DREAMS IN ISLAM
Introduction
“When you smile,
You do not smile alone,
For the flowers in the fields are always
smiling!
And when you sing,
You do not sing alone,
For the birds, and the river, and the rain,
and the wind, also sing!
And when you laugh,
You do not laugh alone,
For are’nt the children always laughing?
But when you weep,
With a weeping beyond tears;
When the heart weeps,
It weeps alone!”
I have chosen to introduce the subject of ‘Dreams
in Islam’ with this poem that I wrote many moons ago, because it clearly
depicts the heart as something that not only ‘sees’, and ‘feels’, and ‘knows’,
but does so in a manner which is more profound than all our other
experiences. Dreams belong to the
heart. Tell me your dreams, and I will
tell you who you are.
In addressing the subject of dreams we are, in fact, studying
the heart and, as a consequence we are probing into the very depths of human
nature and conduct. Some dreams are
divine gifts to the heart, and such gifts come only when the
heart is sound, healthy, innocent, and penetrated with faith in Allah Most High. Other dreams represent attacks on
the heart. And still other dreams are
either medicine for the heart, or windows to the heart that allow
us to see our own hearts.
The Qur’an informs
us that Allah Most High punishes the disbelievers by sealing their ‘hearts’, and
their ‘hearing’, and by placing veils before their ‘eyes’. (Qur’an, al-Baqara, 2:7). As a consequence such people cannot ‘see’!
We live, today, in a world in which the overwhelming majority of
mankind, including some Muslims cannot ‘see’.
The only time a believer can be certain that he can ‘see’ is when he
sees in dreams! But most people no
longer understand this.
A Muslim brother who is actively engaged in the mission of Islam
in the islands of the Caribbean once wrote to me to advise that a Muslim should
not attach any importance to dreams. So opposed was he to the subject that he
felt that attaching importance to dreams was a form of Shirk (i.e.,
a form of compromise in the exclusive worship of the One God, Allah).
Instead of being deviated by dreams, he advised, one should devote one’s
attention to direct contact with Allah Most High.
In fact the religious mind which produced that kind of opinion
is new to this ummah (religious community) and has emerged as a
consequence of the impact of the secularization of thought and knowledge by
today’s dominant western materialist civilization. That secularism, which led
to materialism, and which sometimes emerges in the form of a new godless
religion called humanism, seeks support
from science and rationalism, and is distinctly uncomfortable with all that
relates to transcendental experience.
The true dream is most certainly a transcendental experience! It is by design, and not by accident, that
the modern godless age has relegated the phenomenon of true dreams to academic
and intellectual obscurity. This is
because the true dream cannot be explained using a new Western epistemology
that is essentially directed towards negating the possibility or validity of
knowledge from any source that transcends scientific observation.
