Shams al-Anwar: The Forgotten Arabic Grimoire That Completed Al-Buni's Shams al-Ma'arif — Now in English

There is a text that exists in the shadow of the most famous Arabic grimoire ever written — a text that assumes you have read the Shams al-Ma’arif, that builds on it, extends it, and in certain respects surpasses it as a practitioner’s guide. It was written in 1327 CE, a full century after al-Buni’s death, by a North African scholar named Ibn al-Hajj al-Tilmsani. It has circulated in manuscript form ever since: copied in Morocco, in Egypt, in the Ottoman libraries of Istanbul. It has never been translated into any European language. For English readers, it has been, until this year, completely inaccessible. That changes now.

Al-Buni and the Tradition He Created

To understand Shams al-Anwar wa Kunuz al-Asrar al-Kubra — “Suns of Lights and the Great Treasures of Secrets” — you first need to understand what came before it.

Ahmad ibn Ali al-Buni died around 1225 CE. He was a Sufi scholar from Buna (modern Annaba, Algeria), trained in the Quranic sciences and the Sufi mystical tradition, who spent his career in Cairo. What he did — across a series of texts, of which Shams al-Ma’arif al-Kubra is the most famous (see What Is the Shams al-Ma’arif?) — was synthesize. He pulled together the Arabic letter-science (‘ilm al-huruf), the Greek-derived astrology that had entered Arabic scholarship during the translation movement of the eighth through tenth centuries, the Islamic divine-names theology (asmaʾ al-husna), and the practical talisman-making tradition into a single coherent system.

The result was a cosmological framework in which every Arabic letter carries an elemental quality, a planetary affiliation, and a divine attribute; in which magic squares (awfaq) built from those letters and their numerical values (abjad) are not mere recreational puzzles but instruments for channeling cosmological forces — a system explored in detail in A Magic Square for Every Day of the Week; in which each operation must be conducted at the correct planetary hour, with the correct incense, invoking the correct divine name — all calibrated to the day of the week governed by the relevant planet.

This framework became the foundation of the Arabic occult tradition for the next eight centuries. The Shams al-Ma’arif is the reason scholars working anywhere in the Islamic world, from Morocco to Mughal India, shared a common technical vocabulary for operative magic. Al-Buni did not invent the components. He organized them into a system that could be taught, transmitted, and applied.

Who Was Ibn al-Hajj al-Tilmsani?

A century after al-Buni, the tradition had not frozen. It was alive, developing, contested, elaborated. The fourteenth century was a period of intense intellectual activity across the Islamicate world — the era of Ibn Khaldun (b. 1332 CE) in North Africa, of the mature Ottoman scholarly culture, of the Marinid dynasty’s patronage of learning in Morocco and Algeria. The Maghribi scholarly tradition — North African, rooted in the cities of Tlemcen, Fez, and Tunis — was producing important work across the Islamic sciences.

Ibn al-Hajj al-Tilmsani was part of this tradition. The nisba — the geographical surname — tells us his affiliation: al-Tilmsani means from Tlemcen, the great intellectual center of what is now western Algeria. Al-Maghribi — the Westerner — is a broader designation placing him within the North African and Andalusian scholarly tradition, distinct from the eastern Arabic world (the Levant, Egypt, Iraq). The Tlemcen scholarly tradition in this period was deeply embedded in Sufi practice — the city was a center of the Shadhiliyya and other major Sufi brotherhoods, traditions that had absorbed and transmitted al-Buni’s framework precisely because it aligned with their understanding of letter-mysticism and divine-name practice.

The translator’s note in the John Friend Publishing edition establishes the dating: “attributed to Ibn al-Ḥājj al-Tilmsānī al-Maghribī (c. 14th century (727 AH / 1327 CE)).” The year 727 of the Islamic calendar falls in 1327 CE — squarely in the Marinid period, a generation before Ibn Khaldun would begin his work. This was a text written at a moment when the al-Buni tradition was mature and widely diffused, and when a scholar of Tilmsani’s formation would have had access to multiple manuscript versions of the foundational texts.

What Shams al-Anwar Adds That al-Buni Does Not

The most important thing to understand about Shams al-Anwar is that it is not a commentary on Shams al-Ma’arif. It is not a popularization or an abridgment. It is a further development — a text that takes al-Buni’s system as given and builds new structures on top of it.

Where al-Buni is encyclopedic and theoretical — concerned with establishing the cosmological principles behind the system — Ibn al-Hajj al-Tilmsani is operational. His text is organized as a practitioner’s guide. The thirty chapters of Shams al-Anwar move from the foundational sciences (letter-secrets, divine names, Quranic verse properties) through the specific techniques of operation (incenses, spirit invocation, talisman construction, the awfaq) and into applied procedures for specific goals.

Consider the translator’s note in the JFP edition:

“Barbarous names (ʿajamī) — sequences of letters meant to be pronounced as written — are transliterated exactly and presented alongside the original Arabic script, never translated. Talismanic seals and magic squares are reproduced as images from the source manuscript. Where the source is illegible, the translator has noted the lacuna rather than invent content.”

