First, swallow the world: a compendium of Muslim dreams of completion – the Maqāmāt, Ibn ‘Arabī, and Fāris al-Shidyāq

Abstract

This paper explores several views on dreams and dream interpretation in Arabic and Islamic traditions. The subject has been central to Islam since the prophet interpreted the dreams of his companions after morning prayers in Medina. In a hadīth, Muhammad claimed that auspicious dreams are ‘one forty-sixth part of prophecy.’ Badī’ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī, the tenth-century originator of the popular collections of trickster tales known as maqāmāt, attributed the urge to roam the world collecting ruses and anecdotes to troubling dreams, but he includes no dreams in his tales. It is not until the thirteenth century that al-Saraqustī, an Andalusian imitator, includes dreams and dream interpretations in a maqāmāt collection. While the dreams in Saraqustī are exercises in narrative unreliability, submerged in layers of duplicity and doubt, the prolific metaphysician Muhyiddīn Ibn ‘Arabī generated tens of thousands of pages based on a single vision while circling the ka’bah. The visionary writer included complex analyses of the relationship between matter and imagination within his works, many of which were received in dreams. Fāris al-Shidyāq, in his nineteenth-century novel al-Sāq ‘alā al-Sāq, draws again on the maqāmāt and the Arabic tradition of ‘irrational excess.’ When the Fāriyaq, his fictionalized alter-ego, interprets the dreams of Christian missionaries in Malta, the dream interpreter now becomes a vehicle through which the writer is able to mock hypocrisy, ignorance, and patrimony.

Keywords:

• Dreaming
• Dream interpretation
• Classical Arabic Literature
• Maqamat
• Ibn 'Arabi
• Nahdah
• Faris al-Shidyaq
• Ibn Qutaybah

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Brad Fox is a PhD candidate in English and Medieval Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He teaches creative writing and literature at the City College of New York.

ORCID

Brad Fox http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3952-9107

Notes

1 In ‘Abduh (1924, 229–230). Translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

2 See Ibn Qutaybah (2001) and Kister (1974).

3 Ṣaḥiḥ al-Bukhārī, Vol. 9, Book 87, Ḥadīth 112.

4 Saj’ is characterized by irregular, sometimes rapidly shifting rhyme schemes, written without line breaks, which do not follow the detailed metric patterns of Arabic poetry.

5 On the manuscript tradition, see the forthcoming study by Bilal Orfali.

6 This rule restricts the writer to using, for example, ح س and ر – that is s, h, and r, but not خ ج ش and ز – that is sh, jh, kh, and z. There is sense (حس ) but no life (حاية ). There is generosity (كرم ) but no time (زمان ).

7 For example, Ibn Ishāq’s eighth-century Sīrat Rasūl Allāh – the first biography of Muḥammad – describes the prophet roused by Jibrīl: ‘He came to me … while I was asleep, with a coverlet of brocade whereon was some writing, and said, “Read!”’ (Guillaume 1980, 106).

8 Qur’an 12:4.

9 See Saraqustī translator James Monroe’s The Art of Badīʻ Az-Zamān Al-Hamadhānī as Picaresque Narrative (1983).

10 A widely cited line, ascribed to the legendary early dream interpreter Ibn Sīrīn, claims ‘Whatever the deceased tells you in sleep is true, for he stays in the world of truth’ (quoted in Kinberg 1986, 296).

11 For example, the Sūrat al-Shu’ara reads: ‘And poets – the straying follow them.’ Qur’an 26: 224.

12 See: Affīfi (2002, 110) and Addas (1993, 74).

13 Qur’an 46:11.

14 See, for example, Austin (1980, 230).

15 See, for example, Affīfi (2002, 177): ‘ قد ذكرنا في الفتوحات أن الأثر لا يكون إلا للمعدوم لا للموجود .’

16 ‘ حضرة الخيال .’ See: Affīfi (2002, 99).

17 On the Nahḍah, see Patel (2013).

18 The madness of Davies’ task is on full display here – the arcane term ‘al-ḥāriqah,’ for example, is rendered as ‘the woman the clefts at the head of whose womb are narrow and who holds herself rigid on her side for the man’ (Al-Shidyāq 2015, Vols. 1-2, 26).

19 Several chapters are referred to as maqāmāt, and an appendix contains a ‘Table Showing the Mistakes in the Probative Verses in the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī’ (Al-Shidyāq 2015, Vols. 3-4, 448).

20 The irresistible rendering by Davies of ‘Sayyid Dhahūl bin Ghafūl’ might also be, for example, ‘Sir Mindless son of Heedless.’

21 A reader of Ibn ‘Arabī will inevitably be reminded of the ‘superogatory acts’ of devotion, by which a Sufi invites God to be ‘the hearing, the seeing’ (for example, see Affīfi 2002, 55).

22 While the missionary organization Shidyāq worked for was Anglo-American, its staff included European Protestants as well. According to Davies, the model for Flummox son of Lummox was Christoph Schlienz, a German missionary who at some point was rendered insane by a strike to the head and took to walking naked through the Maltese streets (Al-Shidyāq 2015, Vols. 3-4, 501).

23 Although, as we saw in the earlier chapters set in Lebanon and Egypt, he was enthusiastic about mocking paternalism from any source.