They call it the most feared book in the Islamic library. It is feared because it is read as a cookbook. It deserves to be read as a library.
Behind the rumors is a vast medieval encyclopedia of the science of letters, the divine names, the lunar mansions, and number itself — the same sciences carried in al-Sirr al-Jalīl, at cathedral scale. This edition opens the chambers of study: every square rebuilt and proven live, every claim checked against the arithmetic. And it keeps the operative chambers sealed — studied as history, never handed out as instruction. That is not timidity. It is the ādāb the masters themselves demanded.
The Shams al-Maʿārif al-Kubrā is the great compendium of Islamic letter-science: the twenty-eight letters and their four natures, the Ninety-Nine Names, the seven planetary squares, the lunar mansions, the hours and their rulers — forty chapters moving from the alphabet to the architecture of the cosmos. The copy behind this edition is the four-parts-in-one-volume printing of Muṣṭafā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, Cairo, completed Rajab 1345 AH (1927 CE) — 575 numbered pages and a sixteen-page fihrist, corrected for the press by Ibrāhīm ibn Ḥasan al-Anbābī, with two treatises on the zodiac and the wandering stars bound in at the end. It last left a library desk in March 1991; it opens here for good.
The book travels under the name of Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī al-Būnī (d. c. 622 AH / 1225 CE), the Maghribī master of the science of letters. But modern manuscript scholarship is clear: the Kubrā as it circulates today is a later compilation that grew around al-Būnī's authentic works for centuries after his death — no known manuscript of this long recension predates the 11th/17th century. Genuine Būnian material runs through it, braided with additions no one signed. This edition tells you so plainly, because reverence for a text includes telling the truth about it — the same taṣḥīḥ ethic that governs our sister edition.
The Kubrā contains extensive operative material: procedures aimed at compelling, binding, separating, and harming. None of it is reproduced, summarized, or operationalized here — not the recipes, not the timings, not the conditions. The sword-chapters are treated the way a museum treats a blade: studied for structure and history behind glass, never handed across the counter. What is opened is everything the arithmetic can prove and everything a student of the tradition can licitly study: letters, numbers, names, squares, and the sky's calendar.
The book opens where the tradition always opens: the alphabet as cosmology. Twenty-eight letters — the number of the mansions of the moon — divided four by seven among fire, air, water, and earth. Al-Būnī wrote in the Maghreb, where several letters carry different values than in the East; this edition defaults to the Mashriqī reckoning used across our sister edition, with the Maghribī a single tap away — because a verified edition shows its arithmetic in both dialects.
The correspondence the whole book stands on: the moon crosses one manzila — one mansion of fixed stars — each night, completing the circle of twenty-eight in a lunar month, and the tradition pairs each station with one of the twenty-eight letters in abjad order, alif with the first mansion through ghayn with the last. A calendar made of language; an alphabet paced by the sky. The wheel below turns the pairing into an instrument — each bead colored by its letter's element.
The longest stretch of the book is not squares — it is a slow procession through the Beautiful Names, chapter after chapter. Here is the full traditional roster with every abjad value computed in your browser as you read — nothing pre-typed, nothing trusted from memory — in either reckoning. Filter by text or by number: try 66, the value of the Name itself.
The science of the Names begins in a confession, or it does not begin at all: God is One — and One not as the first of a series but as that which admits no series. Everything else on this page can be counted, and the counting is the point of the page; but tawḥīd is the standing reminder of what the counting can never reach. When the Names chamber above computes the value of الله as sixty-six, it has weighed the ink of four letters — a true fact about an Arabic word, and the tradition delighted in it. It has weighed nothing of the One the word points to. Every sum in this edition measures the pointing finger; none measures the Moon.
From that confession the tradition drew its severe discipline of transcendence — tanzīh. Nothing, the Qurʾān insists, is as His likeness; and so the masters walked a ridge with a fall on either side. To the one side lies likening — imagining that "Hearing" and "Seeing," said of God, work as they do in creatures, only larger. To the other lies stripping — so refusing all description that nothing remains to worship. The classical resolution is a discipline of receiving: the Names are given, not invented. The tradition calls them tawqīfī — held on deposit from revelation — which means the servant neither coins new names for God nor empties the given ones. They are affirmed as true, and He is affirmed as exceeding them, and the tension between those two affirmations is not a problem to be solved but the permanent posture of a creature speaking of its Creator.
