The Middle East is not a separate tradition from Western magic — it is the origin of Western magic. The Mesopotamian roots described in History of Occidental Magic are Middle Eastern roots. What this document covers is what happened to that tradition after the Bronze Age: how it developed in ways that did not feed into the Hermetic School or the Cambridge Circle, how the rise of Islam transformed the relationship between magical practice and official culture, and what the modern magical landscape of the region looks like.
The Solomonic Tradition
The most influential distinctly Middle Eastern contribution to world magic is the Solomonic tradition: the body of knowledge associated with King Solomon's legendary control over demons and jinn. The Testament of Solomon, dated to roughly the 3rd or 4th century AD, describes Solomon compelling 72 entities into service and binding them to build the Temple in Jerusalem. Medieval elaborations — the Key of Solomon and the Lemegeton — systematized these bindings into ritual procedures.
Modern occult scholars take the Solomonic texts seriously as technical documents, not allegories. The 72 entities listed in the Lemegeton are understood to be real; whether they are the same as what the texts describe is disputed, but the binding procedures work, within the limits of what binding procedures can accomplish.
Western demonological tradition classifies Solomon's 72 as demons. Islamic tradition identifies them as jinn. These are not two names for the same thing — the implications differ depending on which account is correct, or whether Solomon was working with both simultaneously. Most scholarly opinion now leans toward the Islamic identification, which has consequences for how the binding techniques are understood and whether they transfer to European demonic entities.
The Solomonic tradition sits at the intersection of Jewish, Islamic, and Christian magical learning. Solomon is a prophet in all three traditions; his magical knowledge passed into the Islamic world, where it merged with the indigenous body of knowledge about jinn.
Magic and Islam
The Quran treats magic (sihr) as real and dangerous. Surah al-Baqarah describes two angels — Harut and Marut — who taught magic to humans at Babylon, explicitly as a test, and warned that using it was a form of unbelief. Classical Islamic legal scholars classified sihr as one of the seven major sins; several schools of Islamic law made its practice a capital offense.
This is the formal position. In practice, the Islamic world produced a substantial body of operative magical learning. Ahmad ibn Ali al-Buni (died c. 1225) wrote the Shams al-Ma'arif ("Sun of Gnosis"), the major Arabic-language grimoire, covering letter magic derived from the abjad numerical system, talismanic construction, invocation of spirits, and interaction with jinn. Ibn Khaldun, writing in the 14th century, discussed sihr in the Muqaddimah as a natural category of knowledge — neither endorsing nor dismissing it.
The Islamic tradition developed its own internal distinction between permitted and forbidden practice. Ruqyah — Quranic recitation used for healing and protection — was permitted. Sihr in the sense of harmful or polytheistic magic was not. The actual line was contested. Sufism created additional pressure: certain orders developed esoteric practices that orthodox scholars viewed with suspicion, though few Sufi shaykhs claimed to work magic openly.
The net effect was not suppression so much as disaggregation. Magical knowledge in the Islamic world survived simultaneously in three channels: technical texts like the Shams al-Ma'arif, folk practice in rural and tribal communities where jinn interaction was assumed as background fact, and Sufi esoteric contexts where it was not called magic.
Jinn
Jinn are not a class of demons. The better parallel in occidental terms is faeries — beings resident in an otherworld that intersects with the physical world at certain places and conditions, capable of interacting with humans on terms ranging from hostile to negotiated, neither uniformly servile nor uniformly dangerous.
Islamic theology gives jinn a specific cosmological framework: they are made from smokeless fire, possess free will, and are subject to the Last Judgment. This framework is a theological description of beings that exist independently of it. The practical tradition of jinn interaction — which predates Islam — describes individual jinn with names, histories, territories, and interests. The relationship between a human practitioner and a jinn resembles, in structure, the relationships described in faerie-lore more than the coercive model of European demon-binding.
Whether the jinn otherworld and the occidental Faerie are the same place under different names is unresolved. Some modern scholars argue they are — that the otherworld is singular and cultures have simply mapped different regions of it with different names. Others note that jinn interact with the physical world in ways that don't quite match the pattern of faerie intrusions: jinn appear to move more freely between worlds, are more consistently present in specific geographic locations, and respond differently to the protective measures that work against faeries. The question has practical consequences that remain actively debated.
