Magicians and tricksters in Egypt and the Levant (Ayyubid and Mamluk eras)

Author's name: Dr. Amr Abdel Aziz Mounir

From here, we begin our study of the practitioners of magic tricks and games, after the marginalized community of harfish, the nature of their role in society, and the skills, arts, and tricks they mastered were largely forgotten in Arabic and foreign writings. While these existed, they were not as widely documented in terms of number and quality as expected. This created a gap between the historical reality of society, which confirms the existence of harfish practitioners of magic. The study chronicles the secret and contradictory lives that teemed with the spaces of society, its bustling markets, and its cheap celebrations and gatherings frequented by the marginalized, the outcasts, and the working classes, all in search of fleeting entertainment that would make them forget the worries of reality and the harshness of life. This is what gives the study its usefulness in its attempt to stand on the secret history of Egyptian society during the era of the Ayyubid and Mamluk sultans, with its markets and paths, and the history of its subterranean culture and its pioneers from the different classes of society and the record of its transformations and the pains of its people. In this field, it is not possible to separate between the transformations of society and the transformations of the people of trickery and fraud, and magic games, as each of them was merged into the other, and this is what we are discussing and its details here.