how acknowledging kabīkaj as a technology and its diverse onto-theologies and cosmologies are fundamental in decolonising the field of Islamicate manuscript studies. Also, the final part of the article reframed Olly Akkerman’s concept of “social codicology” as “sociotechnical codicology” and elaborated on its importance as a methodology to understand the diverse sociotechnical lives of Islamicate manuscripts and their meaning-making process outside the anthropocentric logic of the Renaissance-era and colonial modernity dominating the discipline.
Now, apart from the chemical and entomological networks, the conceptualisation of kabīkaj as a nexus of diverse assemblages also allows us to understand the critical relationship between manuscripts and climate change. Climate change is one of the biggest threats affecting manuscript collections across the world. A 2018 study published in the Climate Risk Management journal assessed 1,232 archival repositories across the United States and found out that 98.8 % of them were “likely to be affected by at least one climate risk factor.”105 A recent report published by the European Union warns that galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) in Europe are affected by rising temperature and humidity, droughts and floods, melting glaciers and rising sea levels, and invasive species and pests.106 Across the continents in the city of Chinguetti in Mauritania, a UNESCO world heritage site which holds around 6,000 Arabic manuscripts in thirteen local libraries from the eighth to the seventeenth centuries, the manuscripts are at the verge of destruction by climate crises like flash floods, the expansion of Saharan sand dunes, and heat. Custodians of these local manuscript collections live with the constant fear of the erasure of their heritage.107 In Indian Ocean littorals, local Muslim libraries in the region of Gujarat use techniques like mothballs and pouches stuffed with rice in bookshelves to resist the rising humidity in their coastal geographies.108 As discussed, Islamicate manuscripts were produced mostly of organic materials and these materials were very vulnerable to fluctuations in weather and climate. Holly Prochaska, the interim head of the Archives and Rare Books Library at the University of Cincinnati, comments on the vulnerability of pre-modern manuscripts in the face of climate change. Prochaska remarks that “the higher the humidity, the higher the temperature, the quicker [manuscripts] will break down their organic materials. Leather will wet rot. Collagen fibres in velum will tighten and shrink.”109
Emerging as an antidote within this organic assemblage, kabīkaj offers a point of departure to understand the position of Islamic manuscripts within an assemblage of organic materials and fluctuating climate conditions. Torsten Wollina has described the writing and preservation of manuscripts as acts in defiance of nature. According to Wollina, “people copied and continued the works of other authors precisely because environmental dangers, among others, threatened the survival of knowledge. Writing promises a way in which knowledge can transcend natural limitations, both in time and space.”110 These attempts to transcend nature were always embedded within diverse emotional forms like the veneration of texts, the fear of a loss of knowledge, and the respect for authors and ancestors that developed between communities and manuscripts. The fear of losing knowledge was always present within the Islamic world, and the loss of knowledge was often associated with the imminence of apocalypse.111 Wollina discusses water networks like ḥawḍ (tank for ablution) around pre-modern Islamic institutions and libraries, their role in making Islamicate manuscripts constantly vulnerable and how that led to the development of different preservation techniques like the invocation of kabīkaj. Along the line of Wollina’s thought, kabīkaj invocation appears as a dialectic formula between natural and anti-natural. It is natural as it harnesses the natural forces and anti-natural as it resists other natural forces.
This complex positionality of kabīkaj offers a critical perspective to understand climate resilience within Islamicate societies. Although practices like kabīkaj were not actually successful in preserving the manuscripts against climate crises, they should be understood contextually within the spatio-temporal networks that produced them. Deeply interwoven with climatic conditions and organic materials, kabīkaj offers a perspective on how people experienced and interpreted ecological calamities and how they developed their own forms of subject and object resilience. As a marker of community resilience towards climate change and temperature variations, kabīkaj offers itself as a source to tap the historical climatological data—emotions, interpretations, and cosmologies surrounding climate change—of the pre-modern Islamicate world. In this way, a sociotechnical codicological understanding of kabīkaj invocation allows us to address multiple lacunae in the field of manuscript studies like the intersection of climate, manuscripts, emotions, community resilience, and cosmologies, which all traditionally fall outside the scope of the discipline.
Ethel Anderson, “Home Life: Allahabad,” The Bulletin, October 15, 1952,
Maurice Collis, Trials in Burma (Bangkok: Ava Publishing House, 1996), 39.
