Dreams and Visions in the World of Islam

A History of Muslim Dreaming and Foreknowing

Elizabeth Sirriyeh

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781780761428
• eBook ISBN: 9780857738202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Psychology

People in Western societies have long been interested in their dreams and what they mean. However, few non-Muslims in the West are likely to seek interpretation of those dreams to help them make life-changing decisions. In the Islamic world the situation is quite different. Dreaming and the import of visions are here of enormous significance, to the degree that many Muslims believe that in their dreams they are receiving divine guidance: for example, on whether or not to accept a marriage proposal, or a new job opportunity. In her authoritative new book, Elizabeth Sirriyeh offers the first concerted history of the rise of dream interpretation in Islamic culture, from medieval times to the present. Central to the book is the figure of the Prophet Muhammad - seen to represent for Muslims the perfect dreamer, visionary and interpreter of dreams. Less benignly, dreams have been exploited in the propaganda of Islamic militants in Afghanistan, and in apocalyptic visions relating to the 9/11 attacks. This timely volume gives an important, fascinating and overlooked subject the exploration it has long deserved.

CHAPTER 1

SEEING GODS AND ANGELS BEFORE THE RISE OF ISLAM

Many of the Muslims' ideas about dreaming and visionary experience derived from the peoples and cultures of the pre-Islamic Near Eastern and Mediterranean regions, although the channels through which they received these ideas have, in most cases, been lost. Only occasionally, for example in the reception of Artemidorus' famous dream manual, is it possible to identify the route by which a particular idea reached the scholars of the medieval Islamic world.¹ This chapter looks selectively at some features of the ancient traditions relating to dreams, including their methods of describing and analysing them, whether in literary narratives or manuals for deciphering dream images. It does not presume to be comprehensive, but considers those characteristics that appear to have been absorbed into the broader dream culture and are often shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims. Records of the waking vision are noted with reference to the experiences of the early Christians before the chapter concludes with some comments on Muslims' adaptation of the pre-Islamic beliefs and practices.

Dreaming in the Ancient Near East

A Symbolic Dream Tale from Mesopotamia

Dream texts from Mesopotamia provide some of the most important and extensive material on dreaming in the region, but they have proved notoriously hard to classify.² They include a range of literary and historical accounts as well as others of an oracular or ritual nature. Some texts have clear meanings and need no interpretation, whereas some contain ‘enigmatic visual images that require an interpreter upon awakening’ and are commonly described as symbolic dreams.³ Still other dreams may contain symbolism that is sufficiently obvious not to require specialised interpretative skill or may consist of a clear message with occasional symbolic elements. It is not clear that the Mesopotamians made strict distinctions between dreams of a symbolic and non-symbolic variety,⁴ but they would bequeath a variety of dream forms to successive peoples in the Near East.

Acknowledging the complexity of the situation, we will first examine the example of a famous literary narrative of a symbolic dream from southern Mesopotamia. The oldest extant version of the dream of Dumuzi has been dated to around 1800–1700 BCE, although it is likely to originate from even older versions.⁵ The dream narrative forms a section in a cycle of mythic accounts concerning Dumuzi, whose name appears in the list of kings of the city of Uruk in ancient Sumer and is thought to have lived in the third millennium BCE. Dumuzi is depicted in the myth as a god-king and shepherd who falls foul of Inana, goddess of sexual love and fertility, the Queen of Heaven (known in Akkadian as Ishtar). A cycle of stories tell of Inana's journey to the Underworld, from which she is permitted to escape on condition that another will take her place. Her lovers, the kings of the cities of Sumer, go into mourning for Inana during her absence in the Underworld. However, Dumuzi does not conform. Instead of mourning, he enrages the goddess by engaging in drunken partying. Inana orders demons to seize Dumuzi so that he will be the one to take her place in the Underworld. Before the demons come to carry him off, Dumuzi lies down in a drunken state to sleep in his sheepfold, but he wakes terrified from a dream. He relates the dream to his sister:

A dream, my sister! A dream! In my dream rushes were rising up for me, rushes kept growing for me; a single reed was shaking its head at me; twin reeds – one was being separated from me. Tall trees in the forest were rising up together over me. Water was poured over my holy coals for me, the cover of my holy churn was removed, my holy drinking cup was torn down from the peg where it hung, my shepherd's stick disappeared from me. An owl (?) took a lamb from the sheep house, a falcon caught a sparrow on the reed fence, my male goats were dragging their dark beards in the dust for me, my rams were scratching the earth with their thick legs for me. The churns were lying on their sides, no milk was being poured, the drinking cups were lying on their sides, Dumuzid [Dumuzi] was dead, the sheepfold was haunted.⁶

There is a sense of tension building in Dumuzi's description of his dream with the piling up of symbolic image after image presaging his terrible fate. The symbolism is largely related to the natural environment and an agricultural lifestyle, involving plants, animals and birds, their movements and interactions with one another and with the life of the shepherd.

