Gold lettering on a dark navy background, with an open book, a lamp and a brass astrolabe, features on the front cover of this edition

A sheet from the Cairo lithograph, showing a four-by-four grid of words enclosed in a border to the right of the Arabic text

Mujarrabāt al-Dayrabī, the complete English edition

Blades were drawn in al-Azhar, and he laid his book aside.

Name: Mujarrabāt al-Dayrabī
Author: Aḥmad ibn ʿUmar al-Dayrabī

Cairo, 1123 AH. Aḥmad al-Dayrabī, a jurist of the Shāfiʿī school, had been gathering tried practices from notes that scholars had left in the margins of their books. Then fighting erupted in the mosque and his sight started to go. He went back to the work and saw it through, and Cairo has never let it fall out of print. As far as we can establish, this is the first time it has appeared in English.

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36 chapters and a conclusion, plus al-Sanūsī's Mujarrabāt drawn from the margins. Collated against an eighteenth-century manuscript held at Exeter, with every numeral read twice and every figure supplied in facsimile.

This is a translation of a historical document. Nothing in it should be taken as a claim that any practice described produces a physical effect.

Chapters: 36, plus a conclusion
Also inside: Al-Sanūsī's Mujarrabāt
Paperback: 229 x 152 mm
Formats: Paperback, Kindle, PDF, EPUB
ISBN: 9798177421872
Translator: Anwar al-Ghundas

What he left behind

Thirty-six chapters and a conclusion. In them al-Dayrabī records the properties he attributes to Qur'anic verses and the Divine Names, alongside prayers, charms, amulets, magic squares and cures: the Fātiḥa and the Verse of the Throne, safeguarding travellers, the evil eye, fever, childbirth and, at the end, oddities ranging from holding fire to drawing stains out of cloth.

In the evil-eye chapter he sets down a tale that an earlier scholar had recorded: a man in Khurāsān whose glance, it was claimed, could bring down a camel. That chapter forms the free sample, allowing the book to be weighed up before purchase.

Threaded through the margins of the Cairo lithograph is a second work, the Mujarrabāt of Shaykh al-Sanūsī, also translated here in its entirety. Al-Dayrabī gave his own book the title Fatḥ al-Malik al-Majīd, The Opening of the Glorious King. He died in 1151 AH (1738 or 1739 CE).

How the pages appear

Each page of the lithograph containing a figure is reproduced twice in the volume: first as a facsimile, exactly as the Cairo printer laid it out, and then in transcription, allowing it to be read cell by cell. Any image can be enlarged with a click or a tap.

A sheet from the Cairo lithograph, showing a four-by-four grid of words enclosed in a border to the right of the Arabic text, with diagonal lines of a second text extending along the margin — Plate 11: the page of lithography that holds the four-by-four word square (the McGill copy, p. 71).

A typeset page from the English edition, featuring the identical four-by-four grid of words copied square by square in both Arabic and English — Cell by cell, the same square copied out, on page 170 of this edition.

A leaf from the Cairo lithograph, with a five-row seal of disconnected letters positioned along the left-hand edge of the frame — Plate 12: the five-rowed seal of disjointed letters (McGill copy, page 72).

The author and the book

Aḥmad ibn ʿUmar al-Dayrabī, a Shāfiʿī jurist based at al-Azhar in Cairo, died in 1151 AH (1738 or 1739 CE). His Mujarrabāt, whose full title is Fatḥ al-Malik al-Majīd, has been reprinted in Cairo without interruption ever since. As far as we have been able to determine, no English edition has previously appeared. According to his own account, work on the text halted in 1123 AH, after sword fighting erupted within al-Azhar.

This is a historical document, and it is offered as such. Al-Dayrabī wrote in the voice of a believer and a legal scholar, addressing readers who inhabited the same world as he did. The customs he describes are rendered as he set them down, with neither dilution nor approval: they are the practices of eighteenth-century Cairo and appear here as history, not as instruction.

How the translation came about

The rendering, produced by Anwar al-Ghundas, came from a Cairo lithograph and was checked against three further copies, one of which is an eighteenth-century manuscript kept at Exeter. Each numeral was read twice, separately, directly from the page. Any page that bears a figure appears in facsimile, and wherever the print is defective a brief note records the fact rather than making a guess.

Translated using cutting-edge AI technology and edited by the publisher.

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