Orientalism in the Astrology Community

edit:
2026-09-29 08:27: Added personal correspondence and link to Lucky Mojo section.
2026-09-23 18:17: Added evidence of possible translation fraud to section on Arabic.
2026-09-22 21:36: Added citations for Christopher Warnock + Lucky Mojo Connection.

CONTENT WARNING: Child suicide. If you are experiencing any feelings or inclinations to harm yourself, please visit https://988lifeline.org/ or call 988 if you’re in the United States or 1564 in Lebanon.

So much grief has been expressed over the last week since it has been revealed to the larger community that Ali Olomi, teacher of Arabic astrology, had a double life moonlighting as a Hoodoo practitioner. For years, Ali has been held up to the astrology community as a beacon of hope to a lot of folks with marginalized identities, and many resonated with his projected persona of progressive politics, inclusion, anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism. And now, for people to see that that was indeed just a persona - how could someone, a brown person nonetheless, claim to be knowledgeable on decolonial studies be engaged in such a harmful colonial act as appropriating a closed Black American spiritual practice? - I understand how difficult it can be for many people in the community. As an Arab1, I too was really excited to see that there was someone with a similar background working on these texts when I returned to the astrology community a few months ago.2

I understand why many did not catch on to his charade and why many others still refuse to see it. This is literally no fault of y’all’s own and I do NOT want this to come off as a judgement. The problem is not yours, the problem is societal and it is pervasive. The problem is the same problem as to why he was outed as a Hoodoo practitioner two years ago and his devotees shut down any criticism and the community accepted it and moved on. The problem is anti-Blackness and Orientalism and these two issues stem from the same roots: colonialism, whiteness, patriarchy, capitalism.

I want you to really sit with and think about WHY this man was able to bamboozle so many people for so long. Something that I take very seriously in my life is solidarity with Black people and I honestly try to fight for the rights of Black people in every moment I can. And the reason is because these are one and the same issue. I’m not saying I only care about Black people because it benefits my community - not at all - I’m saying that Black people are a part of my community. Where do you think the police state architecture in the United States comes from? The technologies and the techniques and the tactics terrorizing Black Americans and Palestinians and Lebanese are co-developed and utilized. We are under the same boot.

NO-ONE IS FREE UNTIL WE ARE ALL FREE. I REALLY NEED YOU GUYS TO UNDERSTAND THIS. FIGHTING FOR BLACK PEOPLE IS FIGHTING FOR PALESTINIANS IS FIGHTING FOR LEBANESE IS FIGHTING FOR SUDANESE IS FIGHTING FOR CONGOLESE IS FIGHTING FOR NEPALESE IS FIGHTING FOR LGBTQIA+ FOLX IS FIGHTING FOR WOMEN IS FIGHTING FOR CHILDREN IS FIGHTING FOR US ALL.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way: let’s move on to the analysis.

Foundational Lenses

The very reason why Ali has felt entitled for over a decade appropriating and profiting from a religion and spiritual practice that was built by and for Black Americans is the same reason why his ‘credentials’ in astrology have not been publicly questioned. Nor his identity. I am approaching the case of Ali in the astrology community through two foundational lenses: one, identity reductionism and two, Orientalism.

Identity reductionism is referring to the simplification and weaponization of identity in justification or validation of harmful behaviours. This can happen on the political stage as a counterrevolutionary measure, as Erica Caines shows in “The Democratic Facade: ‘Practicality’, Identity Reductionism, and the Erosion of Genuine Change.” In this piece, Caines outlines how Kamala Harris (and by extension the Democratic Party) was shielded, by her identity as a Black woman, from backlash from her participation and facilitation of the genocide in Palestine. Identity reductionism can also be a little more benign (but no less insidious) in interpersonal situations, and we are experiencing how Ali has been shielded from intense scrutiny by his proximity to Queerness, the fact that he is a person of color, and his proposed religious identity as a Muslim - which places him at the intersection of three marginalized groups.

The theory of Orientalism, which grew out of the book from Palestinian scholar Edward Said, began as literary criticism and expanded to be applied in all aspects of the social sciences and humanities.3 Orientalism describes how there is a false but pervasive divide between East (orient) and west (occident). This divide insinuates that the cultures of the East are somehow inferior, backward, savage, and most importantly different, leading to a cultural and societal bias and stereotypes against them.4 Said developed this criticism through analyzing a genre of literature and painting that focused on what was then called the Near East, which today we refer to as the Eastern Mediterranean, but it can be applied to essentially all non-western cultures. One of the features of Orientalism is that the individual cultures of the East get subsumed into a generalized identity; the perfect example of this type of stereotyping is Disney’s Aladdin with the culturally unidentifiable mishmash town of Agrabah.5 I will show through this piece how Orientalism is replete through both Ali’s approach to his constructed identity and in his astrology, and why the internalized Orientalism of the community at large bought into his charade.

Issues

#1: Astrological Credentials

When I first started looking into Ali a few months back I encountered a few people who told me he was in the Balkhi School. Upon inquiry, not a single person was able to identify what the Balkhi School was - just that it was some sort of tradition that he was a part of that reached back to Abu Ma’ashar. So naturally, I did some research. What could the Balkhi School be? In the anglophone sphere, I found many references to the so-called Balkhi school of cartographers6 and on the Arabic internet found a video talking about the Balkhi School - a literal physical school in Damascus. Nothing related to astrology whatsoever.