Rabindra Das, “The Muslims of Assam: A Critical Study,” IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science 19, no. 1 (2014): 96–97.
“Islamicate” is a term introduced by Marshall G.S. Hodgson in his book The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Volume One, The Classical Age of Islam. For Hodgson, “Islamicate” denotes a culture centred on a lettered tradition that has been historically distinctive of societies in which Muslims and their faith is recognized as prevalent and socially dominant in one sense or another, and which has been naturally shared in by both Muslims and non-Muslims who participate at all fully in that society. He distinguishes “Islamicate” from “Islam,” which is the religion of Muslims. Here the term “Islamicate” is used because, in Hodgson’s definition Turco-Persian identity falls within the broader scope of Islamicate. See Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vol. 1, The Classical Age of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 57–59.
Mahmood Kooria, “Texts as Objects of Value and Veneration: Islamic Law Books in the Indian Ocean Littoral,” Sociology of Islam 6, no. 1 (2018): 61.
Florian Sobieroj, “Arabic Manuscripts on the Periphery: Northwest Africa, Yemen and China,” in Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field, ed. Jörg B. Quenzer, Dmitry Bondarev and Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 95; Karin Scheper, The Technique of Islamic Bookbinding: Methods, Materials and Regional Varieties (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2018), 348; Amélie Couvrat Desvergnes, “Skin against Paper: Identification of Historical Interleaving Materials in Indo-Iranian Manuscripts,” The Book and Paper Group Annual 34 (2015): 133–134.
Here, “destruction” means both material and spiritual degradation. This is because kabīkaj was also used to protect certain books from being read by uninitiated people. Being read by undeserving people was also seen as a destruction of the spiritual aura of a text. For this point, see Olly Akkerman, “The Bohra Manuscript Treasury as a Sacred Site of Philology: A Study in Social Codicology,” Philological Encounters 4, no. 3–4 (2019): 194.
Finbarr Barry Flood, “Before the Mughals: Material Culture of Sultanate North India,” Muqarnas Online 36, no. 1 (2019): 29.
Bakr b. Ibrahim al-Ishbīlī, Kitāb al-taysīr fī ṣināʿat al-tafsīr, vol. 7–8, ed. ʿAbd Allah Kannūn (Madrid: Revista del Instituto de Estudios Islamicos en Madrid, 1959), 40. For the idea of a “book explosion,” see Jonathan M. Bloom, Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 110–122.
“Practitioner” is used here in its broadest sense, encompassing artisans, intermediate servants, and consumers. It includes anyone who works with their hands in craft production, like a paper maker, author, book binder, in addition to those who do not maintain autonomous control over their production, like a transporter or a cleaner of bookshelves, and those who make use of or simply encounter the objects. See Steven A. Walton, review of Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600, by Pamela O. Long, Aestimatio: Sources and Studies in the History of Science 11 (2014): 102.
Adam Gacek, “The Use of ‘Kabīkaj’ in Arabic Manuscripts,” Manuscripts of the Middle East 1 (1986): 49; Sobieroj, “Arabic,” 95.
James W. Pollock, “Kabikaj to Book Pouches: Library Preservation Magic and Technique in Syria of the 1880’s and the 1980’s West,” MELA Notes 44 (1988): 8–9.
Pollock, “Kabikaj to Book Pouches,”, 8–9; Adam Gacek, Arabic Manuscripts: A Vademecum for Readers (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2009), 137–138.
Julia Solomon, “Ancient Secrets Revealed,” McGill Reporter, December 23, 2010,
Kamran Mahlooji, Mahsima Abdoli, and Arman Zargaran, “Gabigaj: A Persian Herb for Protecting Manuscripts against Fungies and Insects from Safavid Era (1501–1722 AD),” Journal of Research on History of Medicine 9, no. 1 (2020): 67; Robert Hill and Ruth Van Heyningen, “Ranunculin: The Precursor of the Vesicant Substance of the Buttercup,” Biochemical Journal 49, no. 3 (1951): 332.
Mahlooji, Abdoli, and Zargaran, “Gabigaj,” 67.
Gacek, “Use,” 49–53; Gacek, Arabic, 137–138; Mahlooji, Abdoli, and Zargaran, “Gabigaj,” 63–68; Emilie Savage-Smith, “Introduction,” in Magic and Divination in Early Islam, ed. Emilie Savage-Smith (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), xiii–xliv.