The Solomonic binding tradition, under this interpretation, is a method for compelling otherworld beings rather than for commanding demons. European demonologists who adopted Solomonic procedures may have been working with entities their own framework misidentified.
The Colonial Period and the Franklonian System
European colonial powers arrived in the Middle East with the Franklonian system already developed. British agents — some operating through the Cambridge network — collected, translated, and classified Arabic and Persian magical manuscripts throughout the 19th century. E.A. Wallis Budge at the British Museum assembled a substantial collection of Babylonian magical texts. Whether his work was purely academic or included active occult assessment is debated; official records say academic.
The Franklonian system was never formally extended to the Ottoman Empire or most of the colonial Middle East. The Authority's counterparts in the region were thin on the ground and generally worked through influence and treaty rather than direct governance. When the colonial period ended, the institutional structures that had managed magical containment in Europe did not transfer.
Modern Landscape
Magical practice in the contemporary Middle East is more actively suppressed than in Western Europe or North America — not less governed, but governed through different and often harsher mechanisms. Religious law and state security operate in parallel, and the combination is more aggressive about enforcement than secular intelligence services in the West tend to be.
Saudi Arabia treats sorcery as a capital offense under hadd law, and enforces it. In 2009 the Saudi government established an Anti-Witchcraft Unit within the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, with authority to investigate and arrest practitioners. Executions for sorcery-related charges have continued into the present decade. The unit is not, in the game's setting, aware of what it is actually policing — it is enforcing religious law against what it understands as charlatanism and Satanism, with no knowledge of the Franklonian framework. The effect is containment regardless.
Iran manages its occult infrastructure through structures within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Unlike the Saudi model, there is some indication that the relevant Iranian personnel know what they are dealing with — that the suppression is informed rather than incidental. The IRGC unit does not coordinate with Western counterparts.
Egypt occupies a middle position. Al-Azhar University, the primary institution of Sunni Islamic scholarship, has issued repeated rulings against magical practice; Egyptian state security prosecutes cases occasionally, usually framed as fraud. The enforcement is less systematic than Saudi Arabia's and less politically integrated than Iran's.
Iraq and Syria present a particular problem. Both countries are home to sites of extreme antiquity where Bronze Age magical activity was heavy and where the ground was never properly sealed. Decades of war and institutional collapse have left these sites unmonitored. The Authority has assessed several Iraqi sites as actively dangerous; access is effectively uncontrolled.
Israel has the most organized magical governance apparatus in the region built on the Western model: Unit 500, a division within Military Intelligence (Aman) that predates the state and traces its origins to Mandate-era British operations. Unit 500 focuses on prophetic and foresight-related phenomena, which are unusually concentrated in the region, and coordinates selectively with the Authority and the Royal Geometric Society.
Key Concepts
Sihr — The Arabic term for magic, used in the Quran and in classical Islamic law. Encompasses harmful, manipulative, and polytheistic magical practice. Formally forbidden across all major schools of Islamic jurisprudence and treated as a capital offense in several contemporary legal systems.
Jinn — Otherworld beings with an established presence in the Middle East and surrounding regions. The parallel in occidental terms is faeries rather than demons: residents of an otherworld, individually distinct, capable of negotiated or coerced relationships with human practitioners. Whether the jinn otherworld and Faerie are the same place is unresolved.
The Solomonic tradition — The body of magical knowledge attributed to King Solomon, particularly his methods for binding jinn and related entities. Codified in the Testament of Solomon, the Key of Solomon, and the Lemegeton. Western demonology identifies Solomon's 72 as demons; Islamic tradition identifies them as jinn; both binding procedures exist and produce results, but whether they work on the same entities is disputed.
The Shams al-Ma'arif — The major Arabic-language grimoire, written by Ahmad ibn Ali al-Buni in the 13th century. Covers letter magic, talismanic construction, and spirit invocation. Standard reference in the Arabic-language scholarly tradition.
Ruqyah — Quranic recitation used for healing and protection. Permitted under Islamic law in contrast to sihr. Practiced openly and widely; not considered magic by most Islamic scholars, though it produces effects that magicians would recognize.
Unit 500 — The magical governance division within Israeli Military Intelligence (Aman). Its formal existence is not publicly acknowledged. Focused primarily on prophetic and foresight phenomena. Coordinates selectively with the Authority and the Royal Geometric Society.