Why then does a world exist at all? Here the devotional tradition — and this book's genre stands inside it — made its most daring claim: creation is where the Names show their traces. Provision arrives, and al-Razzāq is known; a wound closes, and al-Shāfī; a wrong is covered rather than exposed, and al-Ghaffār, whose form in Arabic is the form of one who covers again and again. The world, read this way, is not a screen between the servant and God but a text — the same claim the letter-science makes about the alphabet, extended to everything. And the reader's task in both texts is identical: not to seize the words but to be shaped by them. The masters called it takhalluq — taking on, at creaturely scale, the shadow of the qualities: mercy from the Merciful, patience from the Patient, generosity from the Generous. The study of the attributes was never meant to end in a doctrine. It ends in a character.
The famous tradition counts the Names ninety-nine, one hundred less one, and promises the Garden to whoever "enumerates" them — and on that word the masters lingered. Iḥṣāʾ, they taught, is not recitation from memory; a parrot could do that, and the page above does it faster still. It is keeping count with a life: knowing each Name, holding to what it asks, being found where it points. This edition computes the letters of all ninety-nine in an instant, and offers the computation gladly — with the tradition's own caveat attached: the browser has enumerated nothing. Only a life enumerates.
That verse is the whole relationship between the Names and creation, stated as a command — and it is worth hearing exactly what the command is. Call upon Him by them. Not: compel by them, not: harness them, not: turn them toward a rival's undoing. Where this literature went astray historically, it went astray at precisely this point, treating the Names as levers when revelation had offered them as doors of address. The tradition's own corrective is the quiet verdict of this entire edition, and the reason its operative wing stays sealed: the Names were given for duʿāʾ, not devices — for calling, not commanding. A servant who knows what the Names are for already possesses everything the sealed chapters falsely promised, and holds it lawfully, and holds it forever.
The book gives the opening formula of the Qurʾān its own chapter, and the arithmetic explains why the tradition never tired of it: written out, the Basmala carries nineteen letters — the number the Qurʾān itself singles out — and their values close on the famous total. Every cell below is computed from the text at load, not typed from memory; toggle the reckoning and watch the sum move.
The tradition holds that nothing rightly begun begins bare. Every sūra of the Qurʾān but one opens with this line, and the Prophet's word — carried in the collections and repeated at the head of a thousand books — warns that a matter of consequence not opened with it is abtar: docked, cut off from its own completion.
Read closely, the formula is not decoration but permission. The one who says it stands at a door and greets the Owner of the house before entering; the tradition's word for this posture is istiʾdhān — asking leave. And for this book in particular, no other opening was possible. A compendium that claims the sciences of letters, numbers, and hours must begin by confessing where letters, numbers, and hours come from: whatever force the alphabet carries is borrowed, and the Basmala is the acknowledgment of the loan, renewed each time before the tools are touched. That is why the masters of this literature treated the line itself as the greatest of the "names of working" — not one instrument among others, but the deed of title to all of them.
The masters lingered longest on the first stroke. The بِ that opens the line is the particle of instrument and accompaniment — by Him, with Him — so that the very first letter a reciter utters already renounces acting in his own strength. A famous word in the Sufi transmission folds the whole library into that single letter: everything in the revealed books is gathered in the Qurʾān, everything in the Qurʾān in the Fātiḥa, everything in the Fātiḥa in the Basmala, everything in the Basmala in its bāʾ — down to the diacritical point beneath it, a single mark of ink. Whatever else that saying means, its plain sense is severe and beautiful: all knowledge reduces, in the end, to where you stand when you begin.
Then the two names of mercy, and the classical readers heard the grammar before the theology. Both descend from رحمة, the mercy whose root-image in Arabic is the womb; but the form رَحْمَن is the pattern of overflowing plenitude — a fullness in flood — while رَحِيم is the pattern of the constant, abiding quality. From this the tradition drew its great distinction. Al-Raḥmān is the mercy of existence itself: the sun on every field, provision on believer and denier alike, the mercy nobody earned and nobody escapes — so exclusive to God that the tradition permits no creature to wear it as a name. Al-Raḥīm is the mercy of response: particular, covenantal, the mercy that meets those who turn toward it and completes what they cannot complete. Said in sequence, the two names span the whole arc of a life — by the mercy that made you, toward the mercy that meets you — and being precedes becoming, which is why Raḥmān is uttered first.
And so the tradition's favorite title for the line: the key. Key of every sūra, key of every locked matter, and in the protective reading the commentators loved, its nineteen letters stand guard over the nineteen keepers of the Fire — one letter answering each gate. This edition would put it in the book's own idiom: the Basmala is the master-square. As every row of a balanced wafq closes on a single constant, every chamber of this devotional science closes on this one line. The arithmetic above and the meaning here are the two halves of the same door — and the door opens inward, toward the heart that says the words and means them. A book begun this way has already stated its deepest claim before its first chapter: the same claim the sister edition finds on the first page of al-Sirr al-Jalīl — that the saying is answered in the sincerity of the one who says it, and everything else is commentary.
