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Some words are never spoken aloud, and yet everyone understands them the moment a certain look is exchanged. In the Maghreb, sihr — sorcery, the evil eye, black magic — is one of them. It is not discussed in living rooms. It is spoken of in kitchens, in lowered voices, between people who already know they will be believed without needing to convince.
This short work of documentary literature begins with a single voice: a boy of six in a village in northern Algeria, watching his mother return from a hospital he no longer recognized her in — and, a month later, return again from a taleb's mud-brick house in the desert, restored to herself in a way medicine could not explain. From that one family, the book moves outward: to the forms sihr is believed to take, the signs said to mark those it touches, the protection Islam offers against it, the marabouts people turn to and the frauds who exploit their fear, and the way all of it now travels through a phone screen at two in the morning.
Gathered over years of conversation across Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, these testimonies are set down without spectacle and without a verdict. The author does not tell you whether sihr is real. He asks a different, and perhaps richer, question: why do human beings, under every sky, so consistently reach for an invisible evil to explain the suffering they cannot otherwise name?
For readers who grew up cradled by these stories but never saw them written down, and for anyone seeking to understand a culture from the inside rather than the outside. Includes a glossary of Arabic and cultural terms.
