In an early twentieth-century catalogue from the Field Museum in Chicago, a Qur’an-inscribed agimat—a talismanic belt from Mindanao—is marked “difficult to obtain.” Composed of cloth, baroque pearls, plant matter, and sacred text, the object was classified as an ethnographic specimen, stripped of its cosmological function and ritual charge. This paper uses that object as a point of departure to examine the broader dispersal of Philippine Islamic talismans across museums in Europe and North America. Drawing on Janet Hoskins’s idea of biographical objects—heirlooms that act as kin, agents, and cosmological anchors—I discuss how the agimat resists standard models of museum cataloguing and repatriation. As with pusaka relics of eastern Indonesia, its efficacy depends on bodily proximity, secrecy, and ritual activation; exposure or digitization may rupture its protective force. Building on scholarship by Christiane Gruber, Yasmine Al-Saleh, Liana Saif, and Amira Mittermaier, which frames Islamic amulets as living mediators of divine protection, I venture into conceptualizing ways of Islamic rematriation: identifying modes of return grounded not in visibility or ownership, but in cosmological re-embedding, ritual discretion, and ethical refusal. The agimat, in this sense, does not return through display or data, but through sacred withdrawal and the restoration of its unseen charge.

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