Dreams that matter: Egyptian landscapes of the imagination 9780520258501, 9780520947856, 9780520258518

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Dreams That Matter

The publisher gratetully acknowledges the generous support of the General Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

Dreams That Matter Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination AMIRA MITTERMAIER

University of California Press BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www-ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2011 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Maittermaier, Amira, 1974-.

Dreams that matter : Egyptian landscapes of the imagination / Armura Mittermaier.

p. om. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-25850-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-520-25851-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Dreams—-Egypt. 2.Egypt--Religion. 3. Dream interpretation—Egypt. 4. Dreams—Religious aspects— Islam—case studies. 5. Ethnopsychology—Egypt. I. Title. BELO7E.M455 2011

154.6'3096216-——de22 2010020056 Manufactured in the United States of America

20 49 18 47 16 15 4 13 12 11

to 9 & 7 © 5 4 3 2 4

This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

Contents

List of lustrations vii Acknowledgments ix On Transliterations and Translations xii

Prelude KV

INTRODUCTION: STUDYING DREAMS

IN UNDREAMY TIMES x

1. DREAM TROUBLE 34 2. THRESHOLDS OF INTERPRETATION 54

3. SEEING THE (IN)VISIBLE 84

4. POETRY AND PROPHECY 112 5. THE ETHICS OF THE VISITATIONAL DREAM 140

6. THE ROYAL ROAD INTO THE UNKNOWN 173

Notes 241 Glossary 265 Bibliography 269 Index 289

7. VIRTUAL REALITIES, VISIONARY REALITIES 204

AFTERWORD: ON THE POLITICS OF DREAMING 232

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Illustrations

1. Metaphorical dreams: hosting the World Cup in 2010 9

2. Shaykh Nabil at the threshold 59

3. Inside [bn Sirin’s shrine 65

4. Shaykh Salah al-Din al-OQiisi 113 5. Atomb’s opening, or its “eye” 145

6. Women visiting al-Sayyida Zaynab 155 7. Freud’s Traumdeutung in Arabic translation 178 8. Two psychologists interpreting dreams on television 197

g. Adream booklet sold on Cairo’s streets 210

10. “Allah” on a piece of bread 222

Vil

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Acknowledgments

At some point during my fieldwork in Cairo, probably on a particularly hot, loud, and frustrating day, I jotted down a reminder in my notebook. | wrote that once back in New York—-while sitting at my desk surrounded by the comfort of my home, with a cup of coffee next to me and my laptop in front of me-—1I shouldn’t forget what a pain fieldwork was at times. The

tratfic, the pollution, the mosquitoes, the heat, the tense political climate, and, maybe more than anything else, the many hours spent waiting for

and running after people—all these frustrations, I insisted, should not be erased in my ethnography. Now, years later, sitting in my office at the University of Toronto, finalizing the last bits and pieces of the book that has grown out of my dissertation, and on my third cup of coftee today, | miss Cairo. Certainly not the everyday annoyances but the people I came to know, rely on, learn from, laugh with, and occasionally argue with. These are the people | want to thank first.

That my assumptions and beliefs were repeatedly shaken up in the field I owe most to Shaykh Qusi and his community. | hope this book can stand as a small token of gratitude tor their many stories, trust, and triendship. I also owe special thanks to Shaykh Mustafa for alli the time he spent patiently answering my questions and for letting new questions arise through our conversations; to Shaykh Hanafi for introducing me to his vast library on dream interpretation and for sharing his thoughts on the art of interpreting dreams in the age of television; and to Shaykh Nabil for the many teas, yansiins, and coffees, for allowing me to witness his interpretive and counseling work, and for his sense of humor. Likewise, Iam deeply grateful to Madame Salwa Alshebeny, who quickly

became much more than an “informant.” I thank her for taking me to countless saint shrines in Islamic Cairo and the City of the Dead, for teaching me so much about the saints, and for distributing rice pudding at one of iX

x / Acknowledgments the shrines after I had passed my dissertation defense. Another informantturned-friend is Hassan Surour, who generously gave me of his time and who gracefully navigated being a friend, research assistant, and teacher all at once. Without Hassan’s company and his occasional attempts to help me come up with a clearer plan, tieldwork would have been more difficult, more alienating, and certainly less enjoyable. Egypt also would be an entirely different place for me without ‘Abdelnagy Sakout, who had the pleasant habit of showing up in Cairo whenever I was feeling discouraged. He and the entire Sakout family, both in Cairo and in Hurghada, have made Egypt feel like a second (or third) home to me. I further wish to thank my relatives Soheir Taraman, ‘Abd al-Aziz El] Desouky, and Mohamed Abd El-Wahhab for their support and hospitality; Sahar Mansour for her cheerful friendship; Dr. Husayn ‘Abd al-Qadir for talking me through the local history of psychoanalysis; Rasha Badr and her family tor the many meals and conversations; Walid Gharib and Huda al~Hussaini for helping me transcribe recordings; Khaled Sakout for introducing me to healers in Upper Egypt;

Muhammad Gaber and Shaykh Hisham for our uniorgettable hourlong conversations under the stars of Qurna; and ‘Umar El-Gendy tor his patient but passionate explanations and for all the stories he has shared with me. For institutional support and for allowing me to escape occasionally into the shielded oasis that is the American University in Cairo, I thank Elizabeth Coker, Farouk Sendiony, and the late Cynthia Nelson.

Guidance and inspiration throughout my years in graduate school at Columbia University (and beyond it) were provided by my dissertation adviser, Brinkley Messick, who first introduced me to the field of anthro-

pology when I was an exchange student at the University of Michigan and who continuously renewed my excitement about the discipline in the years to come; Lila Abu-Lughod, who commented generously on chapter drafts and pushed me to think more carefully about the social life of dreams; Michael Taussig, whose work has long inspired me to marvel at the strangeness of the seemingly ordinary (and the ordinariness of the seemingly strange) and who widened my vision of what ethnographic writing can be; Brian Larkin, who nurtured and guided my deeper interest in the effects of mediation; and Vincent Crapanzano, who offered crucial input both through his close reading of my work and through his own writings. To all of them I am deeply grateful. Numerous colleagues and friends at Columbia University, the University of Toronto, and elsewhere helped me at various stages of this work. Among them are Hussein Agrama, Talal Asad, Deirdre de la Cruz, Narges Erami,

Katherine P. Ewing, Nadia Fadil, Sherine Hamdy, Richard Kernaghan,

Acknowledgments / — xi Michael Lambek, Andrea Muehlebach, Mara Naaman, Anthony Shenoda, Emilio Spadola, Steffen Strohmenger, and Jason Throop. Katie KilroyMarac, Pamela Klassen, and Joshua Dubler read the entire manuscript and

gave me the invaluable gift of thinking through my materials with me. Jess Bier and William Christian Jr. went over the final draft with unimaginable care and attentiveness. Immensely helpful comments were also provided by Stetania Pandolto, Charles Hirschkind, Dale Eickelman, and one anonymous reader. Finally, | wish to thank my editors at the University of California Press, Stan Holwitz, Emily Park, and Reed Malcolm. The research and writing of this book have benefited from the support of a number of institutions and grantors, including Columbia University, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, a Newcombe Doctoral Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, a Mellon Fellowship

in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, a Connaught Start-Up Grant, and the University of Toronto. I thank all these

institutions for their support. Related aspects of this study can be found in the International Journal of Middle East Studies (Mittermaier 2007), Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam (Mittermaier 2008), and After Pluralism: Reimagining Modes of Religious Engagement (see Mittermaier, forthcoming). Participants at the SIAS workshop “The Vision-Thing: Studying Divine Intervention,” held in Palo Alto in July 2007 and in Budapest in July 2008,

as well as the audiences at the Kevorkian Center Research Workshop at New York University, the Anthropology Monday Seminar at the University of Chicago, the Human-in-Difference Workshop at Concordia University, the Social-Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology Discussion Series at the University of Toronto, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and UCLA's Mind, Medicine, and Culture Discussion Group all offered critical feedback that helped me sharpen and refine my arguments. More than I can adequately express | am grateful to Alejandra Gonzalez Jimenez for her unfaltering support, her astute observations, and her thor-

ough and patient engagement with my project. I also wish to thank my sister, Mona Hein, and brother-in-law, Dave Hein, for their support from afar and for accepting that | have found an intellectual home on this side of the Atlantic; my father, Dr. Norbert Mittermaier, who has nurtured my interest in philosophy for as long as I can remember; and my mother, Raita Mittermaier, who oftered invaluable help during my fieldwork and is the reason | am engaging with Egypt in the first place. Most of all, I thank my parents tor believing in me throughout. It is to them that [ wish to dedicate this book.

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On Transliterations and Translations

In a sense, this book consists of the traces of multiple translations: from dream experience to memory; from memory to telling; from telling to interpretation; from Arabic to English (sometimes with German in between); trom handwritten scribbles (and occasionally drawings) to typed tieldnotes;

from fieldnotes to multiple drafts to dissertation to even more drafts to book manuscript to the book that you are holding in your hands; from my interlocutors’ conceptual frameworks to my own and ultimately to those of my readers. Yet, following Walter Benjamin (1968b), one might say that my task in writing this book was not to translate my interlocutors’ stories into academic English but rather to decenter our conceptual frameworks

through translating them into my interlocutors’ dream vocabularies. Benjamin cautions us against a domesticating kind of translation, one that too quickly seeks refuge in familiarity. Instead, he says, we should dwell in the sometimes uncomfortable space of in-betweenness.

One way of reminding the reader of this in-betweenness is to transliterate certain terms instead of translating them. When transliterating trom classical Arabic, | have largely adopted the system outlined in the International Journal of Middle East Studies. When transcribing from Egyptian colloquial Arabic, | moditied the 1J/MES system slightly to convey

a sense of colloquial speech, partly borrowing trom the Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic by el-Said Badawi and Martin Hinds (1986). For the sake of readability, | have omitted diacritical marks, with the exception of the ‘ayn (J and the hamza (’), for my interlocutors’ names (e.g., Rashid instead of Rashid). For all other names | mark the ‘ayn, hamza, and long vowels only (e.g., al-Qardawi instead of al-Qardawi). Some names of well-known personalities, such as ‘Abd al-Nasser, place names, as well as terms with common English spellings, such as Qur’an, are preserved as such. Xill

xiv of On Transliterations and Translations Uniess otherwise noted, all translations from Arabic are my own. Again attempting to retain as many traces as possible, | often give the English equivalent for key terms and provide the Arabic in parentheses. Frequently used Arabic terms are listed in the glossary. (The prefix al-, as in al-bdtin, is a definite article; this term would be listed under the letter b.) For words

that lose too much of their meaning in translation, I alternate between the Arabic term and an English approximation throughout the book. For Quranic verses, | generally use Muhammad Asad’s translations. Plurals of Arabic words are in most cases indicated by adding an s to the singular form, such as hadiths and shaykhs. Ali dates follow the Common Era.

In order to protect my interlocutors’ privacy I have changed most names, with the exception of publicly known figures who spoke under the assumption that their names would be recorded, and with the exception of those who wanted to be named. Ultimately, regardless of whether the dreamers’ names are included, it is the dreams themselves (or rather their traces) that have a story to tell.

Prelude

An open space. It might be the desert. Men and women, maybe fifteen in total, dressed in strange khaki uniforms. | recognize them. They’re Shaykh Qusi’s followers.

I watch as they take small metal tubes in their hands, raise them to their faces, and push them into their eyes, all the way in, until the tubes disappear. Their movements are gentle but determined. Only round, white, inward-turned eyebalis remain in the place where their eyes used to be. Next their shaykh hands them batteries, which they swallow. That's why they see, | think. That’s the secret. Then I wake up and what I have witnessed stops making sense. How can one see more with one’s eyes closed or turned inward? I guess I understand these things better when I’m asleep. Maybe I’ve been in the field for too long. [ jot down the dream in my notebook before it fades from my memory.

XV

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Introduction Studying Dreams in Undreamy Times

“The government used to steal our money,” Ahmad says with a sad smile on his face. “But today things are even worse. Today they steal our hope, too.” Ahmad works for the Ministry of Agriculture in a town on the Red Sea coast. He has a good position and a spacious office, but his income is

still barely enough for him, his wife, and their four children to support themselves. It is May 2007, and Ahmad and I are sitting in a street café on an alley in downtown Cairo where plastic bags and dust are swirling through the air. On the wall behind me a cockroach is crawling, and I try unobtrusively to move my chair a little farther away from it. All around us young and middle-aged men are smoking shisha, some of them chatting but most sitting in silence.’ A veiled woman dressed in black is performing as a fire-eater in the middle of the alley, but no one seems to be paying

attention to her. Ahmad suggests that one of these days I should count the number of people entering stores in downtown Cairo who leave with a shopping bag in their hands. It won’t be many, he predicts. People can’t atford to buy anymore; the only thing left is window-shopping. We are sipping heavy tea that is bearable only with an excessive amount of sugar. But the tea is not the only thing that is heavy; so is the atmosphere. Like Ahmad, many friends during the course of my visit will explain that economically, morally, and politically, Egypt is going through a crisis. Almost everyone | talk to feels helpless, hopeless, and outraged about the ongoing war in Iraq and about the emergency laws that interdict all expressions of

discontent within Egypt itself? “We’re living a nightmare,” people say when I bring up the topic of dreams. Already during my fieldwork in 2003 and 2004 it had quickly dawned on me that these were not particularly dreamy times. Friends remarked that after the Iraq War started and Egypt’s economy fell into disarray, most +

2 / Introduction people would probably have little interest in talking about their dreams. Others warned that nobody would share significant dream-stories with me because nobody wanted to inform “the Americans” about Islam. Soon thereafter, in addition to the [rag War, rising food prices overshadowed Egypt’s dream landscapes. If one has to wake up at three o’clock in the morning to stand in line in front of one of the bakeries that sell statesubsidized bread, little time is left for dreaming. This book is an attempt to think through the role of dreams in such undreamy times. [t is also a belated response to my friend Ahmad, who is not only worried about his children’s and Egypt’s future but also seemed somewhat disappointed when | first told him about my research project. He shrugged his shoulders and said that he wasn’t very convinced by things

you can’t touch. Dreams, he explained, are ay kalam, “just talk.” While taking seriously such voices of doubt and skepticism, as well as the harsh reality that dreamers wake up to every morning, this book argues that certain dreams matter in present-day Egypt. They matter in the sense ot having significance in people’s lives and, more literally, in the sense of having an impact on the visible, material world. They matter because they complicate the notion of a monolithic Islam, and they matter because they destabilize conventional understandings of the “real.”* Although skeptics such as Ahmad, Egyptian state officials, psychoanalysts, and Muslim reformist thinkers contest the importance of all dreams, religiously and politically meaningful dreams—-and more personal ones as well—have by no means been erased from Egypt’s landscapes of the imagination. On the contrary, in recent years interest in Muslim dream interpretation has increased, Egyptians of various class and age backgrounds consult professional dream interpreters and use the istikhdara prayer to invite divinely inspired dream-visions. Classical dream manuals are reprinted, and cheaper

abridged versions are sold on Cairo’s streets and in its bookstalls, as are booklets that explain the nature of dreams from both an Islamic and a Freudian perspective. CD-ROMs, newspapers, magazines, Web sites, and TV shows all offer contemporary Egyptians ways to unravel the hidden meaning behind their dreams. Instead of reading this renewed interest in dreams as an escapism triggered by the nightmare that waking life has become, I suggest that my interlocutors’ dream-stories can open up critical spaces and possibilities.* The kinds of dreams that I retell matter even (and maybe especially) in a time of war, emergency laws, and social disintegration not because they provide dreamers with a protective blanket of false consciousness or hallucinatory wish fulfillment, but because they insert the dreamer into a

Studying Dreams in Undreamy Times / 3 wider network of symbolic debts, relationships, and meanings. They place the dreamer in relation to the Divine, offer guidance, and enable a mode of being in the world that disrupts the illusion of the autonomous sel f-possessed subject, calling attention to in-betweenness and interrelationality instead.° Like the widely used phrase in sh@ Allah (God willing), dreams continually remind believers of their embeddedness in larger orders. While not all Egyptians experience or interpret dreams in this way, the ethical

horizons opened up by some Egyptian dream-stories deserve our (and maybe also my friend Ahmad’s) attention.

According to these stories, certain dreams have ethical dimensions because they involve transformative encounters with the dead, the Prophet Muhammad, the awliya’, and, more broadly, an Elsewhere and the space of the Divine.® Often dreamers are placed in social relationships in their waking worlds as well, be it through the telling, interpretation, or enactment of dreams. In rare cases, dreams or visions can be collectively experienced, or they can be invited through collective practices. By way of mapping

out some of these relational aspects in space and time, my account of Egyptian dream theories, dream interpretations, and dream communities reclaims for the dream and visionary experience public and even political relevance. Ultimately, I suggest that a serious consideration of the ethical and political dimensions of dreaming requires not only thinking through the ethical possibilities of different imaginations, but also reconceiving the imaginary dimensions of ethics and politics.’ Dreams are never just about the dreamer. But neither is waking life. Significantly, by the terms imaginary and imagination | refer not to the made-up (as in “an imaginary friend”) or to fantasy, but to a broader range of meanings that encompass a variety of spaces, modes of perception, and conceptualizations of the real." More precisely, what enables the

dream-stories that I retell is an understanding of the imagination {alkhaydl) that is not anchored in the individual subject but instead refers to an intermediary realm between the spiritual and the material, the Divine and the human, the dreamer and multiple Others, presence and absence. A related term is the barzakh, which in Islamic eschatology and in my interlocutors’ narratives primarily refers to a space in which the spirits of the dead dwell until Judgment Day. Drawing on a wider meaning, |

use the barzakh also as an analytical tool that circumvents the rule of the either/or.’ Stefania Pandolfo (1997, 9) has likened the barzakh to the heterological space that can be opened up by true dialogue, and Vincent Crapanzano (2004, 6, 59) suggests that the barzakh can allow us to think of the space that lies between two or more ways of being in the world as a

4 / Introduction constitutive space, as opposed to focusing exclusively on that which is. A barzakhian perceptive, as we might call it, ruptures binary outlooks and invites us to think beyond the present and the visible. It invites us to dwell on the in-between. I believe that a serious consideration of this in-between as an ethnographic object-——one of discourse, practice, and contestation— and as an analytical tool can offer us insight into modes of being in the world that might not easily be intelligible from within rationalist, secular vocabularies but are nevertheless of political and ethical relevance to my interlocutors. Precisely because the seeing, telling, interpreting, and enacting of dreams is an unfamiliar form of ethical-political engagement, it can compel us to reconsider our assumptions about the imagination. My approach here builds on the work of Saba Mahmood (2005) and Charles Hirschkind (2006), who have both directed our attention to dif-

ferent states and experiences that believers cultivate within the context of the Islamic Revival, a movement that has been reshaping Egypt's social landscapes since the 19708. Encompassing within the “political” not only

the realm of governments and states but also the activities of ordinary people shaping the conditions of their own collective existence (cf. Arendt 1998), both authors highlight the ways in which their ethnographic find-

ings can intervene in our theoretical debates, problematizing, respectively, the feminist equation of agency and resistance, and the notion of the autonomous rational subject. Along similar lines, | am interested in how Egyptian dream-stories not only are affected by political conditions

but are also themselves of political relevance in that they affect how people live in the world and how they relate to others. The resulting dream-stories might accordingly also complicate and reshape our analytical categories. The dream’s interrelational dimensions, for instance, can destabilize the persistent myth of the autonomous, liberal subject, and my interlocutors’ understandings of the imagination can rupture ratiocentric paradigms." Though indebted to Mahmood and Hirschkind, this work diverges from theirs in both fieldsite and argument. The practices described here show a side of the Islamic Revival that has less to do with mosque study groups,

preachers, and sermons and more with saint shrines, the dead, and the barzakh. While the Islamic Revival has reintroduced the space of death into sermons, religious lessons, and everyday discourses, one crucial difference between the preachers in Hirschkind’s study and the dream interpreters | worked with is that the latter do not evoke the afterlife to instill fear; rather, they associate it with joyful encounters, dialogical exchanges, and sites of learning.'’ Dream discourses, like certain Sufi practices, are

Studying Dreams in Undreamy Times / 5 dismissed by many reformist thinkers, but they are in a continuous if ambivalent dialogue with reformism and constitute a vibrant aspect of the Islamic Revival. Furthermore, my interlocutors’ dream-stories do not simply constitute yet another category of the visceral that can shape politics. By calling into question conventional parameters of the “real,” they

invite a more radical rethinking of community and subjectivity. They exceed the logic of self-cultivation by allowing space for the prophetic, alterity, and elements of rupture. The self here does not simply cultivate particular states and experiences, it is also constituted by them. Ultimately, it is the dream’s agency that matters, more so than the dreamer’s.” In this sense, my ethnographic materials complicate the paradigm of self-cultivation, resonating instead with attempts to think through a possible ethics beyond the self-contained subject (e.g., Butler 2005; Levinas 1969, 1991). As my interlocutors’ dream-stories frequently grapple with an alterity that remains radically inassimilable but that nevertheless compels and moves the dreamer, they might ultimately point us toward what Hent de Vries calls the “cultural resources—-the semantic, figural, and argumentative archives-—-trom which different concepts of hospitality, of understand-

ing and welcoming the other as other... can be distilled, criticized, or imagined” (2001, 9).

It might be objected that ethics in Western discourse, at least since the Enlightenment, has been almost by definition about encounters with Others and the dialogical dimensions of human existence. Yet two questions remain unanswered by such a definition. One concerns the role the Other is to play. Is the Other to be converted into sameness, to be tolerated, or to be engaged to the extent that one risks one’s own position in the encounter? Second, as Derrida (1995) reminds us, we need to ask about the other Others that are excluded in any particular ethical stance. Are Others that count only one’s neighbors, or are they also strangers? Are they only the living or also the dead? Are they necessarily human or could they also

be spirits, ghosts, or dreams? My interlocutors’ narratives gesture not only beyond the boundaries of the autonomous individual subject but also beyond those of the visible social world. The Others that address, compel, and move my interlocutors include invisible beings, the dead, the Prophet, the saints, and what Derrida calls the “wholly other,” the Divine. The kinds of imagined communities that figure in my interlocutors’ stories exceed the secular imagined community of the nation-state. They draw on a very different understanding of the imagination, and they enable much broader communities. It is through dreams that such larger communities become imaginable and inhabitable.

6 / Introduction DREAMS IN THE ISLAMIC TRADITION Dreams hold a special place in the Islamic tradition. The Prophet Muhammad’s revelation experiences began in the form of dreams, and he sup-

posedly asked his companions every morning what they had dreamed. Muslim dream interpretation finds its roots in the Qur’an, particularly the Yusut-sura, and even more so in the hadith literature.” Although medieval Muslim literatures on divination through physiognomy, geomancy, palmistry, and other methods abound (Fahd 1966), only dream interpretation established itself as an orthodox discipline, and in medieval times the number of dream manuals even exceeded that of tafsir (Qur’an interpretation) works (Lamoreaux 2002, 4}. Classical and contemporary dream manuals

generally divide dreams into three categories: dreams that are inspired by the devil or evil spirits (hulm);* dreams that mirror the dreamer’s wishes and worries (hadith nafsi}; and divinely inspired dreams or visions (ru’yd). To underline the ru’yda’s prophetic potential, my interlocutors frequently referred to a hadith according to which the Prophet Muhammad announced in the mosque of Medina shortly before his death that once he was gone no form of prophecy would remain except for true dream-visions (al-ru’ya al-sdliha).'® Since the Arabic term rw’yd can denote either waking visions or dream experiences, | generally translate it as “dream-vision.” To some extent the line between sleep and wakefulness is erased in this study, since it is of little relevance to many of my interlocutors.”