In a recent interview with , Ali outlines this Balkhi story in a bit more detail. He says he was at a family friend’s funeral at the age of 15 when he spotted a ‘rotund older guy’ handing out slips of paper with his email and phone number on them making astrology appointments. So, being the ‘nosy fuck’ that he is (verbatim), he ‘snuck up’ and realized the man was making astrology appointments. He began talking to him, realized his name was Agha Mansouri and that he was a member of a family of astrologers called the Banu Munajjim and he had studied formally in the Balkhi School. Ali then began a correspondence with this mystical older man and for three years he formally studied under him and received an ijaza (certification) from the Balkhi School. He finished just as he began college and he was in the archives at UCLA and stumbled upon a book written by Abu Ma’ashar, what Ali calls “his book on revolutions.”7 He then has a revelation that Abu Ma’ashar was the founder of the school he just graduated from, translates the book a la minute, and realizes the techniques were the same he had just learned. He then says that this became a bridge between his academic and occult lives and led him to do research in this area.

WOW, you might think, what a fantastical story! This guy has a magical life! And you would be true, this is a completely fabricated story. Now, in order for lies to be believable, they have to be rooted in some kind of fact. In this case, Ali has taken historical facts and embellished them into some kind of mystical tale in order to explain how he learned astrology. The Banu al Munajjim were real and one of them was Abi Mansour8, the Balki School is real, Abu Ma’ashar was in fact named Al Balkhi… but none of these things are connected. He used historical facts in order to weave a narrative to fictionalize a backstory for himself that would legitimize his astrology practice in lieu of having a verifiable lineage.

Let’s apply this same logic to a white person in the community. Let’s take Chris Brennan for example. Chris Brennan also has a podcast with a very large following and they’re about the same age. Imagine if when asked about his history with astrology he said that he met a stranger who happened to be a direct descendant of a line of astrologers who worked under Vettius Valens and thus had a direct line of transmission of this knowledge through the centuries and it just so happened that this teacher took him under his wing as a teenager and certified him through a correspondence course and then he went to college and discovered a book by Valens by accident and realized it was the same techniques he had just learned. And that’s why he has legitimacy in this work!

Would you:

• a. believe it?

• b. accept it?

• c. pay him money for access to this secret knowledge?

Chris is a legitimate, honest and kind person, so he wouldn’t do a grift like that - but also, he is a white person. Y’all know that a white dude telling a story like that is utter nonsense because we are in the 21st century and you know how information is transmitted. But Ali is a mysterious brown person from a faraway land that is mystical and full of sages and mages and the information is in a language so foreign you wouldn’t even begin to know how to verify whether it’s true or not, so he gets a pass.

This, my friends, is Orientalism.

It is both Orientalism in the way he describes this history - he synchronistically meets a magical rotund older man9 who happens to be an astrologer formally trained in a school founded by Abu Ma’shar - and in the way that the public did not challenge it. Y’all believed it because of your inherent Orientalism. Y’all told me about his lineage through the Balkhi School because of your inherent Orientalism. Your immediate inclination was to not call this out as a fabrication because in your mind the magical mystical East still exists. In your mind Agrabah still exists. BURN DOWN THE AGRABAH IN YOUR MIND.

In the various places he has spoken about himself online, there is one place that I have found in which he qualifies actually having learned anything astrological from a verifiable source, and it’s not some mysterious Oriental sage, it’s Christopher Warnock.

Warnock, like Ali, is a part of a network of appropriators of Hoodoo called Lucky Mojo.10

#2: Connection to the Yronwodes and Lucky Mojo

Lucky Mojo is an appropriated Hoodoo platform. Under their umbrella, they have a forum, an online store, podcast, correspondence school, non-profit, and ‘professional’ organization.11 The founder Catherine Yronwode is a white Jewish woman from San Francisco and the practitioners under her tutelage and leadership are predominately non-Black.12 From personal conversation with Ashley Andem, it has been relayed to me that neither Catherine nor Ali make any sort of real contribution or effort to participate in Black community or give back to youth or elders. Hoodoos have had to deal with the fallout that follows Lucky Mojo practitioners offline, and online, discussions have been had in various groups about steering clear of their network.

In addition to their appropriation of a closed practice, Catherine is a vocal zionist. Remember that Orientalism forms the philosophical backbone of the identity that Ali has constructed for himself. Because of that construction, Ali projects an identity as a pro-Palestine activist, even choosing to present himself in a keffiyeh. In late 2024, his leader posted inflammatory and harmful things on Bluesky against Lebanese and Palestinians. In response, Ali neither made a statement about this behaviour nor severed ties with her. In a time where we understand that silence is complicity, it shows that his connection and dedication to Catherine took precedence over his performative activism.13

This next part is not explicitly Orientalist, but is important to mention. None of this information is hidden and it is very easy to put the pieces together once one begins searching. The information below surfaced in 2024 and despite its gravity, his following continued to grow. I am arguing that the primary reason none of this, including this horrific information below, has made much headway in the community is because of the prevalent Orientalism and Identity Reductionism in the culture. He is rendered untouchable due to the shield of his perceived identity.

DISTURBING CONTENT IN THE CALLOUT BLOCK BELOW

Catherine’s husband and the co-owner of Lucky Mojo, Nagasiva, has served as the outreach director of the so-called Church of Euthanasia. This is an organization which seeks to reduce the human population on Earth. Catherine and her husband run a non-profit institution of which Ali has sat on the board since at least 2015.

In 2008, The Telegraph ran an exposé on the husband, connected at least 29 suicides of minors to his organization. That number included the 16-year old boy who the BBC linked to his moniker, boboroshi, in 2003.

On the deaths, he remarked: “I'm not the protector of these troubled youths. Their parents are the people who made them troubled. They are responsible for them. They should look at their living conditions, genetic features and local conditions which might lead them to take their own lives. Everything else is a ­distraction."

Ali was a moderator on the Lucky Mojo Forums from at least 2009, since when, he has appeared, weekly, on the Lucky Mojo Podcast with Catherine.

Obviously without direct sources or information, we cannot say the following categorically. But we can make a reasonable assumption.