The nineteen-letter anatomy of the sister verse — ḥasbunā Allāhu wa-niʿma al-wakīl — is drawn out step by step on the sister edition.
The tradition's names for the opening sūra are a commentary in themselves: Umm al-Kitāb, the Mother of the Book, because everything after it grows from it; and al-Sabʿ al-Mathānī, the Seven Oft-Repeated, because no unit of the daily prayer stands without it. The tradition also remembers it as a dialogue: recited slowly, half belongs to the servant's praise and half to the servant's need, with the pivot verse shared between them. Below, its seven movements are described rather than reproduced — each row gives the movement's traditional station and this edition's own account of its theme, with the letter-count and value of each verse computed live from the text in this orthography.
In its own chapter the book treats this verse as the summit of protective recitation, and centuries of devotional practice agree. Read as the tradition reads it, the verse moves through a single sustained declaration: the Living, the Self-Subsisting One whom no drowsiness or sleep ever touches; the sole owner of whatever the heavens and the earth contain; before whom no intercession moves without leave; who encompasses what creatures face and what lies behind them, while they grasp of His knowledge only what He wills; whose Footstool embraces the heavens and the earth together, their keeping no weight upon Him — the High, the Tremendous. This edition presents it as the book's devotional center of gravity: a text for recitation and reflection, whole and unadorned.
Twenty-nine sūras open with detached letters — recited as bare letter-names, spelled but never read as words. Count the distinct letters used and the first wonder appears: fourteen — exactly half the alphabet, the same halving the mansions wheel above turns on; the letter-science tradition called these fourteen the luminous letters and their absent siblings the dark half. They combine into fourteen forms, from a single nūn to the five-letter crown of Sūrat Maryam. What do they mean? The honest answer is the classical one: the commentators laid out their best readings and then wrote God knows best. Some heard abbreviations of divine names; some, markers naming and distinguishing the sūras; some, a summons — the way a caller strikes a bell before speaking; and many heard a standing challenge: these are the very letters your own speech is made of, and still the like of this Book is not produced from them. This edition presents the Openings as that scholarly conversation — a historical and linguistic puzzle to be contemplated, and nothing on this page treats them as a cipher to be worked.
Ask the devotional tradition which sūras it reaches for when afraid, and the answer has been stable for a thousand years. This chamber describes why the tradition calls them protective — the logic of the custom, as heritage — and deliberately stops there: what to do with them belongs to a person's own teacher and practice, not to a webpage.
This literature rarely argues; it points. Behind every claim about protection and trust stands a remembered moment from the prophetic story, and the old authors could invoke each one with half a phrase because every reader carried the whole tale. Four of those tales are retold below as narrative summary — cultural and devotional heritage in this edition's own words, describing where scripture speaks rather than reproducing it. Together they are the case-law of tawakkul: the precedents every chamber on this page silently cites.
Young Ibrāhīm broke the idols of his people and left the axe hanging on the largest, and when argument failed them they built a fire so great it had to be fed for days, and threw him into it from a distance because no one could approach. The tradition remembers what he refused on the way in — every offer of rescue but One — and remembers his words as a declaration that God's sufficiency was enough for him.
And the command came, as the Qurʾān records it, addressed not to the man but to the fire: that it be coolness, and that it be safety. He walked out unburned. This is the oldest precedent in the book's world — the moment the sister edition's whole treatise stands on: the verse of sufficiency was a man's entire armor once, and it held.
On the night flight from Mecca, the Prophet and his companion Abū Bakr hid three days in a cave on Mount Thawr while armed men searched the hills with a bounty behind them. The tradition tells that the searchers came so close that their feet could be seen from inside the dark, and Abū Bakr's heart failed him for his friend's sake — two men, one cave, no second exit.
The answer he received has been repeated for fourteen centuries wherever the hunted hide: do not grieve — God is with us; what fear for two whose third is God? The searchers looked at the cave mouth and turned away. Later tellings added a spider's web across the entrance and a nesting dove — ordinary, fragile things standing guard — but the older point is starker: the door was open the whole time, and it was enough.
Yūnus left his city in anger before leave was given, took ship, and when the storm came and the lots were cast, went over the side and was swallowed. The tradition counts three darknesses closed over him — night, sea, and the creature's belly — a confinement no craft or client or friend could reach.