Dream manuals explain the ways to distinguish one type of dream trom another, and occasionally dream interpreters are consulted for decisions regarding specific dreams. Ultimately, however, the categorization of dreams is always open to contestation, and what makes things even more confusing is that Egyptians frequently use the terms rw’yd and hilm (colloquial for ulm) interchangeably. To maintain some of the ensuing ambiguity, I occasionally use the term dream even when referring to what

is taken to be a divinely inspired dream-vision. | also hope thereby to open up our thinking about the imagination writ large. While I am not interested in approaching the dream as a universal experience, I do believe that thinking through other imaginations has the potential to rupture and expand one’s own. Generally, however, this book is about not ordinary dreams but dreamvisions. Dreams of this kind are highly valued because they come fo the dreamer as opposed to being produced by her. In the words of one Egyptian

housewife, the ru’ya is a “dream in which God speaks to you (biykallimik).” Islamic traditions distinguish between literal and symbolic dream-

Studying Dreams in Undreamy Times / 7 visions. Whereas the former require no interpretation (because seeing the Prophet means seeing the Prophet), symbolic dreams need first to be decoded. In both cases, far from reflecting only past experiences, dreamvisions can foreshadow, or even bring about, future events. Accounts from the hadith, Sufi writings, biographical dictionaries, and historical works refer to dream-visions to explain why someone went here or there, waged a war, or founded a new school of thought. Without dreams, the call to prayer reportedly would not have come into existence in its present form; Aristotle’s works would not have been translated into Arabic: and Ibn al“Arabi’s Fusiis al-Hikam (Seals of Wisdom) would never have been written. Historically, it seems, dreams mattered. And they matter too (though maybe differently) in a postcolonial, post-Freudian, post-Enlightenment, postreformist era. In the street café in downtown Cairo, Ahmad spoke to me of hopelessness, economic hardship, and war. Like him, many Egyptians today are primarily concerned with their waking lives. They care little about their dreams, and they insist that divinely inspired dream-visions are a thing of the past, that nowadays all dreams merely reflect the dreamers’ wishes and worries because people are too preoccupied with the hustle and bustle of their daily lives, and that all dream interpreters are charlatans. This partial devaluation of the dream can be understood within a larger context of (post)colonialism and modernization. Reforms in the nineteenth and twen-

tieth centuries restructured not only Egypt’s military, administration, schools, and urban spaces, but also forms of being in the world, subjectivities, and epistemologies. According to Timothy Mitchell (2988), one central

effect of Egypt’s colonial reordering was the very appearance of order, the enframing of the world as a picture—an enframing that introduces a gap between signifier and signified and that runs counter to a different semiotics according to which dreaming of the Prophet means truly seeing the Prophet. As part of this larger reordering, “Islam” was rationalized, objectified, and functionalized, which meant eliminating those elements that now appeared disorderly, backward, or irrational. Retormist thinkers called for a this-worldly ethics by bracketing the metaphysical realm, the barzakh, and the afterlife, and by urging believers to focus on the socio-moral reform of society instead (Sirriyeh 1999; Smith and Haddad 2002). According to the underlying worldview, it is not the imaginary, the otherworldly that matters, but the visible, material world. Dream-visions do not fit neatly into reformist, rationalist, this-worldly versions of Islam. In the eyes of critics, dreams divert the “masses” from “reality.” Evoking the logic of chance, a female medical student explained

8 / Introduction to me that if someone dreams of a friend that she hasn’t seen in a long time and then she sees that friend two days later, she might think it’s the dream coming true, but really it’s just coincidence /sudfa). A young man in Islamic Cairo claimed that dream interpretation is forbidden (haram), and a shop owner in his forties expressed pity when Il asked him if he knew any dream interpreters. “I’m really sorry,” he said, “but those are all lies. Today when people want their dreams interpreted, they go to a psychologist. Dreams are all about psychological states (ahwal nafsiyya) today. The rest is all fake; [Muslim dream interpreters) don’t know a thing.” When | brought up the long history of Muslim dream interpretation, he responded, “Today we have science (‘ilm)}; back then we had ignorance (gahal).” When surveying Cairo’s billboards or watching commercials on Egyp-

tian television, it is easy to succumb to the impression that dreams have been disenchanted and now simply serve to commodity certain life experiences; that metaphorical dreams have triumphed over literal ones. Dreampark is the name of a popular amusement park in Cairo, and Dreamland is that of a development project, promoted as “The Egypt of My Desires” (Mitchel! 2002, 273). In Hurghada, a popular tourist destination on the Red Sea, signs remind those strolling by, “You are now in dreamland.” The dream, offered up for consumption and equated with fun and luxury, counterbalances the bleak reality of “real lite,” but it is equally far removed from the prophetic and the Divine. No longer considered a form of moral guidance or expression, the dream has been turned into a material aspiration. Collapsed into fantasy, the imagination has become a marketing tool of tourism developers, Hollywood, and video games.

Yet the same factors that seem to have disenchanted Egypt’s dream landscapes have also created new spaces for dreams and dream interpretations. The dream-vision today is not only a site of contestation, but also a site through which many ordinary Muslims encounter and engage with the Divine, with one another, and with the Islamic tradition. Paying close attention to intertexualities and heteroglossias (Bakhtin 1981), different chapters in this book describe how the Qur’an, hadith, psychological concepts like the “unconscious,” a modern optocentrism, and media metaphors

have all (re)shaped the vocabulary of contemporary Muslim dreamers and dream interpreters.’ Reformist Islam, Western psychology, and the Internet have not simply flattened, standardized, or erased the dreamvision; they also enable and promote dream talk in new ways. People dream and interpret through their living worlds in Egypt, which includes televi-

sion, cinema, computers, and all that comes with them in terms of the experience and conceptualization of reality. While medieval dream manu-

SR era ee

Studying Dreams in Undreamy Times / 9

a |B.hus se a ao | law owe aN —_— ie ane = om ey : y.. Se \ L '

(aces re } BID | 2010. The Dream— ~

~22 OX? Figure1. Metaphorical dreams: hosting the World Cup in 2010, a wall poster in Cairo.

als are still in use, dreaming and dream interpretation are by no means remnants of the past. Dreaming is modern in Egypt. It should be noted that, somewhat parallel with the Islamic Revival, there has been a Coptic Revival of sorts in which visions and apparitions figure centrally. One of the most famous apparitions of the Virgin Mary worldwide took place in the Cairo neighborhood of Zaytoun in 1968. Two Muslim mechanics sighted the Virgin over the church’s dome from across the street, at first mistaking her for a young woman about to commit suicide. Subsequently millions of Egyptians and foreigners came to Zaytoun to see the Virgin, the Coptic Church officially confirmed the apparitions, and the Arab Socialist Union took control, organized parking around the church, and charged an entrance fee (Nelson 1973). Besides the famous

apparition in Zaytoun, over the past thirty years thousands of Muslims and Christians have been reporting Marian apparitions in and around

10 / Introduction churches in Cairo, the Nile Delta, and Upper Egypt.’? While Muslim imaginations generally take less public forms, this book does not tell a story of loss, of the imagination’s continuous movement toward its own secularization, flattening, or internalization.*° Rather, I highlight how contemporary

Muslim dream-stories are interwoven with the secular modern while at the same time always exceeding it. Empiricist and rationalist discourses often speak through my interlocutors just as their enchanted discourse speaks a part of the secular modern. How people inhabit the religious— both in their dreams and in their everyday life—is intrinsically messy. Women might go to mosque study groups where they are taught to be wary of dreams, and on their way home they might chat with their neighbors about what they dreamed last night. They might even have gone to the mosque in the first place because a dream-vision inspired them to do so. Only close ethnographic attention and attentive listening can offer insight into how dreaming and imagining are understood, contested, and reinvented in Egypt today. In my view, such attentive listening is the central task for any anthropology. ANTHROPOLOGIES OF DREAMS “T see so plainly that there are no definitive signs by which to distinguish being awake from being asleep,” wrote Descartes, one of the fathers of the Enlightenment (1998, 60). The impossibility of distinguishing between dreaming and waking life was so disturbing to Descartes precisely because the two states had long been ontologically, epistemologically, and ethically separated in the West. The dream consequently became one of Descartes’s principal reasons for doubting the reliability of the senses and ultimately

led him to reassert the superiority of rational thought. The circle was closed but a puzzling paradox remained: how does one know that it’s not all just a dream? Anthropological dream studies often seem to be triggered, or at least to be steadily accompanied, by the troubling phenomenon that Descartes had already struggled with: the porous line between the real and the imagined.*? Victorian anthropologist E.B. Tylor, who is credited with introducing the topic of dreams to the field of anthropology, claimed in his Primitive Culture (4871) that “primitives” are unable (or unwilling) to draw a distinction between dream and reality.* As they take dead people, souls, and ghosts to be alive when they appear to them at night, the dream is the source of, and sustains, the primitives’ theory of animism: “Plain experience is there to teach it to every savage; his friend or his enemy is

Studying Dreams in Undreamy Times / tt dead, yet still in dream or open vision he sees the spectral form which is to his philosophy a real objective being, carrying personality as it carries likeness” (Tylor 1970, 10).

Tylor seems somewhat nostalgic for a time when the line between dream and waking life was less clear, yet in his view the “primitives” are mistaken. Like Tylor, Nietzsche claimed that because “savages” mistakenly take dreams to be a “second real world,” they believed in ghosts and gods “throughout many thousands of years” (1986, 16). Freud, too, was to state later on that primitives, children, and neurotics fail to distinguish

between dream image and real image because they are at one in their attitude toward the dead (1950, 62). Based on their dream-experiences, Freud wrote, “primitives” and “peoples of antiquity” used to “project into the world as though they were realities things which in fact enjoyed

reality only within their own minds” (1965, 38).° The dream-wish is hallucinated and thus by definition both seemingly real and intrinsically unreal, Only the Other who lacks reason (for Tylor the primitive; for Freud also the child and the neurotic) fails to acknowledge the essential unreality of the dream. Civilized dreamers wake up and realize that it was only a dream. The porous line between dream and waking reality constitutes a principal reason tor Descartes’s doubt and characterizes primitive dream beliefs for Nietzsche, Tylor, and Freud. It finds expression not only in ascribing to the Other the inability to distinguish between these two states, but equally in asserting that even this Other can draw such distinctions. Accordingly, the same epistemological anxiety is reflected in anthropologists’ attempts

to refute E.B. Tylor’s thesis by proving that primitives actually do tell apart the real and the imagined. Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Lévy-Bruhl in How Natives Think (1926), and J.S. Lincoln in The Dream in Primitive Cultures (1935) all asserted that primitives do in fact distinguish between perceptions that come to them in dreams and those that come while awake. Yet what is most real for the “primitives,” wrote Lévy-Bruhl (1926, 301), is precisely that which is least tangible. What matters to the so-called primitives, he argued, are affective resonances—-what he called mystical participation. This, as Lincoln would add, does not contradict that primitives hold “a fine sense of reality” (1935, 30). The primitives are here redeemed; even they can overcome the confusion between dream and waking life. The insight that dreaming can be conceptualized in different ways and

that it can be valued for different reasons was partially erased when the hegemony of psychoanalytic explanations began to make itself felt more

12 / Introduction strongly in anthropological dream studies. Malinowski, who viewed himself as a pioneer in the application of psychoanalytic theory to the study of “savage lite,” argued that the scarcity of dreams among the nonrepressed Melanesians was due to the fact that dreams spring from unsatisfied sexual desire (1953, ix).*4 In more recent studies the temptation lingers to uncover what is really going on in dreams collected in the field. Dreams of high school students in Papua New Guinea are accordingly related to anxieties

that “are rooted in the unconscious so that many of their dreams present the universal features of the nightmare” (Epstein 1998, 210), and an account of dreams among the Arapesh of northeastern New Guinea concludes that “the behavior of the ghost [in a specific dream] is a fantasy of the dreamer which derives from unconscious negative attitudes felt toward the kinsman in life” (Tuzin 1975, 568). The hegemony and self-enclosed character of the psychoanalytic model leads to a dismissal of alternative logics, which are explained away as a form of false consciousness, allowing one anthropologist to claim that many cultures “do not admit that dreams are fantasies at all; rather [the Arapesh]| take them to be literal experiences of the dreamer’s soul as it wanders on another plane of reality” (ibid. 563; emphasis added). Whenever ethnographic findings are taken as evidence for the universal applicability of Western theories, the Cartesian doubt is easily soothed, and alternative understandings of the imagination are habitually bracketed through the anthropologist’s account of the dream’s social, psychological, or compensatory functions. Instead of studying the effects and deflections

of psychoanalytic theories and considering how ethnographic findings might open up such theories to new readings, anthropologists often seem tempted to reduce the dreams they encounter in the field to unconscious anxieties, conflicts, and wishes while disregarding the dreamers’ own interpretations or treating those interpretations as a separate phenomenon without real explanatory power. Yet the ways that dreams are detined, categorized, experienced, remembered, forgotten, told, written, performed, dismissed, interpreted, analyzed, invoked, and evoked varies historically and even within a single society. As Vincent Crapanzano (2001) reminds

us, dreams cannot be separated from their conceptualization and theorization as these affect, if not the experience of the dream, then at least its reporting. Different dream concepts have different ethical, religious, political, and metaphorical implications. To appreciate the particularities of dreaming and to allow for multiple meanings, one needs to move beyond universalist assumptions about the real and the imagined.

It is worth recalling in this context that the medieval Muslim thinker

Studying Dreams in Undreamy Times / 13 al-Ghazali (d. 14141) addressed a dream problem very similar to the one Descartes was to struggle with a few centuries later.*° He posed the following question: “Do you not see .. . how, when you are asleep you believe things and imagine circumstances, holding them to be stable and enduring, and, so long as you are in that dream-condition, have no doubts about them?” (1994, 23). If one cannot distinguish between dream and sense experience, then how can one ever trust one’s senses? While Descartes

would later solve the problem through the intervention of reason, alGhazali complicated the line between dream and wakefui states by citing a prophetic saying that holds that we are all dreaming and awaken only when we die. He concluded that neither the senses nor reason could fully

be trusted and that “whoever thinks that the understanding of things Divine rests upon strict proofs has in his thought narrowed down the wideness of God’s mercy” (24). Dreaming for al-GhazAli is not to be tamed by human reason; it can itself be a path to truth. Al-Ghazali’s openness to

the possibility of divine inspiration runs counter to the Aristotelian (and later Freudian) notion that dreams are never divine messages because, in Aristotle’s words, it is “absurd to combine the idea that the sender of such dreams should be God with the fact that those to whom he sends them are not the best and wisest, but merely people at random” (Gallop 1996, 107).*° Precisely because seemingly random people in contemporary Egypt claim to be receiving divinely inspired dreams, their stories rupture hierarchical

power structures, ratiocentric paradigms, and psychoanalytic idioms ail at once.

BEYOND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Psychoanalytically speaking, my fascination with the concept of divinely inspired dreams is probably easily explainable as my own reaction against psychoanalysis. As | was growing up in Bavaria, my German father worked as a psychiatrist and neurologist, and my Egyptian mother as a Jungian psychoanalyst and psychotherapist. For as long as | can remember, schizophrenia, depression, hallucinations, and patients’ lite histories figured in our conversations over breakfast, lunch, and dinner—and so did dreams. I recall my early disappointment at the Jungian idea that regardless of whom one dreams about, all the characters in dreams are supposed to be just aspects of oneself. In the Freudian model, too, the dream seems to be all about the dreamer. Freud acknowledged that “there is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable—a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown” (1965, 143n), but for the longest time

14 / Introduction I found little space for this navel within Freud’s larger theory. In Islamic traditions, by contrast, dream-visions are valued precisely because they make possible the cognition of an outside reality, offering believers, in John Lamoreaux’s words, “a royal road that [leads] not inward but outward, providing insight not into the dreamer’s psyche but into the hidden affairs of the world” (2002, 4). Intrigued by this apparent tension between Elsewhere-oriented and psychoanalytic dream models, | wanted to explore what it means for dreamers in the world today to be extended outward as opposed to inward. Over time, I came to realize that the binary between Muslim and psychoanalytic dream models is misleading and that it is not helpful to use Freud as a figure whose claims somehow fail to stand up to the evidence pro-

vided by Egyptian dreams. Freud responded to particular dreams that were themselves shaped by a particular dream culture and by particular sociohistorical contexts, and he responded to epistemological concerns that were just as much about trance-like states, the uncanny, and telepathy as they were about “science.”*’ His main goal was not to prove that humans

are autonomous beings, but, on the contrary, to demonstrate that we are much less rational than we would like to believe. Freud thought that he, like Copernicus and Darwin before him, was fundamentally challenging the pride of humans by uncovering the illusory nature of notions such as free will and reason. When I occasionally contrast Egyptian stories with Freudian readings, my intention is therefore not to critique Freud. Most often in this ethnography “Freud” refers to particular understandings ot his theories that circulate in Egypt or that shape anthropological dream studies, and occasionally, I assume, also my readers’ assumptions.” lronically, while Freud decentered the self-possessed, autonomous self, this self often gets reinscribed in psychologizing discourses. Following a reductive Freudian logic, or alternatively using the idea of false consciousness, observers of Egypt’s dream landscapes could easily hypothesize about causal relations between supposedly prophetic dream-visions and the

contemporary political and social contexts in which these dreams occur and are told. Skeptics might argue that Egyptians seek refuge in imaginary encounters with the Prophet, the saints, and the dead; that dreamvisions and waking visions provide an escape from reality, a distraction that soothes the anxieties characteristic of modern times. One of the aims of this book is to show that such psychologizing and materialist explanations offer only two out of multiple interpretive frameworks and that they obscure, if not violently erase, many others.

Instead of trying to unravel the “Egyptian mind” or the “Muslim

Studying Dreams in Undreamy Times / 15 unconscious,” | want to call into question the presumption that all dreams are inherently linked to the psyche. As Vincent Crapanzano points out, “much of what we in the West call psychological and locate in some sort of internal space (‘in the head,’ ‘in the mind,’ ‘in the brain,’ ‘in consciousness,’

‘in the psyche’) is understood in many cultures in manifestly nonpsychological terms and located in other ‘spaces’” (1992, 142). The “unconscious” is itself historically constituted, and secular scientific worldviews more generally, while claiming to offer unmediated access to “nature,” are built on particular assumptions and sustained by particular power relations.” When insisting on locating the dream’s origin inside the dreamer, one overlooks the possibility of other subjectivities, other dreams, and other imaginations. To move beyond psychologizing and functionalist explanations, or at least to recognize them as historically and geographically specific, we need to pay closer attention to the very processes through which dreamers and interpreters—as well as anthropologists—endow dreams with meaning. Accordingly, I did not go to Egypt with the goal of psychoanalyzing contemporary Egyptians; rather, | was interested in how they tell, understand, interpret, and live their dreams. Bracketing the hegemonic explanatory power of the “unconscious,” I

take as a different point of departure a widened outlook that I call an anthropology of the imagination. Readers might object that sociocultural anthropology is always an anthropology of the imagination to the extent that it shows how reality is socially constructed. Even if we define the imagination more narrowly as having to do with what is largely imperceptible to the senses, many ethnographies deal with the imaginary precisely in this sense, be it in the form of ghosts (Kwon 2008; Mueggler 2001), spirit possession (Boddy 1989; Crapanzano 1980; Lambek 1993; Morris 2000), sorcery (Stoller 1989), the vanishing (ivy 1995), or hope (Miyazaki 2006). What I add to this is a call for closer attention to different understandings of the imagination itself. An anthropology of the imagination, as I see it, should pay attention not simply to particular objects but also to other conceptualizations ot the imagination. Needless to say, other imaginations——or any imagination, for that matter—cannot easily be pinned down.

Objectifying an imagination ignores the fact that “the imagination” as an object is already removed from the elusive, prediscursive experiences that make up the imaginary, and it erases the debates, ambiguities, indifferences, and disagreements surrounding what the imagination is and what it entails. With these limitations in mind, | attempt to trace the landscapes of a particular imagination through attending to my interlocutors’ practices, stories, and vocabularies.

16 / Introduction TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE IMAGINATION The imagination is omnipresent today. Ads and commercials continually encourage us to imagine faster cars, better-tasting beers, and more eftective painkillers. Imaginary Maps, The Imaginary War, and Imaginative Management Contro! are the sort of titles that fill the shelves of North American bookstores. The nation-state has been described as an “imagined community” (Anderson 1991), self and society as constituted through the imagination (Appadurai 1996; Castoriadis 1987), and Western modernity as characterized by a particular “social imaginary” (Taylor 2004). The imagination’s seductive power is employed knowingly and effectively in advertising, and it is used just as frequently to introduce a utopian tone into political discourses.*® Yet what exactly do we mean when we speak or

write about the imagination? Does the term mean anything at all? Or has it become empty-——killed by overuse?

Like history, the discipline of anthropology emerged within, and is bound up with, the Western rationalist tradition, which assumes that “the human is ontologically singular, that gods and spirits are in the end ‘social facts,’ that the social somehow exists prior to them” (Chakrabarty 2000, 16). Within this tradition, from Aristotle to Kant, the imagination has long been understood as a physiological image-making faculty that translates sense impressions into mental images.°! Whereas Plato warned against the imagination because it tempts mortals to mistake themselves for gods, Aristotle allowed phantasia a certain legitimacy, as it could aid practical reason. At the same time, the imagination was eyed with suspicion throughout the history of Western philosophy because it might not merely transmit images but could also play with sense impressions, creating images of nonexistent things——-a danger that could be circumvented only by reason’s firm grip on the imagination. In the seventeenth century, Hobbes described the dangerous moment when the imagination breaks the link between the real and the perceived: “IMAGINATION therefore is nothing

but decaying sense; and is found in men, and many other living creatures, as well sleeping, as waking... . From [the] ignorance of how to distinguish

dreams, and other strong fancies, from vision and sense, did arise the greatest part of the religion of the Gentiles in time past, that worshipped satyrs, fawns, nymphs, and the like; and now-a-days the opinion that rude people have of fairies, ghosts, and goblins, and of the power of witches” (1997, 23, 26). Hobbes, like Nietzsche, Tylor, and Freud, held that the beliet in fantastic beings is caused by an imagination turned loose. The imagination, according to this view, is dangerous.

Studying Dreams in Undreamy Times / 17 A shift from, and reaction against, this attitude occurred in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the Romantic movement came to hail the imagination for its creative ability to generate ideas that cannot be expressed in any other form.** Along with the imagination, the dream was endowed with new potential. In Rousseau’s writings, the dream (and particularly daydreaming) enables an authentic and free kind of thinking, and Novalis remarked that “our life is no dream; but it should and perhaps will become one” (quoted in Robertson 2001, 32). The creative capacity of the imagination came to be praised as the hallmark of the original genius, who could evoke mental visionary experiences by conjuring up unreal images, which were then expressed in art or poetry. Whether regarded with suspicion or acclaimed as the ultimate source of artistic creativity, the imagination is in both cases construed as a faculty anchored within the individual subject. Although there are important exceptions, the imagined has furthermore been equated with the unreal throughout much of Western history. This verdict became remarkably pronounced in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, according to whom the imagination is “an incantation destined to produce the object of one’s thought, the thing one desires, in a manner that one can take possession of it” (1963, 177). Thus, when I imagine Peter, an absent friend, said Sartre, my imagination, spurred by desire, conjures up an image of Peter. Yet even

though the magical powers of my imagination make the absent present, they do so only in a mode of nothingness. Peter’s essential absence, his nothingness, remains. In one of his earliest writings, “Dream, Imagination, and Existence,” Michel Foucault suggests that because the dream involves a derealization of the self, it is “that absolute disclosure of the ethical content” (1986a, 52).° Paradoxically, while the dream is a quintessentially lonely experience, for Foucault it is a key site through which the subject plunges into the cosmos. Foucault also revisits the question of Peter and insists on a crucial difference between image and imagination.°! While the image only seemingly makes the absent present, the imagination succeeds in this very endeavor: “the image mimes the presence of Peter, the imagination goes forth to encounter him” (71). This happens not through confronting Peter in a mode of unreality, but rather through a process of “derealizing” or “absenting” oneself from a world in which it is no longer possible to encounter Peter. Thus, writes Foucault, “To imagine is not to actualize the fable of the little mouse, it is not to transport oneself into the world of Peter. It is to become the world where he is: | am the letter he is reading; | conjure myself from that look of attentive reader; | am the walls of

18 / Introduction his room that watch him from ail sides and hence do not ‘see’ him. But | am also his gaze and his attentiveness, his dissatisfaction or his surprise before the letter. | am not absolute master of what he is doing, | am what he is doing, | am what he is” (68). Shifting our attention from what the imagination is to what it does, Foucault describes an erasure of the sharp line between subject and object, between the absent and the present. The imagination makes me what I imagine. The “like” is erased. Signifier and signified become one. In his essay, Foucault calls explicitly for an anthropology of the imagination, putting forth the uncommon thesis that the “dream is not a modal-

ity of the imagination; the dream is the first condition of its possibility” (1968a, 67). He argues that by psychologizing the dream and seeing it as a mere rhapsody of images, Freud deprived it of its privilege as a specific form of experience (43). As anthropologist Tullio Maranhao (2001) has suggested, Foucault’s essay might offer a more illuminating starting point for anthropological dream studies than theories that insist on the dream’s origin inside the human psyche and that make the dream contingent upon the existence of a specific kind of subject. Maranhao contrasts the mentalist Freudian dream model with Amerindian dream theories that assume “that

the source of a dream is entirely external to the dreaming subject, who yet is virtually constituted by the dream content” (52). Similarly, Egypt’s dream-worlds do not posit an isolated, self-possessed dreamer. Whereas sometimes my interlocutors introduce their dream-stories with halimt-bi (I dreamed of), other times they say ef li fi-l-mandm (it came to me in my dream... ), indicating that some dreams are above all encounters and not projections.