— Shams al-Anwar, Translator’s Note, p. 6

This editorial policy reflects what makes Shams al-Anwar distinctive: it contains material that resists paraphrase. The barbarous names — the voces magicae, the ʿajamī syllables used in invocations — are not translatable because their power is held to reside in their precise phonetic form. Tilmsani preserves them because they are operative, not merely descriptive.

The text also extends al-Buni’s treatment of Quranic verses as operative formulas. Chapter Three (al-Bāb al-Thālith fī Khawāṣṣ al-Āyāt al-Qurʾāniyyah — “On the Properties of the Quranic Verses”) provides specific ayat with their operative properties and protocols for use. This is material that in al-Buni’s text exists as part of a larger theoretical account; in Tilmsani’s, it becomes a working reference.

The Operational Architecture: Spirits, Squares, and Talismans

The middle sections of Shams al-Anwar contain some of the most detailed operational material in any Arabic occult text in English translation. Chapter on the Spirits (Bāb al-Arwāḥ, p. 122) and the immediately following chapter “On the Manner of Constructing Talismanic Squares” (Fī Kayfiyyat ʿAmal al-Awfāq, p. 124) represent the operational core of the second volume.

The procedures for working with spirits are given in sequence, each building on the last:

“If you wish to see the spirit in a waking vision, prepare a room and cleanse it thoroughly, and place in it a mirror of polished steel or a bowl of clear water. Fumigate the room with mastic (masṭakā), frankincense (lubān), and sandalwood (ṣandal), and recite the invocation until the surface of the mirror or the water becomes clouded. Then the form of the spirit will appear to you, and you may address him with your request.”

— Shams al-Anwar, p. 188

These are not metaphors. They are instructions. The text specifies the incenses by their Arabic names (mastic, frankincense, sandalwood), the medium (steel mirror or clear water), and the mechanism (the invocation causes a change in the surface of the medium). This is the operational character that distinguishes Shams al-Anwar from more theoretically oriented texts.

The opening of the book makes the scope explicit. The original Arabic invocation, rendered in the JFP translation, situates the entire work within Islamic cosmology:

“Praise be to God who adorns the horizons with the lights of the stars, and illuminates the secrets through them, and creates from them wonders and marvels. He is the One who made the celestial spheres revolving in their orbits, and the planets coursing upon the path of their stations, traversing the mansions of the heavens. He made them obedient, subjugated through their movements, assigned to them their times and their courses. He made them signs, and through their witnessing one may know the hours, the days, and the months…”

— Shams al-Anwar, p. 7

The planets are not gods. They are signs — instruments through which the single God’s creation can be read and navigated. This theological framing is what allows the entire system of planetary hours, planetary angels, and planetary talismans to exist within an orthodox Islamic framework. It is al-Buni’s argument, inherited and amplified by Tilmsani.

Seven Centuries Without an English Translation: Why?

The Shams al-Ma’arif is famous enough to have attracted Western scholarly attention — fragmentary, contested, but real. Edward Lane mentioned it in his notes on modern Egyptian culture in the 1830s. Later Orientalist scholarship noted its significance. Portions have been discussed in academic works in French and German. And yet no complete English translation of Shams al-Ma’arif itself exists.

Shams al-Anwar is even less known in Western scholarship. It does not appear in most surveys of Arabic occult literature available to English readers. The reason is structural: the Arabic occult tradition was not a priority for the Orientalist translation projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which tended to focus on theological, legal, and literary texts that fit more comfortably into European academic categories. Magic was acknowledged as existing in Arabic manuscripts; it was rarely treated as a legitimate subject for translation.

The result is a 700-year gap. A tradition that has been continuously alive — continuously read, practiced, and copied in the Arabic-speaking world from the fourteenth century to the present — has been invisible to English readers for the entirety of English-language engagement with Islamic civilization.

This is not a minor omission. The Shams al-Ma’arif tradition is, by any measure, the central current in Arabic operative magic. To understand Islamic intellectual history without it is like understanding European medieval thought without access to the grimoire tradition — possible, up to a point, but fundamentally incomplete.

What It Means That It Has Finally Been Translated

The John Friend Publishing edition of Suns of Lights and the Great Treasures of Secrets is the first complete English translation of Shams al-Anwar wa Kunuz al-Asrar al-Kubra. It presents the full text in 264 pages, with Arabic terms in scholarly transliteration following the IJMES romanization standard, barbarous names transliterated exactly as they appear in the source, and all talismanic seals and magic squares reproduced as images from the manuscript.

For the Arabic-speaking world, the tradition this book represents has never been lost. For English readers — scholars of Islamic intellectual history, practitioners of the Western magical tradition who want primary sources rather than secondary summaries, and anyone who has wondered what the Arabic occult tradition actually looked like at the workbench level — this is a primary source that did not previously exist in their language.

The 700-year gap is, at least for this text, closed.

Read It in English for the First Time

Suns of Lights and the Great Treasures of Secrets is available from John Friend Publishing in Kindle, hardcover, and paperback editions, and is included in Kindle Unlimited.

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