Shams al-Ma’arif： The Most Feared Arabic Manuscript in History

Within Middle Eastern occultism, there's a book, a grimoire, believed to be so powerful it has the potential to end the world. Most commonly known as the Shams al-Ma'arif, its very existence embodies the philosophy on why the practice of magic, in any form for whatever purpose, especially by Muslims, is not only frowned upon within the faith, but considered a straight-up In a 2007 interview, an Istanbul librarian named Mehmet Serhan Taishi claimed that in 1984, an official request crossed his desk asking for a copy of an old manuscript held at his library. A request that, in his telling, came from a powerful foreign superpower. The written memo signed by the Ministry of Culture undersecretary Taishi says he examined the manuscript, identified it as the Shams al-Ma'arif, and then refused to cooperate further because of its very unusual occult nature. He wrote objections, escalated the matter to senior officers, and urged that no copy be made. According to Taishi, the request was stopped. No public follow-up was made nor even an explanation provided, leaving the question, why would anyone official want this book in the first place? Commonly consisting of two volumes, its author makes the bold claim that this book is the only book that can allow human beings to communicate with supernatural and preternatural entities, the jinn and even angels. And while the original text itself may or may not have been created with a malicious intent, its alleged power may not only be exploited by humans for evil, but also serve as a gateway for those non-human entities to enter our world. In western occulture and internet discussions, the book is often hyperbolically referred to as the real-life Necronomicon. However, exactly what this book is at its core and how it came to be so powerful is not as straightforward as Lovecraft's fictional version, as the truth behind its existence may be more complicated and darker than what we can possibly imagine. In 2022, members of the social justice organization, the Hiraq Rif movement in Al-Hasima, Morocco, found that they had bitten off more than they can chew after obtaining and reading spells from Shams Al-Ma'arif book. The Rif movement refers to a mass protest organization that took place in the Berber-speaking Rif region in northern Morocco between October 2016 and June 2017, following the death of a Berber fishmonger. In January 2022, three members of the movement, in addition to their families and neighbors living in a district of the city of Hasima, found themselves caught in the middle of a deadly supernatural mystery. According to the news outlet Akhbaruna, one of the members of the Rif organization who had previously been arrested, explained on Facebook live why a series of paranormal events were occurring in his neighborhood. These anomalous instances appear to have begun following the mysteries of two of his neighbors, who were also former Rif detainees. In the house of one of the deceased, an outbreak of random fires have been sporadically occurring, terrifying the neighbors and surviving family members. These fires are completely anomalous in nature, with security investigators unable to determine their causes. Speaking on social media, the surviving activist stated that his friends and the numerous fires that continue to erupt on their property all stem from their use of the book Shams al-Ma'arif. He admits that they were into the occult and this interest led to their deaths since the magic within that book in particular is, and I quote, a satanic magic guarded by elves. In 2003, and at the relatively young age of 58, al-Husayni al-Falaki, a high-profile Egyptian magician, was found dead in his Cairo home under mysterious circumstances. Back in the day, al-Falaki was a minor celebrity who had reproduced and simplified a lot of the material found in Shams al-Ma'arif for his own commercial grimoires. Witnesses say that upon discovery, his face was found horrifically contorted, twisted and bent out of shape. This rumor, coupled with a chief investigator publicly stating that the cause would not be determined, had led to many people to assume that he was killed by a jinn, thus making his tragedy just one of many associated with this book. The book's authorship is attributed to an Algerian mystic named Chehab al-Din al-Buni, who lived during the time of the crusades. Although historical sources about him are rare, he is understood to have been an important individual during his time, who lived to 102 years old. With so many legends, stories, and myths surrounding the book, deciphering the truth from fictional is difficult, but one common theme that is persistent throughout its legacy is that it's cursed, and even just owning it, or being close in proximity to a hard copy of it, can activate its anomalous attributes. These attributes include but are not limited to the following manifestations. Severe psychosis, mental illness, or general depression. The visitation by jinn, shadow beings, or other supernatural