The earliest post mentioning Ali on the Lucky Mojo Forum is March 5 2009. We know that the husband was involved in the forum as of 2006. The Telegraph exposé ran in 2008 and indicated that there were at least 29 connected suicides since 2001, including two linked suicides on the weekend of the piece’s release.

This means that it is entirely possible that the husband was involved in these suicides at the same time as being involved in the Lucky Mojo forums alongside Ali. Although there are no records of “ConjureMan Ali” on the forum before 2009, there are forum records going back further than 2009. It is entirely possible that Ali was operating under a different moniker, and in fact likely, given that he became a moderator in 2009. It is unlikely that Ali had no idea that the exposé had come out, and it is clear that Catherine, Ali, and Nagasiva have been working closely together (doing a weekly podcast together!) since 2009.

Today, it is statistically impossible that Ali is unaware that someone he has worked closely with for 17 years was involved in something as grave as encouraging children to take their own lives. Given the closeness of the association and proximity to the time frame in which deaths are linked to the husband, Ali is absolutely an unsafe person to be around young impressionable people.

#3: Identity Foundations

Identity is really complicated, especially for those of us growing up different shades of brown in the United States. There is a lot of pressure in a highly racialized society to live up to certain identity parameters, and for those of us who don’t fit neatly into any one or two boxes, there can be a lot of pressure to self-identify. I recognize that and I try to always hold space for people to express themselves in whatever way feels authentic to them. Identity is nuanced and our approach to understanding the identities of others should allow for that nuance.

Identity and religion don’t always go along hand in hand, often people aren’t even raised in a religion. But for Ali, he has made a name for himself as someone who promotes Islamic magic and astrology from the Arabic traditions of the Middle Ages. Not everyone needs to adhere to the religion that they study, and people can be experts in subject matter that they aren’t proximal to, that’s not the issue here. Nor is the criticism that someone raised Muslim wouldn’t be involved in a Christian church necessarily, nor vice versa. People are exposed to all kinds of religions all the time. But in this case, Ali harnesses his connection to Islam and this part of his identity to push his narrative, going as far as claiming to be connected to Abu Ma’shar, Al Buni and Ibn Arabi themselves,14 and all the while obfuscates or makes opaque any connections to Christianity or Catholicism in the astrological or academic parts of his life. If any or all of this is true, why is it being hidden?

In his academic and astrological lives, it does not work for the Orientalist image he crafts for himself as an Islamic esotericist or as an authoritative scholar of Islam for the connections to Christianity to be clear. This Identity Reductionism works in the Lucky Mojo network, however, for the Orientalist image he crafts for himself and his ties to Islam to be clear as that grants him perceived legitimacy in the realm of the “Islamic Occult Sciences”.

Ali speaks with authority about being a Muslim and about being raised in Islam, thus adhering to a lunar calendar instead of a solar calendar.15 He claims this relationship to Islam is an authority given to him by birthright, that he was named the spiritual heir of his family’s mysterious un-named spiritual tradition at birth16 and at age 6 his blind great-grandfather who dressed in all green informed him to begin his training.17 He claims to be a Sheikh and an initiate into multiple traditions “of the Near East and North Africa”, which he names ‘rouhiniyah’, ‘Al-Hikmah’, and ‘Marabout’, in 2013. In 2026, he is now claiming to be a Sheikh in a Sufi order of Al Hakimiyya, and has had at least two of his devoted followers convert to Islam to be initiated into this order.

From my research, it seems that الطريقة الصوفية الحكيمية “The Sufi Order of the Hakimiyya” is less a Sufi order proper and more like a school of thought tied back to a historical figure who had great influence on much of Islamic mysticism.18 After claiming since at least 2013 on the Lucky Mojo forum that he was a Sheikh, he only came public with this information after the students who converted to Islam to practice with him put in it their social media profiles.19 After being confronted about his ties to Hoodoo this week, he mentioned being a Sheikh in a private message (shared on Threads), where he notes that he doesn’t bring it up unless someone asks.20 From what I understand, being a Sheikh in a Sufi lineage carries with it deep knowledge and respect for those from whom the learning is passed down and gleaned, and people are open about from whom they learn for this very reason.21

Before his attempt at situating himself as a Sufi mystic, however, he has been involved in Catholic and other Christian practices. He has claimed that he was raised in Baptist conjure22 and has written a book about a Catholic saint.23 In a book published and circulated through the Lucky Mojo network, he is acknowledged as providing many spells from the Bible to contribute to the book.24 In the Patreon and in his work as an astrologer, to my knowledge, his connections to Christianity and to Catholicism are never mentioned and at the very least they are never stressed. He consciously reduces his identity to Muslim in order to claim legitimacy for the work that he does.

From what we know, Ali’s parents are from Afghanistan, and he claims proximity to Persian culture.25 Afghanistan is in Central and South Asia. There are a number of ethnic groups in Afghanistan and one of the primary languages is a relative of Farsi.26 None of this information is all that important except for the fact that Ali claims to be of Middle Eastern descent. People assume that because he is a Muslim and brown and he says he is Middle Eastern, that he is an Arab. This is one of the major Orientalizing pieces of what he does and how the community blindly accepts him.

The “Middle East” as a construction is a deeply colonial and Orientalist frame. This term is often mistakenly interchanged with Arab and Muslim, which is by design and is in service to white racial hierarchy. Adding North Africa to classify the region as MENA only makes sense if you are attempting to classify the region by its former imperial orientation.27 Compare a map with the Middle East and North Africa to the Ottoman Empire.

