A thirteenth-century Arabic book exposes how monks staged miracles to impress and deceive Christian audiences. The Book of Charlatans reveals the tricks behind these wonders and offers insights into medieval Muslim–Christian relations.
By Peter Konieczny
When I was a kid, I distinctly remember seeing a television program that exposed a popular southern American preacher named Peter Popoff. At the time, he was famous for his televised faith-healing revivals across the United States and beyond. During these services, he seemed to receive sudden, miraculous insights about people in the audience — their names, their illnesses, even personal details he had no apparent way of knowing. Was this divine knowledge?
Alas, no. In the mid-1980s, investigators working with magician and skeptic James Randi attended Popoff’s revivals with hidden equipment. What they uncovered became one of the most notorious exposures of religious fraud in modern American history. Popoff wasn’t receiving revelations from God. He was wearing a small radio earpiece. His wife, backstage, was transmitting information the ministry had collected earlier from prayer cards filled out by attendees — details about medical diagnoses, family struggles, and hopes for healing.
I think this exposé had a big effect on me, as I grew up thinking — and still suspect — that many of these popular preachers in America were exploiting people looking for hope. By the way, Peter Popoff is still around, selling “Miracle Spring Water” and pretending to run a new church. He is quite the charlatan.
This brings me to The Book of Charlatans. It is a thirteenth-century Arabic work devoted to exposing frauds, impostors, and professional tricksters across the medieval Islamic world. In its own words, it is a “selection concerning the exposure of secrets,” written to catalogue the techniques of false prophets, counterfeit holy men, corrupt physicians, alchemists, treasure-hunters, conjurors, and other figures who relied on illusion, sleight of hand, or religious manipulation to deceive the public. The book contains thirty chapters and 279 sections, arranged as a series of concise “exposés” punctuated by longer anecdotes, eyewitness tales, and technical explanations of specific tricks.
Although cast as a guide for unmasking deceit, the work also offers an unusually vivid portrait of the medieval underworld. It is written in a lively, often colloquial style, and a blend of scientific tone and earthy narrative gives the book its distinctive voice — at once moralizing, amused, and deeply curious about the human behaviour behind deception.
The Author of Scams
You might not have heard of its author, Jamāl al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-Jawbarī — but as he tells it, you should have! He was born in a village near Damascus, and everything we know about him comes from this book. Al-Jawbarī tells us that he travelled widely — from Morocco and Tunisia to Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, Iraq, and as far as India — observing the practices of charlatans firsthand. He was extremely well-read. Our audience here might know Plato and Aristotle — he read them. The works of the great Islamic philosophers — he read them. Even a book said to have been written by the Biblical Adam — he read that too. He was going to tell us more about the more than 300 books he read, but he didn’t want to bore us with the details.
Al-Jawbarī states that he wrote the work at the request of a Turkmen ruler of a small area in what is now southern Turkey, who reigned between 1222 and 1232. Asked to compose a book similar to an earlier treatise on impostors, he responded by creating an expansive catalogue of swindlers and the mechanics of their deception.
Now, who really was al-Jawbarī? There are clues in his book, including his being a witness to some of these scams and his explaining that he created his own versions of some of the tricks described here. In short, it’s quite possible the author of The Book of Charlatans was himself a charlatan, or at least someone who spent much of his time among the criminal underworld.
Now this book is a great read — one of my favourites from the Middle Ages. You can read about all sorts of cons and scams, plus things like how to disable the traps in ancient tombs before you rob them (think Indiana Jones here), or how to break into a house using a turtle with a candle on its back. Many times, al-Jawbarī finishes his sections by writing “Wise up to these things!”
Religious scams
Al-Jawbarī has a few sections related to conmen who use religion among his fellow Muslims — false prophets, preachers, that sort of thing. Some of the tricks were simple, like putting their own people in the crowd who could give the preacher pre-determined questions, while others were placed there to encourage the crowd to support the preacher’s answers.
