Al-Ahmar, “the Red,” is the jinn king who rules Tuesday under the planet Mars, recorded by name in Arabic manuscripts such as the Shams al-Ma’arif, the al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a and the Sihr Muluk al-Jann.
In the Arabic Solomonic tradition, the universe of jinn is not an undifferentiated mass of spirits. It is a monarchy — a hierarchical kingdom modeled on the political imagination of the medieval Islamic world, with kings, viziers, retinues, and governed territories. At the apex of this hierarchy sit seven kings, one for each visible planet, ruling over the jinn populations associated with their planetary sphere. Al-Ahmar — “the Red” — is the king of the Martian jinn, the sovereign of Tuesday, and one of the most frequently encountered figures in the primary Arabic manuscript literature on operative jinn work.
The Structure of the Seven-King System
Before turning to al-Ahmar specifically, it is necessary to understand the framework he inhabits. The seven-king system of the Arabic jinn tradition maps a planetary hierarchy of spiritual sovereigns onto the seven-day week:
- Saturday: The king associated with Saturn (Maymun)
- Sunday: The Solar king (al-Mudhhab, “the Golden One”)
- Monday: The Lunar king (Murra)
- Tuesday: Al-Ahmar, “the Red” — the Martian king
- Wednesday: The Mercurial king (Barqan)
- Thursday: The Jovian king (Shamhurash)
- Friday: The Venusian king (Zawba’a)
This correspondence system is not perfectly consistent across the Arabic manuscript corpus — different texts assign different names to the same planetary position, a fact addressed in the companion article The Real Names of the Seven Jinn Kings. But the structural principle — seven kings, seven planets, seven days — is nearly universal in the tradition.
The al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a’s own Table of Spiritual Compositions for the Days illustrates the variation. It runs: Sunday, Shamhurash; Monday, Murra; Tuesday, al-Ahmar; Wednesday, Barqan; Thursday, Shamhurash again; Friday, Zawba’a; Saturday, Maymun — each with a cardinal direction, al-Ahmar’s being north. On al-Ahmar’s day, this table agrees with the roster most often cited; the full line-up of the 7 jinn kings, with their epithets and angels, is laid out in 7 Jinn Kings: The Real Names the Goetia Got Wrong.
Al-Ahmar: The Red King
Al-Ahmar’s name is his planetary description. Ahmar means “red” in Arabic — the color of Mars, of blood, of fire, of iron oxide. The association between Mars and redness runs through Arabic astronomical and astrological tradition as it does through every culture that named and studied this planet.
The domains given to his day are precisely what you would expect from a Martian figure. The al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a, which seats al-Ahmar on Tuesday, gives Tuesday (Mars) to “operations of victory, courage, and overcoming enemies.”
Who Is al-Ahmar? What Three Manuscripts Record
The question “who is al-Ahmar” — the name is also written al Ahmar, without the hyphen — is best answered in the manuscripts’ own words, and each of the three principal sources adds something to the portrait of the al-Ahmar jinn king.
The Shams al-Ma’arif. Al-Buni’s Shams al-Ma’arif al-Kubra places al-Ahmar inside a chain of command. One of its adjurations addresses “Samsama’il, the king appointed over the sphere of Mars,” and bids him answer “by the presence of Ahmar the king”; it then turns to al-Ahmar himself: “Answer, O Ahmar, by the right of the king whose command is dominant over you, Samsama’il.” The angel commands; the jinn king obeys. Elsewhere the same book names him with a kunya, Abu Muhriz al-Ahmar, and in its account of the lunar mansions it gives the first mansion, al-Sharatayn, the letter alif, the planet Mars, and a servant it calls simply “the Red One.”
The al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a. The Radiant Jewels assigns al-Ahmar to Tuesday (al-Thulatha’) and to the north in its table of the days. Its Great Oath of Summoning calls on the king of each day in turn — “the king of Tuesday (Mars)” among them — and insists that “the practitioner must address each king appropriately when summoning him.” The same book describes the fire jinn (al-marid) as “red in appearance, powerful and fierce” — the red jinn of the tradition — though it does not itself place them under al-Ahmar.
The Sihr Muluk al-Jann. The Complete Magic of the Jinn Kings gives the shortest and most direct address: “Adjuration to the Red King: Answer, O King al-Ahmar! By the power of these names, obey!” It is accompanied by a numerical seal for the adjuration and a triangular seal, drawn “with the names inscribed at each vertex,” with the central name of power placed within it.
Al-Ahmar’s Planetary Correspondences
Every jinn king in the Arabic tradition carries a full set of planetary correspondences that govern how operations addressed to him must be conducted. For al-Ahmar, these correspondences are Martian:
Day: Tuesday (yawm al-thalatha’), the day ruled by Mars. The al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a (Vol. V) seats al-Ahmar on Tuesday in its table of the days, and the Kitab al-Ajnas has his seal fashioned “in the ascendant of Mars on Tuesday.”