The differences between ethnic groups, religions, languages, traditions, foodways, architecture, and more are vast. It is true that through a lot of the region classified as MENA, Arabic is one of primary spoken languages and has been historically significant. That being said, the dialects of spoken Arabic vary so widely as to not be mutually intelligible from one country to the next. This is a nonsensical organization of countries unless you are attempting to classify an other, a group of people that can be reduced into one blanket identity for the West to make it easier to understand and comprehend. The primary driving factor for this is the predominance of Islam.

Islamophobia is so deep and prevalent in western societies and cultures that the idea that this grouping should work feels natural. Yes, these countries all have a predominance of Islam! They’re different! But what is so different, I might ask, between Islam and Christianity or Judaism? These three religions come from the same root and while they have developed differently over time, they are not so wildly different to use as a basis for othering and dehumanizing a massive portion of the globe based on the predominance of one of them. This is the same reason why I take issue with the term “Islamicate” while describing the astrology practiced - why is it that the authors who are writing in Arabic (or translating from the Arabic, as in the case of Ibn Ezra) are classified as “Islamicate” astrologers, when the astrologers practicing in Europe and writing in Latin and Greek are not classified as “Christianate” astrologers? This stems from internalized Islamophobia which is a product of Orientalism.

The reason why all of this is important to talk about in relation to Ali is that he works with these stereotypes and the level of misinformation that is spread throughout the West in order to Orientalise himself and capitalize on the mystique that he is afforded with proximity to the perceived exotic. In a deleted Wikipedia page he made of himself, he claimed to be “the relative of Afghanistan’s Interior Minister, Nur ul-Haq Ulumi and a descendent of Dost Mohammad Khan through his great grandfather and grandmother King Amanullah Khan and Queen Soraya.”28 He says he is “the legitimate heir to the spiritual sciences of the Near East,” that he comes from “one of the oldest family lines in the Middle East and North Africa who have always been associated with the royal court,” and that he hired as a magician to design “the magical defense of a certain Middle Eastern nation’s defenses.”29

Of course, most of these claims are made in the context of his life as an affiliate of Lucky Mojo and the Hoodoo world, and in his life in the astrology world he usually uses the blanket term Middle Eastern without specificity. By capitalizing on the misinformation of the general public regarding what the so-called Middle East is, Ali is able to claim proximity to the Arabic language which gives him credibility for his “translations”, and further cement harmful stereotypes about the nature of the diverse peoples and regions under this colonial classification.

He Orientalizes himself and due to this concerted effort and the internalized Orientalism of the general population, in combination with a trend toward Identity Reductionism, the specifics of his identity and legitimate connection to this part of the world were never discussed nor brought up. Even as attempts have been made to bring them up, the pervasive and harmful Orientalizing categorization still remains. An anonymous member of the astrology community made an incredible document in an attempt to archive much of the information that concerned community members have put forth during these last couple of weeks. They rightfully identified many of the reasons why it is problematic that he is essentially cosplaying Black culture. And in this very document, she classifies him as “Middle Eastern” in describing him as a non-Black person. While the below is true, the author has neglected, due to their own internalized Orientalism, to look closer at his identity framing.

In the beginning of his Master’s thesis, he lays out his problematic opinion clearly: “In this essay I use the term Middle East and Islamic world interchangeably to refer to the region of the world from North Africa to parts of South Asia like Afghanistan that are nominally conected historically, culturally and religiously…”30 This categorization is fueled by an Orientalist drive to otherize the peoples of the “East,” and belies his philosophical underpinnings despite his claims to operate as a ‘decolonial’ scholar.

#4: The Academic Question

This leads me to his actual scholarship. Ali was awarded his Doctorate in History from the University of California, Irvine, and along the way received a Master. After learning about his work in astrology and seeing some things that didn’t line up, I began to dig into his academic work.

The things that led me to do this research come from videos in which he made definitive statements with no proof. It is irresponsible, as an historian and an educator, to say something is a ‘fact’ in 600 years and thousands of miles of history. It is near impossible to say that anything socially constructed, even in today’s day and age is a fact, and making broad, sweeping claims about massive periods of time in history that span a huge portion of the world is not only negligent, it is dangerous.

The Astrology of Love and Sex: Sexuality and Queer Love

The first came from a video in which he discusses queerness and Islam. I was honestly excited to watch this video, as I had been hearing that he was the scholar to look for with interesting and novel takes and historical grounding. It is a part of his curated online presence to corner this niche, so it makes sense that that was what led me to him.31 The video was posted to his Patreon on June 28 2024, and is entitled “The Astrology of Love and Sex: Sexuality and Queer Love”. In the beginning of the video, there is an image of who Ali claims is Persian Safavid Shah with who Ali describes as a gay lover. Ali precedes talking about the image by describing how we mustn’t project ideas of modernity onto historical figures. Then the image is presented with no source, no provenance, no context. He does not say when nor where the image came from nor who painted it.

Using this image and this caption as proof of his argument, he makes the statement:

The Islamic world is far more comfortable in the pre-modern and early-modern age with gender and sexual ambiguity. There’s a lot of gray area, a lot of flexibility. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that if you were living up until the 19th century - if you were gay - the safest place in the world for you to live would be in the Middle East and in the Islamic World, which includes Africa and India. That’s just a fact. You have no evidence of pogroms, you have no evidence of widespread persecution, you have no evidence of widespread mass executions, all of the things that happened in Europe don’t happen in the Islamic World.32

He moves forward to say:

In the Islamic world, liwat, up until the coming of Ibn aimiya? is associated and understood as some form of sexual violation that is perpetrated on an unwilling participant. And this is found in the legal texts themselves. When they accuse someone of doing liwat, of sodomy, 9 times out of 10 it’s a straight man. It’s straight men that are performing liwat, not gay men.”33

There are further problematic statements in this video, but I would like to focus on these two. The first is simply appalling - he’s stating that categorically, the safest place for a queer person to be, in the pre-modern or early-modern world, is in the Islamic world which includes (by his definition) India, Africa and the “Middle East”. Using those proposed time frames, we could say he’s referring to ANY TIME IN HISTORY before the year 1800 and in nearly half the world. I am sure that anyone even peripherally involved in the writing and construction of history would agree that it is incredibly irresponsible and misleading as an historian to state anything categorically. There is always nuance and variance in society and historical societies are still societies. Can you say that, today, in a time of increasing threat to trans people in our communities, that there is a SAFEST PLACE for trans people to be? Now can you take that statement and apply it to a period of time spanning thousands of years?

