Relics – objects imbued with religious power seen as having potential to intervene in this world – were not always associated with holy bodies, as is typical in Christian contexts. This paper argues that Arabic inscriptions could function in relic-like ways, sacralizing objects, and functioning as material invocations of the divine. This is seen most clearly in tiraz textiles woven with pious phrases or the name of the caliph. These inscriptions were positioned across the entry points to the body to invoke divine protection: in garments, text bands appeared across the shoulders or along the opening of cloaks, and in funerary contexts, they were positioned across the eyes of the deceased. This paper investigates a curious adaptation of script from these textiles to use on objects and architecture, to explore how a single Arabic inscription could function in talismanic ways across materials and geographies. The inscription is not, in itself, a religiously powerful one, but instead a repeating aphorism, “good fortune and prosperity” (al-yumn wa-l-iqbal), that appeared with particular orthographic anomalies on late Fatimid tiraz textiles that circulated around the Mediterranean. The same text, with the same anomalies (a floating waw, a distorted alif-lam) then appeared on a series of objects and architectural spaces on the Iberian Peninsula beginning in the twelfth century. Like the positioning of such inscriptions on bodies, its use in architecture frames windows and doors, always defining liminal spaces as though its presence protected those inside. This paper explores why a series of Muslim, Christian and Jewish patrons and craftsmen would have adapted this motif for their palaces and holy spaces, and how its decorative and talismanic functions would have been perceived. The meanings this inscription carried in the fourteenth-century Iberian Peninsula certainly would have been different than those it evoked in Fatimid Egypt, but its continued use across materials and geographies, and across two centuries, offers insight into the potent protective meanings of Arabic script, within and beyond the Islamic world.