Islam · Corrections
Practice · Sufism○
The Cem and the Semah
The central communal ritual of Alevi Islam, involving a structured service led by a hereditary religious leader and a shared ritual dance of men and women together.
What it isThe mixed-gender dance has long been the target of a specific slander accusing Alevis of impropriety — a libel documented in published scholarship, which this entry names as false without repeating its content. The ritual's actual structure is recorded in published ethnography rather than described here.
Person · Sufism○
Ibn Taymiyya and the Refutation of the Sufis
A fourteenth-century Islamic jurist whose writings against shrine visitation became the founding source text for later reformist movements.
Who they wereHis fatwas remain the direct textual source cited by later Salafi and Wahhabi campaigns against saint veneration. He is popularly cast as opposed to Sufism outright, but was himself formally affiliated with a Sufi order — a detail his later followers rarely mention.
Passage · Science & Alchemy○
Ibn Khaldun on Alchemy and Astrology
— Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah (1377 CE, Tr. Franz Rosenthal)The souls of these sorcerers are able to exercise influence upon the world of elements.
The philosophers distinguish between sorcery and talismans:
in talismans, the worker seeks the aid of the celestial spheres and numbers,
while in pure sorcery, the influence proceeds directly from the focused soul alone.
A fourteenth-century Arabic historian's sustained philosophical argument that both alchemy and astrology are impossible and socially harmful.
The passageWithin Islamic philosophy the passage guards God's sole governance and the worth of honest work: stars do not decide fates, and wealth comes through labour, not transmutation. There is, Ibn Khaldun insists, no agent but God.