entities, which could all be one and the same. Literal demonic possession, and finally, and in the most extreme cases, death. At the beginning of this episode, we introduced to you the late Mehmet Serhan Taishi, the Istanbul librarian, who stated in a 2007 interview that he received an official request from the Ministry of Culture to hand over a copy of the grimoire over two decades earlier. Taishi was not an ordinary librarian, and exactly why he refused the Ministry's request was not simply because he felt the book was dangerous in an abstract way, but that it In 1984, a memo arrived signed by the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Culture. It said there was a book request from the United States, and it wanted a copy of the book to be produced and sent to Ankara. When I saw what the United States was asking for, I examined the book It was Imam Buni's two-volume work called Şemsül Marif. It was a book related to astrology, magic, sorcery, and the hidden sciences we call havas. And unlike similar books found on the market, it also contained an anahtar, a key explaining what should be used and how. Even though I knew Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, I could not decipher the book. So I called a The book contained secret information, almost enough to give clues to being invisible. After I understood what the book was, I wrote an official cover note implying what was inside it, and I emphasized that it should not be given to the United States. When the Ministry insisted, I informed the MIT Undersecretariat, the General Staff, and the Prime Ministry. After the letters I wrote, no copy of the book was produced, and later the General Staff sent a letter thanking me. And you have to ask, if there were 30 books on the same subject, why did the United States want this one? Mehmet Serhan Taysi was considered as one of Turkey's leading researchers and scholars, who became the Director of the National Library in 1983, and continued this duty until his retirement in early 2003, authoring and editing many books and papers on the Ottoman Empire, the occult, history, and even Sufism. So when he received the request for a copy of the Shams a year after becoming the Director, it's understandable how he had the power to maybe citing it as a potential security risk. He may not have been personally aware of it at that time, but it is now an open fact that certain global agencies were invested in the occult to assist with intelligence operations, as this was at the heart of the Cold War. So basically what you see in Netflix's Stranger Things has a hint of reality to it. In past episodes we've already spoken about this with regards to the Ark of the Covenant, ancient extra-canonical biblical texts, and even the possibility of functional Sumerian stargates, amongst other artifacts. The goal between the 1940s and 1980s was to weaponize the occult, but Taysi's concern was not about demons or spirits or the usual folk and urban legends associated with the Shams, but his discovery that the book had potentially unlocked the key to achieving invisibility. Now it's entirely possible that Taysi's story could be a gross exaggeration of a real-life request, because it sounds like the beginning of a horror movie. However, for such a senior figure who's still well-regarded within academia, to risk his reputation with such a story feels unlikely. But whether you believe or not, Taysi's concern remains. Did Albuni's writings incautiously tap into unknown levels of reality? This leads us to the next question. Who exactly was Albuni, and what exactly is the Shams al-Ma'arif? When people hear the title Shams al-Ma'arif, they usually imagine a single forbidden book. A grimoire filled with runes and spells. But it's a little more complex than that, being more akin to a scientific technical manual that facilitates contact between our world and things beyond our world. At its core, it's built around an idea that language, especially sacred language, can be arranged, structured, and coded in ways that can warp or influence the nature of what we perceive as reality, and even interact with higher dimensional beings. Emerging in an age when genuine scientific thought and breakthroughs with regards to physics, space, medicine, and mathematics were being made across the Middle East, this book builds off that momentum, developing a scientific method and technological keys for dealing with the occult. Like for example Mehmet Serhan Taysi's identification of the means for invisibility. That's why so much of the book is made of tables, grids, symbols, and letter number patterns. It's like it's trying to be scientific in its presentation, where the book constructs patterns, combinations of letters, calculated totals, and structured layouts that are meant to embody a specific intent. Now understanding who al-Buni was is key to understanding what the Shams al-Ma'arif is and why it became considered evil. As a mathematician and esotericist, al-Buni integrated Sufi spirituality with occult sciences, i.e. thaumatology, more commonly known