Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies

12. Narrating Sight: Dreaming as Visual Training in Persianate Sufi Hagiography

CHAPTER 12 Narrating Sight Dreaming as Visual Training in Persianate Sufi Hagiography Shahzad Bashir This chapter focuses on the fact that when we discuss dreams, the objects of our analyses are not psychic experiences but narratives that purport to relate such experiences. My particular concern here is with representations of dreams in premodern Sufi literature that occur in the context of formalized, genre-bound texts with a highly modulated relationship to the social contexts in which they were produced. I argue that dream narratives need to be treated as literary artifacts placed strategically within larger textual arrangements. It is only after we have established the relationships of dream narratives with other elements of textual representation within a particular work or a genre that we can begin to elaborate on social or ideational functions that can be ascribed to them. Dream narratives are a common feature of Sufi hagiographic literature, where they perform both descriptive and prescriptive functions .1 I believe that Sufi hagiography needs to be taken more seriously as a kind of foundational premodern Islamic literature because it constitutes our major access to social contexts for which, otherwise, we have little more than highly theoretical treatises. However, hagiographical texts cannot be taken as straightforward descriptions of the lives they purport to depict. Such texts need parsing at the level of elements such as genre, framing, imagery, predominant motifs, and so on.2 Descriptions of purported dream experiences provide a particularly 233 234 Shahzad Bashir useful point of concentration in this regard, with the proviso that we establish correlations between what they contain and other narrative elements of the texts in question in order to draw out larger social and ideological currents running through the literature. This is the task I undertake in this chapter in a limited form. Dreams and Sufi Hagiography In what follows, I concentrate on some dream narratives in the extensive Naqshband¥ hagiographical work Rasha÷åt-i ˜ayn al-÷ayåt (“Dewdrops from the Elixir of Life”) in the context of the ways in which its author narrates visual experience in general. The Rasha÷åt, penned by ˜Al¥ b. ¡usayn Kåshif¥ “|af¥” (d. 1532–1533), is a valuable text for this exercise for a number of different reasons. Compiled at the beginning of the sixteenth century CE, it relies on hagiographical narratives pertaining to Khwåjagån¥-Naqshband¥ lineages as well as other hagiographical works produced in previous decades and centuries . In this sense, the Rasha÷åt is a summation of a literary paradigm central to Sufi intellectual and social life in Persianate societies during the Mongol and T¥m¨rid periods (ca. 1200–1500). But the Rasha÷åt also is a compilation with a deliberate and determinate purpose. It aims to promote the figure of Khwåja ˜Ubaydullåh A±rår (d. 1490) as a Sufi protagonist whose life represents the aggregation of all Sufi virtues.|af¥’s investment in glorifying A±rår is the underlying driving current that makes the Rasha÷åt a work with particular rhetorical ends embedded throughout its narrative. My analyses in this chapter presume that what |af¥ chooses to include in his work is not an unmediated reflection of Sufi lives. Instead, his choices signify a determined agenda with respect to the particular Sufi ideas and practices he wishes to promote within a larger socio-intellectual dialogue alive in his times. My point of departure is that, for |af¥ and other authors of Persianate hagiographic works, accounts of dreams amount to narrative tools designed to underscore their overall authorial agenda. On the one hand, these authors can set dreams apart from quotidian vision on the basis of presumed variance in states of consciousness. Seeing a thing with one’s eyes while being awake can be inflected differently than seeing something with the eye of the mind while the eyelids are shut. On the other hand, the overall morphology and ideological import of dream narratives correspond closely with other ways in which vision operates in these texts. I suggest that “seeing” in these works is understood primarily metaphorically, and the ways 235 Narrating Sight in which this is supposed to happen is depicted quite similarly with respect to dreams and ordinary experience. Most importantly, the texts portray particular sights and ways of seeing as especially beneficial for progress on the Sufi path. What is described to the reader as having been seen, whether...