The Phenomenon - DREAMS IN ISLAM

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     

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.

Source: Dreams in Islam by Imran Hosein
To be continued ....