as magic. This is an issue because Islam does not condone the use of any kind of magic, be it for bad or good ends, as the faith instructs that followers should only seek assistance directly from God on all matters, and to not approach or utilize any other item that would typically be classified as supernatural, or requires interacting with the occult realm. Born in Anaba, Algeria, al-Buni studied in Tunis before establishing himself in Cairo, where he became known as a Sufi master. And while many Sufis, then and now, would give some serious side-eye to his obsession with the occult, al-Buni insisted he wasn't practicing illicit sorcery. He framed what he was doing as spiritual techniques he believed were compatible with God, what we would call today neoplatonism, a philosophy that pushes the idea of transcendence. So in his grimoire, there are long sections focused on names, especially sacred names and powerful formulae. The idea is that certain names, when used in specific structured ways, act like the aforementioned keys, because that can open a direct link to the hidden architecture of reality, where a variety of entities and sentient supernatural forces also happen to exist. And that's why al-Buni is considered problematic. If divine names and symbols start to feel like buttons you can press to force a result, the practice shifts from spirituality into something more dangerous, because it treats created things as if they have power of their own. And within Sufism, that is referred to as idolatry both in description and practice, since for those divine names and symbols to work, the interaction with spirits becomes an essential part of the equation when trying to achieve an end goal. Earlier in our Moroccan case study from 2022, we spoke of how one surviving member of a group who admitted to messing around with the book, claimed that it's a satanic magic protected by elves, which is code for evil entities. This is consistent with the Islamic perspective on magic, because firstly, whatever unseen force a person believes they're communicating with, via an item believed to be anomalous, be it a spell, talisman, grimoire, or whatever, it's not God they are communicating with, nor likely from God. And once that unseen source is treated as a provider of protection, knowledge, or power, it becomes dangerously easy to ascribe God-like abilities to it, thus falling under the definition of idolatry. Hence why it is considered as a major sin in the Sufi tradition and wider faith. And any entity or individual, be they supernatural or human, who does not mind pretending to be God, probably has some personal issues that can make them a risk to those it considers vastly inferior to them. This leads us to the second point, as it's warned that these practices are not neutral tools. These tools of magic, or the entity behind it, can exploit the relationship, using the person's fear, hope, or obsession, as an opening to influence their life. In other words, what begins as seeking help can become a doorway, an invitation for the unseen to intrude into the human world. And there's no guarantee that those entities will have the user's best interest at heart. In fact, if such an entity is willing to interact with a human, it's a probable red flag that you should run. All this to say, the cultural language behind the Al-Shams is that it is a book colored by the prohibitions Islam puts against using magic, hence why it is considered evil. Now coupled with the fame that came with it by default, since its first drafts were written by Buni, and for hundreds of years the book has grown in notoriety, and even content, as a legitimate book of power, we can guess why, during the heart of the Cold War, officials from outside of the region were allegedly trying to get their hands on an original copy, if what the Turkish librarian Mehmet Taishi says is true. His story being eerily reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft's science fictional take on the book. Which leads us into the next chapter. How did the book survive and grow in popularity to the 21st century, and is it on some level alive? Most foreigners associate with Lovecraft's fictional grimoire, the Necronomicon, and with its offensive caricature of an Arabian pseudo-Sufi occultist, Abdul Alhazred, who is often read as a fictional echo of Al-Buni. But one key difference between the two texts, amongst many, is that the Necronomicon has a clean fictional line of transmission, from medieval authorship, to supernatural item that can summon world-ending cosmic beings. Meanwhile, the Shams has a history that's awkwardly complicated in its transmission from creation to dangerous 21st century spellbook. The official, or most widely known, transmission of the book is as follows. According to the lore, Al-Buni had written a single manuscript of this grimoire in deer blood, and those original writings are now hidden somewhere in the vaults of the British library. However, the earliest print version of the text was published by the University of Al-Azhar in Cairo in 1900. But