Thus the sorcerer is one of the corrupters on earth, for he ruins people’s minds and their faith; and when a person’s intellect is corrupted, his religion is corrupted as well. How many a person—Allah protect us—has been wronged by sorcery, living a life of misery in which neither his religious nor his worldly affairs remain sound!

Some scholars have said that sorcery varies: some of it constitutes outright disbelief, while some does not. Their opinion rests on the assumption that certain kinds of sorcery do not necessarily involve shirk. However, the plain meaning of the Quran is that all sorcery is disbelief.

As for the tricks that certain charlatans weave into their act—so-called “physical exercises” that, according to them, rely on sleight of hand, rapid movement, or cosmetic disguise whereby substances are treated so that they appear other than they are—this is sorcery only in the linguistic sense and not the sorcery that counts as disbelief. Yet they have turned such displays into a means of promoting real sorcery: striking a man with a sword without killing him, eating live coals, swallowing snakes, bending iron with nothing but a glance—acts that can be seen in what is nowadays called “the circus.”