[MUSIC] Hello, I'm Sébastian Moureau, researcher

from the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique, attached to the University

of Leuven in Belgium. I mainly study the so-called
occult sciences in the Islamic world, as well as their transmission to and
reception in the Latin world. The Science of Letters, ‘ilm al-ḥurūf'
in Arabic, is a theoretical and practical science based on
the letters the Arabic alphabet. This science is also often called sīmiyā’, which
comes from the transcription of the
Greek word σημεῖον, meaning 'sign', 'symbol'. The proximity of this word with the
Arabic,
kīmiyā’, 'alchemy', left the door open to multitude of
speculations and comparisons. As most Semitic alphabets, the Arabic
alphabet only consists of consonants: the Arabic script has a system for
vowels, but they do not pertain to the alphabet; they are diacritical signs, which
were
introduced in the script at a later stage. This script made of consonants
implies that, when reading Arabic, the person reading it needs to
understand the text, or at least the vocalization of most of the words: a young
English child will be able to
read a treatise about organic chemistry, even if he does not
understand the content, but this proves impossible
in Arabic (or else this child would be
quite ahead of its age). Semitic alphabets are sometimes
compared to flutes, the flute being the script,
the player being the reader, and the breath of the player being the vowels. The
origin of the science of
letters is quite obscure. One of the most often quoted
hypothesis is the <i>jafr</i>, the Shī‘ite system of divination,
an ‘onomatomancy’, namely a system of divination based on names; but
no convincing date can be given, in fact. The science of letters quickly developed
in various overlapping trends: a mystical ‘ilm al-ḥurūf,
a philosophical one, an alchemical one, a magical one, and so on. Actually, ‘ilm
al-ḥurūf is
not restricted to letters. Very often,
if not in the majority of the cases, it is a science of the words
rather than a science of letters. It appeared in the context
of Islamic culture, maybe because of the peculiar
status it gives to speech. In Islam, the Qur’ān is
considered the words of God, and God's words are the sensible
possibility to access to God. The importance of the Qur’ān
status may have led scholars to focus on language
in a very specific manner. For many medieval scholars, who were
interested in the science of letters, speech not only has an epistemological
value, as is the case in the Western modern culture, but
also an ontological value. This means that, in their eyes,
the words, and therefore the letters, not only provide information about things,
but also reflect their inner nature. Their name reflects their being. And some
Medieval thinkers
went even further and asserted that the name of things is not
only a reflection of their nature, but it is their very nature, their being. If the
name of the thing is or
reflects its nature, this means that knowing the name of the thing is
the same as knowing the thing itself. This system inevitably
reminds us of the Kabbalah, a Jewish science of language and
letters, which developed later and that has been introduced in the optional
videos of the second unit of this course. This conception prompted
medieval thinkers to develop systems of analysis of language. They classified
letters in different ways,
according to various criteria; the best known is the classification
of letters according to the four elements: out of the 28 letters of the Arabic
alphabet, seven pertain to fire, seven to air, seven to water and
seven to earth. A similar classification is made
regarding the elementary properties. Seven letters are hot, seven are cold,
seven are dry and seven are moist. Another method of
analysis was the use of the alphanumeric values of letters. Before
the introduction of the so-called Arabic numerals (which are in fact
called 'Indian numerals' in Arabic), the letters of the alphabet were used as
numerals, as is still the case in some scripts such as Hebrew.
Thus, the isopsephic value of the names, that is, their numeric value
once the numeric values of all letters are added to one another, was used
to classify and analyze things. One of the most refined and sophisticated
systems of analysis of things through the names is found in the corpus of
texts attributed to the Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, a large collection of alchemical
texts written, in all likelihood, by different authors, and which I will come back
to in greater
detail in the video on Arabic alchemy. The authors of these texts
postulated that, since the names of things reflect
their nature, it could be possible to know the exact composition
of a thing thanks to its name. In order to do this, they developed
a system called ‘ilm al-mīzān, 'science of the balance', or
mīzān al-ḥurūf, 'balance of the letters'. They put forward a very complex
calculation from the letters of the name
of a thing, which, as they said, reveals the exact composition of
the thing, namely, the exact proportion of elementary properties (heat,
coldness, dryness and moisture). This was the first step
to their main theory, the elixir theory, which will be
investigated in the next video. In a more religious order of ideas, the science of
letters was
especially developed in two ways: The asmā’ al-ḥusnā’ and the
fawātiḥ al-suwar, or ḥurūf muqaṭṭa‘a. The asmā’ al-ḥusnā’, literally the 'most
beautiful names', are the 99 divine names: an Islamic tradition
attributes 99 names to God, which are the 99 ways to describe
the different aspects of God. Many commentaries were written on this.
The fawātiḥ al-suwar, namely the 'opening of the suras' (sura being
the Arabic name of a part of the Qur’ān), or the ḥurūf muqaṭṭa‘a, literally
the 'isolated letters', are mysterious letters or
small groups of letters which are found at the beginning of 29 suras
of the Qur’ān. No explanation was given
about this by the Prophet, and this gave rise to wide
speculations. Muḥyi al-dīn Ibn al-‘Arabī, one of the most
important philosophers in Islam, developed a series of mystical
considerations about these letters. In the same mystical vein, one should
also mention the sect of the ḥurūfiyya, mainly the 'literal', which developed
at the end of the 14th century. Since letters have an ontological
value, they do not only allow one to know things, but
also to act upon them through their name. This notion gave birth to letter magic,
which is one of the widest fields
of the science of the letters. The most famous figure in
letter magic is, undisputedly, Aḥmad al-Būnī, who lived in
the beginning of the 13th century. To this scholar are attributed a series
of magical treatises which had a deep influence on magic
in the Islamic world, not only in the scholarly world, but
also, and maybe principally,
at a more popular level. However, recent studies have pointed
out that the most influential and famous work attributed to Būnī,
the Shams al-ma‘ārif al-kubrā, literally the 'Great Sun of knowledge',
was actually an apocryphal compilation made up from various layers
written during several periods. This treatise puts forward
a large synthesis of theoretical knowledge about letter magic (as speculation
on the most beautiful names and so on), but also very practical recipes. In this
kind of magical treatises,
the letters themselves are sometimes regarded as spiritual beings: they
are linked to angels, and it is possible to act upon spiritual entities by their
means, or even to constrain angels. [MUSIC]