Introduction

Sirāj al-Dīn al-Sakkākī was born in Khwarazm in 555/1160. His Miftāḥ al- ʿulūm (The Key to the Sciences) is an influential text on the study of the Arabic language. Besides being an expert of language, Sakkākī was also known as a magician; his biographers tell us that his powers gained him a position in the court of Chagatai Khan (r. 1227–42 CE), son of Chinggis Khan, where he is said to have captured birds out of the sky using magical inscriptions. Moreover, a contemporary account credits him with influencing a power struggle between the Abbasid caliph and the Khwarazmian Shah with a buried enchanted statue. One 19th-century biography (Khwānsārī's Rawḍāt al-jannāt) describes a work of Sakkākī on the subject of magic and talismans as being “of significant power and critical importance” (kitāb jalīl al-qadr wa-ʿaẓīm al-khaṭar). Unlike his famous book of language, this book of magic has not yet been edited, translated, or studied by modern scholars, and this is the goal of the current Leverhulmefunded project, “A Sorcerer's Handbook.”

Our translation of the title of this book, Kitāb al-Shāmil wa-baḥr al-kāmil, as The Book of the Complete is informed by a reading of its introduction, which refers to the “perfect” scholars of the ancient world on which it bases its information, hence, “The book of the Perfect/Complete person.” It is probable that the title is a play on that of the 11th-century book of magic, al-Shāmil fī l-baḥr al-kāmil (Complete Book of the Perfect Sea) by Ṭabasī.