Talismanic and exorcistic ritual encompasses the making of protective and empowering objects, talismans and amulets, and the performance of rites to drive out or ward off harmful spiritual forces, a pairing of practices found across many traditions and prominent in folk religion and in the popular Islamic and Near Eastern context. A talisman is an object made and consecrated to attract a desired influence or to protect its bearer, often inscribed with sacred words, divine names, verses of scripture, or symbols held to carry power, and made at an auspicious time; an amulet similarly guards against evil, illness, the evil eye and malign spirits. The related exorcistic rites seek to expel or repel the harmful forces themselves, whether afflicting a person, a household or a place.
In the Islamic world these practices take characteristic form. Protective amulets bearing Qur'anic verses, especially the Throne Verse and the chapters of refuge, or the names of God are widely carried and hung, and the recitation of the Qur'an over the afflicted, ruqyah, serves as the principal exorcistic remedy against sorcery, the evil eye and jinn. Islamic scholars distinguish sharply between permitted forms, which use only the words of God and rely on God alone, and forbidden forms, which invoke spirits, use unknown names, or attribute power to the objects themselves, shading into the sorcery the religion condemns, a boundary that runs through the whole field of popular protective magic. Similar talismanic and apotropaic practices, and rites for expelling harmful spirits, appear across the religions, from the protective texts and amulets of Jewish and Christian folk tradition to the charms and exorcisms of many cultures, reflecting a widespread human resort to ritual means of protection against unseen dangers.