Research focused on material culture often draws sharp distinctions between materiality and textuality, with the world of things proffered as a concrete alternative to the airy realm of discourse. Medieval books of magic, however, can fruitfully complicate this quite modern dichotomy. As European medievalist Richard Kieckhefer observes: “A book of magic is also a magical book. It not only tells how to perform magical works, but shares in the numinous qualities and powers of the rites it contains.” Such a conclusion indeed seems irrefutable with regard to the tradition of Latin necromantic grimoires Kieckhefer studies. Many such books even included a text, Liber consecrationum, detailing days-long rites of fasting and prayer for consecrating the book of magic to ensure the efficacy of operations undertaken with it. This paper seeks to test the applicability of Kieckhefer’s maxim on magic books to medieval Islamic contexts by focusing on three major occult works: Al-Sh?mil f? ba?r al-k?mil by Mu?ammad b. A?mad al-?abas? (d. 482/1089), Sirr al-makt?m f? mukh??abat al-nuj?m by Fakhr al-D?n al-R?z? (d. 606/1209), and La???if al-ish?r?t f? al-?ur?f al-?ulw?yat by A?mad al-B?n? (d. 622/1225 or 630/1232-3). As we will see, these Arabic works say relatively little about the book qua magical object, but they communicate a great deal about interactions of text and matter. Dwelling on key points from each work, as well as manuscript evidence for the use of such books, the paper elucidates a complex spectrum of relations between names, words, letters and other signs, texts and books, and subtle and dense aspects of human and nonhuman bodies. Though Kieckhefer’s maxim is found wanting, it is ultimately suggested that what first seems a gulf between medieval European and Islamic contexts is rather a matter of small degrees of conceptual difference and greatly differing textual economies. This paper aims to be significant contribution to the study of medieval ontologies, and draws out important points about Islamic occultism, Sufism, Arabic manuscript culture, and relationships between materiality and textuality in medieval thought.