The imagination that makes such encounters possible is al-khayél, which, historically, referred to an incorporeal form or image (such as a mirror image, shadow, reflection in water, or an afterimage; Lane 1978, 835) but which many of my interlocutors associate with a prophetic mode of perception and a space replete with ethical insight. The imagined, accord-

ing to their view, is not inherently unreal, but it is present and absent at the same time. It defies the either/or and closure. Shaykh Qusi, one of my key interlocutors, offered an explanation for what the imagination can do that resonates with Foucault’s version of the imaginary encounter with Peter: “If you imagine a friend, you can bring him into presence, even if he’s not here. You have to use your imagination. You have to imagine the Prophet and the Prophet’s companions. You imagine what they were like and what it was like to live at their time. Then, through your imagination, you make them real. They’re around you.” For Shaykh Qusi, visions

Studying Dreams in Undreamy Times / 19 and visionary dreams are real imagined experiences. The Prophet and his companions are already around us, yet it is through the imagination that we can perceive them. They are already present, and they are made present through the imagination. Imagining here is not a creative act performed by an autonomous individual subject; it is more akin to a tuning-in. As the medieval Sufi thinker Ibn al-‘Arabi (d. 1240) would say, it is the universe’s mode of self-disclosure. Or as Foucault would say (at least in his early essay), it is a mode of exploding the subject’s boundedness. Accordingly, some of my interlocutors distinguished carefully between imagination fal-khaydal) and tantasy (al-walm). A Quranic healer defined the former as being an “image from the Real (siira min al-laqq},” whereas fantasy implies “if only (y@ rayt).” The dream-vision comes from alkhaydl; an ordinary dream is related to fantasy. A dream-vision, the same healer explained, means “seeing something as if it were true—nay, it is true (ka innu ha’7?i bal huwa ha’7i).” Shaykh Qusi ditterentiated between imagination and fantasy the following way: “There’s a difference between fantasy and imagination. What’s the difference? Fantasy doesn’t refer

to something real, but the imagination might. There are two kinds of imagination. [One is] the materialist kind, that of the unbeliever. Say, for example, the man who invented the car. He first imagined the car, and then he invented it. But the imagination was something from God. God had already decreed in his fate that a car would be invented with four wheels and a steering wheel. The other kind of imagination, that of the believer, lasts only a moment. It’s called divine inspiration.” Shaykh

Qusi not only distinguishes between fantasy and imagination but also differentiates between two kinds of imagination: the materialist kind of the unbeliever and the divinely inspired kind of the believer. Yet significantly, even unbelievers who deem themselves inventive geniuses, in the shaykh’s view, only draw on what God has already ordained. The source of the imagination in both cases lies outside the human subject, but only believers recognize it to be so. The shaykh’s model turns upside down the views of Hobbes, Nietzsche, Tylor, and Freud, according to whom the “primitives” fail to recognize that all dreams originate within the dreamer. According to Shaykh Qusi, it is the unbeliever who fails to recognize the true order of reality. Accordingly, when I speak of the imagination in this ethnography, it needs to be understood as encompassing a wide range of meanings—in Shaykh Qusi’s view, everything from illusion to intuition to divine inspiration and even revelation. Of course, not all Egyptians hail the dream’s epistemological and ethical potentials, and often the imagination is collapsed into fantasy, so that

20 / Introduction even those recounting extraordinary mystical experiences might close with assertions such as, “But only God knows. I don’t believe in these things easily. But it wasn’t al-khaydl. | don’t run after mirages (sarab). It’s not fantasy (walim). Something happened for real.” The man speaking these words had just told me about his visit to al-lmam al-Shafi‘i’s shrine

where, he felt, the saint reached inside his head, grabbed his brain, and turned it 180 degrees. After this miraculous encounter, the man said, his thinking was completely transformed. To assert the realness of this highly significant and transformative experience, he concluded that it was not an imagined encounter. It was not al-khaydl. Instead of reclaiming al-khaydl as a torm of divine intervention, utterances of this kind associate it with fantasy and unreality. Tracing contradictory meanings of the imagination, this book attends to traces of a “secularization of the imaginal” (Corbin 1997, 20), or what Foucault calls “reason’s subjugation of non-reason” in modern times (1965, ix}, while at the same time calling for a serious engagement with the ways in which dreams matter in people’s everyday lives. My call for a serious engagement should not be understood as a call for a return to the kind of anthropology that tries to capture the “native’s

point of view.” First, there is no monolithic native’s point of view that could be captured. Far from presenting one single Egyptian position on dreams, I take the dream as a lens into the complicated, messy, and ongo-

ing negotiation and remaking of “Islam” and “reality” in Egypt today. Second, the image of the anthropologist capturing the native’s point of view obliterates the very dialogue through which meaning is constituted, as well as the power relations inevitably at play in any encounter. As I hope to show, however, taking seriously one’s interlocutors’ dream-stories and being attentive to politics do not have to be mutually exclusive. A serious engagement with other imaginations, rather, is itself a political act.

NOTES ON FIELDWORK Headed to trace Egypt’s landscapes of the imagination, I boarded a Cairobound plane at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport in early January 2003.

Hours later, as the plane was descending, I gazed upon the vast sea of buildings that is commonly referred to as Cairo. Al-Qahira in Arabic, “the victorious one.” Clearly, it had been victorious; | had given in and returned.

It was close to midnight, and minarets gleaming with green neon light dotted the city. Looking down from the plane, I recognized the Corniche, Nile bridges, and five-star hotels, and I had a vague sense of the location of the so-called City of the Dead, which I had spoken so confidently about

Studying Dreams in Undreamy Times / 21 during my proposal defense. I would go and find dream interpreters there, [ had said. What had I been thinking? A seductive subject in theory, the dream is a frustrating object of ethno-

graphic inguiry. Dreams are highly evasive, and they resist the anthropologist’s desire (and presumed obligation) to observe. lt was a constant challenge during my fieldwork—-a challenge that I hope to pass on in the form of this book——not just theoretically questioning the positivistic

premise that the most visible is the most real, but actually suspending this premise to some extent while listening to my interlocutors’ stories. [ tried to cultivate a mode of listening that does not presume to know better than my interlocutors what kind of experience the dream really is, while simultaneously trying not to forget that my interlocutors themselves might be skeptical and cynical at times; that they might say certain things for instrumental reasons; and that they might dismiss others’ accounts as made up or a form of false consciousness. Much of my time was spent talking about dreams, listening to dream interpretations, watching dream shows on television, and collecting dream manuals, both classical and contemporary. While always on the verge of invisibility, dreams have observable preludes and aftermaths. I visited saint shrines where interactions lead to and are inspired by dreams and visions; distributed food at shrines with a friend whenever she was instructed in a dream to do so; took part in dhikr rituals, which can culminate in collective or individual waking visions; and went book shopping with a Muslim dream interpreter. Often I spent time with friends, drinking tea, cooking, chatting, or going for walks. As the dreams that | describe are not contained within the night but affect and are affected by wakeful states, my fieldwork was never just about dreams but always also about everyday life. Besides bringing into play various dream-narratives, this book is based on tieldnotes, which I usually typed up at night, drawing on my memory and quotes and observations I had jotted down in my notebook during the day. On the few occasions when my interlocutors agreed to be recorded,

the turning on of the recorder often marked a shift in language. From chatting informally and sharing anecdotes and personal experiences, they would switch to a more formal tone or even classical Arabic and provide what they considered to be the official scholarly discourse on whatever topic we had been talking about. The only exception might have been an elderly woman who willingly spoke her Prophet-dream into my recorder and who took great pleasure in the idea of her words traveling to Amrika. Many others were suspicious of being recorded, and so, for the most part, I was confined to taking notes. Even note-taking at times bothered my

22 / Introduction interlocutors, particularly Sufi shaykhs, who claimed that | was not paying sufficient attention if I tried to write while listening. Writing is a way of arresting (habs) meaning and not of understanding, they would say. So often I merely listened and subsequently filled the pages of my notebook in cabs, on buses, at juice stands, in coffee shops, or while walking. At first it was not easy to get people to share their views on dreams, the afterlife, or the imagination, not least because I began my fieldwork shortly before the United States—led invasion of Iraq. In addition to a pervasive suspiciousness caused by the political developments in the region, I was faced with frequent inquiries into my own dream background. At times it seemed as if the entire validity of my project hinged on my having seen a divinely inspired dream-vision. If | was driven by an abstract interest in the topic, a platonic love for dreams, if | had come only to study them, then I was highly suspect. At best | was considered to be curious about things one can only understand through experience, and my project was doomed to failure. At worst, I was taken to be the victim and agent of an imperialist agenda concerned with decoding (and recoding) the “Arab mind.” On an especially difficult day of fieldwork, roughly two months into my stay, | called my mother in Germany and asked her if she could come to Egypt to vouch for my part-Egyptianness and trustworthiness. Luckily, she agreed immediately. Having grown up in Cairo, Qena, and Port Said, my mother had left Egypt at the age of eighteen for medical reasons. Although she had been returning for visits on a regular basis, our joint exploration of the field—our encounters with dervishes and dream interpreters, and our nights at mawlids, ecstatic celebrations of saints’ birthdays—revealed a side of Egypt that was as foreign to her as it was to me. Nevertheless, because of her personal, spiritual, and professional background, my mother was able quickly to break the ice with psychologists and Sutis alike, and her presence allowed Egyptians to place me and counterbalanced my aftiliation with a U.S. institution. Once we had moved beyond the initial suspicions, almost everyone had a dream to tell or an opinion about why dreams should or shouldn’t matter. My exploration of the dreams’ various contexts, preludes, and aftermaths involved me in conversations with a wide range of people, including Sufis, dream interpreters, religious scholars, students, intellectuals, psychologists, and many laypersons. As the reader will have noticed, those with whom I spoke during my fieldwork | refer to as my “interlocutors” throughout this book. It is not only because of its unpleasant political con-

notations that I avoid the more commonly used term informants. I also want to emphasize that my conversations and relationships were more dia-

Studying Dreams in Undreamy Times / 23 logical than one-sidedly informative. The wide range of people who came to be my interlocutors is itself significant. Although some Egyptians claim that dreams matter only among members of the poor and working classes, only to women, or only in the countryside, I found that dreams were of relevance also to middle- and upper-class Cairenes, men and women alike.

In talking with my interlocutors, | paid attention to what kinds of dream-stories they told, whom they told them to, when they told them, how they made sense of them, and how dreams moved them through the spaces of their daily lives. Additionally, I tried to listen tor the stories that my interlocutors cid not tell. There are multiple reasons for these silences. Most of my interlocutors were all too familiar with the stereotype of the quintessentially irrational Muslim and were careful not to reproduce it. One afternoon | was chatting about miracies with a relative, who is an imam and a member of the Shadhiliyya Sufi order. We had just marveled over how al-Shadhili (d. 1285), the eponym of the order, had walked over the Red Sea to Medina when the imam suddenly paused and told me that such stories are good only for Friday sermons and mosque lessons, but not “to tell the Americans.” In writing about Islam | should proceed with rational arguments, he continued; otherwise they would say that Islam

is all about superstitions (kiurdfat). The problem here is not whether miracles occur or what kinds of dreams are dreamed. The problem is their articulation: when, where, how, why, and to whom such stories should be

told. Additionally, silences about dreams and visions are related to the awareness that the actual experience always remains out of reach. As a number of people explained to me, by talking about one’s dream-visions one creates a metaphysical veil (hijab) that prevents the seeing of further visions. A family friend in Luxor predicted that Sufis would share with me only theoretical insights into the importance of dream-visions without

saying whether they themselves see dreams of this kind. Dreams constantly seemed suspended between secrecy and everyone having a story to tell. Fluctuating between revelation and concealment, they were both omnipresent and entirely evasive. As I ventured through Egypt’s elusive dream landscapes, four shaykhs— learned scholars and Sufi spiritual advisers—evolved as my guides and companions: Shaykh Nabil, Shaykh Qusi, Shaykh Hanafi, and a shaykh whom I call Shaykh Mustafa.*° As the following chapters repeatedly return to these four key interlocutors, | would like to introduce them briefly.

Shaykh Nabil, skinny and feisty, is the protagonist of chapter 2 but is present throughout the book. When I met him he was close to sixty years old and for more than thirty years had been the guardian of the

24 / Introduction shrine in which [bn Sirin (d. 728), the father of Muslim dream interpretation, lies buried. Himself a popular dream interpreter, Shaykh Nabil is very approachable, albeit somewhat enigmatic. He often sits at the shrine’s threshold, smoking shisha, seemingly lost in thoughts or prayers, observing the street and those passing by. Sometimes he remains in this pensive, meditative mood when visitors arrive; at other times he talks and jokes with them. When I was around, he would either play the role of a fatherly teacher or simply ignore me. | spent numerous days and evenings at the shrine, where I spoke to many of the people who visit Shaykh Nabil to seek his advice and to get their dreams interpreted. On one occasion, a woman invited me to come along to meet “her shaykh”—Shaykh Qusi. Shaykh Qusi is a cosmopolitan and highly educated spiritual leader. The first time I met him, I was immediately struck by his charismatic aura. Yet even though he is revered as a living saint and treated with much admiration and awe, the shaykh instantly put me at ease. He smoked Mariboros while we drank tea and chatted casually about Germany, the Prophet’s saintly descendants, and the nature of dream-visions. The shaykh told me that the invisible and the saints are “just like electricity: we don’t see them, but we see their effects.” As I came to learn more about the shaykh’s background, his liking for such analogies started making sense. Shaykh Qusi holds a graduate degree in chemistry from a Czech university, and he worked in the fields of geology and computer sciences in Egypt, Germany, Spain, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. Besides coming from a hard-science and cosmopolitan background, Shaykh Qusi traces his ancestry to al-[mam alHusayn, the Prophet’s grandson. He studied the authoritative texts of the Islamic tradition from an early age and says he was particularly influenced by al-Ghazali, al-Qushayri, [bn Taymiyya, al-Bukhari, and al-Tirmidhi. During his childhood in Upper Egypt he was introduced to a number of Sufi shaykhs, but for a large part of his life he was primarily preoccupied with actual electricity and chemistry, not their spiritual counterparts. This changed when he was subjected to a spiritual calling in Saudi Arabia. After that point disciples began gathering around him, and since the 19908 they have formed a community called al-Ashraf al-Mahdiyya (the Guided Honorabies). Like Shaykh Qusi, many of his disciples are highly educated and fluent in English; they have university degrees and occupy influential positions in the army, ministries, banks, and large companies. The group holds biweekly hadras—gatherings during which a spiritual text is collectively recited——and it participates in many of Cairo’s mawlids. Subgroups

meet in other Egyptian towns and abroad, including in Saudi Arabia and Australia.

Studying Dreams in Undreamy Times / 25 Although Shaykh Qusi and his disciples come from a more privileged socioeconomic background than Shaykh Nabil and his “clients,” they too follow a mystical path, and as I show in chapter 4, their community is to a large extent guided, shaped, and legitimated by dreams and waking visions. At times Shaykh Qusi seemed almost amused by the fact that I had stumbled upon such a central, highly charged mystical topic without having much of a spiritual background myself. The time I spent with the group has an intense and surreal quality in my memory— in part (but not only) because of the shaykh’s fondness for staying up until the early morning hours. Yet although Shaykh Qusi was always welcoming and willing to answer my questions, it was often difficult to reach him at the gatherings.

His status as a living saint drew crowds who sought his blessings and advice, and after the group’s hadra he was usually shielded by assistants and ushered into a car that was waiting for him outside the mosque. A turning point in my fieldwork was the day Shaykh Qusi instructed his disciples that they should tell me about their own visionary experiences.

I retell a number of their stories in this book. Others have shaped my understanding more implicitly. Often their stories moved me-—not simply because of their highly significant content but also because of the excitement and deep conviction with which they were told and retold.

Shaykh Hanafi is my third key interlocutor. He has become famous through a dream interpretation program on Egyptian television that figures centrally (albeit in its absence) in chapter 1. Many laypersons thought of Shaykh Hanafi as the quintessential dream expert, and friends of mine were highly impressed when I managed to speak to him in person for the first time. The shaykh comes from a Sufi background as well but also takes

pride in his affiliation with al-Azhar, the official institutional voice of Sunni Islam. Al-Azhar, on the other hand, does not approve of the shaykh talking about dream interpretation at his workplace, so we usually met at the shaykh’s house at the outskirts of Cairo, often along with other visitors who would crowd the shaykh’s living room on his official “visiting days.” Shaykh Hanafi is very committed to his identity as a dream interpreter, and at one point he suggested that we should coauthor my book. | often had the feeling that he was frustrated that I had the means to write a book on Muslim dream interpretation while, from his perspective, | barely understand how the art of interpretation works. In spite of his frustration, the shaykh generally welcomed me, but he interacted with me more formally than the other shaykhs did. Often he spoke to me in classical Arabic, and occasionally he interjected that he was not sure what I was going to do with all this information and maybe I was a spy after all.

26 / Introduction My fourth key interlocutor, Shaykh Mustata, is younger than the other shaykhs and less suspicious of me than Shaykh Hanafi. He is trained in social work and always seemed sincerely concerned with the well-being of the people who sought his advice. He studied the classical Islamic sciences, both at al-Azhar and privately with shaykhs, and when I began my fieldwork, he was the government-employed imam of a big Sufi mosque. Subsequently he was transferred to al-Azhar and, a few months later, to another large mosque that is tightly controlled by the government. At that point the shaykh and I started meeting in other public places because he felt that he was being watched at his workplace. He regretted his increasing physical alienation from the saints and told me that he appreciated the opportunity to talk openly with me about visionary and miraculous matters. |, in turn, appreciated the shaykh’s patience and his wide interests, which range from spirit possession to the Palestine-Israel conflict. Many ideas about religious imaginations in this book owe their elaboration to our long conversations. Although they belong to different strata of Egypt’s religious, economic, and social landscapes, all four shaykhs are involved with Sutism-——itself

neither a monolithic nor a static phenomenon, but one that a number of my interlocutors would characterize as a spiritual form of Islam in which love and the constant remembrance (dhikr} of God play a central role. Counter to Michael Gilsenan’s (1967) prediction, Sufi orders have not declined in Egypt but on the contrary have been expanding and attracting middle- and upper-class members, as well as reformist-minded Egyptians

(Hotfman 1995). Working closely with my four key interlocutors and exploring with their help the imaginative repertoires of the Islamic tradition allowed me to move beyond the still-regnant opposition between orthodox Islam and Sufism that permeates scholarly writings as well as everyday discourse in Egypt. All four shaykhs referred to mystical, philosophical, and theological texts and occasionally explained relevant passages to me. At the same time, they would distinguish among three kinds of knowledge: knowledge passed down (naql), knowledge derived from the mind (‘aql), and knowledge divinely inspired (ilm ilahi). As a young Sufi from Luxor put it, true knowledge “does not come from lines (sutiir) [in a book] but trom hearts (sudiir).” Shaykh Qusi, too, at times advised me to forget about books and instead rely on firsthand accounts of those well versed in the spiritual world, such as his disciples. As neither

books nor rational thought could provide me with real insight into the imagination, the shaykhs were pleased with my anthropological interest in (narrativized) experience.

Studying Dreams in Undreamy Times / 27 WRITING DREAMS, WRITING ETHNOGRAPHY A gap separates fieldwork and ethnography. And another one (or the same?)

splits dream-experience and dream-telling. With the rare exception of when I dreamed of my interlocutors, | was presented with only representations of dreams. One could say, as Michael Gilsenan has with regard to miracies, that dreams are “made every day in cafés and conversations” (1983, 75). Although they are the central character of this book, the dreams

themselves have a way of continuously escaping writing. They are the empty spaces between my words. Properly speaking, this is an ethnography of dream-tellings and dream interpretations, but never of the dreams themselves. While recognizing that dreams are elusive and evasive, my interlocutors are not necessarily opposed to subjecting dreams to writing. Written

dreams appear in many texts of the Islamic tradition and Arabic literary genres, including the Qur’an, hadith, dream manuals, medieval Arabic autobiographies (Reynolds 2001), and diaries from as tar back as the eleventh century (Makdisi 1956). My interlocutors occasionally write down their own dreams, either to preserve them for future readers or as a result of the requirements imposed by the mass mediation of dream interpretation. Some of the dream-stories in this book were presented to me already in writing, among them those that had been posted to the Web site for which Shaykh Nabil interprets dreams and those from the Book of Visions, a repository in which Shaykh Qusi’s followers record their visionary expe-

riences. In my own text, dreams appear in different shapes: sometimes they are bounded by quotation marks; at other times they merge into their surroundings. Sometimes they are directly translated from Arabic; other times I retell them in my own words.’ | alternate among various modes of representation to highlight that, in the eyes of my interlocutors, the dream is not hermetically sealed off from the waking world.

While dreams themselves remain out of reach and while it is never verifiable which dreams were really dreamed, | emphasize the dreams’ rhetorical force and their ethical effects. In my view, whether dream-stories are real, projected, or made up is the wrong question to ask. The dreams themselves—that is, the experiences that precede the narratives—cannot

meaningfully be made the subject of an anthropological investigation, and they even elude the dreamers’ own narration. Although it can make a fundamental difference whether people believe that particular stories refer to something real according to their own standards, I hold that the anthro-

pologist is not the ultimate arbiter of the “real,” and that the way this

28 / Introduction category is commonly used tends to erase other forms of relevance. Thus, even though skepticism is not the exclusive privilege of outside observers, | do not modify all accounts of dreams and visions by framing them as mere rhetorical claims. In other words, instead of saying, “Mona claimed to have seen the Prophet,” I might say, “Mona saw the Prophet.” Continuously modifying all vision accounts betrays a particular epistemological bias and obscures the fact that to many of my interlocutors, these experiences are no less real than my own encounters with them. Ultimately our inability to determine whether my interiocutors’ stories refer to something “real” is irrelevant to the fact that they are meaningful in their lives. What can be traced are the discursive, performative, ethical, and political effects of dreams and the realities that dreams bring into being. To remind the reader of the fact that the dream-tellings did not occur in a vacuum but were generally directed to me, I occasionally appear in the text as well. | offer neither an objective account nor a final interpretation but a retelling of my interlocutors’ stories and one particular perspective

on them. Often during my fieldwork I was made keenly aware of my own reactions to, doubts about, and fascinations with the stories I heard, and at times I was reminded of the persistent limitations inherent in my assumptions. One of these moments was the morning when | woke up with two big scratches on my left cheek after dreaming of having got-

ten into a fight with Shaykh Qusi. I still do not know what this dream meant and I never told Shaykh Qusi about it, but being left with a physical mark left me puzzled and slightly disturbed by how deeply involved I had become with Shaykh Qusi’s community and how porous the line might indeed be between dream and waking life. Although experiences of this sort reminded me that the anthropologist is never fully in charge, this does not mean that [am merely a medium for my interlocutors’ dream-stories. In retelling their stories, I subject them to analytical perspectives of which my interlocutors would probably not always approve. Two tields of inquiry run throughout this book, continuously accompanying and inflecting each other. One concerns the politics that define and confine the imagination and the ideological contests over what constitutes “true Islam.” The other concerns the ethical, social, religious, and political implications of al-khaydl, a particular kind of imagination, as it is understood by those who cultivate it and put it into practice. Since these two fields are ultimately inseparable, | begin with the contested landscape in which my interlocutors’ dream-stories are situated. Chapter 1 opens with the interdiction of a popular dream interpretation program on Egyptian television and maps out the many voices and institutions trying to control

Studying Dreams in Undreamy Times / 29 dreams and dreamers. Chapter 2 turns from the logic of the either/or to the dialogical encounter between dreamer and interpreter. Shaykh Nabil, working at a threshold, leads the way into the in-betweenness that is central to this ethnography as a whole. Whereas Shaykh Nabil interprets all three kinds of dreams-—psychologically explainable, devil-sent, and divinely inspired ones—in chapter 3 | zoom in on the ru’ydé and address my interlocutors’ understandings of perception. By complicating the mean-

ing of vision, this chapter aims to set up a place from which we can see my interlocutors’ dream-stories differently. Chapter 4 illustrates how the prophetic is at work in a particularly vibrant community of dreamers: that of Shaykh Qusi and his followers. My account of dream-tellings within this community highlights the ways in which the dream-vision is deeply intertwined with the textual tradition while simultaneously constituting an eruption of knowledge from an Elsewhere. Turning from Shaykh Qusi’s

group to lay dreamers, chapter 5 describes how dreams move ordinary believers in their everyday lives. Dream-encounters can direct dreamers, serve as a fount of authority, and spill over the Egyptian state’s definition of “true Islam.” While they lie beyond the reach of the state’s disciplinary apparatus, they are themselves disciplining and sometimes coercive. Visitational dreams remind dreamers of their communal responsibilities and simultaneously constitute the underlying communities. In chapter 6 I revisit the practice of dream interpretation and address the impact that Western models of psychology have had on Egypt’s dream-landscapes. Through attention to interspaces and ambiguities, | show how both “Freud”

and “Islam” are continuously remade. Like Western psychology, new media forms and technologies have opened up unprecedented spaces and languages for Egyptian dreams. | address some of their effects in the final chapter before revisiting the question of the dream’s political relevance in the afterword. Centrally, this book is an ethnography of Egypt’s dream landscapes and an invitation to rethink the imagination in and through anthropology. It traces dreaming as it is told, lived, cultivated, invoked, and interpreted in Egypt at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but also as it is erased, problematized, and disenchanted. Many of the dream-stories that I retell not only invite us to think beyond the self-possessed subject, they also push up against familiar understandings of “reality” and take us beyond a division of the world into rational/irrational, real/imagined, and either/or. My interlocutors’ dream practices allow us to consider the imagination and the dream in ways that exceed a narrow, imperializing psychoanalytic regime.

The imagination that enables and emerges from their dream-stories is

30 / Introduction not simply fantasy, it is an in-between space, a barzakh, that shifts the attention from observable, material realities to the emergent, the possible, the prophetic, the visionary. Ultimately I believe that an anthropological engagement with such other imaginations, while an intellectual exercise, is one that bears the weight of ethical and political importance-—especially at a time when governments both promise and steal hopes.