Arun Singh and Manouchehr Moshtagh Khorasani, “An Analysis of Qurʾanic Inscriptions on Safavid Afsharid, Zand and Qajar Period Iranian Arms and Armour,” Quaderni Asiatici 96 (2011): 134–135. For the problem of using the word “magic” to describe Islamicate occult practices, see Travis Zadeh, “Magic, Marvel, and Miracle in Early Islamic Thought,” in The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West from Antiquity to the Present, ed. David J. Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 235–267.
The idea of the supernatural versus the natural is a binary built upon the fundamental understanding of what encompasses the natural. The notions of natural and supernatural, in their modern sense, were developed from medieval Christian theology. In medieval Christian theology, the supernatural was something connected to God. The idea was that God has the power to produce miracles, i.e., events that exceed all nature. “Nature” or “natural” encompass all orderly repetition of beings through intelligible reason. See Marinos Sariyannis, “Studying Ottoman Views of the Supernatural: The State-of-the-Art and a Research Agenda,” Acaʾib: Occasional Papers on the Ottoman Perceptions of the Supernatural 1 (2020), 5–10.
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 1.
Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 174–215.
Bruno Latour, “Morality and Technology,” trans. Couze Venn, Theory, Culture & Society 19, no. 5–6 (2002): 249.
Roslyn Kerr, Sport and Technology: An Actor-Network Theory Perspective (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 15.
Finbarr Barry Flood, Technologies de dévotion dans les arts de l’Islam: pèlerins, reliques et copies (Paris: Hazan, 2019); Liana Saif, “Mastering Nature and Soul: Contemplations on Magic and Talismans in Islam,” Ajam Media Collective, October 28, 2020,
Melvin-Koushki, “Is (Islamic),” 311–312.
Melvin-Koushki, “Is (Islamic),” 304; ʿAbdul Qādir Musliyar Ponmaḷa, Fatāwa Muḥyussunna (Kottakkal: Barakath Book Stall, 2010), 526–527.
Saif, “Mastering Nature.”
Melvin-Koushki, “Is (Islamic),” 314.
Saif, “Mastering Nature.”
Melvin-Koushki, “Is (Islamic),” 316.
A. Ginanjar Syaʿban, “Kabikaj, Lafadz Jimat di Muka Kitab,” Attarbiyah, November 14, 2017,
Scheper, Technique, 85, 164; Gacek, “Use,” 49; Michaelle Biddle, Saving Nigeria’s Islamic Manuscript Heritage (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Library, 2008), 4.
Scheper, Technique, 394.
Graham Harman, “Entanglement and Relation: A Response to Bruno Latour and Ian Hodder,” New Literary History 45, no. 1 (2014): 38–43.
Harman, “Entanglement and Relation,” 37–38.
Latour extended the idea of symmetry from early science studies to anthropology, later called symmetrical anthropology. He applied the idea to understand the status of actors in all phenomena. For him, in all knowledge constructions, things, along with human beings, should also be counted as agents. This symmetrical approach without hierarchizing subjects over objects and provisioning proportional agencies to actors according to their roles were based on his advocacy for suspending the non-modern division of culture and nature. For a detailed discussion of symmetry and agency, see Ian Hodder and Gavin Lucas, “The Symmetries and Asymmetries of Human-Thing Relations: A Dialogue,” Archaeological Dialogues 24, no. 2 (2017): 119–137.
Alf Hornborg, “Artifacts have Consequences, not Agency: Toward a Critical Theory of Global Environmental History,” European Journal of Social Theory 20, no. 1 (2017): 98.
Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 91–92.
Hornborg, “Artifacts,” 99.
Saif, “Mastering Nature.”
Emilie Savage-Smith, “Islamic Magical Texts vs. Magical Artefacts,” Societas Magica Newsletter 11 (2003): 1–6.
Pamela H. Smith, “The Codification of Vernacular Theories of Metallic Generation in Sixteenth-Century European Mining and Metalworking,” in The Structures of Practical Knowledge, ed. Matteo Valleriani (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 372–373.
Smith, “Codification,” 377–382.
