The khamsa is an open right hand, shown with five spread fingers, used against the evil eye. Its name is simply the Arabic for five. It is worn as a pendant, hung inside a doorway, painted or moulded onto a house wall, stamped into jewellery and, in a great many households, kept without much thought about why. In Muslim usage it is often called the hand of Fatima; in North African Jewish usage the same object circulates, sometimes associated with Miriam, and it is one of the clearest cases of a shared material practice across two communities that lived in the same towns for centuries. The gesture and the number are the point: five fingers thrown out towards a threat, sometimes accompanied by a spoken formula counting five.
Facts
Disputed
Status Within the TraditionReformist and Salafi scholars class protective amulets as attaching power to a created thing and therefore as forbidden, while popular use has continued 4Tradition: Islam The khamsa, a hand-shaped amulet widely worn and displayed across North Africa and the Middle East by both Muslims and Jews as protection against the evil eye, sits in tension with Islamic legal opinion that treats amulet use as bordering on or constituting shirk, associating protective power with an object rather than with God alone. Roel Meijer's edited volume Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement (2009) records that reformist and Salafi religious opinion, working from a strict reading of tawhid, divine unity, holds such amulets doctrinally impermissible, while long-standing popular practice across the same Muslim-majority societies continues to produce, wear and give khamsa amulets regardless of that ruling. The method is comparative religious sociology, reading published Salafi legal opinion against ethnographic and market evidence of continued popular use in the same communities. Because the reformist position is a minority theological stance within societies where the popular practice remains widespread, neither has displaced the other, and the doctrinal status remains disputed within the same populations. Use
Who May Handle ItAdherents of the tradition 1 ConsecrationNot consecrated; an instrument, not a consecrated object 1 Ritual ContextWorn as a pendant, hung inside a doorway, and painted or moulded onto house walls and gates 1 Origins
Origin of the NameKhamsa is simply the Arabic for five, the operative number of the defence 2 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseThe hand now also circulates as a design and tourist motif with no protective claim attached 3 Attributions
TraditionPopular Muslim and Jewish practice across the Maghreb 1 Identity
Also Known As Category of Sacred ObjectAn open right hand with five spread fingers, used against the evil eye 1 Open Questions
Origin AccountWhere the five-fingered form itself comes from is not established 1 A derivation from a Punic hand of Tanit circulates widely in popular writing and cannot be traced through the evidence; no positive account of the origin has been established either. Learn More
Five Fingers Against the Eye
The evil eye is a practical belief rather than a doctrinal one. It holds that a look, often an admiring one and often unintentional, can damage what it falls on: a child, a herd, a new house, a run of good luck. Around the Mediterranean the counter-measures are numerous and cheap, and the khamsa is among the most durable. It works by the number and the gesture together. Five is the operative quantity, the hand is thrown open towards the threat, and in speech the same defence appears as a formula built on the word for five, sometimes used the moment a compliment has been paid.
The object follows from the gesture. A silver pendant on a chain keeps the hand permanently raised on behalf of the wearer; a hand hung by the door does the same for the household; a hand moulded into a wall, painted over a gate or worked into the back of a mirror extends the protection to the building. Regional workshops give the form its variety, with filigree, granulation, inset stones, fish, eyes and Hebrew or Arabic inscriptions worked into the palm. In North African silverwork the khamsa sits within a much larger repertoire of protective jewellery, and it is frequently combined with other defences rather than used alone, which is a good indication that nobody treated it as sufficient by itself.
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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The khamsa is in Muslim usage often called the hand of Fatima.
Belongs to Tradition
The khamsa is worn in popular Muslim practice across the Maghreb.
The same hand is worn in the Jewish communities of the Maghreb and the wider Mediterranean.
Composed Of
Silver, Metals Most khamsas are made in silver, and also in brass, ceramic, glass and painted wood.
Sources
1. The Evil Eye: A Casebook
2. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition
P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.), Brill, 2005Entry: khamsaView the Source 3. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024Article: hamsaView the Source 4. Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement
Roel Meijer (ed.), Hurst, 2009
Open Questions (1 open question)
Where does the five-fingered khamsa form come from, and is there any evidential chain to a pre-Islamic Punic hand?
A derivation from a Punic hand of the goddess Tanit is repeated widely in popular and semi-scholarly writing about North African amulets, and no chain of evidence is offered for it. No competing positive account of the origin has been established either, so this is a gap rather than a disagreement between camps.
What would resolve this A published series of hand-shaped protective objects with secure archaeological contexts spanning the Punic period, late antiquity and the medieval Maghreb, or a study demonstrating that no such series exists and that the form arises later and independently.
Punic and Roman North African archaeology, together with the material culture history of the medieval MaghrebP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.), The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition
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