1. Dream Trouble But they are cutting off our dreams—dreams don’t mean much, they say, and proceed to make it so... . 1 can feel the Wiper wipe away the dream traces ... fading like steps in windblown sand or snow. WILLIAM BURROUGHS

Then he said: Why dreams? For that kind of stuff you have to go to Iran or maybe Morocco. They know more about this stuff. I said: But Egyptians dream too, don’t they? He said: Yes, but we dream of going out and of girls. FIELDNOTES, ft February 2003

“Hey! Have you heard yet? A Saudi Arabian woman called in and said she

saw the moon breast-feeding a boy, and the shaykh said this means the mahdi has been born.” If you're in Cairo (and if you speak Arabic), most likely you will have heard—if not this version, then a slightly different one. Maybe the woman was not Saudi Arabian but Palestinian. Maybe she did not see the moon breast-feeding a boy, but herself breast-feeding the moon, or the moon being breast-fed by the sun. You might also have heard

that the shaykh asked the woman to perform her ablutions and made her swear three times that she had neither lied nor exaggerated. Or that the shaykh cried upon hearing the dream. Regardless of which version you heard, you will be familiar with its central elements: a woman, a phone

call, the moon, the shaykh, the mahdi...andadream. The rumor was out and spreading throughout Cairo. While the dream had simply seemed strange, its interpretation was alarming and troublesome. Within a Sunni eschatological context, the mahdi is a savior who will restore true Islam at a time of decadence and decay immediately preceding Judgment Day.! His birth is a serious matter: it indicates that the end of the world is near. In newspaper interviews, Shaykh Hanafi insisted that a dream of a breast-feeding moon would be absurd and lie “outside of rationality (khdrig ‘an al-‘agliniyya}.” He swore that neither had he been asked about this particular dream nor had he given this particular interpretation. Yet it mattered little how often the shaykh asserted that he, like everyone else, had learned about the supposed dream only from ran31

32 / Dream Trouble dom people on the street and at work. “Bring me a single person who has seen me interpret the dream and not just eard about it,” Shaykh Hanafi protested again and again, but the repetitive chatter of the rumor drowned

him out. As far as Cairo was concerned, the dream had been dreamed and Shaykh Hanafi had offered his troubling interpretation. Al-Azhar promptly issued a decree that interdicted the broadcasting of dreams and other metaphysical matters (al-ghaybiyydat) to “the masses.” Rw’@, Shaykh Hanafi’s popular dream-program, was taken off the air. It was 22 January 2003.

Having arrived only three weeks prior to this incident, I had been spending my days with friends and relatives, carefully testing the ground by broaching my research topic. Some of my friends marveled over the fact that two research foundations had given me thousands of dollars to study something as obscure and ephemeral as dreams and visions. Those more supportive of my project would either pull their copy of Ibn Sirin’s dream manual from one of their shelves or out of their bedside drawer or, alternatively, they would begin talking about Ru’a@. The TV program was recommended to me by a variety of people, ranging from a woman who sweeps the floors in the Sayyida Zaynab mosque to a medical student in the upper-class neighborhood of Medinat Nasser. Broadcast every Wednesday night on Egyptian national television, Ru’a was a typical live call-in TV show. Viewers told their dreams via phone, and a young female moderator directed their requests for interpretation either to Shaykh Hanafi or to an Egyptian psychologist (a different one was invited to participate in the show every week). Many people commended Ru’ as a perfect example ot how Islam and modern science could successfully be brought together. For others it was an ongoing source of information. Instead of looking up symbols in classical dream manuals, by watching the show they would learn how to interpret their own dreams. Marwa, a twenty-one-year-old student from a lower-middle-class background, eagerly awaited Ruw’fi every week, took detailed notes, and over the course of a year had composed her own little dream manual based on the shaykh’s mass-mediated interpreta-

tions. Like her, many of my friends were excited about the program, and [, in turn, found their excitement reassuring during those first few weeks of fieldwork. Ruw’a was a readily available conversation topic and set of field

data, easily consumable and just as easily recordable. Or so I thought. The day came on which | was to watch Rw’@ myselt for the first time. I settled onto a sofa in front of the television in the apartment that | was renting in Mohandeseen. | had inserted a videocassette into the recorder

and sat waiting with a cup of Nescafé, notebook in hand. The evening

Dream Trouble / 33 passed, and Rw’a was never broadcast. I called Marwa to find out what was going on. Maybe the shaykh is sick, she suggested, or maybe he’s traveling. But she sounded doubtful. It could also be the case that the program

had simply been discontinued without any warning or explanation—a fate not uncommon for TV programs in Egypt. Marwa’s fears were confirmed when a few days later the rumor of the breast-feeding moon and the impending arrival of the ma/idi began circulating, accompanied by the Azharite decree against mass-mediated dream interpretations. Rw’a's end was widely discussed on Cairo’s streets and in its print media. Everyone seemed to have an opinion about it, and my disappointment at the program’s cancellation soon gave way to the realization that it constituted an ideal “incitement to discourse.”* Multiple religious and secular discursive regimes converged in the attempt to ban dream interpretation from the public sphere. Among Ruw’a’s loudest critics was the Egyptian state itself, which has a particular dislike for all “excessive” forms of Sufism and

which draws legitimacy from its claim to protect the Islamic heritage (cf. Starrett 1998). While not an Islamic state per se and often attacked by its opponents as too secular, Egypt has a state mufti; mosques are subject to government inspection; al-Azhar was effectively placed under state control in 1961; and over the course of the twentieth century, reform laws were issued that prohibit specific ritual practices and that moved the administration of Sufi orders under the supervision of the Higher Council of Sufi Attairs. The latter, first established in 1903, exists to assure that Sufism remains within the confines of “true Islam” and free of ecstatic rituals and claims to ongoing forms of prophecy.’ Although the Egyptian state and al-Azhar are not always neatly aligned, in the debate around Ru’ their positions overlapped.* The Azharite decree stated that dream interpretation on television was dangerous “because it can cause confusion or anxiety (valbala}) in the public opinion,” and the Ministry of Religious Affairs declared Ruf to be a form of “idle talk” and claimed that “there is nothing in the Islamic religion that confirms the idea of dream interpretation.” For this reason, the ministry insisted, the TV station should replace Rwa@ with a different program, which was to “deal with religion and morals instead of dream interpretation and intrusions into the Unknown (al-¢hayb}.”° By way of the preposition instead of, dream interpretation was placed outside the realm of religion and morals. Al-Azhar and the state seemed to agree: dream interpretation is un-Islamic and only confuses the masses.

State officials and religious scholars were joined on this issue by Western-trained professionals and liberal journalists. Whereas a number of psychologists had participated in Ruw’a, others had long rejected the

34 / Dream Trouble program, complaining either that the shaykh always had the last word on the show, or worse: that he was a charlatan. One newspaper criticized Ria for deflecting the public’s attention from “real, political issues,” and that at a time-—shortly before the invasion of Iraq in 2003-——when all Arabs should be keeping an eye on what was happening in the region. The staterun daily newspaper al-Gumhiiriyya warned that in particular “illiterate and uneducated people” needed to be protected from the spreading of humbug and myths, and an Azharite publication expressed concern about

the rumor of the ma/di arising right at a time when the Muslim community was facing such grave dangers.’ In the eyes of secular critics and religious scholars alike, dream talk is nothing but an opiate of the masses. It depoliticizes and numbs. Taking the Ru’a debate as an entry point into the complex terrain of Egypt’s dream landscapes, this chapter introduces some of the players that continuously reshape these landscapes—not so much the more obvious ones such as dream interpreters and psychologists (to whom I turn in later chapters), but rather bureaucratic institutions, colonial forces, Orientalists, Saudi scholars, al-Azhar, Muslim Brotherhood members, and Muslim

reformists. By reformists | mostly mean here thinkers associated with Salafism, a Sunni reform movement that emerged in Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that aimed at overcoming a perceived stagnation through a return to the Islam of the salaf, the pious ancestors, and by proving Islam’s compatibility with rationality and modern science. While reformist rationalities do not abandon the prophetic, they bracket it by promoting the view that the Prophet Muhammad’s revelation experience was the final divine intervention and that, consequently, contemporary Muslims should rely on their minds instead of their dreams.

In what follows, | first turn from the Ru’a debate to another incident from my fieldwork that illustrates how reformist reason confines the imagination to a this-worldly social realm while foreclosing its metaphysical dimensions. The remainder of the chapter aims to contextualize these interdictions and separations by unraveling discourses around “charlatanry” and “superstition,” tracing the impact of the Orientalist stereotype of the irrational “Arab mind,” and describing a brief genealogy of reformist views on dreams. Muslim scholars have been discussing the relation between reason and revelation for many centuries,® but the hyperrationalism of the Salafi reformers needs to be understood at least in part as a reaction to a modern European exaltation of scientific reason. Although the kind of rationality that is promoted by Muslim reformers is not simply a copy of modern European rationalities, like them, it insists on

Dream Trouble / 35 firm boundaries between the knowable and the Unknown, the real and the imaginary, the living and the dead. Instead of dwelling on the in-between, reformist reason insists on clear-cut boundaries. ERASURES OF THE BARZAKH “But he’s dead,” the imam repeated. It seemed as though what he really wanted to say was, “Don’t you get it? He’s dead! Is that so hard to understand? Are you telling me you're as ignorant as these folks who come here every day?” Here: Cairo’s City of the Dead, and more specifically the beautiful medieval mosque in which the famous legal scholar al-Imam al-Shaf'l (d. 820) lies buried. Here: where hundreds of Egyptians drop off letters or where letters arrive by mail, addressed to the long-deceased saintly scholar. Here: one of those places where I expected to hear marvelous dream-stories. How else could al-Imam al-Shafid respond to the letter writers but by appearing to them in dreams or waking visions? Besides being the founder of one of the four Sunni schools of law, al-

Imam al-Shafil was directly related to the Prophet Muhammad.’ He is revered as a saint in Egypt and believed to serve as a defendant on the hidden court of saints (al-mankama al-batiniyya). For decades Egyptians have been sending letters to the saint to ask for his help or intercession. Having read about the letters, | had come to the shrine to find out about the saint’s means of responding to these many requests.'° Since most of the

visitors were absorbed in prayer or busy talking to the saint, | decided to ask the imam in charge of the mosque about al-Imam al-Shaii’s preferred mode of communication. Upon entering the imam’s office, I noticed Ibn Sirin’s dream manual on his desk, next to classical hadith and tafsir works, and so, after having introduced myself, I quickly and confidently brought up the question of dream-visions. “I’ve heard that people write letters to al-imam al-Shatia,” I said, “and

I was wondering how he responds to them. Do people see him in their dreams?”

The imam’s hospitable welcome gave way to a frown. “Al-Imam alShafi is dead,” he said, “so how could anyone still see him?” To emphasize al-Imam al-Shafi'i’s absolute deadness, the imam used the harsh word mayyit (dead) instead of the gentler mutawaffi (passed away). He could also have said that the saintly legal scholar dwells in the realm of God’s mercy (fi rahmat Allah}, which would have implied that death is not an end but rather an awakening.

36 / Dream Trouble I was thrown off by the imam’s response and began wondering whether Ibn Sirin fultilled only a decorative function on his desk. If the imam had read the dream manual, he would know that seeing the dead in a dream can be quite informative. According to Ibn Sirin, when a dead person wears a crown or green clothes, this means that he is doing well in the afterlife. A dream in which the dead perform a good deed is a sign that one should do the same. Classical sources are full of stories that rely on dreamed communication between the dead and the living. The imam’s claim that the dead are unable to guide the living diverges not only from these classical sources, but also from the dream ethics adhered to by many Egyptians, who consider the visitational dream a real interlocutory possibility. According to them, dream-encounters are possible because the dead are in the barzakh, as are the spirits of the living while they are asleep or ina heightened spiritual state. Many dreamers and dream interpreters appreciate the barzakh as a dialogical in-between space, a space in which the living and the dead can meet. In what sense, then, does it matter that al-lmam al-Shafid is dead? And why would someone so dismissive of the intimate ties between believers and saints have chosen to work in such a saintly mosque? It dawned on me that this was turning into one of those absurd moments when anthropologists explain to their informants what they would have liked to hear from them. I couldn’t help it: “So he’s dead, but he’s still around, isn’t he? He’s still in the barzakh.” “So what if he is?” the imam responded. “How can he solve our problems down here from there?”

“But...,” I began again. The imam interrupted me: It’s wrong of people to write letters to al-Imam al-Shafit, complaining to him and asking for help. They do it only out of ignorance. Of course al-Imdm [al-Shafi‘i] never responds to them. He’s dead, after all. How could he respond to them? How could he solve their problems for them? It’s wrong to turn to him for help. We are only to turn to God for help. [God said] “Iam near” [Qur’an 2:186]. Seeking help through anyone else (al-tawassul) is not permitted. ... Writing letters to someone like that is idolatry (shirk)... . Luckily it has gotten less, the problem of people writing letters. One or two centuries ago people used to do it much more. Now they understand better. Because of science (“ilm} their minds are enlightened (yastanir al-‘uqiil). And of course the mind tells you that it’s wrong. That he’s dead. That he won’t solve your problems for you.

Dream Trouble / 37 From a reformist point of view, the dead, including the Prophet and the awliy@, are truly dead; mutual visits and conversations between the dead and the living are impossible. To underline this point, reformist thinkers often cite a Quranic verse stating that “behind those [who leave the world) there is a barrier jof death| (barzakh) until the Day when all will be raised trom the dead” {23:100).!' According to reformist readings of this verse, the dead are strictly separated from the living until Judgment Day. The barzakh here is not an in-between space but a barrier. “So what if he is?” the imam responded when I referred to the saint’s presence in the barzakh, Al-Imam al-Shafi'i might be in that realm, but he cannot influence the lives of the living. So what? might be the best way to sum up what reformist reason more generally has to say about the possibility of truthful dream-visions. Such dreams exist in theory but no longer in practice. The dead are in the barzakh, but the living have no access to that realm. While dream-visions are not categorically denied, dreams cannot live up to the imperative of certitude that is embraced by reformist reason. The possibility of prophecy is accordingly not erased, but it is bounded. In the imam’s view, the fact that people write letters to a dead saint is a token of their ignorance, their lack of enlightenment. Instead of turning to a metaphysical Elsewhere for help, they should learn how to take their problems into their own hands. Like Ru’@’s critics, the imam holds that expecting help from an Elsewhere leads to idle talk and confusion and that Islam should be swept free of all superstitious beliefs. Modern science in his eyes is not a token of secularism or Western imperialism but a tool for purifying Islam. Through it, all minds are to be enlightened. Gradually our conversation turned to more mundane matters. I learned that the imam had grown up in Upper Egypt, that he had studied in Saudi

Arabia, that he greatly admired the orderliness that he associates with Germany, and that he had never chosen to work in al-Imam al-Shahi'’s saintly mosque but the government had assigned him to it—maybe precisely because of his rationalistic stance. Of course, until all minds are “enlightened,” neither the Egyptian state

nor its imams can prevent people from dreaming of saints or from writing letters to them. The most they can do is interdict dream programs on national television and ritually erase the material traces of the people’s “superstitions.” * At al-Imam al-Shafi'l’s shrine, government officials collect and burn the believers’ letters on a weekly basis. In a gesture toward a brighter future, when all “ignorance” will be overcome, the people’s

requests go up in smoke. Other times the letters fulfill an even more pragmatic purpose. The imam told me that before the letters are burned,

38 / Dream Trouble he occasionally reads some of them to get a sense of people’s worries and concerns, which he then addresses in his Friday sermons. If, for instance, a number of the letters are about divorce, the sermon will include strategies for dealing with marital problems. In the imam’s opinion, he can provide concrete, religiously and scientifically sound advice; al-Imam al-Shati'l cannot. He is dead and out of reach.

Of Charlatans and Superstitions Those who insist that they can communicate with the dead and those who ascribe too much value to their dreams are frequently labeled “superstitious” in Egypt. Muslim dream interpreters, in turn, are called charlatans. When superstitions or acts of charlatanry threaten to get out of hand, the

boundaries of “true Islam” are enforced. Often the difference between acceptable and unacceptable practices is a matter of scope and audience. Just as saint veneration embarrasses state officials because of its highly visible

nature, an article in the Egyptian weekly ‘Agidati expressed outrage at the abuse of dream interpretation for the “tricking of simple people” and introduced the readers to a “proper” dream interpreter—-one who recognizes her limits and remains within the boundaries of the private; one who interprets only for relatives, friends, and neighbors and does “not receive anyone, be it at home or at work or on the telephone in order to interpret.

It is for those around [her|.” Shaykh Hanati’s televised interpretations, by contrast, were reaching an entire TV audience, and the announcement of the coming of the mahdi (and thus of the impending end of the world) concerned all Muslims, if not the world at large. The terms daggdl and sha‘wadia are used widely in the Arabic media, the former meaning “swindler,” “cheat,” “imposter,” “quack,” or “charlatan,” and the latter “magic,” “humbug,” “swindle,” or “trickery.”"* Time and again friends warned me that I should choose my interlocutors carefully. Worried that I might represent Islam wrongly in the “West,” they urged me not to talk to dervishes, Sufis, elderly women, and those who

make a “business” out of lying. A basic rule of thumb suggested by a young Egyptian woman was that “whoever tells you he’s a dream interpreter is a charlatan.” When Egyptians speak of charlatans, they generally refer to people who abuse their religion and make money by tricking others. Occasionally a Faustian contract with the devil or evil spirits is also implied. Terms such as charlatan derive their discursive force in part from how they group practices and beliefs. Dream interpretation is superstitious because it is just like reading the future in coffee cups, writing horoscopes, or using charms. A dream interpreter is a charlatan who financially exploits

Dream Trouble / 39 people just like those claiming to exorcise evil spirits. Categorizations of this sort manifest themselves in analogies drawn by journalists, in how books are arranged in bookstores, and also in what people assumed to be relevant for my project. Some handed me their booklets on zodiac signs when | brought up dreams; others spoke to me about magic spells, drew amulets, or took me to Our’anic healers or zdr rituals. Dreams were of little importance in these contexts, but somehow these spheres belonged together in the minds of my interlocutors. A study of “274 different kinds of superstitions,” conducted in 2003 by the National Center for Criminal and Social Research in Cairo, concluded that Egyptians have been spending a yearly amount of ten billion Egyptian

pounds on “unraveling unknown matters (gir@dt al-chayb),” magic, and the treatment of spirit possession.'© Thousands, the research center reported, seek out charlatans in the hope of being healed, averting the evil eye or magical spells, or becoming pregnant. According to the report, the fees paid to charlatans range between ten pounds for less~known ones and ten thousand pounds for the most famous healers, who are frequented by

Egyptians and visitors from the Gulf states alike.” The research center claimed that currently about three hundred thousand charlatans are active in Egypt. Besides Egyptian newspapers, their counterparts in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states also reported on these findings. How is it possible, they asked, that Arabs spend more money on humbug than on education? Why are Egyptians so prone to falling for charlatanry? How has superstition taken hold of Egypt's “collective mind (al-‘aql al-jama‘7)"?"® Different answers were suggested. Some sociologists held the cinema and television responsible for portraying charlatanry in an increasing number of films. Such films, according to one journalist, exploit the masses’

ignorance and promote an escape to the supernatural instead of enculturing (tathgif) and enlightening (tanwir) people.’ Others came to the defense of the mass media and argued that films only portray what is already an eminent phenomenon in society, or merely show why it is wrong to go to a charlatan. Frequently Egyptian journalists correlated the resurgence of magic, humbug, and superstitions with political, economic, and social instabilities, arguing that historically, people turn to the super-

natural especially during crises. Instead of taking the future into their hands, one journalist noted, the Arabs subject it to a “nonreal and nonmaterial world that is woven by the imagination of magicians, swindlers, and charlatans.”*® A newspaper from the Emirates blamed the increase in charlatanry on a feeling of despair, insufficient religious knowledge, and shortcomings in the educational structure.*!

40 / Dream Trouble While journalists, sociologists, and other experts were busy debating what has led to an increase in superstitious beliefs and charlatanry, they failed to consider a number of alternative questions. Instead of asking what has caused a turn to “superstitions,” one might ask, for instance, what all

this talk about “superstition” signifies. In part the answer might be that the portrayal of “bad Muslims” helps to define and reaftirm the “good Muslims.”*? Additionally, as I suggest next, the categories of charlatanry and superstition need to be understood as outcomes of particular colonial histories. Although the distinction between experts and charlatans is not a modern phenomenon, and although the lines that are drawn today resonate with older binaries,* they were intensified when colonizers’ and Orientalists’ accounts of the Muslims’ irrationality and illogicality fueled reformers’ calls to rid Islam of all superstitions. The lingering image of the muddled, illogical “Arab mind” haunts, so I believe, many contemporary debates about the contours of “true Islam.”

The “Arab Mind”

A recurring trope in Orientalist and colonialist discourses insists that Islam is inherently irrational. Scottish Orientalist H.A.R. Gibb commented on the “aversion of the Muslims from thought-processes of rationalism” (1947, 7), and American Islamicist Duncan MacDonald (1911, 48) claimed that the “Orientals” have the creative imagination of a child and are therefore in need of missionaries. According to MacDonald, while Christianity managed to bring the unseen into history, Islam failed to do so and was therefore overpowered by the uncanny (cf. Pruett 1984). As Edward Said (1979) has pointed out, MacDonald and Gibb participated in an immense, intertextual web of meanings that constructs the Orient as Other and that intersects with and feeds into colonialist discourses. A typical colonialist take on the “Oriental mind” was otfered by Lord Cromer, the first British viceroy of Egypt, who mused over how Egypt could best

be brought out of its “semi-civilized condition.” While stating that he felt a deep sympathy for the Egyptian people, Lord Cromer explained that true understanding between Egyptians and Europeans was practically

impossible because of a want of mental symmetry. In a chapter on the nature of Egyptians in his book Modern Egypt, Cromer juxtaposed the logical, scientific, curious, questioning European mind with the superstitious, fatalistic “muddle-headedness” of Egyptians. According to Cromer, the European is a “close reasoner” and “natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic,” whereas the Arab’s mind, “like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry” (1908, 146). Although he noted that

Dream Trouble / At the Arabs perfected the science of dialectics and contributed to European thought in the eleventh and twelfth centuries through their teachings of Aristotelian philosophy, Cromer held that the contemporary Egyptian is inherently gullible and therefore “readily becomes the dupe of the magician and the astrologer. Even highly educated Egyptians are prone to refer the common occurrences of life to the intervention of some supernatural agency” (1461,).

Similar discourses not only crop up today in the Arab press but linger also in other forms. One version of the trope of the irrational Muslim, Arab, or Oriental appears in Raphael Patai’s book The Arab Mind, which was first published in 1973 and has been used in U.S. military training camps in recent years. Patai explains that “what the Arab mind does is to elect purposely to give greater weight in thought and speech to wishes rather than reality, to what it would like things to be rather than to what they objectively are” (1983, 165). According to Patai, the Arabs are unable to grasp reality objectively and are therefore stuck in a fantasy world. He relates these mental incapacities to the Arabic speakers’ intoxication with eloquence, proneness to verbal exaggeration, tendency toward repetitiousness, and grammatical unconcern with time distinctions (44-72). More recently, the trope of the irrational or anti-rationalist Muslim reemerged in Pope Benedict XVI's controversial speech in Regensburg, Germany, in September 2006—-a speech in which the pope contrasted the intrinsic harmony between Christianity and Greek philosophy with the supposed view of Muslim scholars that God is absolutely transcendent and not bound by rationality. In response, a number of Muslim scholars pointed out that the pope had failed to address the relationship between

God’s transcendent nature and human reason in the Islamic tradition, and that the use of one’s reason is a religious duty in Islam.” Like the stereotype of the irrational Muslim, these counterarguments are nothing new. Muslim reformers have long been going to great lengths to prove that Islam is in fact a highly rational religion. What is overlooked by both

those insisting on the inherent irrationality of Islam and those insisting on its inherent rationality is a realm that is neither rational nor irrational: the imagination. REFORMIST RATIONALITIES

Muslim reformers are compelled to defend Islam against colonialist and Orientialist stereotypes. But they insist on the need to rely on rational thought also because of the powerful political and even revolutionary

42 / Dream Trouble potential that can arise from claims to prophecy and divine inspiration. A famous historical example of a vision-inspired national heroine is Joan of Arc, who was executed for heresy in the fifteenth century after she had asserted that her visions of God told her to recover France from English domination. In the early twentieth century the Muslim reformist journal Al-Mandr received a letter inquiring whether Joan of Arc should be considered a prophet. Rashid Rida, one of the key Salafi thinkers, responded that Joan of Arc was not a prophet because she never called her followers to a religion. He went on to explain that the French are a people easily moved by irrational factors, as proved by the example of Napoleon leading his troops into certain death by reciting poetry for them (1996, 42). Rida

later included the inquiry along with his response in The Muhammadan Revelation, a book centrally concerned with dislodging the Orientalist claim that Muhammad received only a “personal revelation,” that is to say, an inspiration that “flowed from his subliminal self, with its highly refined religious sensibilities, into his conscious mind” (3). While Rida acknowledged that Muhammad's prophecy started with dreams, he held that “visions are actually mental pictures that are open to interpretation, so that it is only the true prophet who is capable of distinguishing the true interpretation from the false” (22). Rida confirmed the possibility of revelation in the form of dreams but simultaneously limited its accessibility to the Prophet. The Prophet’s revelation experience was more than a dream, and only he was able to recognize it as such. Ordinary believers’ dreams,

by contrast, are always less than revelation. Rida explained that Joan of Arc “was motivated by nervous energy which came about as a result of her anxiety over the political situation and as a result of her sentimental religiosity and belief in the legends that were popular in her times. All of this is quite common, and is shared by all those who claim to be the awaited Messiah, like Mohammad Ahmad in the Sudan, or the Bab in Iran, or Ahmad the Qadiani in India” (43).