Dumuzi calls on his sister to interpret the evil dream and her response is noteworthy. She repeats that it is ‘not favourable’ and asks her brother to tell her no more of it.⁷ Her reaction heralds an attitude that will become deeply embedded in Middle Eastern society; it is better not to speak of terrifying night visions. In Mesopotamia the common outlook on such evil dreams was that they were either sent by a deity as a punishment for the dreamer's sins or provoked by the dreamer's enemies, who felt more able to attack a dreamer who had lost divine protection.⁸ In Dumuzi's case, he was defenceless against the wrath of the goddess Inana. His sister, however, does offer an interpretation of the nightmare, which is remarkable because many later interpreters would not wish to emulate her example. She deciphers each symbolic image in turn, a practice that has parallels in much later periods when interpreting symbolic dreams. For instance, she predicts that the male goats ‘dragging their dark beards in the dust’ signify that her own ‘hair will whirl around in the air like a hurricane’ in mourning for her brother, while the rams ‘scratching the earth with their thick legs’ show that she will tear her cheeks with her fingernails for him ‘as if with a boxwood needle’.⁹ Some meanings are obvious, while others are obscure, but all the symbols herald death and destruction, an evil fate for Dumuzi.

In Mesopotamian literature these types of dreams were regarded as ‘symbolic messages sent by a god and understood intuitively by the dreamer or a dream-interpreter’.¹⁰ Sudden awakening from a dream, as in the case of Dumuzi, would be taken as a sign of the divine origin of a dream. Those who possessed intuitive knowledge of the meanings of dreams might be thought to contain an element of the divine, as in the case of Dumuzi's sister, her brother being regarded as a god-king. Alternatively, they could be those with priestly links to deities as well as other natural ecstatics or seers. Females appear prominent in the role of dream interpreters, but it is not clear whether gender was a significant factor in predisposing someone to develop an intuitive ability.

Biblical Records of Symbolic Dreams

To what extent were influences from Mesopotamia absorbed into the Old Testament narratives of symbolic dreams? Notable symbolic dreams are recorded with reference to Joseph as both dreamer and interpreter of dreams in Genesis 37 and 40–1 and striking narratives of such dreams are also included in the Aramaic chapters of Daniel, 2, 4 and 7. Central to these accounts is the message that both the righteous and the wicked may receive veridical dream communication from God, but it is the Israelites who are enabled by God to understand the divine messages.¹¹ Notably, the servants of the Lord, Joseph and Daniel, are sent with the true interpretation of enigmatic dreams. Both the Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar wake from their dreams in an anxious, troubled state, which has led to the suggestion that this is an indication of ‘contemporary interpretative practices, such as those evident in Mesopotamia’.¹² The interpretation of the dream acts in a way similar to exorcism so as to release the dreamer from the powerful and evil hold of the uninterpreted dream.

The Genesis accounts of symbolic dreams may or may not bear the marks of Mesopotamian influence, but it is of interest to note certain shared views observable from biblical accounts and Mesopotamian epic. All the narratives support a belief in symbolic dreams as messages sent by a deity to a variety of human dreamers, including those with an element of the divine in them or a special relationship to the deity. All such dreams can be interpreted by those who receive divine guidance, the gift of intuitive insight into the true meanings of dreams. In the Mesopotamian context, female interpreters of this type are present, although inspired dream knowledge may not be an exclusively female prerogative because males also interpret. In Israel males are the inspired interpreters. In all cases, the symbolic dream narratives suggest the superiority of intuitive, divinely guided interpretations over deductive human systems of divination based on the following of inherited technical knowledge. However, the technically trained, if uninspired, forms of dream interpretation were also highly popular over thousands of years. Information on these deductive systems in the ancient Near East has been most fully preserved from Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Guides to Symbolic Dreams in Egypt and Mesopotamia

In Egypt the earliest references to dreams occur in a series of texts described as ‘Letters to the Dead’ and dating mainly from the time of political division known as the First Intermediate Period (c.2150–2055 BCE).¹³ The letters were placed in the tombs, usually in order for living relatives and friends to make requests that the dead offer their help; they include reference to the desire to see the dead in a dream. It is noteworthy that the ancient Egyptians speak of ‘seeing in a dream’ rather than referring to ‘dreaming’.¹⁴

The only work on dream interpretation surviving from Egypt before the Greco-Roman period is thought likely to date from the reign of Ramesses II (1279–1213 BCE), possibly from around 1279–1257.¹⁵ Only 11 pages of the papyrus are preserved in a reasonable condition and they include a collection of dream omens, in which there is an attempt to divide humanity into two broad categories of dreamers: those who have good dreams and those who have nightmares. Those having good dreams are identified as the followers of the god Horus, but, unfortunately, the description of them is missing from the text. Those who experience nightmares are said to be the followers of his adversary Seth, god of disorder, and their characteristics include red hair, bad manners, aggression and rowdy drunken behaviour.

Each dream omen in the Egyptian papyrus opens with the words, ‘If a man sees himself in a dream’. However, the dreams are then divided into a set of 143 good dreams of the Followers of Horus and 91 bad dreams of the Followers of Seth. There is no obvious organisation by topic. An example of a good dream reads: ‘Sitting in an orchard in the sun: good: it means pleasure.’ A case of a bad dream reads: ‘Drinking warm beer: bad: it means suffering will come upon him.’¹⁶ The list of bad dreams is followed by advice on a purification ritual to rid the dreamer of their evil effects.