In the second statement, he is attempting to redefine a term that is documented in Islamic law as referring to homosexuality. I am not a scholar of Islamic jurisprudence by any way shape or form, but I did look up some articles about this to try to understand how and why he is challenging this established legal terminology.34 It certainly is one thing to try to read the past historically, meaning not projecting contemporary worldviews onto it, but attempting to redefine a term that has been accepted in a legal structure over centuries is a bit of a stretch. The issue in this statement, however, is more concrete. He says “in legal texts” 9 times out of ten straight men are being charged of liwat. The first questions regard the so-called sources, which is typical of his charlatan approach. What legal texts? When? From where? He never specifies ANY so-called texts he is working from. Let’s say these ‘texts’ exist. How can one presume to know the sexual orientation of an historical person who was accused of something? Earlier in this same video he describes AT LENGTH how the ‘gay identity’ did not exist in these times. And yet, he presumes to be able to know by looking at a legal document whether or not someone was gay?

These kinds of broad sweeping claims are made all over his work. It is more than just irresponsible scholarship, it is intentionally shaping a narrative using pseudo-academic methods, banking on his credibility as a PhD and his shield of Exotic Oriental Man to a group of vulnerable people who are seeking representation and belonging. The video is only for his Patreon and he claims he had just done this talk at Harvard. That claim lends him a sense of credibility and legitimacy that is not going to be researched (how many viewers followed up to verify that claim?) and without any effort at all adds to the sense of authority that he is awarded by his followers.

Whole Sign Houses video with The Astrology Podcast

After watching this video, I started to research him a bit online. I was pulled to The Astrology Podcast excerpt from episode 295 where Ali had an appeared in 2021. Chris Brennan introduces the question by describing 30 extant charts that Ali had been working with were all using Whole Sign Houses. Ali Orientalises himself in this conversation, by first claiming distance from what he calls a ‘culture war or controversy’ regarding house systems in ‘modern astrologers’, and then by stating that “there is no controversy whatsoever if your lens is not Eurocentric. If you’re only looking at the European sources, then of course you’re gonna fall into this debate. But if you’re looking at the Medieval Islamicate sources, there’s absolutely no question they’re using sign based divisions.”35 I thought this statement was a little strange, considering the Alcabitius quadrant-based house system is named after one of these “Medieval Islamicate Astrologers”. Then he goes on to clarify that quadrant-based house systems ARE in fact being used for predictive methods, and that the 30 charts are those compiled from Abu Ma’shar.

A fair statement to make, here, is that we can assume that Abu Ma’shar worked primarily with Whole Sign Houses in nativities and quadrant houses in predictive work, and because his textbook was so widespread that it is likely that many other astrologers followed suit. But by stating this as fact, once again we see a case of Ali making misleading and narrative-driving statements without adequate proof. Another misleading part of this presentation is that Ali describes the horoscopes as being written out by Abu Ma’shar, not in the graphical images of charts: “Your rising sign is Pisces, so your money is ruled by Aries.” This is complicated because it is entirely possible to be using a quadrant-based house system and not have intercepted houses, which would lead to a chart that would follow in the correct order of the signs of the Zodiac. This means it is a presumption by Ali that he presents as fact.

This video also contains a number of mistakes in Arabic.36 I am not here to judge his pronunciation of Arabic, it is a really difficult language for non-native speakers. I, too, struggle with pronunciation and I have been exposed to the language my entire life. Some of my most humbling moments over the last year here in Lebanon have been in using Arabic daily to speak with strangers. But the number of errors AND the type of errors here are suspect and caught me off guard as I watched the video, especially as this person has positioned himself as not only a scholar and an authority in this material but as a translator of Arabic.

First, he goes to describe Abu Ma’shar’s Book of Revolutions. He twice mispronounces كتاب تحاويل ‘kitab tahawil’ with two separate pronunciations. Then he talks about كتاب مواليد ‘kitab mawalid’, which he proceeds to pronounce incorrectly as well. قسمة ‘qisma’ is also mispronounced and he claims there are ‘60 meanings’ for this word.

He mispronounces بيت ‘beit’, the word for house, and Chris pulls up a chart. As Ali is describing the chart, there are a number of glaring errors. The first is when he describes the ascendant, طالع ‘tal3’. He then says “in the fifth house it says ‘acrab’,” which he describes as Scorpio. Scorpio is عقرب ‘‘aqrab’.

In the fifth house, as you can see above, it actually says زحل مرخ ‘zuhal, merikh’ Saturn and Mars. He does go on to say that Saturn and Mars are listed, and he pronounces Mars as ‘mirakh’, not ‘merikh’. This is notable - mirach is a fixed star, and Mars is one of the primary seven planets.

I really don’t want you guys to think I’m being judgemental and nit-picky here. I make pronunciation errors all the time and because I am surrounded by Arabic speakers I am corrected. This is an essential part of of learning. Ali is claiming that this astrological tradition is passed down from teacher to student and that he learned from someone who has a lineage going back centuries, and yet he makes glaring mistakes that implies he’s not working with this language and has not been corrected. One could say that he was nervous, but at that point he had been appearing on a weekly podcast for 12 years so stage fright doesn’t seem likely. I, too, make mistakes in speech and am better with the written word. But I will say coming from someone who is immersed in the Arabic language, it certainly is curious how these mistakes are being made especially for someone who purports to be translating from said language, and for such common words.

