The phenomenon of true dreams should have presented the Muslim, on the other hand, with a heaven-sent opportunity for demonstrating the validity of Islam’s spiritual interpretation of reality, of the universe and of human nature. Yet, apart from the rare authentic and erudite Sufi master, of the likes of Dr. Muhammad Iqbal, Muslim scholars living in this modern age of the ascendancy of the West have not produced, from an Islamic psychological perspective, any theoretical work on the phenomenon of dreams. Work is being done by scholars trained in western psychology (i.e., psychology as a discipline which was developed in western secular materialist civilization), but because they are operating in a completely secular scientific framework they suffer from significant limitations and handicaps.
We wish to pose the question: Why has this great opportunity for
using true dreams as a means of demolishing the western epistemology been
missed by Islamic scholarship and by the so called great contemporary Islamic reform
movements? Iqbal has observed that religious thought in Islam has been practically stationary during
the last five hundred years.1
This is a statement that should truly alarm Muslims and jolt
their minds to enquiring for the cause of this intellectual lethargy in our
religious thought. Our view is that a scientific and ‘Protestant’ version of
Islam emerged as a consequence of the intellectual impact of the western colonial
rule over Muslims. That scientific
‘Protestant’ version of Islam was the child of the very western epistemology
which was essentially directed towards negating the possibility or validity of
knowledge from any source which transcends scientific observation.
Islamic Protestantism emerged in Saudi Arabia in the form of the
Wahhabi movement and proceeded to launch a fierce and relentless attack
on Sufism. It was quite clear
that authentic Sufism had lost its intellectual dynamism and creativity and,
like everything else in Islamic civilization, was in a state of drift. Iqbal took note of that failure in a scathing
passage in his famous work from which we have been quoting:
“The technique of medieval mysticism by which religious life, in
its higher manifestations, developed itself both in the East and in the West,
has now practically failed. And in the
Muslim East it has, perhaps, done far greater havoc than anywhere else. Far from reintegrating the forces of the
average man’s inner life, and thus preparing him for participation in the march
of history, it has taught him a false renunciation and made him perfectly
contented with his ignorance and spiritual thralldom.” 2
The enlightened student of Iqbal, (Maulana) Dr. F. R.
Ansari, also points to degeneration in Sufism, but warns against throwing away
the baby with the bath-water:
“With the awful degeneration of Muslim society, due to certain
historical factors well-known to students of Islamic
history, the understanding as well as the practice of tasawwuf also has degenerated
in more dimensions than one. Also its
name has been misused for certain wrong notions and ideas in certain
quarters. In spite of that, however, the
denial to the Islamic religious quest (i.e., tasawwuf) of its rightful
place amounts to the very negation of Islam. Also, interpreting tasawwuf in terms of
mysticism projected by other religions is a flagrant violation of Truth.” 3
Sufism suffered the fate of being high-jacked by professional
opportunists who perfected the art of psychological suggestion to introduce
variant practices through which they established veritable spiritual serfdom's.
But in the process of purging Islamic beliefs and practices of all that was
perceived as Sufi bid’ah (innovations), the scientific ‘Protestant’
Islamic movement acted as a Trojan horse within the body of Islam allowing the
western epistemology to secularize Islam.
The ‘baby’ was thrown out with the ‘bath water’! That secularized version of Islam was then
declared to be Islamic revivalism. The so-called great Islamic reform movements
proceeded to establish centers of learning and to produce large numbers of scholars
who were intellectually incapable of dealing with the subject of dreams. Worse than that, their zealotry and misguided
attack on authentic Sufism resulted in such inner damage to their own
spiritual personalities that they themselves were now rendered incapable of
themselves being blessed by Allah Most High with continuous good and true
dreams.