According to Rida, Joan of Arc was not a prophet, but neither were the modern messianic leaders of Islam, such as Muhammad Ahmac, who proclaimed himself ma/idi in Sudan in 1881 and declared a jihdd against the Ottoman rulers; Bab, the founder of Babism in Iran (from which the Baha’i faith was later derived); and Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who founded the Ahmadiyya movement in India in 1889. Rida implied that all these messianic leaders were motivated by psychological anxieties, political instabilities, and prevalent beliefs that allowed them to imagine and present themselves as mahdi-like figures. Although Rida was more conservative than other Salafi reformers and

Dream Trouble / A3 increasingly became influenced by Wahhabi thought, his suspicion against ongoing claims to prophecy resonates with a broader Salafi emphasis on reason and aspiration to certitude. Famous debates, such as that between the reformer al-Afghani and the French historian Ernest Renan in 1883, or that between Muhammad ‘Abduh and the Christian Lebanese secularist Farah Antoun in 1902, centered precisely on the question of whether Islam is compatible with reason. In insisting that Islam is a highly rational

religion, the Salafi reformers described it as distinct from Christianity, which, according to their account, has long embraced a belief in miracles. Rida noted that whereas the concepts of reason, thought, consideration, and deliberation are absent from the Bible, the Qur’an mentions the word mind (‘agl} more than fifty times (1996, 107). When Salati thinkers emphasize Islam’s inherent rationality, they do not necessarily embrace European models of reason. As Talal Asad (2003, 2211.) has pointed out, it would be reductive to think that the reformers

simply turned against manifestations of mysticism because they represented the irrationality that the European bourgeoisie disliked most about Islam.*° Far from exclusively being a colonial legacy, such a skepticism is prominent already in the writings of the medieval scholar Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), who, as Fritz Meier puts it, was “in tavor of ‘Apollonian’ intellectual clarity and against all forms of ‘Dionysian’ rapture” (1999, 317), and who held against Sufis their unwarranted valuation of experience and exceptional states. While not denying the possibility that one might even

see God in dreams and waking visions, lbn Taymiyya warned that one should never consider dreams or visions binding and true in a way that would raise their status to that of the Our’an and sunna. Rida emphasized Islam’s high regard for the mind and, like Ibn Taymiyya,

he rejected an overvaluation of mystical experience. Simultaneously he denounced the supposed rationality of Western Orientalists who claimed to be using a mode of critical analysis to disprove the divine origins of the Qur’anic revelation (1996, 49). While defending the historical occurrence of revelation, Salafi reformers were particularly skeptical of Sufi claims to divine inspiration. Rida, ‘Abduh, and al-Afghani were all involved in Sufi orders early in their lives and continued to express their respect for “true Sufism,” but they repeatedly denounced the aberrations of popular religious customs and wanted to outlaw what they considered to be excessive Sufi practices. One token of the reformers’ ambivalent attitude about Sufism is al-Mandr wa-l-Azhar, a book that Ridd wrote toward the end of his life. In it he recalled a number of extraordinary mystical experiences that he himself underwent as a young man: he felt himself move outside his

AA / Dream Trouble body while reading al-Ghazali’s Revival of the Religious Sciences; he saw visions of future events; he was able to heal the sick through his prayers; and, during his involvement with the Nagshabandiyya order, he saw the Prophet, Abt Bakr, and a shaykh of his order in a state between sleeping and waking (Rida 1933; cf. Sirrtyeh 1999, 99). Although Rida was impressed and moved by these experiences, he later came to reject them as inherently unreliable. He did so without resorting to European Enlightenment thought or modern scientific arguments. Instead of referring to his contemporaries Freud and Jung, he discarded supposed “dreams of the holy dead as mainly dreams of the unholy devils” (Sirriyeh 2000, 130). Interestingly, Rida was not entirely consistent in devaluing the dream’s evidential potential. In his 1933 book he drew on a dream that a father of an acquaintance had seen and in which he questioned the great medieval Sufi master Ibn al-‘Arabi about what happened to him after his death. Ibn al-‘Arabi confessed in the dream that he led many people astray in his life because he was confused about the imaginal world (155).°’ It is ironic that Ridé provided imaginary proof to disprove the importance of the imagi-

nary realm. Apparently the evidential promise of dream-visions could be so compelling that even the rationalist reformer disregarded his own convictions when a dream fitted into his argument. In principle, however, Salati reformers reject the dream’s prophetic and ethical potential. The reformers’ expulsion from Islam of whatever is seen as nonrational (i.e., the insistence on a rational Islam and the construction of “superstition” as an abject category) draws on rationalist trends in the Islamic tradition while simultaneously responding to Orientalist tropes of the quintessentially irrational Muslim. The resulting skepticism finds expression today

not only in state-aligned institutions but also in oppositional religious movements.

Muslim Brotherhood Thinkers on Dreams Although “modernist” and “Islamist” trends are frequently juxtaposed in academic and journalistic writings, as far as dreams are concerned, state-aligned, modernist positions often converge and overlap with oppositional, “Islamist” ones. Salafi thought not only has permeated al-Azhar and Egypt's official religious institutions,*® but it also is reflected in the epistemological stance adopted by thinkers affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that has moved in and out of legitimacy since it was first founded in 1928 and today forms one of the strongest oppositional forces in Egypt.

Hasan al-Bannd, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, stressed in

Dream Trouble / AS his Risdlat al-Ta‘lim (Thesis of Education) that Islam is a rational religion, a religion that “frees the mind (yuharrir al-‘agl)” (1981, 358). He distinguished sharply between legitimate sources of knowledge (namely, Qur’an,

sunna, science, and rational thought) and their deviant counterparts, and he denounced knowledge gained by way of dreams, divine inspiration, and premonitions. Al-Banna’s take on dream-visions and divination was later echoed by Yisut al-Qardawi, a key figure in the Islamic Revival movement, who was stripped of his Egyptian nationality because of his support for the Muslim Brotherhood and who currently lives in Qatar. In a book titled Islam's Position on Divine Inspiration, Illumination, DreamVisions, Amulets, Divination, and Spells, al-Qardawi explains that Hasan al-Banna’s stance illuminates the movement’s position on “excessive Sufis who make of what they are inspired by in the waking state and what they see in their sleep a proof through which they justify their deeds and words as if it were the infallible revelation. They even have turned illumination,

inspiration, and dream-visions into legal evidence (dalil). This is a clear error and a big mistake” (1996, 11). Again, “excessive Sutis” are here criticized for overvaluing their experience and for mistaking their dream-visions for a form of revelation. Yet like Rida, al-Qardawi not only denounces “those who rely on dream-visions in their life as if they were revelation and wait in every matter for a dreamvision that will point them the right way,” but he also disagrees with those

who deny the existence of dream-visions altogether: “There are people whose view is obscured |literaily: whose veil is thick], like the materialists of our time and of all times and like the followers of the school of psychoanalysis. They deny the truthful dream-vision and see all dream-visions only as a reflection of what is in the psyche during the waking state or what is hidden in the basements of the inner mind, the unconscious” (ibid. 120).

Whereas the imam in al-lmam al-Shafi‘i’s mosque drew on “modern science” to discard the masses’ “backward” beliets, al-Qardawi puristically aims at disproving the dream’s reliability from within the Islamic tradition. In opposition to materialists, empiricists, and psychoanalysts, he reaffirms the reality of dream-visions and asserts that divine inspiration and illumination do occur in the miracles of prophets and saints, to whom God might reveal some “hidden things of the unknown matters of the future” (ibid. 37). While not denying the theoretical possibility of dreamvisions, al-Oarddwi tries to contain their effectiveness. Dream-visions, he warns, can never qualify as evidence.”? He explains that if one learns through a dream that a specilic witness has lied, or that money was stolen, or that water is impure, none of these findings matters in reality as even

46 / Dream Trouble the Prophet always judged based on visible facts (al-zawéihir} and not based on what God had revealed to him. Offering an example of what can happen

when dreams are mistaken for evidence, al-Oardawi cites an article from the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahrdm, according to which a judge changed the date for local elections because of a dream-vision he had seen. “This way,” al-OQardawi laments, “dream-visions have begun interfering in religion, politics, and all aspects of life” (120).

In light of his distrust of the dream-vision’s epistemological and ethi-

cal potential, it is not surprising that al-Oardawi responded to the Ria debate in the form of a rhetorical question: “And why should we care about

dream-visions? (fa-md balund bi-l-rwa al-mandmiyya).”° In the wake of the debate a fatwa was also issued on Islam Online, a bilingual Web site initiated by al-Qardawi, which urged Muslims not to “arrange their conditions and [not to] modify their states depending on these kinds of dream-visions. It is a dangerous slippery ground (mazlaq) that Muslims should not trust.” One of the Egyptian muftis involved in the collective issuing of the fatwa told me proudly that it was clicked on far more often than any other recent fatwa. Saudi Critics

Along with state-aligned and oppositional reformist voices coming out of Egypt, Saudi scholars have been expressing their disdain for dream interpretation, particularly in its mass-mediated forms. Saudi scholars are primarily associated with Wahhabism, a literalist reform movement that began in Saudi Arabia in the eighteenth century and that aims at the purification of Islam through a return to the Qur’an and the sunna while taking a strong stand against bid‘a, saint worship, polytheism, and Sufism. Wahhabi thought has influenced some Salafi thinkers directly, and many Egyptian scholars have studied in Saudi Arabia; additionally, since the

early 1960s the well-funded Muslim World League in Mecca has been sending Saudi-trained scholars into various parts of the Muslim world. Through these educational exchanges, by way of labor migration, television, the Internet, and print media, Wahhabi thought has been extending beyond Saudi Arabia’s borders, and I often found Egyptians quoting authoritative Saudi opinions that they had read in newspapers. Others complained of what could be called a “Saudification” of Islam.

In 2003 ‘Abd al-Aziz Al al-Shaykh, the main mufti of Saudi Arabia, warned against the phenomenon of dream interpretation, which “is spreading widely in the name of Islam” on television and in newspapers and magazines, and which can lead to social unrest and cause “disputes and

Dream Trouble / AT discords by bringing apart a woman and her husband, or a man and his relatives and friends.” He concluded that all Muslims should work together in closing the door before this “great evil (sharr ‘azim).”* In an article in an Emirati newspaper, published a few months after Rw’d’s discontinuation, a Saudi scholar went a step further, claiming that even “the Prophet

(peace and prayers be upon him) did not know how to interpret dreams. Dream interpretation on satellite channels is slander {iftira) against God. They talk about things that they know nothing about. They commit horrid mistakes in filling people with doubt and in confusing their lives in unprecedented ways. They should tear God!” Dream interpretation, once the only legitimate form of divination in Islam, has here become a great evil. The notion that not even the Prophet Muhammad knew how to interpret dreams diverges from standard hadith works, according to which the Prophet frequently interpreted his companions’ dreams. Since even he knew next to nothing of al-ghayb, the metaphysical realm of the Unknown, it is implied, regular believers should not dig into that dangerous realm either. To underline this point, critics of dream interpretation, and of divination more generally, frequently draw on the following Qur’anic verses: For, with Him [God] are the keys to the things that are beyond a created being’s perception (al-ghayb): none knows them but He. (6:59)

Say: “None in the heaven or on earth knows the hidden reality fal-ghayb) save God.” (27:65)

Say [o Prophet]: | do not say unto you, “God's treasures are with me”; nor [do I say], “I know the things that are beyond the reach of human perception”; nor do | say unto you, “Behold, lam an angel”: I but follow what is revealed to me. (6:50)

Salati and Wahhabi reformers do not dismiss al-ghayb, but they declare it to be inaccessible. In separating the knowable from the Unknown, they call for an exclusive reliance on veritiable knowledge. Since the Unknown is out of reach and the gate of prophecy is closed, the dream arises as an object that needs to be controlled and domesticated. According to reformist thinkers, dreams are at best a private matter but should play no role in the public, legal, or political realm. AWAKENINGS

Faced with criticism from various sides, dream interpreters have been defending their work against the allegation that it is fraudulent, supersti-

48 / Dream Trouble tious, or outdated. Countering the notion that dream interpretation is un-Islamic, they insist that it is part of, and legitimated by, the textual tradition. One dream interpreter from Upper Egypt who has appeared on a number of television shows asserted in June 2003, “dream interpreta-

tion is a lawful matter famr shar‘%) that is proven in the Qur’an, the sunna, and the sayings of the ancestors fal-salaf).”** Similarly, Shaykh Hanati detended Ru’ in an interview by insisting that “all [he had] said in this [TV] show were things in agreement with the Qur’an and the sunna. These things can be found in the depths of books.”*4 Unlike the Egyptian Ministry of Religious Aftairs, which requested a religiously sound program “instead of” Ruw’a, dream interpreters assert that dream interpretation lies fully within the boundaries of the Islamic tradition, thus reclaiming for their work the status of orthodoxy.

Already before the rumor about the mahdi dream erupted, Shaykh Hanafi had been asked in an interview whether dream interpretation was not a superstitious practice. He answered that dream interpretation is a divine gift and a science legitimized by Ibn Sirin and in the hadith. “The books of the sunna are filled with this kind of knowledge,” he said, “but people have become alienated from it.”°? When talking to me, Shaykh Hanafi often emphasized his religious training, noting that by the age of ten he had memorized the Qur’an, that he had studied the classical Islamic sciences at al-Azhar, and that for forty years he had learned trom a shaykh of the Bayytimi Sufi order. Subsequently he worked as a teacher, an imam, and in the field of da‘wa; and when he started the TV program, he was an employee in the administrative office of al-Azhar’s protessoriate. Whereas al-Azhar’s decree denounced dream interpretation as un-Islamic, Shaykh Hanafi tried to resituate his work within the scope of Azharite legitimacy. In a newspaper interview following Rid’s discontinuation he claimed, “It I had said empty talk or sought refuge with delusions and charlatanry, no one would have let me; my colleagues at al-Azhar would have directed me onto the right path.”°° When I first met the shaykh, he highlighted his Azharite credentials along with the textual embeddedness of his interpretive work. He showed me the many books that he uses when dealing with dreams, among them

the manuals of Ibn Sirin, Ibn Shahin, and al-Nabulusi, hadith collections, classical works of figh (Islamic jurisprudence), al-Ghazali’s and Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawzi’s writings, and Kitdb al-Hayawiin, as well as more recent self-help literatures. Our subsequent meetings usually began with us comparing the newest books on dreams we had acquired. The shaykh took great pride in the bookcases that were being built in his living room

Dream Trouble / AQ during my fieldwork, and one day he introduced me to Zaynab, another visitor to his house, whom he commended for “reading everywhere and at all times.” After Zaynab had confirmed that reading is “more important to [her] than eating or sleeping,” Shaykh Hanafi asked her to take off her reading glasses so he could compare them with his own. He was proud that his were thicker. For Shaykh Hanafi, the size of his private library and the thickness of his glasses characterize him as a proper scholar and symbolize the textual grounding and legitimacy of dream interpretation. The point is therefore not that Muslim reformers are rational whereas dreamers and dream interpreters fall victim to, or intentionally embrace, irrationality. A quick glance into any of the classical dream manuals shows

that Muslim dream interpretation is a highly complex, elaborate hermeneutical science with many rules and complicated techniques. It is also worth recalling in this context Shaykh Hanafi’s remark that a dream of a breast-feeding moon would lie “outside of rationality.” Shaykh Hanafi not only believes in the validity (and rationality) of dream interpretation but also asserts that dreams offering guidance or prophetic insight are themselves “rational.” For him, being a dream interpreter does not mean subscribing to irrationality, it means following a particular rationality that comes out of a complex textual tradition. This tradition, however, does not reject the imagination as reason’s Other, instead welcoming it as a mode of divine inspiration. While relying on his ever-growing library, Shaykh Hanafi believes that the art of dream interpretation is not something that can be learned or passed on easily. His work as a dream interpreter, he says, responds to a gift given to him by God. The shaykh legitimizes his practice by insisting that it is grounded in years of study and that it is a divine gift, both at once. In his view, precisely because TV programs like Ru’@ bring together scholarly knowledge and divine inspiration, they have an important role to play in

society. Far from numbing the masses or distracting them from political matters, such programs can incite the viewers’ political imaginations. Sharply rejecting the claim that his program was brainwashing the masses, Shaykh Hanafi insisted that Rw’a “does not spread superstitions and does not numb (yukhaddir) people. Counter to what some are claiming, it does not alienate [the viewers] from the difficult matters that the Muslim community is facing. It proceeds in the sphere of true and safe direction and the call for a reform of the self and the awakening of the Muslims. It incites them to hold on to their religion and to busy themselves with the worship ot God and the issues of their community (umma).”*” For Shaykh Hanati, tar from being un-Islamic, dream interpretation is his duty as a Muslim.

50 / Dream Trouble Although he denies ever having announced the coming of Judgment Day, he believes that his interpretations are ethically and politically awakening. Dream interpretation in his view exceeds distinctions between the public and the private, the psychological and the political. Even the dream of the breast-feeding moon could potentially have awakened Ru’a’s viewers. While declared irrational by Shaykh Hanafi himself, the dream announced a radical change and simultaneously commented on the current state of affairs. Things were so bad in Egypt (or in the world at large) that the end was near. Aware of these implications, critics of the program warned that such dream talk could incite social unrest or fitna. The fact that dreams (or rather their interpretations) can be mobilizing has been proved by history. I referred earlier to Rashid Rida’s dismissal of difterent messianic leaders who claimed to be divinely inspired. Rida could have used many additional examples. The founding of the Ottoman Empire was supposedly inspired by a dream seen by Osman. Shaykh Mansiir, a shaykh associated with the Naqshabandiyya order in the northern Caucasus, had a dream of the Prophet in the late eighteenth century that convinced him to lead an anticolonial resistance movement. More recently, the insurrection in Mecca in 1979 was triggered by an eschatological expectation of the mahdi's arrival that had been revealed to the insurgents’ leader by way of a dream-vision.“* Even some of the Western media’s favorite “Islamists,” like Bin Laden and Mullah ‘Omar, the founder of the Taliban movement, have claimed to have been inspired by dream-visions.”

Most of the dreamers and dream interpreters whom I came to know during my fieldwork do not aim at overthrowing governments or global powers. Dream interpretation for Shaykh Hanafi and his Egyptian colleagues speaks rather to everyday concerns with piety and virtue that, as Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind have argued, are as much part of the Islamic Revival as are its more obviously political manifestations. As the examples in later chapters will show, dream-visions often direct dream-

ers to concrete actions such as visiting the saints, distributing alms, or joining a Sufi order. Practices and experiences of the imagination can have powertul ethical dimensions; they can shape lives and create communities. Dream interpreters accordingly often provide dreamers not only with an interpretation but also with a directive for how they are to live their life. While Shaykh Hanafi denounced the dream of the breast-feeding moon as irrational and while he is wary of making his interpretive work sound too political, he refers to his calling at times as a form of jildid or da‘wa.

Jihad in this context implies neither a holy war nor an inner spiritual struggle but a constant striving to heighten the Muslim community’s

Dream Trouble / 51 awareness and moral state. The term da‘wa here refers to calling Muslims

back to their religion and inciting them to adhere to the Qur’an and to follow the Prophet’s tradition. For interpreters like Shaykh Hanafi, and for those watching their programs, there exists a space even within a rationalized, reformed, postcolonial world in which the imaginary is not sealed off from the real. According to their view, dream interpretation does not distract Muslims from political realities, it is instead a call for a reform of the seit, political awareness, and correct religious practice. It is a form of jihdd. Dream interpretation, then, is not numbing but, one might say, an “experiment in the technique of awakening” (Benjamin 1999a, 388). Far from being tied to superstition, the dream is here redeemed as a prophetic medium. And far from being a charlatan, the dream interpreter is a translator of ethical imperatives from an Elsewhere. CONCLUSION

Dreams are unreliable, say the Muslim reformers. Trdume sind Schdume, we say in German. Dreams are nothing but foam. They might be bubbly

and fun. They might reflect the whole spectrum of colors. They might seem substantial. Yet in reality they are only air: meaningless, fleeting, and inconsequential. At the moment the dreamer wakes up, the dream is devalued, dismissed, and generally forgotten. If they are merely foam, dreams have little to offer to dreamers in their waking lives. From a rationalisticand Muslim reformist perspective, the relationship between dream and wakeful time is marked by oppositional pairs: internal versus external, subjective versus objective, illusory versus real.

Tracing the impact of such dichotomization, | began with an end in this chapter. Rw’d’s discontinuation in January 2003 raised questions not only about the predictability of the coming of Judgment Day but also about the legitimacy of Muslim dream interpretation, particularly in its mass-mediated torms. The possibility, reliability, and relevance of dream-

visions were debated by al-Azhar, the Egyptian Ministry of Religious Afttairs, Saudi scholars, journalists, sociologists, psychologists, laypersons,

and at least one disappointed anthropologist and her friends. The Rw’a debate is interesting not only for the answers that these various people and institutions provided but also for the very event of the debate. Rather than attempt to decide whether Shaykh Hanafi truly is an expert or a charlatan, or if dream interpretation is indeed part of the Islamic tradition or merely a form of superstition, | have examined how, why, by whom, and to what effect these questions were being discussed with such urgency.

52 / Dream Trouble Ultimately, the debate points to a broader remapping of Egypt’s religious and imaginary landscapes. While seemingly trivial, Ru’a’s end illustrates the dream’s precarious place within the continuously reconfigured fields of Islam, politics, and ethics in Egypt. Without necessarily drawing on the same arguments or sensibilities, Muslim reformists and secular professionals frequently converge in their criticism of “superstitions” and “charlatanry.” Although they form a somewhat uneasy alliance, both parties tend to banish the in-between and the possibility of communication with the dead, the unseen, and the Unknown. Concerned with certainty, reformists take rationality as the prime source of orderliness. Adopting the language of either/or, they divorce the political from the imaginary, the visible from the invisible, the dead from the living, and the dream from that which matters. Whether insisting on the irrationality or rationality of Islam, both secularists and reformists overlook an imagination that is neither rational nor irrational. This imagination is what dreamers and dream interpreters trade in, and it is the central tocus of this ethnography. Why then, one might ask, begin a book on dreams and imaginations with the end of a dream interpretation program? | chose this beginning because a close look at the range of skeptical voices that aim to confine, discipline, and domesticate the dream allows for a better understanding of the charged political context in which the dream-stories in this book are situated and with which they are always already engaged. Attention to interdictions, to the work done by categories such as “superstition” or “charlatanry,” sheds light on what “true Islam” is supposed to look like in the eyes of the Egyptian state, modernists, and reformers, and it situates current debates within the context of larger histories of colonization. Another reason for beginning with contestations is that the perceived need to tame and depoliticize the dream reveals the dream’s ethical, political, and even revolutionary potential. Simply put, the continual assertion

that dreams don’t or shouldn’t matter can tell us something about the extent to which they do matter. Al-Azhar’s concern with the broadcasting of dream interpretations “to the masses” is related to the fact that dreamvisions can move dreamers, their communities, and even entire societies. Precisely because dream-visions have these ethical-political dimensions, they trouble secularists. Because they promise a glimpse of the prophetic, they trouble this-world-oriented, rationalist reformers. And because they undermine hierarchies, they trouble the Egyptian state and scholars who claim the exclusive right to define Islam for Egypt’s citizens.

Still, it could be argued that beginning with material conditions and

Dream Trouble / 53 political contestations gives in to the narrative conventions of secular storytelling. The danger of such a beginning is that it overdetermines a secular

politics while obscuring the fact that before we are citizens, we all are dreamers. While the material and political context is crucial—at least for those of us trained in and by secular narrative conventions—it can lead us away trom that which exceeds the secular modern, that which is never contained by it yet is always already a part of it. Dreams are not bubbles that

float through the secular modern; they speak directly to, of, and within the modern. In this sense the perpetual attempts of the secular modern to erase its own dreamy sides attest not to the effectiveness of these attempts but to their ongoing failure. Although state officials, orthodox scholars, retormists, and rationalists

try to banish dreams into the private sphere, dreams, like rumors, have a habit of spilling over. Yet while dreams frequently guide dreamers in their waking lives, their meaning is often not immediately transparent. This is why dreamers call in to TV shows such as Rw or consult locally known dream interpreters. The next chapter is devoted to one such dream

interpreter: the guardian of [bn Sirin’s shrine. As we will see, not only state institutions but also dream interpreters discipline the dream. They do so not by enforcing the imperatives of a secular rational order but by subjecting the dream to the intricate rules of the Muslim tradition of dream interpretation. At the same time, dream interpreters claim not to have control over the dream but to translate its ethical imperative. They occupy an in-between space. Thus, the next chapter leads us from the either/or into the realm of the in-between. Shaykh Hanati’s story, too, does not end where | left off earlier. Only a few months after Ru’a had been discontinued, a journalist approached the shaykh and suggested that he record lectures on the Muslim tradition of dream interpretation and sell them on tapes and CDs. Banned trom national television and eyed with suspicion by al-Azhar and the Egyptian state, the dream reemerged in other media. When I returned to Egypt a year later, Shaykh Hanafi had also found his way back onto Egypt’s television screens. He was now interpreting dreams on a privately owned Egyptian satellite television station, and this time he had done away with his colleague, the psychologist. My friend Marwa was happily following the shaykh’s new program, and she made me realize that not only do dream-stories circulate by way of satellite waves, but so do dreams. Marwa still takes notes on Shaykh Hanati’s interpretations and occasionally, she told me, she redreams dreams that the shaykh has interpreted on the program. Dreams are tricky. They might be declared irrelevant, but they cannot easily be wiped away.

