Medical and para-medical manuscripts in the Cambridge Genizah Collections

play an important role here, as in many other aspects of everyday life. In medicine, amulets were used to gain longevity, cure certain problems (e.g., madness, alcoholism, leprosy, headache, and bedwetting), ward off epidemics, guarantee fertility or sterility, and bring pregnancy to a safe conclusion; in other areas, they served to protect against weapons, cancel the effects of other amulets, defend against demons, secure success or prosperity, harm enemies, and gain protection in general. Asante was heavily influenced by the popular talismanic tradition of Islamic North Africa. The incantations in the amulets are full of Qur'anic quotations and paraphrases, and bear excerpts from the Islamic biographical tradition on Muhammad, names of Islamic religious figures (e.g., angels), and Arabic terminology (such as references to the jinn). Owusu-Ansah demonstrates that these charms were produced and sold in Asante by a Muslim trading community. Though the local folk were pagans and prevented Muslim proselytization, they esteemed the Qur'an for its magical power. There was a brisk market for Islamic talismans generally, and a six-line amulet could be sold for half an ounce of gold. Owusu-Ansah stresses-again quite rightly-that his corpus is not a collection of amulets, but rather consists of instructions for making these charms. Amulets usually do not indicate, in and of themselves, how they are to be made and used, and Owusu-Ansah provides this type of information from the material in the Copenhagen corpus, research in western accounts of practices and beliefs in Asante in the early nineteenth century, and numerous interviews and other field work. The belief system revolving around these amulets proves to be very complex. Individual incantations were deemed effective only against specific problems, and not everyone could make them. Those bearing (or thought to bear) verses from the Qur'an were considered effective only by the permission of the God of Islam, and so were not expected to work immediately, while others were regarded as having instantaneous effect irrespective of the influences of other spiritual powers. Some amulets were worn; others were buried in the corners of a house; others were washed or soaked in water, thus producing a liquid (for drinking or washing) to which the power of the charm was transferred. Owusu-Ansah's work is an important contribution to the history of a body of magical lore in which medicine and medical concerns loomed very large indeed, and is relevant to the history of popular medicine in …