But others were more elaborate. Al-Jawbarī describes holy men — shaykhs — who claimed to have supernatural powers. Here’s what they would do: before a gathering, they lit a great fire in a deep baking pit, the kind used for roasting meat. After the firewood had burned down, the shaykh would climb down into the flames, disappear for a while, and then re-emerge, calm and unharmed, carrying a dish of roast lamb or chicken stew as if it had just been cooked by divine miracle. The crowd would be speechless, convinced they had seen a man walk through fire.
But of course, there was no miracle at all — only clever trickery. The book explains three different ways the deception was done. The first involved construction. The pit could be specially built so that only the top part contained heat, while the bottom stayed cool. A hidden metal sheet kept the fire away from where the shaykh was standing. He simply timed his “miracle” to match how long it took the food to finish cooking, then climbed back out with the dish.
The Book of Charlatans has been translated by Humphrey Davies and published under the Library of Arabic Literature series from NYU Press
The second method was even more theatrical. In some places, the pit was built over a secret tunnel leading outside the village. At the right moment, the shaykh would quietly slip away, duck into the tunnel, and re-emerge from the bottom of the fire pit itself, dancing and smiling while the crowd gasped in wonder. The author even says, “I saw this one with my own eyes.”
And the third method was more straightforward — though no less strange. Some men coated their bodies with a homemade fireproof ointment. One recipe involved boiling frogs until the flesh dissolved, skimming off the fat, and mixing it with saltpeter. Rub that onto your skin, and you could endure a short exposure to flames without being burned.
Exposé of the Tricks of Monks
The fourth chapter of this book begins with the following introduction:
For your information, this tribe of charlatans is the most mendacious, hypocritical, and cunning nation of all. They mess with the minds of Christian men, seduce their women, and infect them with the clap without anyone being aware of what they’re up to. They are the most despicable of people but cleverer than the rest, even though among themselves they know they are on the wrong path.
Al-Jawbarī is here talking about monks and priests, and he comes up with several examples where churches and monasteries were practising deceitful techniques. He mentions a monastery in Cyprus which has a statue of Christ that weeps like rain. Here is how al-Jawbarī explains the miracle:
Its head and body are hollow. There is a cleverly designed water heater in its head that has a faucet opening into the idol’s eyes. When the monk wants it to weep, he fills the heater with water and heats it till it is too hot to touch. Then he adjusts the faucet and the idol’s tears flow like rain and it moves its head from side to side like someone moaning.
Al-Jawbarī says he personally saw in a monastery in Egypt a trick where, during a festival, a monk would walk down into a particular well that had dried up:
When the monk reached the lowest step, he would cense it and say whatever nonsense might come into his head. As soon as he did so, the water would rise as far as the step on which he was standing. Then he would go up to the next step, and the water would rise to the level of that step, and it would go on like that till the well had filled with water, which the people would take away in bottles and jugs to use for washing, and which they would store in their houses to be used against any illness or pain.
At the end of the day, the monk would return to the well, but as he descended each step the water would lower itself, until nothing remained. But for our author, this is no miracle at all, just an inventive use of three wells.
Al-Jawbarī cites other miracles in churches and monasteries, like a relic that could float in mid-air — that was because the church’s walls were built with magnetic rock, or a relic that seeped oil — the monks had prepared a log that had been soaked in that oil.
The Miracle of the Holy Fire
During Easter festivities at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, there is a ceremony where the Patriarch enters the tomb-chamber in darkness, carrying unlit candles. After a period of silence, a flame suddenly appears inside the tomb — believers say it descends miraculously — and the Patriarch emerges holding candles that are now burning with a bright, flickering light. The fire then spreads quickly through the crowd as thousands of pilgrims light their own candles, filling the church with a rising wave of flames, shouting, and emotion.
This is still happening today and remains a very controversial ceremony. For al-Jawbarī, this is “the greatest illusion the ancients ever fabricated.” He goes on to describe what he thinks was the trick behind the miracle, which makes use of a hidden pot inside the church’s dome, and a chain coated in oil of Meccan balsam — an oily resin from a plant found in Egypt and Arabia. When a monk starts a flame in the hidden pot, the fire then descends down the chain to the Patriarch’s candles.