2. Thresholds of Interpretation The fragile liteboat between this and that. Your words are the sails. WILLIAM BURROUGHS

Ta‘bir [noun}: (1) interpretation (of dreams); (2) utterance (of feelings); (3) expression (in general, also artistic); (4) making cross over, making swim across adapted from HANS WEHR DICTIONARY

As many Egyptians will tell you, Muhammad Ibn Sirin was the most prominent Muslim dream interpreter of all time. Like Freud in other cultural terrains, he overshadows all that can possibly be said, thought, and written about dreams in Egypt today. Ibn Sirin’s mother was a slave of Caliph Abt Bakr, and his father was taken prisoner in Iraq during the first Muslim conquests and later freed by Caliph ‘Umar.’ Born in Basra, Iraq, in 654, Ibn Sirin was a pious yet reportedly eccentric cloth merchant and scholar who transmitted prophetic traditions and came to be described as a “man of great trustworthiness, who inspired confidence, [was] great and worthy, [and| well-versed in jurisprudence.”* Besides being a mer-

chant, scholar, and hadith transmitter, after his death in 728 Ibn Sirin retrospectively became best known for his skills in dream interpretation.’ Countless times during my fieldwork I was advised to read Tafsir al-Ahlam (Interpretation of Dreams), a book supposedly written by Ibn Sirin that is available in most of Cairo’s bookstalls, next to cheaper, abridged paperback versions. The fact that Tafsir al-Ahlam, as well as dozens of other dream manuals, might have been wrongly ascribed to Ibn Sirin and that numerous other Muslim scholars have written similar works has little impact on the current constellation of the Muslim tradition of dream interpretation, with which Ibn Sirin has practically become synonymous. Ibn Sirin is the Muslim Freud. And quite trankly, it always gave me a thrill to find a message from him on my answering machine. Who would be a better informant than the father of Muslim dream interpretation, dead or alive? Allii? Ibn Sirin. Kallimini! Beep. “Hello? [This is| Ibn Sirin. Call me,” my answering machine says. I pick up the phone and return Shaykh Nabil’s call. I tell him Vl stop by shortly. While often dreading the thought of 54

Thresholds of Interpretation / — 55 having to leave the house again after a long and tiring day out in the city, [ could rarely resist the magnetic pull of Ibn Sirin’s shrine. Shaykh Nabil has been in charge of the small shrine for the past thirty years, and like Ibn Sirin, he is a popular dream interpreter. Although his overly enigmatic utterances and his occasional unwillingness to engage in any kind of conversation sometimes frustrated me, looking back I think of Shaykh Nabil as one of my most compelling interlocutors. When I first began my fieldwork, I had already learned of the shrine and its guardian through a passing remark in a German book on dreams in Islam, and——particularly in light of the erasures described in the previous chapter—I was enticed by the idea of a fixed fieldsite, a material location, that promised to counterbalance the ephemeral nature of dreams and dream-stories.* After almost two months of futile attempts to locate the shrine’s site, | was strolling with Hassan, an Egyptian folklorist, through Cairo’s deserted alleys late one night when he casually remarked that one of these days we should pay a visit to [bn Sirin as well. I was thrilled to have found someone at last who could take me to the shrine, and I was too excited to wait. So it was that very night that I first met [bn Sirin. Shaykh Nabil—almost sixty years old, skinny, balding, and wearing a wrinkled but stylish shirt—-was sitting at the shrine’s threshold, shisha in one hand and a giass of tea in the other. Hassan would later tell me that the fact that the shaykh was still at the shrine that night, even though it was long past midnight, was a sign indicating that Ibn Sirin was content with my research project. Shaykh Nabil welcomed Hassan and me into the shrine, ordered a round of tea from the neighboring street café, and gave us a brief lecture on [bn Sirin’s background while evading all questions about his own work. He seemed friendly yet slightly suspicious. When | returned to the shrine a few days later, he received me more warmly and told me that he had seen a dream in which | was wearing a school uniform and he pushed me onto the “right path (al-sirdt al-mustagim).” He explained that the dream meant that he should help me, and soon thereafter he began referring to me as Ibn Sirin’s student (talmidha) and his own student. It seemed irrelevant to me whether the shaykh had really dreamed of me or the dream-story was only a rhetorical device. What mattered was that I felt more welcome at the shrine. And what intrigued me from the beginning was Shaykh Nabil’s relationship with Ibn Sirin. I was looking forward to learning from him and, through him, trom Ibn Sirin. The relation between the two dream interpreters is a complex one, to say the least. Ibn Sirin died in the eighth century; Shaykh Nabil lives in the twenty-first century. Yet they are intimately connected. Depending

56 / Thresholds of Interpretation on whom he talks to, Shaykh Nabil might emphasize his blood ties to [bn Sirin’s mother, who supposedly came from the shaykh’s village or a neighboring village in Upper Egypt. This sometimes leads Shaykh Nabil to claim that he is directly related to Ibn Sirin’s family, which makes him an extension of Ibn Sirin, occasionally allowing for a full collapse of their identities (“Hello, this is Ibn Sirin”), and at other times for a partial identification (as “the little Ibn Sirin,” which is how an Egyptian magazine, alShabab, reters to the shaykh; or “Shaykh Nabil Muhammad Ibn Sirin the Egyptian,” which is how Shaykh Nabil likes to sign his letters). Frequently the shaykh calls himself Ibn Sirin’s grandson and successor (hafidu wa khaliftu). Spiritually inclined Egyptians do not take the claim to an actual blood relationship too literally. Hassan explained to me that Ibn Sirin is Shaykh Nabil’s “grandfather” just as al-Sayyid al-Badawi, a popular Sufi saint from the thirteenth century who is buried in Tanta, is a “father to all of us.” Regardless of his family history, by virtue of having been called upon to restore and open the shrine and through being in daily contact with “the shrine’s owner (sahib al-magdm),” Shaykh Nabil is connected to Ibn Sirin and receives inspiration and knowledge through him. In a world not ruled by the laws of linear temporality and individual identity, Shaykh Nabil is Ibn Sirin, albeit a modernized version, as he himself likes to emphasize. He told me that he brings Ibn Sirin “up to date” by simplifying his interpretive approach for contemporary dreamers who lack the time and skills to deal with the complexities of the textual tradition. Through giyds, the legal and interpretive method of analogical reasoning, Shaykh Nabil decodes the meaning of symbols that Ibn Sirin could not have known about, such as computers, trains, and airplanes. As we will see in later chapters, Shaykh Nabil is also “modern” in the sense that he incorporates elements of Freud’s psychology into Ibn Sirin’s interpretive system and does not exclusively interpret face-to-face, but has widened his interpretive scope by using the phone and Internet. My account of Shaykh Nabil’s enactments of a somewhat marginalized interpretive tradition is intended to convey a sense of the nonmechanical nature of his interpretations; it shows the imagination at work. By describing everyday interactions in the shrine, I hope to enrich our understanding and appreciation of what I call an ethics of in-betweenness. By this | mean not simply an ethics arising from dialogical, face-to-face encounters but also an attitude of openness toward the (in)visible, the barzakh, the imaginary, and the emergent.® It is an ethics that is about the process of interaction at least as much as it is about the outcome of that interaction. Shaykh Nabil’s work implies an understanding of interpretation that is

Thresholds of Interpretation / 57 not so much about getting from dream to meaning by the quickest route possible. What happens along the way is at least as important. This chapter,

then, is about the inter- in interpretation. As such, it aims to set the tone for this book’s broader exploration of the barzakh, the in-between. THE BETWIXT AND BETWEEN OF DREAM INTERPRETATION

In his study of early Muslim dream literatures, John Lamoreaux suggests that historically, “dream interpreters [might] have competed with other religious specialists (saints, for instance, or jurists) for recognition as mediators between this world and the next, between the God who sends revelation and the humans who receive it” (2002, 11). Although dream interpreters are not formally recognized or sanctioned as religious experts, they, along with other mediating figures, relate divinely revealed knowledge to the here-and-now. Other such mediators include preachers, whose sermons “articulate the formal religious message of Islam with the needs of the community, its problems and its weltanschauung” (Antoun 1989, xiii); muftis, who function as “creative mediators of the ideal and the real of the shari‘a” (Messick 1993, 151); judges; Sufi shaykhs; saints; and scholars.© We might add to this list astrologers, diviners, healers, and numerologists. At times contending for interpretive authority with one another or with state representatives, all of these mediators translate between the Divine and human knowledge. The in-between, according to anthropologists, can be dangerous yet aiso full of utopian potentials (Douglas 1966; Gennep 1960; Stoller 2009). Victor

Turner called the limen, or threshold, “a reaim of pure possibility where novel configurations of ideas and relations arise” (1967, 97). Similarly,

in the work of the medieval Muslim thinker al-Ghazali, the dihliz, an Arabized Persian word that originally referred to the space between door and house, functions as a “new locus of epistemic and political enunciation” (Moosa 2005, 49}.

Shaykh Nabil often literally sits at the shrine’s threshold or dihliz. His wooden stool is inside the shrine; his feet, shisha, and tea table are outside. His work, too, involves a constant crossing over, a passing back and forth: the very act of interpretation occurs in an inter-space, a barzakh. Referring to dream interpretation in classical Arabic literature, the word ta‘bir literally means taking across or making cross over. Shaykh Nabil continuously carries words and images across the river that separates a dream from its meaning. Since this river can be treacherous, Egyptians often rely on a

58 / Thresholds of Interpretation ferryman—a dream expert—to take them across. Not anyone will do. Occasionally I was warned that one should be careful whom one asks to interpret a dream because, according to a prophetic tradition, the first interpretation will always come true, regardless of its accuracy. Some skill

is needed in interpreting dreams as what appears to be a dream-vision might in reality be the devil or evil spirits tricking one’s senses, and even the interpretation of a dream-vision requires expertise and experience, if not divine inspiration. Only those who are both divinely inspired and learned in the art of interpretation can ensure a safe journey from one shore to the other. The dihliz, this creative yet dangerous space, the betwixt and between, is Shaykh Nabil’s home. As an interpreter he dwells in the space between

dream and meaning, divine truth and human knowledge, the technical and the visionary, day and night, this and that. It is precisely its relation to in~-betweenness that imbues Shaykh Nabil’s work with an ethical force and that aligns dream interpretation with prophecy. In present-day Egypt, more commonly than ta‘bir, the term tafsir, generally associated with commentaries on the Qur'an, is used to refer to the interpretation of dreams.’ The latter term makes the dream-vision an object of interpretation parallel to the Qur’an, and to some extent one might think of dream interpretation as a shadow of Quranic exegesis, an interpretive subculture

or enclave. Al-Ghazali, in his Jawdhir al-Qur’dn, explicitly likens one hermeneutical process to the other: “Know indeed, that interpretation [of the Quran] is analogous to the science of interpreting dreams” (quoted in Moosa 2005, 76). Yet while Qur’anic exegesis is a fully orthodox science, dream interpretation is often eyed with suspicion in Egypt, and it is frequently called un-Islamic or at least outdated. When [ asked a mufti at al-Azhar’s fatwa council about the legitimacy of dream interpretation, he told me in a slightly offended tone that “here at al-Azhar, we don’t interpret dreams.” It seems that in the past, dream interpretation held a more respected place in society. [bn Khaldiin lists it as one of the “sciences of the religious law” (1967, 367) and, according to al-Nabulusi, it was “the prime science since the beginning of the world, which the prophets and messengers did not cease to study and act upon” (quoted in Grunebaum 1966, 7). Classical

and contemporary dream manuals generally refer to the prophet Yasut (Joseph) as the father of Muslim dream interpretation because, according to the Qur’an, God taught him the “interpretation of dreams (ta’wil alanddith},” and he subsequently interpreted the dreams of two prisoners and the pharaoh (12:101, 36, 43). Alternatively, the Prophet Muhammad

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Thresholds of Interpretation / 59

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is praised as the first Muslim dream interpreter, and his interpretations of specific dreams are recorded in hadiths. Abi Bakr, a companion of the Prophet and the first caliph, was known to interpret dreams, and so was Asma, Abt Bakr’s daughter. While in the early centuries principally specialists in hadith concerned themselves with dreams, by the tenth century also philosophers and mystics became engaged with the emerging tradition

of Muslim dream interpretation, a tradition that furthermore came to be much influenced by Artemidorus’s Oneirocritica, a Greek work written in the second century and translated into Arabic in the ninth century. In the tenth century al-Khallal composed a biographical dictionary titled Tabagat al-Mu‘abbirin (The Classes of Dream Interpreters), no longer

60 / Thresholds of Interpretation extant, which listed 7,500 exceptionally gifted dream interpreters, among them six prophets, thirteen of the Prophet’s companions, ten jurists, nine ascetics, eight authors of dream interpretation works, six philosophers, five physicians, three Jews, three Christians, three Zoroastrians, seven pagan Arabs, three magicians, and four experts in physiognomy. This wide array of early interpreters was gradually displaced by three scholars whose legacy came to stand in for the whole of Muslim dream interpretation: Ibn Shahin (d. 1468), al-Ndbulusi (d. 1731), and of course Ibn Sirin. The texts that are ascribed to al-Nabulusi and Ibn Sirin are the most widely used dream manuals in Egypt today. Both in their classical leatherbound editions and in the form of abridged paperback reprints, they generally consist of two sections: a theoretical introduction, which defines the different kinds of dreams, discusses relevant hadiths, explains interpretive strategies, and describes the interpreter’s duties; and a section that contains a list of dream symbols and their meanings. Ibn Sirin’s manual contains more than fifty sections with topics such as dreams of the angels, the Prophet’s companions, prayer, mosques, the dead, animals, birds, the

sun and the moon, the sea, furniture, thirst, and traveling. Although the manuals seem to resemble dictionaries, interpretation is generally not understood as a mechanical process. One dream book explains that interpreters do not “resort to rigid literal interpretations as is commonly believed”: rather, dream interpretation is “an art and a science of its own” (Nabulusi 1999, 23). Consequently, besides providing lists of symbols and their meanings, most dream books also contain advice on what one should look for in a good interpreter, as well as subsections on the “good manners and rules needed by the interpreter” (e.g., Kishk 1995; Sayyid 1991). Drawing on guidelines from such contemporary texts, let us next consider the profile of the ideal Muslim dream interpreter. A Textual Ideal Type

According to numerous dream books that | bought on Cairo’s streets, dream interpretation happens through divine inspiration, yet it is also a proper science (‘ilm} with complicated rules. While trading in the imagination, a good interpreter is no less steeped in Islamic textual traditions than other religious experts. The earliest Muslim dream manual that has survived in complete form, composed by Ibn Qutayba (d. 889), lists nine methods for interpretation: interpretation based on the name of objects appearing in the dream (ta’wil al-asm@’), based on the characteristics associated with the objects (ta’wil bi-i-ma‘nd}, by the Qur’an, by the hadith, by proverbs, through opposition or inversion (bi-l-didd wa-l-magliib),

Thresholds of Interpretation / 61 through increase or decrease (bi-Il-ziydda wa-|-nagqs}, based on what time the dream was seen (bi-!-wagt), and based on the dreamer’s concrete circumstances (Lamoreaux 2002, 29-31). To deal with this complex and multilayered grammar of dreams, according to contemporary publications, a dream interpreter roughly needs the skills of a religious scholar, a linguist, and a keen observer.

Most dream books consider particularly important a profound familiarity with the Qur’an and hadith, because many symbois derive their meaning from these two sources. If a shirt is seen in a dream, the interpreter, drawing on a particular hadith, could take it to symbolize religion.®

Because of the Qur’anic verse “they [women] are as a garment for you imen|], and you are as a garment for them” (2:187), a shirt can also signify a spouse, or it can point to a glad tiding because of the prophet Yiisut’s utterance, “|And now] go and take this tunic of mine and lay it over my father’s face” (12:93). Sometimes knowledge of the field of Qur’anic interpretation

is described as indispensable, because the dream-vision is itself a part of prophecy and thus intrinsically related to the Qur’an. Other books explain that the Qur’an and hadith need to be known because they constitute part of the dreamers’ culture (thagdfa} and therefore shape their consciousness and ultimately their dreams. Besides being familiar with the key texts of the Islamic tradition, interpreters have to be experts in the Arabic language. A solid knowledge of the etymology of words, synonyms, and opposites enables the interpreter to draw analogies (giyds), to relate words to similar-sounding ones (tashbi/t), and to derive meanings based on the words’ roots {ishtigdq).? The name Rashid, for instance, can be interpreted as guidance firshdd); marriage (jawaz) in a dream symbolizes the overcoming (taja@wuz) of obstacles. It is not enough to know classical Arabic with all its etymological and grammatical intricacies; interpreters should also keep abreast of common sayings and proverbs, as well as with the ways people express themselves— literally, as one dream book puts it, with “what runs on the people’s tongue (ma yajri ‘ala lisén al-nds).” Additionally, the dream interpreter has to be an anthropologist or sociologist of sorts. He should be knowledgeable about prevailing social norms, about how people live, and about their environments, religious beliefs, and daily practices. (I use the male pronoun to stay close to the language of the dream booklets. I will shortly have more to say about the gendering of dream interpretation in Egypt today.) For a correct interpretation he also needs to know the dreamer’s age, gender, personality, profession, and social position. Thus, if the interpreter has never met the dreamer, then ideally a

62 / Thresholds of Interpretation dream should not be interpreted. Supposedly, Ibn Sirin spent a good part of the day questioning dreamers about their background, type of work, and living conditions. As is illustrated by the following story that a dream interpreter told me, [bn Sirin also relied on nonverbalized impressions: Once a man came to [bn Sirin and asked him to interpret a dream in which he had seen himself pertorm the call to prayer (ywadhdhin). Ibn Sirin interpreted the dream to mean that the man would go on the pilgrimage. Another man came and said he had dreamed that he was performing the call to prayer. [bn Sirin interpreted the dream to mean that the dreamer would steal and his hand would be cut off. Both interpretations came true. Someone asked Ibn Sirin why he had interpreted the same dream in two different ways, and he responded, | saw in the face of the first man something good, and I interpreted it to mean that he would go on the pilgrimage based on the [Qur’anic] verse “Proclaim (adhdhin) thou unto all people the [duty of] pilgrimage” [22:27|. | saw the second man’s face as ugly and I took it to mean that he would steal based on the verse “A herald fmu’adhdhin) called out, ‘O you people of the caravan! Verily, you are thieves!’” [12:70]

According to this story, it is essential for interpreter and dreamer to meet face-to-face. Ibn Sirin did not simply listen to what the dreamers told him about their lives; he also looked ito them through the skill of firdsa, an intuitive, divinely inspired knowledge that extends one’s sight beyond the visible. A dream interpreter’s acquired knowledge accordingly needs to be supplemented with—or rather, preceded by—~a divine gift of inner sight. Dream books explain that the interpreter should be pious

and virtuous (‘afif al-nafs), have pure morals, and be honest. He must care for the way he earns his living, what he eats, and what he drinks, and he must be a sincere and God-fearing person. The notion that it even matters what the dream interpreter eats and drinks is related to the belief that one’s visionary sight can be strengthened through spiritual practices, dhikr, and prayer, yet also through eating permissible (halal) food. As the next chapter will show, the prerequisites for seeing truthful dream-visions thus partly overlap with the conditions for interpreting them. Embodied practices can strengthen the sight of both dreamer and interpreter.

The interaction between dreamer and interpreter is scripted to some extent as well. When someone is about to tell a dream, the proper response is khayr in sh@ Allah (Jsomething| good, God willing). After hearing the dream, the interpreter should not answer right away but should undertake a period of reflection and contemplation. He is to focus on key symbols,

and he needs to remember that a dream can sometimes mean its oppo-

Thresholds of Interpretation / 63 site, and that its interpretation might apply to someone other than the dreamer. Finally, as the following story from a contemporary dream book illustrates, the way in which an interpretation is delivered is also important:

“Once a Caliph saw his teeth falling out in a dream. He called a dream interpreter and asked him about the meaning ot his dream. The interpreter replied: ‘The entire family of my master will perish.’ The Caliph became upset, and he called for another interpreter and told him the dream. The second dream interpreter replied: ‘The dream of my master, the prince of the believers, is true, for he shall live the longest amongst his relatives.’ Immediately the Caliph embraced the man and rewarded him for his skill and tacttulness” (Akili 1992, xxiii). Both of the interpretations given in this story point toward the same future. Yet they provoke opposite reac-

tions. As the story indicates, knowing how to interpret a dream is not enough; one also needs to know how to frame the interpretation. With these various guidelines in mind that characterize the ideal interpreter—pious, knowledgeable, virtuous, well-read, scholarly, linguistically skilled, divinely inspired, alert, and tactful—it is now time to return to Shaykh Nabil. BECOMING AN INTERPRETER: SHAYKH NABIL’S LIFE HISTORY In Egypt there are many laypersons, both male and female, who are known to be gifted dream interpreters. They might not fulfill all the prerequisites

that are described in the literature and they might even be illiterate, but friends, relatives, and neighbors might seek them out because of their reputation. Additionally, there are full-time, and more publicly known, interpreters. All of the full-time interpreters whom | met or heard about in Egypt are male, and they are called shaykhs. As we move trom the textual ideal type to [bn Sirin’s shrine, the remainder of this chapter continues the story of Shaykh Nabil. Dreamers in Cairo who wish to speak to him generally take a microbus, bus, or taxi and get off around the Sayyida Natisa mosque. After paying al-Sayyida Nafisa a quick

visit, they continue their way down a little street known as Al-Ashrat Street. Al-Ashraf Street looks like hundreds of other unpaved streets and alleys in Cairo. It has a few outdoor cafés, which are frequented almost exclusively by men. The smell of freshly baked bread emanates from a small bakery. The street is somewhat narrow but eventually widens onto a square witha

64 / Thresholds of Interpretation fruit and vegetable market. A number of mosques dot the street, and many cats lounge in the shade. Children play soccer. Vendors push wooden carts over the uneven ground. Mopeds race by. Small stores sell candy, writing utensils, groceries, spices, music, and tapes of the Qur’an. Faces start to become familiar after a short while. Greetings are called back and forth. Al-Ashraf Street is a small street after all, seemingly like any other small street in Cairo. Yet Al-Ashraf Street is special. For some, it is one of the most sacred streets in the entire city. As Shaykh Nabil likes to point out, practically anywhere in the street one stands on top of hundreds of dead people, since the entire area used to be a cemetery. The street runs through one of the most urbanized parts of the Southern Cemetery, a section of Cairo’s City of the Dead,’ and it hosts a considerable number of saint shrines, among

them shrines belonging to relatives of the Prophet Muhammad such as al-Sayyida Sukayna, al-Sayyida Rugayya, al-Sayyida ‘Atiqga, Muhammad

al-Jattari, and Muhammad al~Anwar.'!! Thus the name of the street: alashraf reters to the Prophet’s descendants. Although they are frequented by many visitors, the shrines here are calmer and more intimate than the larger, more widely known saints’ mosques in Cairo, such as those of alImam al-Husayn, al-Sayyida Nafisa, or al-Sayyida Zaynab. Many of my Egyptian friends had never heard of the street and its saintly inhabitants, yet those who visit them do so frequently and fervently. Ibn Sirin’s shrine is among the smallest shrines on the street. Entering through its low door and taking a step down, one finds oneself in a small, square room. In its middle stands a wooden enclosure (magqsiira}, decorated

with a chain of green lights; this surrounds the structure, covered with a black cloth with woven inscriptions, that represents the coffin and is referred to as such (tdbiit), On its top, two large headpieces with green turbans frame a wooden Qur’an-holder on which an opened Qur’an rests. The turbans symbolize the two shaykhs who are buried in the shrine: [bn Sirin, who died in Basra but who, according to Shaykh Nabil, is buried here in Cairo, and Shaykh ‘Abd ai-Ghani ‘Abdullah al-Balasi, a less widely known saint.