Within the ancient Near Eastern region the arts of dream divination were at their most technically accomplished in Mesopotamia, and it is the Mesopotamian system that appears to have had the greatest long-term influence in the area. Foretelling the future through dreams formed just a small part of an extensive system of divination that comprised many different methods of foreknowing, including the observation of natural phenomena, such as unusual animal births, the movement of birds and insects and the configurations of the stars. The divination discussed earlier in the chapter, with reference to the symbolic dream narratives of Mesopotamia and Israel, may be classed as ‘natural’ or ‘inspired’, since it depends on natural abilities to understand divine messages. However, in Mesopotamia, as in Egypt, trained practitioners were also considered as able to comprehend certain divine communications through the use of deductive methods. Consequently, they could be consulted on the meanings of dreams, among other phenomena, in the hope that a dream might contain a propitious omen and that the evil consequences of nightmares might be averted.

The earliest written tradition of deductive divination of dreams from Mesopotamia has been dated to the Old Babylonian period from around 1800–1700 BCE. Perhaps the earliest example of this type of technical interpretation occurs with reference to a nightmare: ‘If a man while he sleeps [dreams that] the town falls again and again upon him and he groans and no one hears him’, then the interpretation is a positive one that protective spirits are attached to his body. However, if he groans and someone hears him, there is a demon attached to his body.¹⁷ Dream omens such as these were apparently copied for hundreds of years before being gathered into a more organised form, notably in the famous Assyrian Dream Book of the seventh century BCE. The scribal practice in Mesopotamia demanded that each dream omen be laid out on a separate line, if necessary continuing on a second indented line of Akkadian cuneiform text. The predictions opened with an ‘if’-clause, following the same pattern as the nightmare omen above and similar to that of the Egyptian predictions. However, unlike the Egyptian omens, those in the Assyrian Dream Book are organised by topics, for instance a topic on going to a series of places. This group first outlines the effects on the dreamer of going to various cities and regions, then to the houses of different categories of people (parents, a gardener, tavern-keeper, sailor or ploughman) and, finally, countryside locations such as an orchard, vegetable garden or sheepfold.¹⁸

Dreams of all classes of people may be considered meaningful, but the same dream may result in different outcomes according to the status of the dreamer. Similarly, the meaning may vary due to variations in the description of the symbolic image seen in the dream. For example, the colour of an object may affect the interpretation. A black dog and a white dog will have different meanings. The behaviour of the image will also impact the significance; if ants are seen heading north, it will not mean the same as if they were heading south.¹⁹ The origin of the image can also affect the interpretation; water from a river or well indicates wealth, whereas water from a ditch is a sign of quarrels. If the dreamer is given water from a canal, ‘the storm-god will flood his harvest’.²⁰ However, some symbolism is more consistent. The right side is invariably associated with being good or fortunate, while the left side is said to be bad or unfortunate, and it does not matter what other variables are present.²¹

Near Eastern Epiphany Dreams

Egyptian and Mesopotamian guides to dreams concern the dreams received by people from a variety of classes. However, epiphanies in which the dreamer saw and/or heard deities or their messengers were usually the preserve of those in authority. The dreamer is normally described as falling deeply asleep and then hearing a message delivered in a clear manner by a divine figure or a representative of the deity, who stood at the dreamer's head. The dream's message was readily understood by the dreamer and required no interpretation. The auditory element was of key importance. There might or might not be a description of the speaker's appearance. In the dream records of the Hebrew Bible it was common for only a memory of the speaker's voice to be recorded.

However, at times there was a visual element even in the biblical accounts, a notable case being that of Jacob's dream at Bethel, recorded in Genesis 28. On this occasion Jacob famously saw angels ascending and descending a ladder between earth and heaven and heard God addressing him directly: ‘I am the Lord, God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac.’²² Nevertheless, the most vivid accounts of dream visions accompanying spoken messages have survived in the reports of theophanies from Mesopotamia. A striking example is that of an Assyrian priest, who dreamt of the goddess Ishtar entering his room, ‘quivers hanging at her right and left, holding the bow in her (one) hand, the sharp sword drawn (ready) for battle’.²³ Other accounts described a figure of amazing size and beauty, towering over the dreamer.²⁴ On some occasions the speaker informed the dreamer of divine favour, perhaps announcing a forthcoming victory or acquisition of power; sometimes the deity or messenger entered into a dialogue with the dreamer, in which case the dreamer was expected to respond in a spirit of submission and obedience. Across the ancie...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Seeing Gods and Angels before the Rise of Islam
• 2. The Prophet as Model Visionary
• 3. Scholars and Saints in the Path of the Prophet
• 4. The Dream Must Be Interpreted
• 5. Muslims Dreaming of Christians, Christians Dreaming of Muslims
• 6. ‘And if a Woman Dreams’
• 7. Envisioning God and His Prophet
• 8. Contacting the Righteous Dead
• 9. Visionary Traditions and the Impact of Modernity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back Cover