Dreaming in Christianity and Islam: Culture, Conflict, and Creativity

Foreword

x i FOREWORD The sharing of dreams and dream interpretations is a tradition that runs deep within many communities and cultures the world over. Within those communities where dreaming has been most valued, there is a belief that an individual’s dream is like an epistle from God that benefits the entire community. This has been particularly true in contexts where an individual ’s sense of social responsibility is the care of the entire community. The dream is understood to be a message that reflects the condition of and hope for the community. Resident in the consciousness of most Americans are these words: “I have a dream.” In what have become the immortal words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we recall, and are called to, the dream of liberty, equality, peace, and human dignity. This dream has been associated with the American Dream, but its inspiring hope goes deeper than the existence of the United States of America. King’s inspiring words, framed around the language of dreaming, emphasized living a better tomorrow. His proclamation of “the dream,” however, was more than making use of dream language as an inspiring metaphor to capture America’s imagination. King was sharing his actual “vision of the night” that came to him as a declaration of hope from the God of his ancestors. He believed in the power of dreaming, and many were inspired to change because they also believed in the transformative power of dreaming. Yet, even as King was a prophet to America, his voice represented but one of the great traditions of the Abrahamic religions. Within the boundaries of the United States of America during those turbulent days of the 1960s, there was another prophet from a branch of Islam. El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz raised his voice to proclaim the American dream to be a vision of terror, a nightmare that continues to torment the hopeless people of the nation. Shabazz, also known as Malcolm X, was haunted by images that warned the nation to submit to Allah or face the consequences of faithlessness. Through his conversations with the Divine, he became persuaded that the nightmare could be efficacious for inspiring the unity of all human beings the world x ii LEE H. BU T LER JR . over. Consequently, even his interpretation of the dream as a nightmare declared the inspired hope of liberty, equality, peace, and human dignity. What was true for both voices was a belief that the Almighty continues to speak to people, and people are inspired, through the language of dreams. They both believed that if we would just listen to what the Spirit has to say, our lives can be transformed and our nation diverted from ultimate destruction. They both believed that sharing the dream can communicate the human condition and express hope for the global community. Dreaming in Christianity and Islam is a call, not unlike the prophetic calling of two great voices from the past, to take heed to what the Spirit has to say to the peoples of the world. This book is a vision of hope that says: Although our interpretations of the visions may differ, there is but one Creator of the universe who desires the liberty, equality, peace, and dignity of all living souls. Everyone who values dreaming agrees that a properly interpreted dream can promote life, just as a misinterpreted dream can lead to destruction. I further believe that interpretation is also a matter of social location. Our life circumstances inform our interpretive engagement with dream symbols . While the same dream can be interpreted differently (like King’s and Shabazz’s interpretations of the American Dream), both interpretations can provoke the same hopeful purposes of the Divine. The book of Job describes dreaming as messages from the Spirit. “For God does speak—now one way, now another—though man may not perceive it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on men as they slumber in their beds, he may speak in their ears and terrify them with warnings, to turn man from wrongdoing and keep him from pride, to preserve his soul from the pit, his life from perishing by the sword” (Job 33:1–18). If we take seriously the holy declaration of Job about dreaming, a dream, no matter how we experience the vision, is divinely inspired for the betterment of humanity. Dreaming is a soulful experience. As such, dreaming participates in the...