The Hand of Fatima or Hand of Miriam (also known as Khamsa (Arabic - that is the number "five") is a characteristic amulet of the Muslim and Jewish religions, widespread in the Near and Middle East, and in northern Africa.

For Muslims, the tradition holds that Fatima, daughter of the prophet Muhammad, while preparing dinner, would attend her husband's return with a concubine; jealous of this, by mistake he put his hand into the boiling water, without however feeling pain. For Muslim believers it therefore represents the symbol of seriousness and self-control.

In the modern age the image was used to indicate the spaces used for women, and more generally as an apotropaic object, consisting of a colored hand and sometimes very adorned with arabesques, bearing moreover an eye in the middle (the latter from to connect with another Islamic para-religious symbol, the eye of Allah).

From an anthropological-religious point of view, the hand can be linked to the very foundations of Islamic belief: the five fingers of the hand in fact recall the five pillars of the Islam of faith. However, for popular Islam, the Hand represents more than anything else an infallible remedy against the evil eye and negative influences in general.