A More Insidious Type of Scam
While al-Jawbarī’s explanations of these tricks are fascinating, it is also very interesting to see how our author characterizes the Christian monks and priests behind these so-called frauds. As he explains each of these cons, al-Jawbarī tells us about the vast amounts of money that were collected at these sites, and explicitly says they do this to “get their hands on the Christians’ money.” (He also often says that they do it to get their women too).
Now, this is not very surprising. All of the con artists in The Book of Charlatans are doing this for money. But al-Jawbarī places a particular emphasis, when it comes to these Christians, on the idea that they use religion to continually fleece their fellow believers.
During the section on the Holy Sepulchre, al-Jawbarī includes a story in which an Ayyubid sultan comes to Jerusalem and demands to see this so-called Holy Fire miracle. A monk tells him:
Which do you prefer, to have all the money that accrues to you from it, or to observe how it appears? If you expose the secret, the money will disappear, so leave it be, protected and preserved, and profit by all that money!
What emerges from these stories is a striking portrait of Christian leadership as complicit in the very frauds they present as miracles. Al-Jawbarī is not simply accusing individual monks of misbehaviour; he is suggesting a system in which everyone in positions of ecclesiastical authority knows exactly how the tricks work. The statues that weep, the wells that refill themselves, the relics that float or drip oil — in his telling, these are not isolated deceptions but institutional productions, crafted and maintained by communities of monks and priests who have mastered the techniques of illusion. The clergy appear as a coordinated troupe, their monasteries functioning almost like theatres in which religious wonder is manufactured behind the scenes.
And in contrast to these orchestrators of marvels, the ordinary Christian public appears in his narrative as completely unaware. They are not malicious, not scheming — simply trusting, and therefore vulnerable. They come seeking blessings, cures, or reassurance, and they leave convinced they have witnessed the hand of God. For al-Jawbarī, this dynamic turns everyday Christians into dupes, sincere believers trapped in a cycle of deception precisely because the people they most trust — monks, priests, patriarchs — are the ones setting the stage.
What makes this even more pointed is al-Jawbarī’s insistence that Muslim authorities allow all of this to continue. He portrays Muslim political leaders as looking the other way, tolerating these spectacles inside their domains or on their borders, even though they must know they are fraudulent. The implication is that such leaders are either indifferent, compromised, or quietly benefiting from the pilgrims, payments, and prestige that these Christian rituals attract. In his framing, Muslim rulers’ permissiveness becomes a form of complicity: by failing to intervene, they create the conditions in which charlatanry thrives.
This kind of view was certainly not unique to al-Jawbarī, and attitudes like his had a real impact on Muslim–Christian relations in the medieval Middle East. By the late thirteenth century, we see a noticeable hardening of positions: episodes of inter-religious violence become more common, and political factions begin calling for Christians to be removed from administrative posts. Complaints circulated widely that Christians — who often held important roles as scribes, tax officials, and physicians — were corrupt, manipulative, or untrustworthy. Whether these accusations were grounded in fact or fueled by rhetoric, they reveal a climate in which suspicions of Christian deception were increasingly taken for granted.
In the end, what al-Jawbarī offers us is not just a catalogue of medieval tricks, but a way of thinking about the performance of religious authority across centuries. The mechanics may change — wireless earpieces instead of hollow statues, studio lighting instead of hidden pits — but the dynamic remains the same: people seeking hope, intermediaries staging wonder, and institutions that sometimes look the other way. The Popoff exposé that fascinated me as a child, and the spectacles al-Jawbarī dismantles in the thirteenth century, are separated by continents, cultures, and faiths, yet both hinge on the same basic insight: that the line between devotion and deception can be perilously thin.
And that is why The Book of Charlatans still matters. It reminds us that behind every miracle worth believing in, there is always someone asking us to be cautious, to look more closely, and — as al-Jawbarī liked to say — to “wise up to these things.”