Objects have inherent capacity by their design, material and constitutional properties to inflict or repel effects. Apart from the power of the inscriptions written over it, certain matters—like various types of iron and steel, or iron oxide and water, etc.—have ontological properties for themselves that mean that it is only in associating with them that the inscriptions could transform into talismans. See Muḥammad ibn Abī al-Barakāt Jōhari Nezāmi, Javāhernāme-ye-Nizāmi, ed. Iraj Afshār (Tehran: Mirās-e-Maktūb, 2004), 226.
Kerr, Sport and Technology, 15.
Saif, “Mastering Nature.”
Melvin-Koushki, “Is (Islamic),” 316.
Smith, “Codification,” 377–379. For the relation between materiality and practices like consumption and veneration associated with manuscripts, see Akkerman, “Bohra,” 192–194.
Syaʿban, “Kabikaj.”
Marshall G.S. Hodgson introduced the concept of “Persianate” in his book The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Volume Two, The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Period. Hodgson uses the term to denote the geographical area between the Balkans to Turkestan and China and South and Southeast Asia into Malaysia, where Persian was the standard literary language among Muslims, and a whole artistic and literary cultural tradition carried in or inspired by Persian existed between the late medieval and early modern period. See Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Volume Two, The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 293.
Ronit Ricci introduced the concept of the “Arabic cosmopolis” in her book Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia. Ricci coined the term inspired by the concept “Sanskrit cosmopolis,” introduced by Sheldon Pollock. By “Arabic cosmopolis,” Ricci means the unique political and cultural status of the Arabic language, which developed almost simultaneously across large parts of India and Southeast Asia, and the knowledge and cultural discourses that developed along with it. The concept of the Arabic cosmopolis charts the history of transition from the use of cosmopolitan Arabic to the emergence of vernacular literary cultures across the geographies connected by it. See Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 13–21.
Akkerman, “Bohra,” 191–192.
Latour discusses the connection and similarity between his network analysis and assemblage thinking in several places. For example, he argues that the original usage of the word “network” intended to mean something similar to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “rhizome,” which refers to “a series of transformations.” See Bruno Latour, “On Recalling ANT,” The Sociological Review 47, no. 1 (1999): 15.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 219; Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 1–3.
For discussions on the relation between natural causality and divine omnipotence in Islamic philosophy, see Jon McGinnis, “Occasionalism, Natural Causation and Science in al-Ghazali,” in Arabic Theology, Arabic Philosophy: From the Many to the One: Essays in Celebration of Richard M. Frank, ed. James E. Montgomery (Leuven: Peeters Publication, 2006), 445–457.
Saif, “Mastering Nature.”
Hugh McDiarmid, Complete Poems, vol. 1–2, eds. Michael Grieve and W.R. Aitken (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993–1994), 790.
Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Bīrūnī, Saydāneh, vol. 2, trans. Abū Bakr ibn ʿAli al-Kāshānī, eds. Manuchehr Sotoodeh and Iraj Afshār (Tehran: Shahid Beheshti University, 1980), 579.
Sheikh Bakr ibn ʿAbdullah abī Zayd, Muʿjam al-Manāhī al-Lafẓiyya wa Fawāʾid fil Alfāẓ (Riyadh: Dār al-ʿĀṣimat fil Nashr wal Tawzīʿ, 1996), 563.
Ponmaḷa, Fatāwa, 528.
Ponmaḷa, Fatāwa, 527.
Ponmaḷa, Fatāwa, 527–528.
Ponmaḷa, Fatāwa, 528.
Albert Dietrich, Medicinalia Arabica: Studien über arabische medizinische Handschriften in türkischen und syrischen Bibliotheken (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1967), 41.
Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Dasūqī, Ḥāshiyat al-Dasūqī ʿalā Mukhtaṣar al-Maʿānī li-Saʿad al-Dīn al-Taftāzāni, vol. 2 (Beirut: Maktabat al-ʿAṣriyya, 2007), 440–441.
In the Qurʾan, ḥurūf al-nidāʾ is used to denote abiotic beings like earth and sky, because they are obedient to the commands of Allah, which is a general feature of biotic beings. Since they share a feature with biotic beings, they are perceived to be like biotic beings in this context, and the vocative particle is attached to them. See Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Bayḍāwī, Anwār al-Tanzīl wa-asrār al-taʾwīl al-maʿrūf bi-Tafsīr al-Bayḍāwi, vol. 3 (Beirut: Dar Ehia al-Tourath al-Arabi, 1998), 136.