But long before the modern materialist West impacted on
religious thought by secularizing it, the world of Islam had experienced the
same phenomenon in the emergence of the Mu’atazilite school of religious
thought in Islam. Iqbal described that
event:
“The Mu’atazilah, conceiving religion merely as a body of
religious doctrines and ignoring it as a vital fact, took no notice of
non-conceptual modes of approaching Reality and reduced religion to a mere
system of logical concepts ending in a purely negative attitude. They failed to see that in the domain of
knowledge - scientific or religious - complete independence of thought from concrete
experience is not possible.” (Iqbal
is here referring to religious experience, among other things, and religious
experience includes true dreams). 4
It was the genius of Dr. Muhammad Iqbal that he was able to
distinguish authentic Sufism from its corruptions, and restore authentic
Sufism. It was his genius that he
succeeded in articulating the Sufi epistemology in a manner which demolished
the considerable objections of the scientific, ‘Protestant’, secularly educated
intelligentsia in the modern West as well as in the Muslim world. Had Dr. Muhammad Iqbal studied Islam at
Al-Azhar University in Egypt or at the Deoband and Lucknow Islamic
seminaries in India, he would never have emerged as the great scholar and sage
that he was. And the reason for this was
not limited to his own natural talent but also to the epistemology which he
inherited from authentic Sufism, - an epistemology which scientific
‘Protestant’ Islam could never deliver.
Secular Europe’s scientific method differed from the scientific
method that reached Europe from Muslim Spain. What post-Christian secular
Europe did was to establish a new dogmatic religion that claimed that only that
which could be observed could be the subject of a scientific enquiry. The new dogmatic religion thus fostered
habits of concrete thought that mitigated against the very substance and
life-blood of religion, i.e., religious experience. Europe proceeded to establish a basic dogma, i.e.,
the audacious claim that only ‘scientific’ knowledge was ‘real’ knowledge,
- all else belonged to Disneyland. And
so, the modern religious mind in Europe slowly closed its doors to ‘religious
experience’ and to the study of such phenomena.
The true dream is a religious experience. William James has done an extreme useful
service to religious thought in producing his classical work: ‘Varieties of
Religious Experience’, in which the true dream has a pride of place.
What possible scientific method could there be for examining the
phenomenon of a true dream? Here, for example, is what a true dream can be:
Last night I dreamt that my neighbor’s house was on fire. This morning it was burnt down.
This experience of a true dream cannot possibly be the subject
of a scientific enquiry because secular western psychology, operating with the
new scientific method, cannot transcend observable phenomena. Freud was the perfected product of the new
scientific thinking and, as a consequence, was theoretically incapable of
dealing with the phenomenon of true dreams.
It is precisely because of the great danger posed by the new
western epistemology and the scientific religion which emerges from that
epistemology that Iqbal began his great work, ‘The Reconstruction of
Religious Thought in Islam’ with two very powerfully written
chapters on ‘Knowledge and Religious Experience’ and ‘The Philosophical
Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience’. He followed them up with
another later chapter entitled: ‘Is Religion Possible?’
Iqbal made a valiant effort to respond to the challenge posed by
scientific ‘Protestant’ Islam in its rejection of religious experience as a
source of knowledge. He began his work
by addressing the subject in the Preface of the book itself. We quote him at length so that the reader who
is unfamiliar with his thought, or hitherto incapable of understanding him, may
now be encouraged to study his great work:
“The Qur’an is a book which emphasizes ‘deed’ rather than
‘idea’. There are, however, men to whom
it is not possible organically to assimilate an alien universe by re-living, as
a vital process, that special type of inner experience on which religious faith
ultimately rests. Moreover, modern man, by developing habits of concrete
thought - habits which Islam
itself fostered at least in the earlier stages of its cultural career - has
rendered himself less capable of that experience which he further suspects
because of its liability to illusion.
The more genuine schools of Sufism have, no doubt, done good work in shaping and directing the evolution of religious experience in Islam; but their latter-day representatives, owing to their ignorance of the modern mind, have become absolutely incapable of receiving any fresh inspiration from modern thought and experience. They are perpetuating methods which were created for generations possessing a cultural outlook differing, in many important respects, from our own. ‘Your creation and your resurrection,’ says the Qur’an, ‘are like the creation and resurrection of a single soul.’ A living experience of the kind of biological unity embodied in this verse requires today a method physiologically less violent and psychologically more suitable to a concrete type of mind. In the absence of such a method the demand for a scientific form of religious knowledge is only natural.” 5
The more genuine schools of Sufism have, no doubt, done good work in shaping and directing the evolution of religious experience in Islam; but their latter-day representatives, owing to their ignorance of the modern mind, have become absolutely incapable of receiving any fresh inspiration from modern thought and experience. They are perpetuating methods which were created for generations possessing a cultural outlook differing, in many important respects, from our own. ‘Your creation and your resurrection,’ says the Qur’an, ‘are like the creation and resurrection of a single soul.’ A living experience of the kind of biological unity embodied in this verse requires today a method physiologically less violent and psychologically more suitable to a concrete type of mind. In the absence of such a method the demand for a scientific form of religious knowledge is only natural.” 5
If ever there was a impregnable defense of the Sufi epistemology
articulated in the idiom of modern thought, Iqbal accomplished it. The tragedy since 1938, when Iqbal’s work was
published, is that contemporary Islamic scholarship which has emerged from the
scientific ‘Protestant’ version of Islam has been intellectually incapable of
even understanding these three chapters of Iqbal’s great work.