At times, I found it strange to think that I was spending hours sitting inside a tomb. But the presence of the dead can have very different effects— even within one and the same society. In preachers’ sermons and parents’

warnings to their children, death might evoke fear. In Ibn Sirin’s shrine, the presence of the dead contributes to a peaceful and joyous atmosphere.” Whenever the birthday of Ibn Sirin or one of the other saints buried in the neighborhood approached, Shaykh Nabil’s eyes sparkled, and he spoke with

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Thresholds of Interpretation / 65

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excitement of the celebration that was about to happen. Ibn Sirin’s shrine is a place where people talk much about their dream-encounters with the dead, and where the dead feel very present. Yet they do not disrupt the shrine’s calm, festive, and lively atmosphere; they are an integral part of it. Shaykh Nabil has worked hard to turn the shrine into a welcoming, even cozy space. He has made the shrine a home of sorts—for himself, for the visitors, and for the dead. Around the wooden enclosure, the room’s tile floor is covered with a number of rugs. Over the years the shaykh has equipped the shrine with two telephones, a tape player, and two lockable boxes that are built into the wooden paneling and in which he keeps some books and personal belongings. Inside the central enclosure and around the walls, Shaykh Nabil has hung framed photographs of recently deceased religious personalities such as Shaykh Mutawalli al-Sha‘rawi and Shaykh

66 / Thresholds of Interpretation Salih al-Ja‘tari, the latter a Sudanese saint who became famous through his popular lessons at al-Azhar. Besides the photographs, a calendar and two clocks adorn the wall, as well as posters with hadiths, religious poems,

and the family tree of afl al-bayt. Over the small mihrab, in green paint and with yellow shading, Shaykh Nabil has written Allahu Akbar (God is great), the Prophet’s name, and the names of the first four caliphs: Abii Bakr, ‘Umar, ‘Uthm&n, and ‘Ali. On other walls, in the same colors, one finds sayings that are popular among Sufis, such as “The one loves God who loves Husayn fahabba Allah man ahabba Husaynan),” and a poem composed by Hassan Ibn Thabit, who lived at the Prophet’s time and wrote eulogies for him and who, according to Shaykh Nabil’s version of history, was Ibn Sirin’s father.

With the exception of the rugs, the shrine is furnished with a single chair (which occasionally doubles as a table) in the corner facing the entrance and a low wooden stool right by the door on which Shaykh Nabil usually sits. For male visitors, plastic chairs are sometimes brought over trom the neighboring coffee shop, which are placed in a hali-circle outside the shrine’s door. Women are invited to go inside and sit on the floor a bit away from the entrance, so as to be protected from prying eyes. Shaykh Nabil frequently moves back and forth between inside and outside, but most often he sits right at the threshold. From there, he can keep an eye on the inside of the shrine, follow what is happening on the street, call out and return greetings, welcome visitors, and gaze at the facade of al-Sayyida Rugayya’s nearby mosque.

“Al-Sayyida Rugayya Wants You” Shaykh Nabil was born in Upper Egypt, in a village between Assiut and Luxor. He rarely speaks of his life before the moment of initiation, and on the few occasions when he does, he gives different and sometimes contradictory accounts of his childhood. Most times he describes it as a rather regular one: “I’m a normal, simple person finsdn ‘adi basit) from a poor family that is close to God.” Other times, he emphasizes the exceptional spirituality that pervades his family. Not only does his family history supposedly connect him to Ibn Sirin’s mother, but his own father, maternal uncle, and brother were also “hidden saints (min awliyd al-bdtin).” Although no one knew of the father’s saintliness, he revealed himself to his son on his deathbed. Shaykh Nabil told me that he became diabetic from the shock and sadness that he experienced at that moment. Even when speaking of his saintly relatives, Shaykh Nabil usually stresses that he, in contrast to them, is a “normal person.” Only once did he suggest that his

Thresholds of Interpretation / 67 own childhood experiences might not have been that normal after all: “It started when | was young. | was seeing. | was seeing everything when | was young. Like that. But when I began telling people, it got less (ikhtaffat ‘anni). | began to understand.” What exactly Shaykh Nabil was seeing and what he began to understand, he does not say, because he has learned by now that one should not disclose what he calls “divine secrets fasrdr iahiyya).” What the shaykh might be hinting at, however, is that he was seeing the Prophet and the saints; that he had significant dream and waking visions; that his inner vision (basira) at times overpowered his optical vision. The spiritual calling that he received later in his life was pretigured and announced through an early and extraordinary gift. For a while, Shaykh Nabil’s life progressed along more or less conventional lines. At some point he had to join the army, but he soon got out of it by pretending to be suicidal and deliberately cutting his wrists. Because of his experiences with the army, the shaykh says, he has no sense of belonging (intima) to his country at all. He worked in commerce, married, had a daughter, and later divorced his wife. In 1973, when he was thirty years old, his lite changed drastically. A dream-vision commanded him to open Ibn Sirin’s shrine across the street from al-Sayyida Rugay ya’s mosque. Al-Sayyida Rugayya was the daughter of ‘Ali, the fourth caliph, and she is one of Cairo’s patron saints. The precise circumstances of how she initiated Shaykh Nabil into being the guardian of Ibn Sirin’s shrine never became entirely clear to me. He told me that al-Sayyida Rugayya’s mosque was always his favorite place in Cairo, and that he would visit it whenever he came to the city. Once he mentioned that at the time he was commanded

to open the shrine, he had been living as a dervish in and around this particular mosque for a number of years. According to other versions of his life history, he was in Upper Egypt when the order (al-amr) came to him. Regardless of his physical location and lifestyle at that particular moment,

Shaykh Nabil describes receiving the order as an all-transformative and life-altering experience. Ultimately, it was God who gave the order, yet it was delivered through al-Sayyida Rugayya or, more precisely, through the “hidden court fal-mahkama al-batiniyya),” composed of saints, who usually make their verdicts known by way of dream-visions. Shaykh Nabil remembers, “I saw in a dream-vision a gathering of alSayyida Zaynab, the Prophet, and his family (ah! al-bayt). They said, ‘Al-Sayyida Rugayya wants you (ayzzak). [This is] the secret appointment fal-taklif al-bdtini).’ |i said] ‘Why does she want me?’ They said, ‘Open your grandfather’s shrine!l’” This short and rather simple dream-vision was recurrent, and Shaykh Nabil obeyed the order. He opened Ibn Sirin’s

68 / Thresholds of Interpretation shrine, which, according to him, prior to that moment had been closed and was slowly deteriorating."* Today Shaykh Nabil is not only the shrine’s guardian but also keeps Ibn Sirin’s work alive. Like the initial order that put him in charge of the shrine, the skill of dream interpretation came to him involuntarily. Again it was al-Sayyida Rugayya who gave him what he calls a gift (‘ata’), or the blessing of interpretation (na‘mat al-ta’wil). Whereas Shaykh Nabil was initiated into the oneiric art by al-Sayyida Ruqayya, classical accounts of the formation of dream interpreters often describe a direct link between famous interpreters, or they trace a connection to the Prophet Muhammad or the prophet Yasuf. As in Shaykh Nabil’s

initiation story, such links do not have to consist of physical encounters, but they can occur in the realm of the barzakh. Tbn Sirin himself, according to classical sources, was informed of his calling through a dream encounter with the prophet Yisuf: I dreamt that I entered the Friday mosque. With me were three older men and one handsome young fellow. I said to the young fellow: “Who are you?” He replied: “I’m Joseph | Yaisuf].” I said: “And who are these older men?” He answered: “My fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” I said: “Teach me what God has taught you.” ... He then opened his mouth and said: “What do you see?” I replied: “Your tongue.” He opened his mouth further and said: “Look now! What do you see?” I said: “Your uvula.” He opened his mouth still further and said: “Look now! What do you see?” I said: “Your heart.” He then said: “Interpret [abbir] and conceal nothing.” ... When morning came, whenever anyone told me about a dream it was as if | could see it in the palm of my hand. (quoted in Lamoreaux 2002, 22f.)

Once Ibn Sirin was able to see Yisuf’s heart, he had acquired the skill of interpretation. Not only had he learned the prophet’s innermost secret, but seeing beyond the visible and interpreting dreams are also two interrelated gifts. An alternative account of Ibn Sirin’s calling involves a slightly different version of the dream-encounter: “|[bn Sirin] said: In a dream I saw Joseph the prophet over our prophet. To him I said: ‘Teach me the interpretation of dreams.’ He replied: ‘Open your mouth.’ This I did. He then spat into it. When morning dawned—behold, I was an interpreter of dreams” (ibid. 22}. According to both versions, [bn Sirin received the gift of dream interpretation directly from the prophet Yiisuf; the passing on of saliva symbolizes the transfer of knowledge. Although one could easily read these initiation stories and their contemporary counterparts with an eye to their legitimizing and authorizing function, such accounts also tell us something about how the gift of interpretation is conceptualized. Far

Thresholds of Interpretation / 69 from being simply a mechanical skill, the ability to interpret is a prophetic gift that is passed on to the interpreter-to-be by imaginary interlocutors, who might be dead but are still involved in the lives of the living. Just like

the dreamer, the dream interpreter is embedded in a larger network of relations that exceed the visible boundaries of the social.

At times, the bodily absorption of the skill of dream interpretation figures in present-day accounts as well. Shaykh Sayyid is a dream interpreter whose telephone number had been given to me by an employee

at al-Azhar, insisting that the shaykh “interprets very well (biyfassar kwayyis khéilis).” When I called Shaykh Sayyid, he answered, introducing himself as “Shaykh Sayyid Hamdi Ibrahim, the dream interpreter (mufas-

sir al-ahlam).” During our first meeting, Shaykh Sayyid told me that he had grown up ina small village between Qena and Luxor, and at the age of ten had dreamed that the prophet Yiisuf came to him and gave him a glass of milk to drink with the words, “This is dream interpretation.” After experiencing this dream, he knew how to interpret dreams and, according to his account, became famous for his interpretations when he was still a child. Later he hosted a weekly dream interpretation show on Dubai TV, and today he detines his profession explicitly as dream interpretation. When I met him, Shaykh Sayyid was living in Cairo, where he interprets dreams on television, in newspapers, and over the phone. Significantly, Shaykh Sayyid says that he does not rely exclusively on the gift he received at the age of ten. Dream interpretation, also in his view, brings together divine inspiration and mechanical rules. He told me that while at first he interpreted exclusively by intuition (fitra) and through divine inspiration (ilham), he later studied dream interpretation books. Among the texts he considers important are the classical writings of Ibn Shahin, Ibn Sirin, and Ja‘tar al-Sadig, as well as the hadith works by al-Bukhadri, Muslim, and al-Tirmidhi. In addition, he owns a number of contemporary paperback booklets on dreams and visions—similar to ones I had bought from street vendors—with titles such as Ta‘bir alMandm wa Tafsir al-Ahlam (Dream Interpretation); al-Rw’a wa-l-Allaim (Visions and Dreams); Al-Mar’a fi Ta‘bir al-Mandm (Women in Dream Interpretation); Rua al-Nabi fi Ahlam al-Sahdaba (Visions of the Prophet in the Companions’ Dreams); Al-TIlm wa Tafsir al-Ahlaim (Science and Dream Interpretation); Ahkdm Tafsir al-Rwa wa-l-Ahlam fi al-Qur’dn al-Karim wa-!-Sunna (Rules for the Interpretation of Visions and Dreams in the Qur’an and the Sunna); and Ashhar al-Ahlam fi al-Tarikh (The Most Famous Dreams in History). Like Shaykh Sayyid, Shaykh Nabil claims to have received his interpre-

70 / Thresholds of Interpretation tive skills as a divine or saintly gift, but he too grounds his practice in specific texts. He is intimately familiar with Ibn Sirin’s work and often

reads the Quran and other books that are popular among spiritually inclined Muslims in Egypt. As with other interpreters, divine inspiration and bookish learning are not mutually exclusive. In 1989, Shaykh Nabil published his own booklet on dream interpretation, which he distributed free of charge until he ran out of copies. Titled Ta’wil al-Ahdadith:

Nafahdt min Magdm Sidi Muhammad bin Sirin Mufassir al-Ahlaim (The Interpretation of Dreams: Fragrances from the Tomb of Muhammad Ibn Sirin the Dream Interpreter), it lists as its references the Qur’an, Ibn Sirin, Qisas al-Anbiyd@ (Stories of the Prophets), [bn al-‘Arabi’s Fusiis alHikam (Seals of Wisdom), al-Sha‘rani’s al-Tabaqdt (Classes), Ibn Kathir’s al-Biddya wa-!-Nihdya (The Beginning and the End), Sigmund Freud’s al-Tahlil al-Nafsi (Psychoanalysis), al-lmaém Malik’s al-Muwatta (The Approved), and Muhammad Qutb’s Dalil al-Hayréin fi Tafsir al-Qur’dn

(Guide for the Perplexed in Qur’an Interpretation). While presumably familiar with these texts, when interpreting dreams or giving ethical advice Shaykh Nabil draws on divine inspiration that is delivered to him through the awliy@ or Ibn Sirin. Ultimately, he told me, divine inspiration (ilham) is much stronger than studying (dirdsa). Echoing Ibn Sirin’s initiation story, Shaykh Sayyid (at the age of ten) and Shaykh Nabil (at the age of thirty) both received the gift of interpre-

tation from interlocutors who were no longer alive but with whom they could nevertheless interact in the space of the barzakh. Both consider it important to know the textual tradition, but they familiarized themselves with it only after having been initiated into the art of interpretation. The central role played by the prophet Yusuf in Shaykh Sayyid’s story and by al-Sayyida Ruqayya in Shaykh Nabil’s story mirrors their respective locations within Egypt’s religious landscapes. Whereas Shaykh Sayyid thinks of himself as closely following the sunna, Shaykh Nabil is in touch with Cairo’s Sufis and dervishes. Shaykh Sayyid disapproves of mawlids because he thinks that they “are not of the sunna,” whereas Shaykh Nabil anticipates the mawlids with excitement, actively participates in them, and is in close contact with the awliyd’. Regardless of these differences, an overpowering moment of divine inspiration figures centrally in both interpreters’ trajectories. Of course, it also depends on the audience and intended effect what account dream interpreters give of their own becoming. Shaykh Sayyid might have carefully modeled his initiation story to mirror that of Ibn Sirin in order to ground his authority, and Shaykh Nabil’s story tlhuctu-

Thresholds of Interpretation / 71 ates depending on the interlocutory context. When I first heard the story of how al-Sayyida Rugqayya gave him the gift of interpretation, Shaykh Nabil, Hassan, and I were sitting in Ibn Sirin’s shrine, drinking tea and chatting. He recounted the story at a point when, I think, he had gained a basic trust that | was sincerely interested in his work. By contrast, in response to a rather cynical journalist who asked the shaykh once about the basis for his claim to be a dream interpreter, he said that he “found in [him] self the ability to interpret dreams for the people.” In responding to the journalist, Shaykh Nabil placed emphasis on an innate ability, on giftedness as opposed to a sudden gift. But when he is not speaking to a skeptical journalist and the entire readership of a popular weekly newspaper, he

describes himself as an ordinary person who, at the age of thirty, was suddenly called upon by a saint to whom he feels particularly connected. Being turned into a dream interpreter is an instance of being acted upon, just as the dream-vision acts upon the dreamer. Shaykh Nabil’s experience of divine inspiration, moreover, is not limited to the two moments when he was instructed to open the shrine and when he was turned into a dream interpreter. As he describes it, every single moment of interpretation is infused with divine inspiration.

INSIDE IBN SIRIN’S SHRINE Shaykh Nabil lives close by, but according to his own estimate, he spends 80 percent of his time at the shrine. His work and spiritual state are intimately connected to Ibn Sirin’s baraka. As Madame Salwa, a frequent visitor to the shrine, put it, “Of course [Shaykh Nabil] is spiritual (rawh dni}! How could you not be if you sat in a place like this all day long?” Initiated into the art of interpretation by al-Sayyida Rugayya and drawing on the shrine’s baraka, Shaykh Nabil continually carries meanings from the barzakh into the realm of language. There are days, especially particularly hot or cold ones, when few visitors come by. The shaykh then takes the Qur’an from inside the wooden enclosure and reads, or he leafs through religious books, smokes shisha, drinks tea, gazes out onto the street, or naps. Other times, the shrine is a place of constant comings and goings. It becomes especially crowded after the communal Friday prayer and on Sundays, al-Sayyida Natisa’s ofticial visiting day, when those who come to her nearby mosque also visit the saints buried in its vicinity. Some of the people who come to Ibn Sirin’s shrine are regulars who have known Shaykh Nabil for a long time; others are referred to him by friends, colleagues, or relatives. Many end up

72 / Thresholds of Interpretation sitting with the shaykh for one or two hours. Others stop by briefly, and still others only greet the shaykh politely, as they have come not to see him but to pay [bn Sirin a visit. One time a middle-aged man entered the shrine without acknowledging Shaykh Nabil’s presence; he went straight to the magsiira and sprinkled a bottle of rose water onto it. While others might have taken offense at the man’s seeming impoliteness and his failure

to speak the proper greeting while entering the shrine, Shaykh Nabil did not seem to mind, and I had spent enough time with him at that point to assume that the man was probably carrying out an order that Ibn Sirin had delivered to him by way of a dream-vision. There is no single typical visitor to [bn Sirin’s shrine, though probably more women come than men, and more middle-aged than particularly young or old people. Yet especially in terms of socioeconomic backgrounds, Shaykh Nabil’s clientele is remarkably heterogeneous. Among the people you might meet at the shrine is a wealthy woman who works for an Egyp-

tian broadcasting station. She wears bright red lipstick and a black coat, and has a thin black shaw! casually placed over her dyed hair. While most visitors arrive by foot, she takes a taxi down the unpaved street right to the shrine’s entrance. She has come for advice and frantically lets her misbaha,

a string of prayer beads, glide through her fingers while talking to the shaykh. When her cell phone rings, she answers and carries on a long and loud conversation, half in French and half in Arabic. Another upper-class woman whom you might meet at the shrine will tell you that she was born in Egypt, lived in San Francisco tor most of her lite, but then returned to Cairo when she grew tired of living in the United States after 9/11. “I love it here,” she will say in English, euphorically; “I like the poor. They’re so much better than the rich.” Next to these upper-class visitors, you might

encounter at the shrine an unmarried, veiled woman in her forties who spends her days issuing passports in a government office and occasionally comes after work to have her dreams interpreted. Another woman, who is here to inquire about a specific dream, complains that her husband wants to divorce her after only six months of marriage. A lawyer, who has known Shaykh Nabil since he first opened the shrine thirty years ago, sometimes stops by, as does a young man who is a member of the Burhaniyya Sufi order. Occasionally, a female dervish shows up; she seems disturbed and usually wears a man’s jacket that is a few sizes too big for her. Foreigners

come by as well. The first one ever to start visiting the shrine was an Austrian convert to Islam, who used to teach German at al-Azhar University and now works for a German television station in Cairo. One time, Shaykh Nabil told me, an American woman came to the shrine, and they

Thresholds of Interpretation / 73 sat and talked until five o’clock in the morning. “She was a Sufi from the inside,” he said, “even though she wasn’t even Muslim.” | was yet another semiforeigner frequenting the shrine. One regular at the shrine during my fieldwork, Madame Salwa, sees many dream-visions. She has known Shaykh Nabil for a long time and (wrongly) believes that his father and grandfather were in charge of the shrine before him. When she sees a dream-vision, she prefers going to the shaykh in person and usually comes all the way from her house by way of bus, microbus, or taxi. The ride, depending on traffic, can take up to an hour. At other times, Madame Salwa’s husband, a police officer who worries about his reputation, forbids her to go to the saint shrines, Ibn Sirin’s included. Those days Madame Salwa gets her dreams interpreted over the phone, usually when her husband is out of the house. Even though she respects Shaykh Nabil as a dream interpreter, she disapproves of his joking and casual manner, particularly with the women who come to the shrine. The shaykh, by contrast, commends Madame Salwa for her spirituality and integrity and sometimes calls her “Ibn Sirin’s daughter.” Once he jokingly added that she will have to take over the shrine when he dies. Madame Samia, another regular, is an employee in the Department of Medicine at ‘Ain Shams University. She is divorced and lives in ‘Abbassiya,

together with her mother and daughter. She says that she likes “spiritual matters (al-rawhdniyydt)” and enjoys interpreting her colleagues’ dreams. A friend first introduced her to Shaykh Nabil when she had seen a “difficult dream {ri’yda sa‘ba},” and he helped her understand its meaning. Contrasting the shaykh’s interpretations with her own, she told me, “of course, it’s different because he has divine inspiration, he has studied it, and it’s inherited (mawriith).” After first meeting the shaykh, she began visiting him on a regular basis in the hope that he would teach her how to become a better interpreter herself. Although this desired apprenticeship never materialized, she keeps coming to see him because she appreciates his practical and ethical advice and because she likes the atmosphere at the shrine. She told me she was glad to be able to spend time outside her home, to watch and talk to people, occasionally even to meet people from other countries such as myself, to take part in the mawilids, and to hear the call to prayer resounding from the many minarets in the area. Madame Salwa, Madame Samia, the upper-class women, government

employees, teachers, peasants, doctors, policemen, lawyers, Sufis, dervishes, workers, housewives, and the occasional anthropologist visit the shrine to ask for advice, complain, cry, laugh, pray, chat, and drink black tea, anise tea, or Turkish coffee. Although Shaykh Nabil is enigmatic at

74. / Thresholds of Interpretation times, he is also a very approachable shaykh, different from the imams of government-run mosques, who are often more reserved. Additionally, Shaykh Nabil is a dream expert, and in most cases visitors come to him not just to chat but also to tell their dreams and learn of their hidden meanings.

The Telling of Dreams A dream’s narration is closely related to its coming true—at least according to a hadith that states, “a dream is hanging on a bird’s foot. When you tell

it, it happens.”'® The dream is made real through interlocution, through language. Bad dreams are accordingly not to be told, or at best should be told in a bathroom so as to render them ineffective. By not telling a dream, its performative potential is contained. (The problem is, of course, that sometimes one learns only by telling a dream that it is devil-inspired.) To some extent, the dream-telling makes the dream, which might also explain why the Islamic tradition cautions so strongly against the telling of invented dreams. Those who lie about dreams will be gravely punished in the hereafter by being given an impossible task. A hadith warns, “Whoever claims to have had a dream which he actually did not have, will be ordered to make a knot between two barley grains which he will not be able to do” (Bukhari 1979, no. 7042). This punishment is specified alongside the pun-

ishment for other sinners; on Judgment Day, molten lead will be poured into the ears of those who eavesdrop on other people’s conversations, and those who create or draw pictures will be ordered to put a soul into those pictures. Lying about one’s dreams is included in this list of sins because, as the Prophet is reported to have said, “the worst lie is that a person claims to have had a dream which he has not had” (no. 7043). Ina different sense, the

notion that narrated dreams are powerful is also underlined in the Qur'an, where Yiisuf is warned by his father not to tell his dream to his brothers so as not to evoke their envy.

Ibn Sirin’s shrine is considered a safe place for telling dreams, and Shaykh Nabil is trusted as an interpreter. Sometimes visitors at the shrine

mention their dreams in passing, after first having had tea and having exchanged a number of polite back-and-forths with the shaykh. Others begin right away: “Shaykh, I dreamed that... (shuft fi-l-mandm... ).” Although the conversations with Shaykh Nabil are seemingly casual, some skill is involved in narrating dreams in ways that will lend themselves to

a meaningful interpretation. Just as Freudian patients supposedly dream Freudian dreams and Jungian patients Jungian ones, more generally the ways in which dreams are remembered and told (and maybe also dreamed) seem to adapt to specific horizons of expectation. | became keenly aware

Thresholds of Interpretation / 75 of this when, soon after | had met Shaykh Nabil, I told him about a dream of my own that had always seemed significant to me (it involves me saving a baby from drowning while everyone else simply watches). To my disappointment, Shaykh Nabil seemed still to be waiting for the important part of the dream once | had already finished telling it. When he realized that I had nothing to add, he otfered platitudes in lieu of the eye-opening interpretation | was hoping for. | had told the shaykh my dream in Arabic, but I clearly did not speak the right language—a language that is learned by listening to others’ dreams and reading or hearing about dreams in the textual tradition. Shaykh Nabil’s clients are much more familiar with this language. Their dreams resonate. Unlike mine, theirs make sense.

Although dream-stories have to fit specified schemes and meet certain expectations, they nevertheless belong to the dreamer. In Shaykh Nabil’s view, a dream says something about the dreamer just as much as it says something to the dreamer. For many, furthermore, dream-telling is a genre that allows them to talk about emotions and life circumstances that they might otherwise be less likely to discuss.” There is nothing one cannot say as long as one is telling a dream, and frequently visitors to Ibn Sirin’s shrine not only recount their dreams but blend their dream-stories into an account of their waking problems and worries. When people talk about their dreams and worries, Shaykh Nabil listens, sometimes attentively, sometimes haltheartedly, sometimes impatiently,

depending on his mood. Often he smokes shisha while the visitors are speaking. Occasionally he asks for clarifications, inquiring for instance about the names of people who appeared in the dream. More often, he merely listens. At times, dream narrations create a semiprivate space within the shrine’s public space; they evoke a sense of intimacy. Shaykh Nabil then draws closer to the visitors as they begin telling their dreams; other times, he leads them into the shrine if other people are sitting outside. There are exceptions to this norm of semiprivacy. Some have no problem with their dreams and the subsequent interpretations being audible to all

those present. Two women, both likely in their forties, who came to the shrine one evening proceeded to speak loudly and clearly, even though a number of people were coming and going, and even though their dreams seemed slightly repulsive (to me, at least). The first woman spoke at length

of a dream in which she went to the bathroom to defecate, and the other woman told us a surreal-sounding dream that featured ants crawling out of a hole in the wall, followed by cockroaches, and finally the Prophet. Other dreamers whisper their dreams or speak in a low voice. One afternoon, a woman who thought I wanted to become a dream interpreter

76 / Thresholds of Interpretation myself asked me whether she could tell me a dream that she was too embarrassed (maksiifa) to tell the shaykh. In the dream——which she had seen while fasting, in a state of ritual purity, and after praying the morning prayer—she saw herself having intercourse with her sister’s husband, who is also her cousin. She seemed worried and uncomfortable. I tried to explain to her (as I did to many people) that | was not an aspiring interpreter, and | encouraged her to speak to the shaykh directly, assuring her that I had often heard him say that one should never be embarrassed about one’s dreams. The woman followed my advice and soon thereafter left the shrine greatly relieved, as Shaykh Nabil had interpreted the dream to bea glad tiding devoid of any sexual implications.