Color: Red. The Kitab al-Ajnas has al-Ahmar’s seal made “in red carnelian or in gold.”
Metal: Iron. Mars governs iron in the planetary-material correspondence system.
Suffumigation: Sulfurous or acrid incenses. The bakhur (incense) the al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a gives Mars includes pepper, ginger and red sulfur. These are distinguished in the manuscripts from the pleasant incenses appropriate to Venusian or Solar operations.
Number: The Martian number in the abjad system is associated with the value of the Mars square — the five-by-five magic square (wafq) built around the number 65, whose row, column, and diagonal sums are each 65.
Al-Ahmar’s Seal
In the manuscript tradition, each of the seven jinn kings has a personal seal — a khatam — that serves as his operative signature. This seal is a geometric figure inscribed in the talisman or conjuration document as a mark of the king’s authority and identity. A conjuration document that carries al-Ahmar’s seal is, in the manuscript logic, addressed directly to him and carrying his own emblem — like a letter bearing a sovereign’s seal.
Al-Ahmar’s khatam appears in both Kitab al-Ajnas (Vol. IV) and Sihr Muluk al-Jann (Vol. VII). The Kitab al-Ajnas gives it as a magic square; the Sihr Muluk al-Jann gives a numerical seal for his adjuration and a triangular seal with names of power at each vertex.
The seal is not decorative in the manuscript tradition. It is the operative identifier of the king — the mark that distinguishes a document addressed to al-Ahmar from one addressed to any other king, and that, according to the tradition’s internal logic, makes the address binding.
The Adjuration Formula
The operative centerpiece of al-Ahmar’s documentation in the manuscripts is his ‘azima — the adjuration formula used to compel his attendance. This formula combines several elements consistent across the conjuration literature:
An invocation of divine authority: The practitioner speaks not in his own name but in the name of the divine power (God, Solomon, the patriarchs and prophets) under whose authority the jinn kings are commanded. This theological grounding is not peripheral — it is the mechanism by which the conjuration operates. The jinn are understood to be subject to divine command, and the practitioner invoking that command channels it.
A naming of the king: Al-Ahmar is addressed by name, by his planetary correspondence, by his station in the hierarchy, and — in the Shams al-Ma’arif — by the name of the angel over him, Samsama’il.
A statement of the request: What the practitioner requires is stated explicitly and specifically. The Arabic manuscript tradition does not favor vague requests in operative formulas.
A binding clause: The formula concludes with a compulsion formula — a statement that holds the king to his response and prevents evasion.
The full adjuration text from the Sihr Muluk al-Jann for al-Ahmar is discussed in the dedicated article Al-Ahmar, the Red King of Jinn: His Adjuration, which presents the first English translation of that specific formula.
Al-Ahmar in Context: The Jinn King Literature
Al-Ahmar does not appear in isolation. He is one node in a well-documented system that the Arabic manuscript tradition developed across several centuries of textual production. The seven-king system appears, in varying degrees of elaboration, in a large number of texts — from brief sections of the Shams al-Ma’arif to entire volumes devoted to the conjuration of the jinn kings, like the Sihr Muluk al-Jann.
The tradition’s relationship to the broader Solomonic literature is significant. Solomon’s authority over the jinn is established in the Quran (Surah 27 and 38) and elaborated in post-Quranic literature into a detailed cosmological account of how the jinn kingdom is organized and how it was brought under human command. Al-Ahmar’s subjection to Solomon — and therefore to any practitioner invoking Solomon’s authority — is a theological claim embedded in the operative tradition, not merely a folkloric narrative.
The closest Western parallel is the Goetic tradition, in which named spirits are assigned to specific roles and summoned by specific seals and adjurations. The relationship between Western Goetia and its Arabic antecedents is explored in Goetia: The Arabic Source of Solomonic Demonology. The jinn king system, including al-Ahmar, predates the Goetic texts and may well be among their source traditions.
Reading al-Ahmar in the Primary Sources
Two John Friend Publishing volumes that give access to al-Ahmar’s documentation in Arabic manuscripts are al-Jawahir al-Lamma’a (Vol. V) — which provides a complete system of planetary-jinn king correspondence and the operational structure for working with each king — and Sihr Muluk al-Jann (Vol. VII), which provides adjuration formulas, seals, and conjuration texts for the jinn kings it names.
Together, these two volumes give a reader of English unprecedented access to the primary Arabic documentation of al-Ahmar and the broader seven-king tradition. Both texts are translated directly from Arabic manuscripts with bilingual presentation of key passages.
For the wider system of the jinn kings in which al-Ahmar stands, see the pages for The Complete Magic of the Jinn Kings and the Radiant Jewels, the jinn summoning book attributed to Ali Abu Hayy Allah al-Marzuqi. The step-by-step summoning protocol the Radiant Jewels prescribes is summarized in How to Summon a Jinn: The Seven Kings of Jinn.