Dreams are part of a larger whole that may be described as
intuitive experience. Today’s scientific
religion has pitted ‘reason’ or ‘thought’ against ‘intuition’ and depicted them
as opposites. This is the reason why the
modern secularly educated mind either ignores dreams, being incapable of
rationally assimilating such a source of knowledge and experience, or reluctantly
admits them but with an apologetic admission of a flirtation with supernatural superstition. Iqbal took up the challenge and argued the
case for the epistemological validity of ‘intuitive’ knowledge and
experience. He declared:
“ . . . Nor is there any reason to suppose that thought and
intuition are essentially opposed to each other. They spring up from the same root and
complement each other. The one grasps Reality
piecemeal, the other grasps it in its wholeness. The one fixes its gaze on the eternal, the other
on the temporal aspect of reality. The
one is present enjoyment of the whole of Reality; the other aims at traversing
the whole by slowly specifying and closing up the various regions of the whole
for exclusive observation. Both are in
need of each other for mutual rejuvenation.
Both seek visions of the same Reality which reveals itself to them in
accordance with their function in life.
In fact, intuition, as Bergson rightly says, is only a higher kind of
intellect.” 6
It should also be a matter of great significance to our
skeptical readers that the Qur’an itself has chosen to commence its
guidance to humanity by insisting, at the very beginning, (Qur’an,
al Baqarah,2:1) that religious faith is essentially constructed on belief in
that which lies beyond our normal observation, - i.e., beyond the world
of concrete thought (al-ghaib)!
True dreams belong to that world. Indeed
the most profound experience in the life of the Prophet Muhammad sallalahu ‘alaihi wa sallam
was a nocturnal journey (not a dream) into that unseen world, - a journey on which
he was taken in order that he might have direct experience of the
transcendental world. Thus the Qur’an declares:
“He surely saw the greatest of the Signs of his Lord.”
(Qur’an: al-Najm:- 53:18)
Knowledge must be de-secularized if religious Truth is to be
allowed to play the role which only Truth can play. That role is one of restoring human society to the beliefs and
values of authentic religion which alone can anchor mankind in a life of peace,
happiness, fulfillment and success. In order for knowledge to be desecularized
we need to demonstrate that knowledge can come, and has come, from a transcendental
source, - a source which transcends normal experience. Only when knowledge has
been desecularized can the modern mind apply itself seriously to restoring the
life of the sacred. The late outstanding
Islamic scholar, Ismail Faruqi (ra), was attempting to do
precisely that, i.e., to desecularize knowledge. Unfortunately he coined the term ‘Islamization
of Knowledge’ and in doing so the essential goal of desecularizing
knowledge was obscured and eventually lost by those who inherited his noble
mission in the cause of Truth.
A serious study on the phenomenon of dreams by an erudite Muslim
psychologist can make a significant contribution towards de-secularizing
knowledge and redirecting thought to the recognition of the primacy of the
sacred, and to the understanding of the essential harmony in the relationship
between ‘material’ form and ‘spiritual’ substance in the external
universe and the human phenomenon.
Islamic scholarship of the quality and caliber of Dr. Muhammad
Iqbal is required for undertaking such a study that we describe as: The
Metaphysics of the True Dream.
It is our hope that this booklet will provoke Muslim
psychologists who have a profound interest in Islam learning, to devote more
thought and attention to the subject, and to direct their intellectual and
spiritual energy towards pursuing that strategic goal which we have described.