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Ḥasan b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, Fatḥ al-Majīd li-sharḥ Kitāb al-Tawḥīd (Riyadh: Dār al- Ṣamīʿī li-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzīʿ), 301.
Ponmaḷa, Fatāwa, 405.
Ponmaḷa, Fatāwa, 489–490.
Ponmaḷa, Fatāwa, 406.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “The Meaning and Role of “Philosophy” in Islam,” Studia Islamica, no. 37 (1973): 64.
Singh and Khorasani, “An Analysis,” 134.
For the connection between Islamic philosophy, ʿālam al-mithāl, and Plato, see Fazlur Rahman, “Dream, Imagination and ʿĀlam al-Mithāl,” Islamic Studies 3, no. 2 (1964): 167–180.
Ponmaḷa, Fatāwa, 526.
Singh and Khorasani, “An Analysis,” 134.
Smith, “The Codification,” 388.
Matteo Valleriani, “Foreword,” in The Structures of Practical Knowledge, ed. Matteo Valleriani (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017), vii.
Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2016), 356–357.
Olly Akkerman, A Neo-Fatimid Treasury of Books: Arabic Manuscripts among the Alawi Bohras of South Asia (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 286–288.
Mahlooji, Abdoli, and Zargaran, “Gabigaj,” 65.
Akkerman, Neo-Fatimid Treasury, 288.
Lucinda Cole, Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life (1600–1740) (Michigan: Michigan University Press, 2016), 7.
Semih Çelik, “Humans in Animalscapes: Reconstructing Vermin-Human Interactions in Rural Anatolia and Mesopotamia (ca. 1600–1850),” DIYÂR 3, no. 1 (2022): 55.
Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 10.
Çelik, “Humans,” 51.
Melvin-Koushki, “Is (Islamic),” 303–304.
Melvin-Koushki, “Is (Islamic),” 306.
Nur Sobers-Khan, “Reclaiming Manuscripts: Divination, Social Justice, and Islamic Codicology,” in Critical Muslim: Relics, ed. Ziauddin Sardar (London: Hurst Publishers, 2020), 86–90.
Sobers-Khan, “Reclaiming Manuscripts,” 88.
Gacek, Arabic, 64.
Sobers-Khan, “Reclaiming Manuscripts,” 84.
Akkerman, “Bohra,” 197.
Akkerman, “Bohra,” 194–195.
Akkerman, Neo-Fatimid Treasury, 351–352.
Akkerman, “Bohra,” 199–200.
Akkerman, “Bohra,” 197.
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979); Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986).
Steve Matthewman, Technology and Social Theory (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 105.
Bruno Latour, “Technology is Society Made Durable,” in A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, ed. John Law (London: Routledge, 1990), 103.
Bruno Latour, We Have Never been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 5–7.
Lucia Santaella and Tarcísio Cardoso, “The Baffling Concept of Technical Mediation in Bruno Latour,” MATRIZes 9, no. 1 (2015): 170.
Akkerman, “Bohra,” 197.
Akkerman, “Bohra,” 199.
Giovanni Ciotti, “Notes for an Ontological Approach within Manuscript Studies: Object Oriented Ontology and the Pothi Manuscript Culture,” in Exploring Written Artefacts: Objects, Methods, and Concepts, vol. 1, ed. Jörg B. Quenzer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021): 865.
Tara Mazurczyk, Nathan Piekielek, Eira Tansey, and Ben Goldman, “American Archives and Climate Change: Risks and Adaptation,” Climate Risk Management 20 (2018): 118.
Magdalena Pasikowsa-Schnass, “Museums, Libraries and Archives in the Face of Climate Change Challenges,” EPRS: European Parliamentary Research Service, 2023,
Ruby Mellen and Marco Longari, “Mauritania’s Ancient Libraries Could be Lost to the Expanding Desert,” The Washington Post, March 20, 2023,
Akkerman, Neo-Fatimid Treasury, 225.
Emmet Lindner, “Floods, Fires and Humidity: How Climate Change Affects Book Preservation,” The New York Times, January 7, 2023,
Torsten Wollina, “Nature Made Absent: Environmental History and Arabic Manuscript Studies,” Damascus Anecdotes, September 1, 2019,
Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl b. Ibrāhīm b. al-Mughīrat al-Jaʿfiyyi al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī (Riyadh: Dār al-Ḥaḍāra li al-Nashri wa-l-Tawzīʿ), 27.
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