A Shared Object and a Disputed One

Two things about the khamsa are regularly flattened and should not be. The first is that it is not a Muslim object with a Jewish borrowing attached, nor the reverse. Jews and Muslims lived in the same North African towns for many centuries, bought from the same silversmiths, and used the same protective repertoire, and the khamsa is one of the plainest pieces of evidence for that shared material world. The names attached to it differ by community, the hand of Fatima in much Muslim usage, an association with Miriam in some Jewish usage, but the object and the reasoning behind it are common ground.

The second is that its use has never been uncontested within Islam. Scholars in the reformist and Salafi tradition class protective amulets as an attachment of power to a created thing, and therefore as an offence against the divine unity, and they say so about the khamsa specifically. Popular practice has not stopped, and the two positions coexist in the same societies rather than one having replaced the other. Reporting only the popular use would misdescribe the religion; reporting only the scholarly objection would misdescribe what people actually do. A third layer now sits on top of both, in which the hand is a design motif on tourist goods and a national or regional emblem with no protective claim attached at all.