What he did there was not an operation. He glorified God and confessed his own wrong — the tradition holds his words up as the model of dhikr made in extremity — and the darknesses were commanded to release him onto the shore. The old astronomers gave the name of this story to the twenty-eighth and last mansion of the moon, Baṭn al-Ḥūt, the Belly of the Fish, where the wheel above completes its circle: the month, like the story, ends in deliverance.
The collections themselves record that harm was once worked against the Prophet by a man of Medina — an affliction of illusion and confusion, its instruments hidden down a dry well. The tradition does not glamorize the episode; it tells it to establish two things at once: that such harm was real enough to touch even him, and that its entire undoing came not by counter-craft but by revelation — disclosure of what was hidden, and the sending down of the two short sūras of refuge that close the Qurʾān.
He was shown where the thing lay; it was drawn up and destroyed; the affliction lifted like a rope loosed knot by knot. This story is the charter of the whole protective tradition — and its verdict is this edition's verdict: the answer to the sealed arts was never a better spell. It was taking refuge in the One the letters belong to.
Around the Prophet's given name the devotional centuries built a garden of titles — gathered in litanies, strung through poetry, and treasured by exactly the literature this book belongs to. Twelve of the best-loved are below, each with its meaning and its letter-value computed live in the Mashriqī reckoning; tap any name for its letters. The two most famous values became beloved facts of the tradition in their own right: Muḥammad, 92, and Aḥmad, 53. Devotional custom went further still and read even two of the mystery-openings — Ṭā-Hā and Yā-Sīn — as address-names of the Prophet, a reading the Openings chamber above handles with scholarly caution and the poets embraced without any.
The names describe an office; the tradition insisted the character came first. Before any revelation, Mecca's merchants had already settled his title by experience: al-Amīn, the trustworthy — the man with whom deposits were safe, a verdict rendered by people who would later oppose him and never retracted on this point even then. The tradition's portrait holds a constellation of qualities in balance: truthfulness that did not bend for advantage; a mercy so habitual that harshness registered as absence; patience that outlasted persecution without curdling into vengeance — the accounts agree he did not avenge himself, and reserved his anger for violated limits rather than wounded pride. Asked in later years to sum his character, his household pointed not to a list of virtues but to the revelation itself: his conduct, they said, was the Book made visible — walking, greeting, keeping its word. That description is the quiet center of the whole devotional names-tradition: every title in the garden above is one petal of it.
The Kubrā itself tells no stories — it is a book of sciences, not of tales. But the tradition that carried it taught its hardest lessons in the adab of the teaching-story, and every science on this page has a tale-shaped truth behind it. The four below are original compositions written for this edition in that spirit — not translations of any text — and each one answers a chamber above.
A scribe of Fez spent forty years weighing words. Every name he met, he broke into letters and summed; his margins were black with arithmetic, and it was said he could give you the value of a sentence before you finished saying it. At last he traveled to a master in the mountains and set his life's ledger on the floor between them. “I have weighed every name of God,” he said, “and every verse of protection, and every word of the daily prayer.”
The master turned the pages a long time. “One weight is missing,” he said. “At the foot of my path sits a beggar, and you passed him with bread in your bag. What is the value of the bread that stayed in the bag?”
The scribe was silent.
“Weigh that,” said the master, closing the ledger gently, “and these forty years will finally balance.”
In Aleppo an apprentice learned every ward and pin until he could cut a key blindfolded from the sound of a lock alone. Yet each morning he watched his master stand before the shop door — key already in hand — bow his head, and say bismillāh before turning it.
“Master,” the boy finally asked, “why greet a door you can open?”
The old man held the key up to the light. “So that I never come to believe,” he said, “that it is the key that opens it.”
A dervish walked the roads for forty years with a sword at his belt and was never robbed. In his old age, brigands finally stopped him at a ford. “Draw, old man,” said the youngest, “and let us see this famous blade.”
The dervish unbuckled the scabbard and handed it over whole. It was olive-wood, carved in one piece — no blade inside it, and no opening for one. Only the shape of a sword, worn smooth by forty years of weather.
“Then what protected you?” the young man asked.
“The same thing,” said the dervish, taking it back, “that just protected you from drawing yours.” And he crossed the ford and walked on.
A student of the sky kept perfect tables. Each night he computed the moon's mansion to the minute, and he had not actually looked up in some years, the tables being faster. One winter the damp got into his papers and the ink ran, and he stood in his courtyard, lost beneath a clear sky.
An old date-farmer, passing with her donkey, glanced up. “She sleeps in al-Qalb tonight,” she said, “the heart of the scorpion.”