Peter Konieczny is Editor of Medievalists.net
Top Image: British Library MS Yates Thompson 13 fol.174r
A thirteenth-century Arabic book exposes how monks staged miracles to impress and deceive Christian audiences. The Book of Charlatans reveals the tricks behind these wonders and offers insights into medieval Muslim–Christian relations.
By Peter Konieczny
When I was a kid, I distinctly remember seeing a television program that exposed a popular southern American preacher named Peter Popoff. At the time, he was famous for his televised faith-healing revivals across the United States and beyond. During these services, he seemed to receive sudden, miraculous insights about people in the audience — their names, their illnesses, even personal details he had no apparent way of knowing. Was this divine knowledge?
Alas, no. In the mid-1980s, investigators working with magician and skeptic James Randi attended Popoff’s revivals with hidden equipment. What they uncovered became one of the most notorious exposures of religious fraud in modern American history. Popoff wasn’t receiving revelations from God. He was wearing a small radio earpiece. His wife, backstage, was transmitting information the ministry had collected earlier from prayer cards filled out by attendees — details about medical diagnoses, family struggles, and hopes for healing.
I think this exposé had a big effect on me, as I grew up thinking — and still suspect — that many of these popular preachers in America were exploiting people looking for hope. By the way, Peter Popoff is still around, selling “Miracle Spring Water” and pretending to run a new church. He is quite the charlatan.
This brings me to The Book of Charlatans. It is a thirteenth-century Arabic work devoted to exposing frauds, impostors, and professional tricksters across the medieval Islamic world. In its own words, it is a “selection concerning the exposure of secrets,” written to catalogue the techniques of false prophets, counterfeit holy men, corrupt physicians, alchemists, treasure-hunters, conjurors, and other figures who relied on illusion, sleight of hand, or religious manipulation to deceive the public. The book contains thirty chapters and 279 sections, arranged as a series of concise “exposés” punctuated by longer anecdotes, eyewitness tales, and technical explanations of specific tricks.
Although cast as a guide for unmasking deceit, the work also offers an unusually vivid portrait of the medieval underworld. It is written in a lively, often colloquial style, and a blend of scientific tone and earthy narrative gives the book its distinctive voice — at once moralizing, amused, and deeply curious about the human behaviour behind deception.
The Author of Scams
You might not have heard of its author, Jamāl al-Dīn ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-Jawbarī — but as he tells it, you should have! He was born in a village near Damascus, and everything we know about him comes from this book. Al-Jawbarī tells us that he travelled widely — from Morocco and Tunisia to Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, Iraq, and as far as India — observing the practices of charlatans firsthand. He was extremely well-read. Our audience here might know Plato and Aristotle — he read them. The works of the great Islamic philosophers — he read them. Even a book said to have been written by the Biblical Adam — he read that too. He was going to tell us more about the more than 300 books he read, but he didn’t want to bore us with the details.
Al-Jawbarī states that he wrote the work at the request of a Turkmen ruler of a small area in what is now southern Turkey, who reigned between 1222 and 1232. Asked to compose a book similar to an earlier treatise on impostors, he responded by creating an expansive catalogue of swindlers and the mechanics of their deception.
Now, who really was al-Jawbarī? There are clues in his book, including his being a witness to some of these scams and his explaining that he created his own versions of some of the tricks described here. In short, it’s quite possible the author of The Book of Charlatans was himself a charlatan, or at least someone who spent much of his time among the criminal underworld.
Now this book is a great read — one of my favourites from the Middle Ages. You can read about all sorts of cons and scams, plus things like how to disable the traps in ancient tombs before you rob them (think Indiana Jones here), or how to break into a house using a turtle with a candle on its back. Many times, al-Jawbarī finishes his sections by writing “Wise up to these things!”
Religious scams
Al-Jawbarī has a few sections related to conmen who use religion among his fellow Muslims — false prophets, preachers, that sort of thing. Some of the tricks were simple, like putting their own people in the crowd who could give the preacher pre-determined questions, while others were placed there to encourage the crowd to support the preacher’s answers.
