The black art (ilmu jahat
A.E. Coope, a Malayan Civil Service officer, published this article in 1933 presenting a detailed transcription and translation of a pocket book of Malay black art (ilmu jahat) recovered from the belongings of a celebrated Kelantan burglar. The article documents the intersection of Islamic formulae, spirit invocation, and practical criminal technique in a single manuscript, offering one of the few published examples of a working criminal’s grimoire from colonial Malaya.
Summary
Coope’s article is essentially a philological and ethnographic study of a single primary source: a small pocket book dropped by a Kelantan criminal during a failed escape from a detective in Kota Baharu. The criminal, after a successful burglary, was challenged by a detective whose pistol missed fire; in the resulting scuffle the criminal dropped bundles of stolen property and personal effects, among them the pocket book and a Siamese cloth belt charm. Coope, with the assistance of Tengku Khalid of Kota Baharu (described as “a connoisseur of ancient lore”), romanised and translated the contents, which included three ketika (lists of auspicious and inauspicious times for going out), a list of days of great ill-omen in the Islamic calendar, three invocations to evil spirits intended to aid burglary (sekol), a bullet charm (pengunchi peluru), and a diagram of the bintang chelaka (“bad luck compass”).
The invocations are the most revealing elements. They address “Royal Jins of Islam, ye Seven Brethren” and “Mighty Powers of the Seven Worlds,” blending orthodox Islamic formulae (bismillah, salutations, references to the Light of God) with commands to lock the “seven doors” and “nine doors” of a named victim, pressing down his organs until he is “as dead as a corpse in the grave.” The bullet charm is addressed to the Hantu Raya (Great Demon) in its threefold manifestation—Father of the jungle, Mother of the sea, Son of the plain—and adjures the gun and bullet by naming their supposed origins. Coope notes the characteristic obscurity of such texts, attributing it partly to corruption in Jawi script and partly to the deliberate concealment of commonplaces in “resounding abracadabras” by the art’s practitioners.
The article’s closing observation is characteristically wry. Coope traces the criminal’s subsequent movements against the book’s own prescriptions: he burgled successfully on a Friday night after midnight (a “good” time), the bullet charm “worked” when the detective’s pistol missed fire (though the detective later noted the firing pin was worn), he was arrested on a Monday at dawn (when the ketika prescribes anxiety), and on the 19th of a month—when the bintang chelaka dictates that one should not go out at all owing to malevolent earthly influences—he appeared before a judge who sentenced him to seven years.
Key Findings
- The pocket book contained three ketika (lucky/unlucky time lists), a list of ten ill-omened days in the Islamic calendar, three burglary invocations (sekol), one bullet charm (pengunchi peluru), and one bintang chelaka diagram (p. 264).
- The Siamese cloth belt charm, over five feet long, bore phrases including “prevent blows,” “enormous strength,” “thickness of skin,” “always in luck,” and “love of women”; a Siamese informant judged it a “fake” (p. 264).
- The ill-omened days listed are: 28th Muharram, 10th Safar, 4th Rabi-al-awal, 28th Rabi-al-akhir, 22nd Jamad-al-awal, 20th Jamad-al-akhir, 12th Rajab (designated nahas akhbar, “great ill-omen”), 20th Sha’ban, 27th Ramthan, and 28th Zu’l-Ka’dah (p. 268).
- The bintang chelaka operates on a 30-day cycle: the malevolent star occupies a different compass point each day, making it unlucky to depart from a house whose door faces that point; on the 9th, 19th, and 29th the danger comes from the earth, and on the 10th, 20th, and 30th from the sky, with no safe direction (p. 271).
- The bullet charm invokes the Hantu Raya in three manifestations (Landi, Landak, Daim), with the threat that naming one of the three causes the other two to disappear (p. 270).
- The criminal received a sentence of seven years’ imprisonment (p. 272).
Conclusion
Coope’s definitive takeaway is not a judgment on the efficacy of the black art but a demonstration of its internal logic and its intimate entanglement with Islamic vocabulary and cosmology. The manuscript reveals a system in which the criminal’s entire operational calendar—when to go out, in which direction, what to say to a gun—was governed by a coherent (if heterodox) supernatural framework, and the article’s closing irony underscores that the system’s own prescriptions, taken at face value, “proved” its value in the criminal’s misfortune.
Context
- Coope was an M.C.S. (Malayan Civil Service) officer; the article reflects the colonial administrative habit of collecting and cataloguing indigenous knowledge encountered in the course of police and judicial work, framing the material as a curiosity recovered from a criminal rather than as a living tradition.
- The study’s historiographical value lies in its preservation of a complete, annotated transcription of a criminal’s working manuscript in Jawi script, a genre of source material that is otherwise extremely rare in the published record.