These kinds of mixups really put his competency into question, especially while there are other factors at play. There have been sources that he has attributed certain “translations” to, that there have been no access to by the general public. An independent researcher recently attempted to trace some of these supposed translations, and found that they led back to the work of Ben Dykes.37 I have said it before and I will said it again - the only reason why he has been able to get away with all of this is by playing the Exotic Brown Person card. And the community accepts it. This is Orientalism.

Questions of Authenticiy in the Academy

After seeing these videos, I wanted to dig into his academic work. Although his credentials are verifiable, he has been known to not only exaggerate but falsify his academic achievements in the past.38 I searched for him through Google Scholar39 and saw that he had a chapter in an edited volume about Jinn in the Qur’an, but otherwise hadn’t published anything related to esotericism. I found his Doctoral dissertation and his Masters thesis, and saw that these works, too, had nothing to do with ‘Islamicate’ astrology or esotericism, but rather tackled questions of Islamic nationalism and identity. I downloaded these works and began to read.

One of the first things one does, as an historian, is check the source material someone is using to form their argument. I flipped to the back of the Master’s thesis and saw there was no archive list or distinction between primary and secondary sources, which is not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it does make it a little more difficult. So I started looking through footnotes.

The footnotes are a mess. The issue here is more than simply sloppy citation practice. This is negligence. Not a single footnote tells you in which archive the document is located, many of them don’t include page numbers, and it is clear that many were copy-pasted without paying attention to reformatting. All of these things could be chalked up to the fact that he was a graduate student and didn’t know better, but the pattern follows through in his dissertation and notably for you astrologers - in his Patreon.

Of these troubling footnotes there is one that I would like to draw particular attention to, regarding a speech delivered in French by Ernest Renan.

Renan gave this speech not at the Académie française, but the Sorbonne, on March 29 1883. I found a copy of the speech in French, published in a book and available on the Internet Archive. Later on in the paper, he quotes this speech once more.

I had already checked the document for the previous quotes, and indeed, they were there: but I could not locate this quote, “The Muslims are themselves the first victims of Islam.” His footnote does not indicate any page number, so I searched the entire document. I looked for another copy of the speech, and found one housed in the BnF Gallica. Again, this quote was missing. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I looked for an English translation of the speech - perhaps he was working off of a translation that took liberties. I found an English translation, and again, no quote.

So I went into Gallica, the archive in which Journal des Débats is digitized and available online. I looked at the date he cited. No speech by Ernest Renan. After much digging, it turns out that Renan did in fact write that “les musulmans sont les premières victimes de l’islam”, in a response to a response of the speech. That response was published in Journal des Débats, but on a different date altogether, and to my knowledge the speech was not published in the journal at all.40

Through a thorough examination of a Patreon-only video, a publicly available podcast, and his Master’s thesis, it is clear that Ali has a pattern of not exercising a clear ethical backbone when presenting historical arguments based on primary sources, nor citing their provenance. A part of presenting arguments based on primary sources is providing their context and nuance. Cherry-picking from various documents and presenting them as a clear narrative is misleading and irresponsible. What is striking is that many others in the astrology community have pointed out that he seems to be a bit negligent with providing source material or tracing their provenance for his astrological work, but he gets a pass.

Again, I am asserting that the lack of scrutiny he has faced is due to Identity Reductionism and overwhelming Orientalism in the community - he is given the benefit of the doubt time and time again due to his proximity to the culture he purports to represent and the seeming foreign-ness of the information to the Western mind. The other key piece here of the Identity Reductionism here is his position as an academic; it is assumed that as a Dr. his work is of inherently more quality and value than that of the general population.

#5: Proximity to Queerness

This is not a subject that I would like to dwell on, as I do not believe it is my place to discuss. However, I would like to open this up for input from the community. It has been brought to my attention that Ali routinely makes homophobic comments in the Patreon and people are concerned about his conflation of sexuality and gender identity.

I would like to offer this as a problem area which is also a part of the Orientalist identity shield that Ali and his devotees employ to claim immunity for their harmful behaviours online. If anyone would expand more, I believe it would be beneficial for the community as a whole to explore this topic.

#6: Right to Islamic Magic

This is one of the more difficult areas and the final thing I shall discuss here. This is not about Ali’s Orientalism, per se, but more about that which is present in the community. A part of the reason why Orientalism has been a successful framework is due to its use in the service of colonialism. There are two main directions that Orientalism frames the east. One, in a backwards society full of uncivilized people, which is what lends itself to needing the paternalistic guidance of the west. Two, in a mysterious and exotic land filled with magic and wonder. Obviously Ali capitalizes on the latter in the way he describes himself and his past, but the former is more pervasive.

This idea that the cultures that are subject to Orientalism are backwards and uncivilized is in service to colonialism. It’s even present in the language that set up the League of Nations Mandates for Lebanon and Palestine, which are essentially the last form of overt colonization.41 Believing that these people are not able to handle their own lands and resources is a part of this structure. Believing that the west has a right to these lands and resources is a part of this structure.

Believing that someone who is not Muslim and is not of Yemeni or Egyptian or whatever descent from where these traditions derive has a right to this magic is a part of this structure. I’m not saying that people HAVE TO BE from a certain religion or from a certain culture to enjoy and respect that culture. But the issue here is extraction.

That was something that struck me as people began exiting from the Patreon. Mentions of mass downloads of all the posts, of the importance of the “teachings”, of needing to still have this information. Why does the larger community as a whole feel they have a right or entitlement to this information? Why do they feel that they need to know how to do Islamic magic? Why did certain folx feel the need to literally change their religion in order to participate in this magical tradition? Yes, it works, but that doesn’t mean that it is for everyone.