But others were more elaborate. Al-Jawbarī describes holy men — shaykhs — who claimed to have supernatural powers. Here’s what they would do: before a gathering, they lit a great fire in a deep baking pit, the kind used for roasting meat. After the firewood had burned down, the shaykh would climb down into the flames, disappear for a while, and then re-emerge, calm and unharmed, carrying a dish of roast lamb or chicken stew as if it had just been cooked by divine miracle. The crowd would be speechless, convinced they had seen a man walk through fire.
But of course, there was no miracle at all — only clever trickery. The book explains three different ways the deception was done. The first involved construction. The pit could be specially built so that only the top part contained heat, while the bottom stayed cool. A hidden metal sheet kept the fire away from where the shaykh was standing. He simply timed his “miracle” to match how long it took the food to finish cooking, then climbed back out with the dish.
The second method was even more theatrical. In some places, the pit was built over a secret tunnel leading outside the village. At the right moment, the shaykh would quietly slip away, duck into the tunnel, and re-emerge from the bottom of the fire pit itself, dancing and smiling while the crowd gasped in wonder. The author even says, “I saw this one with my own eyes.”
And the third method was more straightforward — though no less strange. Some men coated their bodies with a homemade fireproof ointment. One recipe involved boiling frogs until the flesh dissolved, skimming off the fat, and mixing it with saltpeter. Rub that onto your skin, and you could endure a short exposure to flames without being burned.
Exposé of the Tricks of Monks
The fourth chapter of this book begins with the following introduction:
For your information, this tribe of charlatans is the most mendacious, hypocritical, and cunning nation of all. They mess with the minds of Christian men, seduce their women, and infect them with the clap without anyone being aware of what they’re up to. They are the most despicable of people but cleverer than the rest, even though among themselves they know they are on the wrong path.
Al-Jawbarī is here talking about monks and priests, and he comes up with several examples where churches and monasteries were practising deceitful techniques. He mentions a monastery in Cyprus which has a statue of Christ that weeps like rain. Here is how al-Jawbarī explains the miracle:
Its head and body are hollow. There is a cleverly designed water heater in its head that has a faucet opening into the idol’s eyes. When the monk wants it to weep, he fills the heater with water and heats it till it is too hot to touch. Then he adjusts the faucet and the idol’s tears flow like rain and it moves its head from side to side like someone moaning.
Al-Jawbarī says he personally saw in a monastery in Egypt a trick where, during a festival, a monk would walk down into a particular well that had dried up:
When the monk reached the lowest step, he would cense it and say whatever nonsense might come into his head. As soon as he did so, the water would rise as far as the step on which he was standing. Then he would go up to the next step, and the water would rise to the level of that step, and it would go on like that till the well had filled with water, which the people would take away in bottles and jugs to use for washing, and which they would store in their houses to be used against any illness or pain.
At the end of the day, the monk would return to the well, but as he descended each step the water would lower itself, until nothing remained. But for our author, this is no miracle at all, just an inventive use of three wells.
Al-Jawbarī cites other miracles in churches and monasteries, like a relic that could float in mid-air — that was because the church’s walls were built with magnetic rock, or a relic that seeped oil — the monks had prepared a log that had been soaked in that oil.
The Miracle of the Holy Fire
During Easter festivities at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, there is a ceremony where the Patriarch enters the tomb-chamber in darkness, carrying unlit candles. After a period of silence, a flame suddenly appears inside the tomb — believers say it descends miraculously — and the Patriarch emerges holding candles that are now burning with a bright, flickering light. The fire then spreads quickly through the crowd as thousands of pilgrims light their own candles, filling the church with a rising wave of flames, shouting, and emotion.
This is still happening today and remains a very controversial ceremony. For al-Jawbarī, this is “the greatest illusion the ancients ever fabricated.” He goes on to describe what he thinks was the trick behind the miracle, which makes use of a hidden pot inside the church’s dome, and a chain coated in oil of Meccan balsam — an oily resin from a plant found in Egypt and Arabia. When a monk starts a flame in the hidden pot, the fire then descends down the chain to the Patriarch’s candles.
