Long before the earliest printing presses were established in the West, medieval Arabic block printing enjoyed a contained period of efflorescence in the Islamic world between the 9th and early 15th centuries. Block-prints encompassed numerous genres, including royal decrees from 10th-century al-Andalus, paper currency from 12th-century northern Syria, and amulets like the one here. Some engravers would embed motifs onto wooden blocks by carving away the negative space around their designs. Others produced metal plates by first inscribing the design onto a clay tablet with a stylus, then impressing malleable or molten tin into the grooves of the mold. The red Arabic header to this amulet declares, “There is no conqueror except God,” which was also the motto of the Nasrid dynasty in Granada. Below it, a square frame of black naskh script encloses two concentric circles with various invocations and titles of God. Fewer than a hundred of these medieval printed amulets (known as tarsh) are known to have survived to this day, making this work part of an exceptional group and a rare example of its particular design.

Scattered references from poets across from the 10th to 14th centuries relate how unscrupulous peddlers would produce a stock of amulets from blocks or plates to prey upon gullible shoppers. These poets do not cast amulet buyers in a positive light, often describing them as illiterate or unable to discern that the peddlers did not “write” these works themselves. Despite these negative characterizations, the fact that the majority of Arabic block-prints are amulets attest to their widespread popularity. Likewise, the block-printing techniques described above enabled the mass-production of paper amulets to meet the demands of these commercial buyers. Typically, users rolled and stored these papers in metal cylinders suspended from chains as necklaces. The intimate proximity of the amulet to the body of the believer was paramount in activating its magical properties. Thus, many charms and related talismans were worn as jewelry, like rings, arm bands, and necklaces. These methods of storage may have also helped many of these fragile works survive the ravages of time.

Most printed amulets comprise long, rectangular strips of paper bearing quotations from the Qur’an, the names of God, or other para-religious texts of an apotropaic nature, which were designed to fend off evil and more specific harms. The main Arabic text of this amulet begins with a bismillah and an address to God in the square frame, followed by divine names and titles that may relate to the intention of the amulet, though part of the text is somewhat obscured. The central roundel repeats the shahada (Muslim declaration of faith), interspersed with further divine titles proclaiming God is “everlasting,” “generous in forgiveness,” “the forgiver of sins,” and “hearer of prayers.” As seen in this case, many amuletic texts need not pull quotations from the Qur’an in a strict fashion, but could freely mix and match a broad range of verses and related allusions from the Hadith and elsewhere, all of which formed the common corpus of magical texts.