THE SCIENCE OF LETTERS · LESSON 4 OF 5 · 13 MIN
Al-Būnī and the Shams al-Maʿārif
The Sufi of Būna, the most famous and most disputed grimoire of the Islamic world, and why scholars now speak of a "corpus Būnianum".
If one name stands for magic in the Islamic world, it is al-Būnī. Yoruba Muslim healers in Nigeria still refer to him, and readers of popular "tested remedies" (mujarrabāt) books all over the Muslim world have heard of him. Yet very little is known about the man, and the book that made him famous may be only partly his.