A More Insidious Type of Scam
While al-Jawbarī’s explanations of these tricks are fascinating, it is also very interesting to see how our author characterizes the Christian monks and priests behind these so-called frauds. As he explains each of these cons, al-Jawbarī tells us about the vast amounts of money that were collected at these sites, and explicitly says they do this to “get their hands on the Christians’ money.” (He also often says that they do it to get their women too).
Now, this is not very surprising. All of the con artists in The Book of Charlatans are doing this for money. But al-Jawbarī places a particular emphasis, when it comes to these Christians, on the idea that they use religion to continually fleece their fellow believers.
During the section on the Holy Sepulchre, al-Jawbarī includes a story in which an Ayyubid sultan comes to Jerusalem and demands to see this so-called Holy Fire miracle. A monk tells him:
Which do you prefer, to have all the money that accrues to you from it, or to observe how it appears? If you expose the secret, the money will disappear, so leave it be, protected and preserved, and profit by all that money!
What emerges from these stories is a striking portrait of Christian leadership as complicit in the very frauds they present as miracles. Al-Jawbarī is not simply accusing individual monks of misbehaviour; he is suggesting a system in which everyone in positions of ecclesiastical authority knows exactly how the tricks work. The statues that weep, the wells that refill themselves, the relics that float or drip oil — in his telling, these are not isolated deceptions but institutional productions, crafted and maintained by communities of monks and priests who have mastered the techniques of illusion. The clergy appear as a coordinated troupe, their monasteries functioning almost like theatres in which religious wonder is manufactured behind the scenes.
And in contrast to these orchestrators of marvels, the ordinary Christian public appears in his narrative as completely unaware. They are not malicious, not scheming — simply trusting, and therefore vulnerable. They come seeking blessings, cures, or reassurance, and they leave convinced they have witnessed the hand of God. For al-Jawbarī, this dynamic turns everyday Christians into dupes, sincere believers trapped in a cycle of deception precisely because the people they most trust — monks, priests, patriarchs — are the ones setting the stage.
What makes this even more pointed is al-Jawbarī’s insistence that Muslim authorities allow all of this to continue. He portrays Muslim political leaders as looking the other way, tolerating these spectacles inside their domains or on their borders, even though they must know they are fraudulent. The implication is that such leaders are either indifferent, compromised, or quietly benefiting from the pilgrims, payments, and prestige that these Christian rituals attract. In his framing, Muslim rulers’ permissiveness becomes a form of complicity: by failing to intervene, they create the conditions in which charlatanry thrives.
This kind of view was certainly not unique to al-Jawbarī, and attitudes like his had a real impact on Muslim–Christian relations in the medieval Middle East. By the late thirteenth century, we see a noticeable hardening of positions: episodes of inter-religious violence become more common, and political factions begin calling for Christians to be removed from administrative posts. Complaints circulated widely that Christians — who often held important roles as scribes, tax officials, and physicians — were corrupt, manipulative, or untrustworthy. Whether these accusations were grounded in fact or fueled by rhetoric, they reveal a climate in which suspicions of Christian deception were increasingly taken for granted.
In the end, what al-Jawbarī offers us is not just a catalogue of medieval tricks, but a way of thinking about the performance of religious authority across centuries. The mechanics may change — wireless earpieces instead of hollow statues, studio lighting instead of hidden pits — but the dynamic remains the same: people seeking hope, intermediaries staging wonder, and institutions that sometimes look the other way. The Popoff exposé that fascinated me as a child, and the spectacles al-Jawbarī dismantles in the thirteenth century, are separated by continents, cultures, and faiths, yet both hinge on the same basic insight: that the line between devotion and deception can be perilously thin.
And that is why The Book of Charlatans still matters. It reminds us that behind every miracle worth believing in, there is always someone asking us to be cautious, to look more closely, and — as al-Jawbarī liked to say — to “wise up to these things.”
Peter Konieczny is Editor of Medievalists.net
Top Image: British Library MS Yates Thompson 13 fol.174r
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