Prayers and Invocations for Seeking God’s Protection: Manuscript

Preserved within a small, decorated, blue-covered manuscript, now housed in the Beinecke Library at Yale, a Rifāʿī Sufi litany (ḥizb) against harmful forces has been transmitted into an intricately illuminated Ottoman-style prayer manual, most likely produced in the nineteenth century. Its gilded pages register not only devotional content but also the aesthetic and material conditions through which Sufi practices were disseminated in the late Ottoman Empire, revealing a tension between ritual efficacy and elite forms of calligraphic and manuscript production.

The text is a specific liturgical tradition: a prayer attributed to the twelfth-century mystic Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī al-Rifāʽī, founder of the Rifāʿī Sufi ṭarīqa. It is traditionally titled Ḥizb al-Ṣayf al-Qāṭiʿ, “The Litany of the Cutting Sword”, and its recitation as a sung prayer continues to the present day. The text is composed as a bricolage of Qurʾānic verses, phrases, and words, which are reassembled to create a novel spiritual syntax. Thematically, it emphasizes seeking refuge and protection in God from evil forces, avoiding sin, and the reward and divine protection granted to the righteous.  

The manuscript contains a set of invocations rendered in calligraphic Arabic script in black and red ink on a small-format folio (10 × 16 cm). Each opening consists of a page in which two illuminated text panels occupy only part of the surface, leaving wide, uninscribed margins. What is unique about this manuscript is its appearance as a single, individually wrapped and decorated booklet, enclosed in a blue, gold-decorated cover. This suggests that the object was intended for individual, repetitive use. Its intricate decoration makes clear that this object was crafted in an elite context - recognized for its uniqueness and its talismanic powers.

Sources:

ʻAbd al-Bāsiṭ, Sharaf al-Dīn Ḥasan ibn ʻAbd al-Ḥakīm, ed. Al-Fajr al-ṭāliʻ fī dhikr al-sayf al-qāṭic, by Abū al-Yaman Muḥammad. Damascus: Dār al-Bashā’ir li-l-Ṭibāʻah wa-al-Nashr wa-al-Tawzīʻ, 1999.

Chekhab-Abudaya, M., and Sobers-Khan, N. (2025). Acts of Devotion in Late Ottoman Prayer Books: An Illustrated Manuscript in the Collection of the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha. Muqarnas Online 41, 1, 205-242,

Pantić, Nikola. Sufism in Ottoman Damascus: religion, magic, and the eighteenth-century networks of the holy. Routledge, 2023.