“You keep tables?” he asked.
“I kept trees,” she said. “Sixty years of watching where they drank the light. Your tables are the memory of ten thousand nights like mine — honor them, copy them fresh. But then go outside.”
The heart of the book's third part: seven squares, one for each of the seven wanderers, from Saturn's 3×3 to the Moon's 9×9. The Sun holds the 6×6 — every row, column, and diagonal closing on 111 — which is why it turns at the head of this page: the book named itself after this square's planet. Nothing here is drawn from memory; your browser constructs each square from its rule and re-proves every line the moment the page loads.
The same engine that drives our sister edition, tuned to the Sun. Give it a name, a word, or a number; it computes the abjad value in either reckoning and distributes it across a balanced square whose every row and column carries the whole. Squares are offered for study and contemplation of the number — the meditative craft the tradition calls fikr, not operation.
Two words govern this book's reputation, and both deserve a museum label rather than a rumor. Wafq — plural awfāq — is Arabic for accord, harmony: the tradition's name for what mathematicians call a magic square, an arrangement of numbers in which every row, column, and diagonal agrees on a single sum. Ṭilasm — the ancestor of the English talisman — descends from the Greek telesma, a completed or consecrated thing: the tradition's name for an object bearing writing, number, or figure, made to carry meaning beyond its material. A wafq is a structure; a ṭilasm is an artifact; this literature is where the two met.
The mathematics is real mathematics, and it is older than any use anyone put it to. The 3×3 arrangement appears in Chinese tradition as the Lo Shu diagram long before Arabic letters existed to label it. When the translation movement brought the sciences into Arabic, the squares came with them, and the Islamic mathematicians treated construction as pure combinatorics: how to build a balanced square of any order, odd or even — a genuinely hard problem, solved in treatises of the tenth and eleventh centuries by mathematicians of the first rank who wrote on awfāq exactly as they wrote on optics or number theory. Their general law survives on this very page: every square in the Atlas and the Gallery obeys the constant those treatises derived, and your browser re-derives it on every load. That inheritance — construction as demonstrable mathematics — is the part of the tradition this edition operates.
The artifact record is a museum wing of its own. Collections around the world hold the physical descendants of this literature: engraved medicinal bowls with squares worked into their basins, seal-stones and pendants bearing the 3×3, talismanic shirts painted with grids and verses, and manuscript charts by the thousands. Historians read these objects the way they read votive offerings from any tradition — as testimony to what people feared, hoped, and trusted — and the honest museum label for all of them says the same thing: these artifacts document a worldview; they do not demonstrate a mechanism.
The Būnian corpus stands at the meeting point. In it, the mathematicians' squares and the devotional tradition's names were braided together, and the result traveled astonishingly far: the same seven planetary attributions displayed in the Atlas above crossed into Latin compendia and Renaissance Europe, where the "planetary squares" became a fixture of a whole second esoteric tradition. Modern scholarship reads ʿilm al-awfāq as one of history's clearest hinges between mathematics, medicine, and piety — and reads the operative manuals, this book's included, as documents of belief rather than instructions worth transmitting. That is precisely this edition's stance, stated academically.
Everything above describes; nothing prescribes. In keeping with the Sealed Chamber policy stated in the Book section, this edition deliberately withholds the operative layer of the awfāq tradition in every form: construction formulas directed at effects, pairings of squares with verses or names for stated purposes, material prescriptions, conditions, and timings. That withholding is not softened by any framing — devotional, Qurʾānic, or protective — because framing does not change what an instruction is. The mathematics is open above and in the Gallery below, as mathematics. The uses remain behind glass, as history.
Four exhibits, chosen for what they reveal about structure alone. Each control below doesn't just decorate — it verifies: the highlighted property is recomputed from the numbers in front of you.
The 1345 AH printing closes with two short rasāʾil of classical astrology: Zahr al-murūj fī dalāʾil al-burūj — “The Flower of the Meadows, on the Indications of the Signs” — on the twelve zodiacal signs, and Laṭāʾif al-ishāra fī khaṣāʾiṣ al-kawākib al-sayyāra — “The Subtleties of Indication, on the Characters of the Wandering Stars” — on the temperaments of the seven planets. What follows is that sky-lore in summary, described as the tradition described it: the historical worldview the book's readers carried, presented for study rather than belief or practice.
“Whatever good you spend is for your own souls.” This edition is offered free, without accounts or tracking. Verifying a six-hundred-page lithograph one chapter at a time is slow, careful work — a gift of any size helps it continue.
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