Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies, Book Review

Dreams are unsettling for dreamers regardless of their creed or communal identity. However, how long dreams haunt dreamers is an entirely different story. While studying in seminary, I encountered many perplexities with respect to dreams. I remember a senior theologian who reminded his pupils about the importance of dreams. He once attempted to explain the meaning behind the appearance of the rivers of heaven in dreams by virtue of Quranic verses, insisting that they do not imply the promise of grace or paradise but, rather, they foretell that one will end up with a wife who urinates in her bed. I was amazed at how a theologian could extrapolate such interpretations. In the work under review, Elizabeth Sirriyeh tries to situate such amazement in a larger historical trajectory in order to reveal the impact of earlier traditions on dreaming in the " world of Islam. " Sirriyeh elucidates the history of dreams and dream interpretation and their social functions in Islamicate culture over the course of nine chapters. Although it is not formally organized in this manner, I think it is beneficial to divide the book into two sections: the first three chapters examine dreams and dream interpretation historically from pre-Islamic to Islamic societies, and in the remaining chapters she shifts attention to the social imaginaries of dreaming among subsequent people of the faith. The first chapter explores the patterns of dreaming and interpreting dreams in pre-Islamic contexts. Sirriyeh pays special attention to Artemidorus's manual on the modes of dream interpretation. Identifying the patterns articulated therein, she demonstrates how they reoccur in the Abrahamic traditions' methods of interpreting dreams, even to the extent of sharing identical readings of specific symbols. She gives the example of how both Jewish rabbis, based on the Babylonian Talmud, and Artemidorus understood " a raven seen in a dream as representing an adulterer " (23). Another fascinating observation Sirriyeh makes in this chapter is how within the Christian tradition the appearance of angels in dreams " could help to explain conversions or perhaps encourage them " (26). After outlining common narratives and similar interpretative models found in dream manuals from the pre-Islamic to early Islamic eras, she concludes that there were " essentially conservative qualities of dream interpretation in the region " (28). As to the questions, why do dreams matter and why do believers in and practitioners of the Abrahamic traditions seek ways to interpret them, Sirriyeh proffers a poetic answer: " to release the dreamer from the powerful and evil hold of the uninterpreted dream " (12).

This essay is an assessment of a number of dreams discussed by Bin Laden and some of his followers (dreams that allegedly anticipated and thus validated the September 11th, 2001 attacks) in the light of scripturally based Islamic oneiromancy. The essay's goal is to use classical Islamic scholarship to counter the simplistic - and highly manipulative - interpretation assigned to said dreams by Bin Laden. Whereas a fundamentalist mind is essentially focused on literal dream interpretation (in the same way as it accepts only literal Qur’ānic exegesis), classical Islamic oneiromancy reveals itself as a highly complex and dynamical discipline that can be used to suggest that the dreams of crashing planes may have been a warning rather than a divine legitimization of terrorist acts. Moreover, Islam’s true tradition of dream interpretation is only marginally interested in divination. Its actual scope is the recovery of an original epistemic content merely clothed in dream images. To find the true meaning of a dream is then to support a broader quest for knowledge.

International Multidisciplinary Journal of Pure Life (IMJPL), 2023

SUBJECT AND OBJECTIVES: The Holy Quran has always been an inexhaustible source of divine wisdom and knowledge that Muslim philosophers and mystics picked up and demonstrated through research and analysis. Among the important Quranic topics dealt with by Muslim mystics, headed by Ibn Arabi, is the true dream, as the Almighty Lord in His Holy Book, singled out several verses for it, so that Surat Joseph had topped the Holy Quran with the subject of the true vision and its interpretation. METHOD AND FINDING: In this research, we sought, by following the descriptive analytical method of the dream Quranic verses, based on a mystical viewpoint, to know its origin which has two dimensions, one existential and the other cognitive, as well as clarifying its effects on humans life. CONCLUSION: Based on this study, we concluded that the origin of the dream in the Holy Quran is mystically linked to the discontiguous world of imagination on one hand, and the world of contiguous world of imagination on the other hand, connecting this with the position of man and what he perceives from the presence of imagination, which is an independent presence in which meanings and spirits appear in forms. In addition, revealing the importance of the true dream in terms of predicting future events, and the position of the dream interpreter in regard to realizing the dream in the world of visibility.

book review

Religion, 1997

Ilahiyat Studies, 2021

This paper analyzes the theory that ʿAbd al-Karīm Surūsh proposes through an article series called The Prophet Muhammad: The Messenger of Prophetic Dreams, in light of previous approaches about revelation (waḥy) with regard to dreams and imagination. For this purpose, the first chapter of this paper centers on the distinction between the word “dream” (ruʾyā), as in Surūsh’s theory, and traditional approaches to revelation to determine differences in terms of content. The second chapter associates the explanation of revelation with dreams in order to compare alternative “imagination” (خيال، متخيلة) based approaches in Islamic philosophy and Sufism, in turn clarifying how Surūsh distinguishes them and resolves the relevant problematics.

Early Christian and early Islamic texts on dreams and dream interpretation have come under increased scrutiny in recent decades. Dream literature from pagan and Jewish antiquity to the early medieval period demonstrates that dreams, especially prophetic dreams, were used to establish spiritual authority, enforce compliance, and justify violence in a religious context. The common cultural roots of Christi-anity and Islam emerge when we recognise the crucial role played by dreams and prophecy in the two traditions. The various methodologies used in recent scholarship on dreams and their interpretation are surveyed with a view to identifying those most relevant to the analysis of first-millennium CE literary sources in Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Arabic. The key texts from the three major religious traditions in this period (Western Christian, Eastern Christian, and Islamic) are then analysed with a view to assessing whether early Christians and Muslims understood and taxonomised dreams differently. Literary genre and audience (lay, clerical, or monastic) are revealed as the key determinants of difference, rather than religious origins.