like the original manuscript, this version has also been lost to history. A truncated version of the book then appeared in Lebanon during the 1980s, and it's only this version of the text that you can find today. However, what we have just described here is not the whole story. Deer blood myth aside, the name, or more accurately, the brand Shams Al-Ma'arif, had stopped pointing to a singular multi-volume book on powerful magic centuries before what we've today. By the time the book reached the mass market in the late 20th century, it had already begun a continuous process of being edited, standardized, repackaged, and recopied. Ergo, today in its current form, numerous other writers have contributed to it, evolving the text. The prevailing view among experts is that the grimoire is a compilation, a pseudepigrapha, of various authors, each possibly well enough versed on dark magic. According to academic Noah Gardiner, the circulation and impact of Al-Buni's original works were initially restricted to closed Sufi communities. But by the 14th century, this changed, and today, Al-Buni's fame rests largely on the popular printed editions of Shams Al-Ma'arif Al-Kubra, not the Shams Al-Ma'arif. This name change reflects a compilation of Bunian-type occult practices produced in the 17th century, added to his original writings possibly by a later generation of disciples and others. But who, we don't know. So regardless of we have to question who or even what else contributed to this book. Were all of their goals as noble as what the original author proclaimed, or something darker? What we do know is the negative impact it has had on the lives of some, but not all, of those who have innocently read it, and those who actively use it. Taking us back to our Cairo 2003 case study that illustrates how the text can be both expanded upon and then destroyed. In our second case study, the Egyptian magician Al-Husayni Al-Falaki, who was found in his apartment under mysterious circumstances, was a known practicer of dark magic. According to legend, even when he worked on a supernatural flick that involved an actual copy of the book on set, both cast and crew reported strange disturbances. Now like what we have just discussed, Falaki was engaged in what many so-called practitioners of magic have done before, taking elements from the Shams, mixing them with their own writings and other so-called magical texts, and then producing their own grimoires. And although Al-Falaki didn't label his derivative works as Shams Al-Ma'arif Al-Kubra, imagine that same process happening for hundreds of years, except that with each new popular iteration that emerged, it ends up being marketed and remembered as the definitive Shams Al-Ma'arif or the Shams Al-Ma'arif Al-Kubra. Now, you will undoubtedly find people in the comments of this video and similar episodes who say they read a copy of the book and nothing happened, and chances are they're telling the truth. But you'll also get the complete opposite. Testimonies from people who claim their lives, or the lives of someone they know, were turned upside down simply from keeping a copy in their home, let alone reading it. Skeptics are justified in arguing that every instance of this book's alleged anomalous influence could be psychological or even sociological rather than paranormal, especially when there are countless grimoires out there that are allegedly more powerful, yet have had zero impact on anyone's life. So what makes the Shams powerful? In some ways, it's what you could call an infohazard, a threat that spreads through knowledge itself. And whether you interpret that as genuinely supernatural, purely psychological, or some mixture of both, it seems to rely on a psychological component to be most effective. Here, we're specifically talking about users of the book, cases where simply knowing it exists is enough for its effects to begin. On the blog Mawara At-Tabiyyara, there's a first-person account where the narrator, let's call him Jasim, says he approached the grimoire for the sole purpose of discrediting it. But in the telling of his experience, once he started reading and then recounting to others what he learned, minor disturbances began. At first, lights would regularly randomly flicker in his presence, but then more disturbing episodes of nightmares followed by sleep paralysis began to occur, coupled with a feeling that something had latched on to him. It should be noted that these secondary effects from reading the book have been retold by a number of other users who have also read the text. And it's typically the strongest paranormal effect anyone would experience before all strange activity subsides. As for Jasim, although the activity eventually subsided, still today, even just mentioning the book leaves him feeling drained. We mention this almost harmless instance because it ties into how the book becomes alive as both a metaphorical cultural object and something truly anomalous. This leads us directly to the haunted object idea. Fans of the SCP universe will understand this