Say it was affiliated with a different religion or culture - and I’m speaking here not to the point of it being open or closed - but say it was, as an example, Korean traditional magic. Wouldn’t the idea of even beginning to learn Korean magic without any sort of tie to the region make people feel strange? Wouldn’t it give you pause if you knew of a ton of white and other people, but very few of Korean descent, who were dedicated to learning Korean magic? Under the guise of being taught by someone as problematic as Ali?

The reason why this has not been considered is because Orientalism is so pervasive that this colonial aspect, the extractive nature of needing and wanting and feeling entitled to, is inherently a part of many who participated in that Patreon. When I say the extractive nature, a part of this means that it is disconnected from the peoples from whom it originated and is pulled out for its very real magical potential. By being translated into English, it is also being extracted from its language of creation and transmission, which carries its own magic. What really stood out to me in all this is that there are dedicated followers of Ali who have been very vocal about using this magic that, from their internet presences, do not seem to have any real understanding about what the cultures connected with them mean. The context is lost and reduced and extracted.

This is an issue that warrants further exploration and I hope that others might take time to think about this deeply and understand the ways in which Orientalism is present in their own minds and practices.

If you have gotten all the way down here, BRAVO! Thank you for joining me on this journey of research and discovery. I want to end here with a little prayer for safety and strength for everyone caught up and involved in this situation.

There is a lot of real and palpable grief for many people in the astrological community who truly looked up to Ali as a leader. He said the right things, he acted the right way, and our internalized Orientalism and penchant toward Identity Reductionism worked in his favor to shield him from intense scrutiny. As more things come to light about the true nature of who he is and how he is, I would like to offer a bit of hope to the community.

Ali’s way of reading into the past is his way of reading into the past. The beautiful thing about being a human is that we all have brains and we all have the opportunity to excercise those brains and create and learn and grow. And you do not need Ali to read a primary source for you, you can read it yourself! You can take this opportunity to start a book club and build community and read through some of these sources together. You will get way more out of them from engaging with them on your own than through someone’s problematic filter.

Thank you all for taking the time to read this, and I really hope that our community is stronger after this.

1

Just to give you a little background about my positionality while I write this piece: I was born and raised in the Seattle area, my dad is from Lebanon and my mom was born in Washington State to a mother from Newfoundland, CA and a father from New England. Her blood is 100% Irish and she was very much raised as Irish diaspora. My parents were born in the 1950s and my dad immigrated to the States in the 1980s. I was born in the late 1980s. I was raised in between Catholicism, Greek Orthodox, and general agnosticism and I left my home and moved to NYC sight unseen at the age of 22. From 22 to 29 I lived between NYC, Seattle, Portland and Los Angeles, working in restaurants and specializing in wine, and at 29 I moved to New Orleans. At the age of 32 I began my undergraduate education and in 5 years I attained two bachelors degrees and a masters, and then began a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. In the summer before I started my doctorate I returned to Lebanon for the first time in 22 years, met my soulmate and got married. The US government initiated an immigration ban so without being able to bring my husband to the States (it’s a 7 year program) I left my PhD and moved to Lebanon to start my life with my husband. If you want to see a cute picture of us there’s one here:

2

I was very involved in the astrology community from about 2017-2020. I was volunteering at conferences, including the last UAC, I sat on the board of one of the major orgs and I was serving as the President of AYA. In 2020 I had a near-death experience that rendered me extremely ill for months, I was not given a blood transfusion when I should have been and my body had to rebuild my blood supply naturally. Because of that, I dropped the ball on my responsibilities and and stepped back from leadership. I returned in April 2026.

3

Here are a couple of quick and easy resources if you don’t want to read the whole book: The Conversation; Elif Notes.

4

Please do recall that Bibi Netanyahu and his contemporaries frequently refer to Palestinians as animals or sub-human. This is a really intense form of Orientalism. See: Middle East Monitor.

5

Take a look at this article to examine Aladdin a little more closely: Authenticity and Discourses in Aladdin (1992).

6

Wikipedia; Turkish Studies; Mysteries of Mankind; Gerald R Tibbets; My Old Maps… there are so many more references to the Balkhi School as a mapmaking tradition. Google away.

7

I verified in the UCLA library holdings that there are, in fact, no manuscripts of Abu Ma’shar at UCLA. There is, however, a copy of Robert Schmidt’s English translation of Abu Ma’shar’s On Solar Revolutions, Part II. I also checked the Special Collections at UCLA and found no Abu Ma’shar. Special Collections require appointments and wouldn’t be something one would be able to stumble upon, anyway.

8

Read about the Banu al Munajjem here.

9

I mean…

10

If not outright a part of their network, he does make mention to them more than once on his website. See: https://www.renaissanceastrology.com/chartweek8-19-02.html; https://www.renaissanceastrology.com/passionharmonytalisman.html.Previously, he was selling an Astrology for Rootworkers course on his website, on the page for which he recommended the Lucky Mojo correspondence course. https://web.archive.org/web/20120504013712/http://renaissanceastrology.com/astrologyforrootworkers.html.

11

I am not going to link to the pages in this section - they’re very easy to find online. The reason why I am not doing so is because A LOT of those pages are reeking of magic and it doesn’t feel good. Exercise your own judgement as to whether or not you want to search for and these websites, and do protect yourself before reading much of what is written. In good conscience I cannot link back to them. There is this resource that compiles all of the entries of ConjureMan Ali on the Lucky Mojo Forums without needing you to look at their site: Markdown Pastebin.

12

At least, non-Black. Below, a screenshot from the podcast that Ali has been a weekly co-host of since 2009.

