In Islamic thought the letters of the Arabic alphabet are more than marks for sounds. The Qur'an is the speech of God, and God created by speaking — "Be!", kun, and it is. So the letters themselves came to be seen by some as the building blocks of creation, each with its number, its nature and its power. The study of that power is ʿilm al-ḥurūf, "the science of letters".
Letters in the Qur'an
Twenty-nine suras of the Qur'an open with letters spoken one by one and never explained: Alif Lām Mīm, Ṭā Hā, Yā Sīn, Kāf Hā Yā ʿAyn Ṣād. These disconnected letters (al-ḥurūf al-muqaṭṭaʿa) have been pondered for fourteen centuries. Commentators have read them as abbreviations, as oaths, as numbers, or as mysteries known only to God — and to students of the letters they were the clearest sign that the alphabet holds secrets.
Sīmiyā and siḥr
Medieval writers set the letter-sciences apart from ordinary sorcery. Sīmiyā — from sīma, "sign" — also called rūḥāniyya, "spirituality", and ʿilm al-ḥikma, "the science of wisdom", was presented as a lawful spiritual science of the divine names: linking the higher natures to the lower through letters, numbers and squares. Siḥr, sorcery by the help of jinn and devils, was forbidden. Whether the line could really be drawn was argued over then as now.
Numbers and natures
Every Arabic letter has a number in the abjad system, so that every word is also a sum — the subject of the next lesson. Letters also had natures. The alchemical works ascribed to Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, written by a school of alchemists in the late 9th and early 10th centuries, built a "science of the balance" (ʿilm al-mīzān) that tried to reduce all things, metals included, to measures and proportions — and weighed the letters of a substance's Arabic name to find the proportions of its qualities.
The Sufis and the letters
For the great Andalusian mystic Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240) the letters were a hierarchy of beings, with their own spiritual realities; he wrote at length on them in his Meccan Revelations. His contemporary Aḥmad al-Būnī (d. 1225), whom you will meet in a later lesson, made the letters, the divine names and the magic squares into a practical art of talismans.
Ibn Khaldūn's critique
In 1377 the historian Ibn Khaldūn finished his Muqaddima, the introduction to his history of the world. In its chapter on the sciences he described the "science of the secrets of letters", named Ibn ʿArabī and al-Būnī as its leading theorists and certain "extremist" Sufis as its practitioners — and judged it harshly, as a pretension to powers the soul does not have. His critique has been read ever since as the voice of the sceptical scholar against the occultists of his day.
Approaching it today
ʿIlm al-ḥurūf belongs to the history of a living faith. Many Muslims regard letter-magic as forbidden; others see the letters as a legitimate object of contemplation. This track treats it as history and as a way of thinking — the same way the Hebrew letters are treated in the Qabalah — and not as instruction in making amulets.
Exercise
Write out the Arabic alphabet in the Abjad & Magic Squares tool and listen to the names of the letters. Then compare: which Hebrew letters in Hebrew Letters have the same numbers? Write a paragraph on what the two traditions share and where they part.