as a type of info or memetic hazard. Once a concept, be it an object or an idea, has a powerful story attached to it, simply engaging with it can trigger a chain of effects, whether that chain is supernatural, psychological, or both. So, in our Jasim case study, even though he approached the object, in this case the Shams grimoire, as a skeptic, supernatural occurrences were reported shortly after reading from it. One possible reason is his cultural framing as a Muslim and Arab who already has knowledge of the book's alleged anomalous attributes. This is where the line between supernatural reputation, psychology, and sociology all converge. In this case, the effects described are comparatively mild, and some would argue even purely psychological. But across other traditions, you find similar warnings about opening doors via artifacts, books, and talismans, even casually or as a non-believer. In Christianity, followers are taught to avoid rituals, mediums, and spirit contact in pursuit of hidden knowledge, because not every spirit is assumed to be safe or truthful, even if the experience feels comforting, even if it looks holy. Similar caution shows up in Haitian Vodou and in Korean Shamanism, including rites like Sit-Gim-Gut. I think that's how it's pronounced. The point is, contact is unpredictable. You can send a signal, you can't choose who receives it, and you definitely can't control the reply. But here's the key point. This does not mean Shams is inert, with zero supernatural component, only that, in addition to any anomalous aspect that it may actually possess, its power to disrupt is magnified by a cultural and sociological framework. That's why we here on this channel take issue with other YouTubers, content creators, journalists, and filmmakers who cover this book irresponsibly, because they simply lack the cultural awareness required to truly understand why it's forbidden, and they don't know the damage they are doing by simply uploading pages from it onto their platforms for others to view. This is why, and I am sure to the annoyance of those who can read Arabic, throughout this episode, out of all the ancient manuscripts we have shown on screen, although they are from roughly the same time period as when the Shams was initially produced, none of them are on magic, and very few are on the supernatural. They are just regular, and for their time, cutting-edge, scientific papers and treatises, and only shown here for illustrative purposes. Not only are there the aforementioned psychological risks associated with the actual grimoire manuscripts, but what if just showing those original text exposes viewers to real anomalous threats? And then there are the other examples of this book that don't easily lend themselves to any kind of rational explanation, from instances that resulted in the unexplainable loss of life, to global governmental agencies investigating it, and other case studies that were originally in this script, but were ultimately cut for time, because it would push this episode closer to the hour mark. By the way, Patreons, the full uncensored cut of this episode will be uploaded by the end of the month, Inshallah. There is a delay, because in addition to other case studies, it will take a deeper dive into the scholarly and theoretical perspectives on this text, that are just too deep and dense for a channel like this to upload normally. So what do you think? Had you heard about Shams al-Ma'arif before this? Were you aware of the psychological toll it has taken on some people? And do you believe these afflictions are entirely generated by the mind, something truly supernatural, or perhaps both? And do you know anyone who has had a personal experience with it? And to be clear, while al-Buni adapted Sufism in a way that many would say violates the core tenets of Islam and slides into a kind of idolatry, although none of us are Sufis ourselves, we are sure those who are would confirm that associating with the occult is not what Sufism is about. But in areas where Sufism overlaps with the darker aspects of the occult, in the next episode we're going back to Turkey. As for this episode by the way, by chance it opened with a case we had no idea existed until we began re-researching the Shams, discovering to our shock claims that global superpowers were interested in it. And the fact that it was a Turkish library they contacted is telling, because experts on Sufism, especially in Turkey, also have historical knowledge about terrifying vampire infestations that have been happening for centuries in and around the country, whether folkloric or alleged real-life encounters. And it's something we're going to investigate. It's going to be a wild episode. Anyway, until this channel returns to a predictable upload routine, shorter breaks, more consistency, the kind of pattern that helps the algorithm push these to wider audiences, we thank you for your continued support in liking, sharing, and commenting on our videos, and we ask you to continue to do so. Until then, Inshallah, see you in the next one.