13

Ali himself, despite claiming to be a pro-Palestine activist, engaged in pinkwashing in an article he wrote in 2016 as a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine. People are allowed to grow and change, and grad school is certainly a time to learn new things about oneself and ones position regarding issues like the settler-colonial zionist entity. Notably, 2016 was a particularly deadly year for Palestinians in the West Bank, so it is certainly a choice to begin one’s article in that fashion.

14

See Note 16.

15On World Astrology: In Conversation With Dr Ali A Olomi at the Los Angeles Astro Salon A Mercury talisman and a trip to Marrakech, Morocco, introduced me to Dr. Ali A. Olomi’s work. I was visiting a jewelry vendor and mentioned I was an astrologer. His eyes lit up, and he proceeded to show me his collection of astrological talismans and astrolabes…Read morea year ago · 10 likes · Vivi16

Sources (not in order of screenshot): One; Two; Three; Four; Five; Six; Seven.

17

In this podcast, timestamp: 1:27 - 3:40.

18

I found this page in Arabic which says the order was named after Abu ‘Abd Allah Muhammad bin ‘Ali al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi. According to an article by Muhammad Khalid Masud, al-Tirmidhi “began his studies…when he was eight years old. He does not give the name of his teacher…[his] written works have probably had a greater influence on later Sufism than any direct influence he may have had through his disciples.” Muhammad Khalid Masud, “AL-ḤAKĪM AL-TIRMIḎH̱Ī’S BUDUWW S̱H̱A’N.” Islamic Studies 4, no. 3 (1965): 315–43. http://www.jstor.org.uno.idm.oclc.org/stable/20832809. There’s an English Wikipedia page about al-Tirmidhi, here. There is a PhD thesis from 1970 on al-Tirmidhi, which details his primary teachings - among them saints and sainthood.

19

Notably, this shift of putting the information in their social media profiles came on the heels of attending a private workshop held on campus at Loyola Marymount University on a Saturday afternoon. The following is a screenshot of an email from someone who was invited to the workshop:

Hosting a private workshop for non-students on campus is a strange ethical grey area in my opinion. It is notable that he hosted this event on a Saturday when campus would be less populated and he would be under less scrutiny. It is not unheard of for professors to have non-students visit them on campus, but using campus facilities to host a pseudo-academic talisman making workshop with outside guests feels like a real stretch of what should be allowed.

20

21

I welcome any and all input from any practicing Sufis who have any other information about this. I understand that these types of subcultures keep their secrets close to the chest, and I am not of the mind to expose a group of people who would otherwise like to remain hidden. But this is just the information I was able to glean from researching in English and in Arabic.

22

See Note 16.

23

Available on Internet Archive.

24

On the bottom paragraph of the acknowledgements, it reads: “Finally, many answers to questions, as well as favourite Bible spells provided herein, came to us from our wonderful colleagues in AIRR, the Association of Independent Readers and Rootworkers: ConjureMan Ali, Lukianos, Mary Bee, Miss Bri, Ms. Melanie, and Professor Ames.” Book can be found here.

25

See Note 15.

26

For more information about Afghan Persian, see here.

27

South West Asia and North Africa, or SWANA, which is a term that has been popularized in the last few years, is simply a rebranding of MENA and is still based on the same colonialist and Orientalist frame.

28

The page was deleted because all of the articles that were linked to were written by Ali himself, which goes against the Wikipedia guidelines. See: wikibin.org/articles/ali-a-olomi.html.

29

See Note 16.

30

Ali, Olomi. “The Oriental and the Orientalist: Al Afghani and the Construction of Pan-Islamism.” Thesis, Master, History, 2014, page 3.

31

The majority of his work is behind a paywall. When he first started the podcast Head on History it was not geared toward only Islamic esotericism or queerness but rather tackled larger historical questions and the first couple years of the podcast that are more scholarly in nature are available. When he started incorporating more magic and esotericism it went behind the paywall. That being said, there are some choice and select podcasts available for free online, even through this period. The below is a screenshot showing what he chooses to promote outside of the paywall. Source.

32

“The Astrology of Love and Sex: Sexuality and Queer Love,” Timestamp: 09:39 - 10:22 NOTE: if you are not on his Patreon and want access to this video, please email me at criticalastrology@tuta.io

33

“The Astrology of Love and Sex: Sexuality and Queer Love,” Timestamp: 14:10 - 14:37

34

See: Omar, Sara. “From Semantics to Normative Law: Perceptions of Liwāṭ (Sodomy) and Siḥāq (Tribadism) in Islamic Jurisprudence (8th-15th Century CE).” Islamic Law and Society 19, no. 3 (2012): 222–56. http://www.jstor.org.uno.idm.oclc.org/stable/41723250.; Ja’afar Agaji Abdullahi, Lawal Tambaya Ahmad, and Misbahuddeen Muhammad Bashir, “The Divergent Views of Jurists (Fuqaha) on Punishment of Sodomy (Liwat): Its Relevance to Our Contemporary Society,” Middle East Research Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 4, no. 01 (February 28, 2024): 19–25, doi:10.36348/merjhss.2024.v04i01.003.

35

“Whole Sign Houses in Arabic Astrology,” Timestamp: 1:38 - 1:53

36

The links in this section take you to pages for each of these words where you can listen to the dictionary pronunciation and hear the differences for yourself.

37

See: https://junawadi.com/

38

In 2012 he had just finished his bachelors and was in graduate school, per his CV:

39

Trust me when I say I am actively de-Googling and it is an incremental process.

40

This was found in a book from 1887 called Discours et Conférences, which can be accessed on the Internet Archive, page 407.

41

See Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations: https://www.ungeneva.org/en/about/league-of-nations/covenant.