First, swallow the world: a compendium of Muslim dreams of completion – the Maqāmāt, Ibn ‘Arabī, and Fāris al-Shidyāq

Abstract

This paper explores several views on dreams and dream interpretation in Arabic and Islamic traditions. The subject has been central to Islam since the prophet interpreted the dreams of his companions after morning prayers in Medina. In a hadīth, Muhammad claimed that auspicious dreams are ‘one forty-sixth part of prophecy.’ Badī’ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī, the tenth-century originator of the popular collections of trickster tales known as maqāmāt, attributed the urge to roam the world collecting ruses and anecdotes to troubling dreams, but he includes no dreams in his tales. It is not until the thirteenth century that al-Saraqustī, an Andalusian imitator, includes dreams and dream interpretations in a maqāmāt collection. While the dreams in Saraqustī are exercises in narrative unreliability, submerged in layers of duplicity and doubt, the prolific metaphysician Muhyiddīn Ibn ‘Arabī generated tens of thousands of pages based on a single vision while circling the ka’bah. The visionary writer included complex analyses of the relationship between matter and imagination within his works, many of which were received in dreams. Fāris al-Shidyāq, in his nineteenth-century novel al-Sāq ‘alā al-Sāq, draws again on the maqāmāt and the Arabic tradition of ‘irrational excess.’ When the Fāriyaq, his fictionalized alter-ego, interprets the dreams of Christian missionaries in Malta, the dream interpreter now becomes a vehicle through which the writer is able to mock hypocrisy, ignorance, and patrimony.