Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies

10. Behind the Veil of the Unseen: Dreams and Dreaming in the Classical and Medieval Sufi Tradition

CHAPTER 10 Behind the Veil of the Unseen Dreams and Dreaming in the Classical and Medieval Sufi Tradition Erik S. Ohlander As the now rather passé Victorian-era anthropologist E.B. Tylor famously stated, the very origin of religion itself is to be found in two universal human experiences: death and dreams.1 For Tylor it was these two basic experiences that, as rationally interpreted by his imagined first “savage philosopher” in the mists of prehistory, lay at the root of “animism” and, in turn, animism at the root of what would eventually evolve into “religion” proper. Although Tylor’s unilinear model of cultural evolution is now certainly little more than a quaint “survival” of his own evolutionary moment, his attempt to position death and dreams as major leitmotifs within and across the wide sweep of human religious discourse is not. It is the latter that is of concern here. Although perhaps no longer serviceable as an overarching category in the comparative study of religion, a sizable body of recent anthropological, historical, literary, psychological, and related scholarship on dreams and dreaming explicated in both localized and crosscultural religious contexts has set out to theorize the implications of Tylor’s observation.2 The upshot of this literature, divergent as its conclusions may be, is that dreams and dreaming seem to be prominent enough in religious discourses to demand the attention of those who see such discourses as potential structuring elements in human social, cultural, political, and intellectual life in the first place. In this, 199 200 Erik S. Ohlander the Islamic tradition has received its fair share of attention,3 and if nothing else, the sheer number of premodern Muslim oneirocritical texts alone evince the relative historical importance of the discourse on dreams and dreaming within it.4 This brief inquiry seeks to contribute to this discussion by offering a few interconnected observations on the admittedly vast subject of dreams and dreaming among Sufis, focusing in particular on three key markers attendant to what might be called a foundational Sufi oneirology that emerged over the course of the fourth/tenth through the early eighth/fourteenth centuries. The first of these three markers is the “communicativeness of dreams.” By this is meant simply that Sufi writers of the period construed dreams and dreaming as a special medium for the disclosure or communication of knowledge otherwise inaccessible. Second, there is the marker of what might be called the “pragmatic nature” of dreams and dreaming, which means that the particular mystical oneirology associated with the period viewed dreams and dreaming as a phenomenon with explicit practicable bearing on wayfaring along the Sufi path. The final marker is that of the “evidentiary value” of dreams and dreaming. Here, classical and medieval Sufi authors saw dreams and dreaming as proof of status and authority, in particular in relation to the claim that among all the social-sectarian groups (†awå˘if) comprising the Muslim body politic, it was the Sufis themselves who were the true “heirs to the prophets” (wurråth al-anbiyå˘). Together, these three markers delimit the scope of a wider oneiric discourse from which later Sufi oneirocritics would draw inspiration. Interpretive and Methodological Considerations Those familiar with Sufi literature well know that dreams and dreaming have long played a role in Sufi constructions of the Muslim mystical subject, serving as both a salient marker of communal identity and positioning in hagiography and a significant object of experience and analysis in theoretical texts.5 However, as with other discrete clusters of mystical discourse falling within the descriptive ambit of Sufism, the relatively wide attestation of dream interpretation manuals, visionary diaries,6 and associated literatures emerging from Sufi milieux in the later-medieval through the early-modern period seems to have depended heavily on a discourse of dreams developed and systematized in the classical and medieval Sufi tradition. In an effort to define and explicate the contours of this foundational discourse, this inquiry seeks 201 Behind the Veil of the Unseen to attend to a phenomenology of dreams and dreaming expressed in a representative group of Sufi texts, comprising both theoretical and hagiographic materials, composed or compiled over the course of the fourth/tenth through the early eighth/fourteenth centuries.The method used was simple: Once a fixed body of texts was chosen,7 they were then probed for explicit references to dreams and dreaming with the goal of...