The Classification of Dreams As Vincent Crapanzano suggests, a dreamer’s interlocutors “have a special hold over the dream. They take possession of it. They give it fixity” (2001, 255). One way of giving fixity to a dream is to categorize it. Dream interpreters are expected to be particularly skilled in distinguishing among the

three types of dreams, and some dreamers turn to them specifically to find out what kind of dream they have seen. When I asked Shaykh Nabil whether more people come to him with dream-visions than with ordinary dreams, he told me, “They come with everything. It’s a cocktail. They come

with all three kinds: dream-visions, hadith nafsi, and dreams from the devil. They don’t know what they have. It’s like when you go to the doctor. It’s the doctor who tells you what you have.” Just as a doctor arrives at a diagnosis based on specific symptoms, difterent clues help the interpreter distinguish among the three kinds of dreams. According to most dream interpreters I spoke to, a dream-vision is a short,

flashlike image, whereas psychologically explainable and devil-induced dreams consist of a series of confused images. The dream-vision, according to Shaykh Nabil, is a clear “understood message (risaila mafhiima).” It is,

so Shaykh Hanafi would say, “only one or two words.” A hadith nafsi, by contrast, can be much longer and often leaves the dreamer confused. Someone likened the hadith nafsi to an action film: it’s fast and in lots of colors. To determine what kind of dream was seen, the interpreter sometimes asks the dreamer whether she went to sleep in a state of purity, and whether she prays regularly and keeps up with her religious obligations. Additionally, inquiring about the dreamer’s feelings when she awoke can help determine what kind of dream was seen. If she felt calm and happy, it was probably a dream-vision; dreams that bring fear (khawf), fright (ru‘b}, and terror (faza‘) are generally induced by the devil or a jinn. Such

Thresholds of Interpretation = / 77 dreams make you grind your teeth, one dream interpreter explained to me; a dream-vision leaves you at peace. Finally, a dream-vision is generally

remembered more clearly than a meaningless or devil-inspired dream. According to some scholars, the temporal context of the dream matters as well. Dreams seen during daybreak are more likely to be dream-visions; dreams seen in the winter or when rain is coming are probably meaningless. Shaykh Nabil disagrees with the view that dream-visions are bound to certain times or seasons. He holds that “God sends His messages whenever He wants.”

Shaykh Nabil reacts differently to the three kinds of dreams. If the dream was (predominantly) a hadith nafsi, he tells the dreamer what its cause might have been and what the dreamer should do about it. [If it was induced by the devil, he instructs the dreamer to spit over her left shoulder three times and to seek refuge with God, as is recommended in a hadith. Devil-inspired dreams are thereby averted, and one should not give them

any further thought. If the dream was divinely inspired, Shaykh Nabil presents an interpretation. Yet it is important that while the three categories are clearly distinguished in the textual tradition, in actual instances of interpretation Shaykh Nabil rarely draws clear-cut lines between them. Only dreams from the devil are unambiguously identified and categorized,

while many others are handled as both originating within the dreamer and divine messages. As we will see in a later chapter, it is precisely this ambiguity that allows the shaykh to integrate psychological terms into his interpretation of prophetic dreams and, in turn, to expand the category of the prophetic to include even seemingly psychological dreams.

The Interpretation of Dreams In ancient Greek contexts, dream interpretation functioned as what Foucault calls “one of the techniques of existence” and as a “life practice” (1986b, 5). Similarly, Shaykh Nabil’s interpretations offer a form of ethical guidance; they direct the dreamer. Besides decoding the dream’s meanings, the shaykh often urges the dreamer to pray more, to become more diligent in worship, or to attend to familial duties. Like the dream-vision itself, the act of dream interpretation puts forth a moral imperative. This imperative is not always effective. Take the example of Layla, a thirty-five-year-old unmarried woman who works as an English instructor at al-Azhar’s Women’s College and who wears a full face veil (nigab). Once Layla dreamed of her parents, who had passed away long before. In the dream, she noticed a beautiful dress on her father’s grave that, she thought, might have been a wedding dress. Her mother, who was alive in

78 / Thresholds of Interpretation the dream, prevented her from reaching the dress. Layla learned from a dream interpretation book that both the symbol of the dress and the act of taking something from a grave indicate something positive (khayr), and she was troubled because her mother seemed to keep her from reaching this good. Layla figured that she was supposed to do something to appease her mother, who was apparently upset with her. But what was her mother trying to tell her? Why was she upset? Layla was reluctant to translate her dream into a concrete action, such as visiting her parents’ graves or distrib-

uting alms in their names. Since she knew about my research, she asked me to recommend a dream interpreter who might be able to tell her exactly what she needed to do. She was neither interested in talking to Shaykh Nabil because she “doles| not like Sufis,” nor in talking to Shaykh Sayyid, whom she had seen on television and deemed not scholarly enough. In the end, she decided to call Shaykh Hanafi, the dream interpreter from Rw’ whose Azharite affiliation she appreciated. Yet when she told the shaykh by telephone that many of her dreams come true, he responded that she must have a Christian jinn on her and asked her twice whether she really prays all the obligatory prayers. In part, this (mis}interpretation has to do with the technological mediation of dream interpretations, which | discuss in more detail in a later chapter. Had the shaykh met Layla in person, he probably would have offered a very different interpretation. Regardless, it was a strange experience for Layla, who is used to being categorized as ultrareligious because of the nigab. She was rather dismayed by the whole experience and told me that she felt reaffirmed in her opinion that quite generally “dreams don’t matter.” Most dreamers, by contrast, seek out an interpreter’s expertise because they believe that their dreams contain an ethical message and because they want help with unraveling this message. In his interpretations, Shaykh Nabil usually focuses on key symbols, which he interprets etymologically or through reference to the Qur’an. Often the shaykh quotes the relevant Quranic verses, and his interpretations almost always correspond to those that are found in the texts ascribed to Ibn Sirin. Significantly, however, Shaykh Nabil does not resort to actual books, and he does not claim to “look up” symbols in his memory. Instead, he describes his interpretations as coming “from above, from the Divine Realm (min fi’, min ‘and Allah).” Referring to the times when he interprets dreams on the phone, he explained to me, “When I talk on the phone, a state overcomes me (biygi-li hal), and 1 say it. It’s not from me. The mind (al-‘aql} doesn’t play

a role in it.” The interpretations come through Shaykh Nabil, just as the dream-visions to which he responds have come through the dreamers.

Thresholds of Interpretation / 79 According to the shaykh’s own understanding, his interpretations go beyond a mechanical decoding of symbols in two ways. First, while the meaning

of key symbols could seemingly also be looked up in a dream manual, he simultaneously transmits divinely inspired knowledge—knowledge that does not come from him. Second, his work not only extends upward to the Divine realm but also downward toward the material concerns of everyday life. In his interpretive work, Shaykh Nabil takes the dreamer’s life circumstances into account because, as he puts it, the “meaning goes back to the person who sees the dream.” He pays attention to what a man in a café in Cairo once described to me as asbab al-ru’yd, the reasons or circumstances of the dream-vision. This term echoes the principle of asbab al-nuziil, which embeds Qur’anic verses in the social-historical context in which they were first revealed. For Shaykh Nabil, imaginary and waking states are intimately connected. Not surprisingly, then, the shaykh’s work does not stop at the threshold between night and day.

Beyond Dream Interpretation Shaykh Nabil is not exclusively concerned with dreams; he also performs a number of other roles. People come to the shrine for all kinds of advice. Madame Samia’s daughter, for instance, once complained to the shaykh

that a college friend of hers had exchanged rings with another student. She thought it was too early for them to get engaged, as they still had too many years left in college and subsequently would need time to save for an apartment and prepare for marriage. She wanted to know whether she was right and seemed content when Shaykh Nabil agreed with her moral judgment. Besides giving advice, Shaykh Nabil also heals visitors by making the sick or possessed recite invocations (du‘a’) after him. Others come to him with problems such as childlessness or financial trouble. For Shaykh Nabil, dream interpretation, which provides an inner calmness (ra/a), is only one way ot “serving people (khidmat al-ndis}.” As he sees it, his work more broadly consists of “establishing peace between people, of |increasing| the good between them, and of directing them (al-islah bayn al-nds wa-l-khayr baynahum wa-l-tawegih).” One day when I arrived at the shrine, three women were talking to the shaykh about problems one of them was having with her fiancé. Shaykh Nabil, whom I had rarely seen so worked up, exclaimed that he wanted to go and beat the man with his shoes. He kept passing his shisha back and forth with the oldest woman, then he ordered coffee for all three, and when they had emptied their glasses, he shared the rest of his own coffee with them. The women slowly calmed down, the atmosphere relaxed, and they

80 / Thresholds of Interpretation began joking about the problem that they had previously been so upset about.

Ona different day, a twenty-two-year-old man from the neighborhood showed up at the shrine. He had been taking hallucinatory drugs for seven years, now was partially paralyzed, and had spent some time in prison. Shaykh Nabil was familiar with the man’s history, and he knew that even hospitals for the poor would not admit him, or anyone for that matter, without the right connections fwasta). Step by step, he walked the young man through his options and tried to think of venues for help. I remember how impressed | was that day by the shaykh’s street smarts. Compared to his often very abstract interpretations and enigmatic explanations, his advice to the man was very down-to-earth, practical, and utterly realistic. Besides healing and giving religious, legal, moral, and practical advice,

the shaykh at times also provides tangible material support. Material things, says Shaykh Nabil, are meaningless: “All that matters are the heart and the mind. Material things come and go.” The shaykh not only theoretically promotes this constant flow, but also participates in it on a daily basis. The current runs right through Ibn Sirin’s shrine, which, unlike other shrines, is not supported by the Ministry of Religious Aftairs. It is alli, privately run. To keep the shrine going, to pay for electricity as well as his own food and medicine, the shaykh relies on material help that comes to the shrine by way of its visitors. Although officially Shaykh Nabil claims not to take money for his interpretations (because “the recompense comes from God alone”),'® about half of the people who come to the shrine give some compensation. On rare occasions, wealthy upper-class visitors might give as much as fifty pounds (about ten dollars). Poorer visitors from Cairo or the countryside might place a twenty-five- or fifty-piaster bill (ess than ten cents) in Shaykh Nabil’s hand as they leave the shrine. Not surprisingly, Shaykh Nabil often also hinted at ways in which I could help out, emphasizing my indebtedness to Ibn Sirin and assuring me, for instance, that paying the shrine’s phone bill would count as a pious deed. At times his requests annoyed me, but part of me was also happy to distribute some of my research funding to and, more important, through Shaykh Nabil. According to the shaykh, most of the money he receives is not for him or the shrine but gets passed on to those in need. “People these days are all in very difficult situations (shad@id),” he says; “it’s even reflected in

their dreams.” As the shaykh sees it, he takes from the rich and gives to the poor, thereby also helping the rich, as they perform a pious deed in giving the money. According to his view, he provides a middle point

Thresholds of Interpretation / S41 between the rich and the poor, a point where the good fal-khayr} meets. People from the neighborhood at times also receive food from Shaykh Nabil, especially during Ramadan and the mawlids that take place in the vicinity of the shrine. Ina little side alley close to the shrine, Shaykh Nabil has constructed a room and set up a small, basic kitchen in which food is prepared during Ramadan, sometimes by the shaykh himself, but more frequently by others who want to make up for days of fasting that they or their relatives have missed. | spent hours in that kitchen with Madame Salwa cooking chicken, rice, mulukhiyya, and green beans while listening to her telling me stories from the Qur’an. Shaykh Nabil sometimes helped with the preparations, and generally he was in charge of distributing the food to the people from the neighborhood, who would come by in the late afternoon with plastic or metal bowls. The moments when the shaykh handed out the food always seemed to me intimately related to his work as a dream interpreter, although for a long time I could not quite put my finger on the connection. Now, looking back, I think that what unites these two acts—-of distributing food and interpreting dreams—is that both are acts of mediation. Whether he inhabits the threshold between the visible and the invisible or that between rich and poor, Shaykh Nabil is a mediating point. CONCLUSION

Dreams cross multiple thresholds. Occurring in an experiential realm, a dream is translated every time it is remembered, told, retold, interpreted, and enacted. As certain dreams bring with them a moral imperative, the actual occurrence of what the dream prefigures or teaches already constitutes an interpretation and is sometimes referred to as such in Arabic. Saying that a dream “was interpreted /itfassar)” can accordingly mean simply that it came true. Other dreams need first to be rendered meaningful before the dreamer can react to the moral imperative they put forth. This is where the dream interpreter comes into the picture: as a translator, cultural broker, religious expert, and moral guide. My ethnographic portrait of Shaykh Nabil suggests that his interpretations are mechanical, prophetic, and attuned to the dreamers’ concrete life circumstances all at once. They are bound to the shaykh’s persona, physical location, and the legacy of classical interpretations, yet they are also flashlike, prophetic eruptions from an Elsewhere. While potentially therapeutic,

the interactions at Ibn Sirin’s shrine differ from those someone would undergo while positioned on a Freudian couch—the new “holy site” for

82 / Thresholds of Interpretation dreams, according to lan Hacking (2001, 256). Rather than being oriented

toward the past, dream-tellings and interpretations at the shrine point toward the future and embed believers in larger networks of meanings that exceed visible material and social worlds. The encounter with Shaykh Nabil is itself rarely confined to the act of dream-telling and interpretation, and the ethics of in-betweenness in the context of the shrine refers to more than the act of sailing across the river that separates a dream from its meaning. Tea is sipped, shisha smoked, gossip told, advice given, and money handed over. Hands are shaken, shoulders patted, prayers spoken, and healing invocations mumbled. Shaykh Nabil’s work is not confined to the ethereal realm; he also responds to very material concerns and gives very practical advice. The shrine is a place of multiple exchanges, not confined to but infused with tokens from the imaginary realm. Besides interpreting dreams, Shaykh Nabil offers moral and psychological guidance; he distributes food and money to those in need, and the shrine he guards provides a refuge from the harshness and boredom of everyday life. The shrine is a nexus of social relations. Dreamers meet other dreamers; they interact with Shaykh Nabil and Ibn Sirin; and they ponder their relationships with the saints buried in the neighborhood, as well as with the saints and the dead whom they encountered in their dreams. The shrine was a nexus of social relations for me as well. It is where I first met many of the dreamers whom I came to know during my fieldwork, and even the person who first introduced me to Shaykh Qusi’s community was originally met through Shaykh Nabil. In the next chapter, I pursue the theme of in-betweenness, turning from

the in-between of interpretation to the in-between of the dream itself. More precisely, I leave behind the vast array of dreams that Shaykh Nabil deals with on a daily basis (a “cocktail,” as he says) and zoom in on the ru’ya, the divinely inspired dream or waking vision. Shaykh Nabil does not always draw a clear line between ru’yd and ordinary dream, between the rare, exceptional glimpse of divine inspiration and the welling up of unconscious feelings or wishes. In his view, even the most ordinary dreamers can receive the extraordinary gift of divine inspiration. Yet in turning from Shaykh Nabil’s rather fluid dream-worlds to more hierarchized ones, the issue of who can see what kind of dream or vision becomes more salient.

Even if the Prophet appears in dreams, would he really visit just about anyone—illiterate housewives just as much as Sufi shaykhs? Precisely because dream-visions frequently involve visitations, theoretically anyone could claim to have experienced them. But while dream-visions seem to constitute a highly democratic medium of communication with the Divine,

Thresholds of Interpretation / 83 there is also much one can do to invite a dream-vision. Working through the seeming tension between divinely sent and yet self-cultivated states, the next chapter centers on three interrelated questions: How, according to my interlocutors, does one see the (in)visible? Who can see it? and How can

anthropologists study what they themselves cannot see?

3. Seeing the (In)visible The universe that we’re stuck in is the one of our five senses. What we can feel, hear, touch, and so on. The challenge is to explode your body, to free yourself. SHAYRH OUSI

He who dreams sleeps, but already he who dreams is he who sleeps no longer. He is not another, some other person, but the premonition of the other, of that which cannot say “I” anymore, which recognizes itself neither in itself nor in other. MAURICE BLANCHOT

“If you open your eyes, you'll see thousands,” said the Azharite shaykh. He was referring to thousands of angels, saints, and other (in)visible beings. Dressed in formal! Azharite attire, the shaykh was a special guest that night at the m@idat al-rahmdn where Shaykh Qusi’s disciples were serving food

to up to three thousand people, as they did on every evening throughout the month of Ramadan. The group’s md’idat al-rahmdin, literally a “table of the Ail-Merciful,” is one of the many spaces set up in Cairo during the month of fasting where food is given out when it is time to break fast to those in need or away from home. It was already dark, and most of the guests had finished their meal and were swiftly departing. Empty metal plates and bowls, previously filled with dates, broth, chicken, rice, okra, bread, and pickled vegetables, were left behind on the tables, mingling with green, blue, red, and yellow plastic cups. The time had come for Shaykh Qusi’s followers to shed their aprons, sit down, and eat. Afterward

some members of the group, both men and women, gathered around the Azharite guest, and I pulled up a chair to join them. Sipping sugary tea, we leaned back and listened as the shaykh began talking about the lives of various prophets. | was just starting to feel sleepy when someone suddenly stood up and interrupted the shaykh. “We already know all that,” he said with a loud and determined voice. “Tell us about al-bdtin. Tell us about the things we don’t see.” [ leaned forward to see who had spoken those words. It was al-Sayyid Ahmad, one of Shaykh Qusi’s most devoted followers. Al-Sayyid Ahmad

is a man with upper-class sensibilities and demeanors. He works for the Egyptian air force and usually wears expensive-looking suits at the gath34

Seeing the (In)visible / 85 erings. Whenever a TV crew came to do a report on the group, he would likely be one of the people chosen to appear in front of the camera. | knew al-Sayyid Ahmad as a polite and soft-spoken man, and the rude way in which he had interrupted the guest startled me. Only later did I realize that asking the shaykh to speak of what “we don’t see” was in fact flattering and a sign of respect. Truly seeing, it implied, means knowing. Ordinary sight equals blindness. The knowledge that al-Sayyid Ahmad requested was not just any knowledge; it was knowledge of al-batin. Referring to hidden, inner meanings, al-batin is opposed to al-zdhir, the obvious, surface meaning. The prophets’ lives, which the Azharite shaykh had been telling us about, are no secret. Imams refer to them during Friday sermons and on television; one can learn about them in mosque lessons, from books, and on the Internet. What al-Sayyid Ahmad was asking for was not a retelling of the already known (or the easily knowable), but a glimpse of the unknown, al-bdtin, the invisible. His request rested on the assumption that al-bdtin can be translated into language for those unable to perceive it. It might be invisible to most people, but it is not unspeakable. The Azharite shaykh hesitated. Then he revealed in a mysterious tone that the parking lot on which we were gathered was a place of baraka, a place of heightened spiritual power. Not only was it a blessed place, but even more: the Prophet was present, as were angels and the Prophet’s companions. There were thousands! As the shaykh spoke, I felt the listeners’ attention rise and the mood shift. His assertions were met with enthusiasm. Allah, Allah, Allah, some exclaimed. Allahu akbar. Al-Sayyid Ahmad began to cry. The Azharite shaykh turned silent and looked at me for a moment, but our gazes did not meet. I did not see him seeing me; rather, he seemed to be looking through me, or maybe he was not looking at all, but only seeing. My gaze was not mirrored but deflected. The shaykh’s voice brought me back from the uncanny hall of shattered mirrors. “To see the thousands around us, you have to look with a sincere gaze (basira mukitlisa),” he said with a subtle smile on his face. “Just open your eyes!” I opened my eyes more ... nothing. I squinted and still did not see. For a moment I wondered whether the shaykh was mocking us, those unable to perceive the thousands surrounding us. So what if we all squint or open our eyes widely? We still would not see what the shaykh was seeing. A young Indonesian man was sitting next to me, and someone translated the shaykh’s words into English for him, placing particular emphasis on the Prophet’s presence. The young man turned up his eyeballs and moved them in a half-circle. “So he’s around now?” The self-appointed translator

86 / Seeing the (In)visible nodded and asked the young man whether he was able to see the Prophet, to which the latter replied faithfully, “No, I’m not at that stage yet.” The

translator nodded again; he seemed content. Although the young man had optimistically hinted at the future possibility that he, too, might one day be seeing, his response acknowledged and reaffirmed the hierarchy reaching from those who are blind to those with complete vision. Opening one’s eyes apparently meant something other than the delicate muscular movement that pulls back one’s eyelids to expose the millions of ocular nerve endings to the material world. Far from inviting us to look more, the Azharite shaykh had advised us to look differently. By engaging with nonoptical understandings of sight, this chapter calls for a critical look at the method of observation. According to my inter-

locutors, an observing gaze misses out on entire orders of reality. Yet also, and significantly, training oneself to see in a different way is never enough. A “sincere gaze” can be cultivated, but central to my interlocutors’ larger imagination is the acknowledgment that the ru’ya might betall the subject as a radically unexpected event. This dimension necessitates thinking beyond the paradigm of self-cultivation. It assumes a more open and dialogically constituted subject, one who is not only an agent but also a patient who is acted upon.' As my interlocutors see it, self-cultivation is never sufficient because the believer is always both subject and object of the

experience, constituting the dream and constituted by it. BEYOND OBSERVATION “Each culture specifies what we should ‘expect to see’ when we see,” Michel

de Certeau once noted (1983, 26). We are socialized to pay attention to certain things and not to others, to see in certain ways and not in others. Although anthropologists generally cannot study sense experiences in their unmediated form (assuming that unmediated experience even exists), they can examine narrative, performative, and discursive renderings of such experiences. The actual vision always escapes its theorization and narrativization, but we can assume that what people say about seeing and how and what they see are to some extent interrelated. It gets tricky, however, when one’s interlocutors claim to be seeing things that the anthropologist is unable to see. What was I to make of the thousands who were supposedly surrounding us that Ramadan night, but who were entirely invisible

to me? The easiest way out of such a dilemma is to interpret all waking visions and apparitions as hallucinations, inventions, projections of wishes, or at best optical or technologically produced illusions. Such a move means

Seeing the (In)visible / 87 ascribing absolute authority to one’s own observing gaze and, more generally, it means assuming that the anthropologist always sees (and knows)

more than her informants. More rewarding in my opinion is to bracket readily available explanations, recognize the historical specificity of different modes of seeing, give close ethnographic consideration to other imaginations, and examine critically our own blind spots.

Although seeing seems so natural that its historicity is easily overlooked, it is affected by historical transtormations and has been understood in a variety of ways over the centuries. Ancient Greek vision theories centered on the question of whether something material issues from the object and enters into the eye (“intromission theory”), or the eye sends out rays

that go forth to meet the object (“extramission theory”). Proponents of the former theory struggled to justify how the large replica of a mountain could fit into the eye, while their opponents tried to explain how rays originating in the eye could reach as far as the stars. A third theory, favored by Cicero, suggested that the air between eye and object is transformed into a receptive medium, so that the “air itself sees together with us” (Lindberg 1976, 9). After Greek philosophical, mathematical, and medical texts were

translated into Arabic in the ninth century, Muslim scholars such as alKindi (d. ca. 866) and Hunayn ibn Ishaq (d. 873) adopted and further developed Greek optical models. The Arab philosophers’ theories then traveled back to Europe and eventually culminated in Kepler’s scientific discoveries

of the “true” functioning of the eye at the beginning of the seventeenth century (Lindberg 1976). The eye, now conceptualized as the most reliable sense organ, came to play a central role in modernity, which accordingly is sometimes labeled ocularcentric.? Anthropologists, too, subscribe to this ocularcentrism to the extent that the classical fieldwork method of “participant observation” reinforces the eye’s hegemony. Although many anthropologists have devoted their attention to nonobservable realms—to ghosts, spirits, hopes, dreams, and memories, but also to the market’s “invisible hand,” ideologies, utopias, and the nation-state—observation still looms large as a supposed gateway into other cultures.’ What the method of observation is believed to entail

might be deducible from a 1954 essay called “The Nobility of Sight” by German philosopher and phenomenologist Hans Jonas. In response to the question why “since the days of Greek philosophy sight has been hailed as the most excellent of the senses” (1966, 135), Jonas proposes the following reasons: First, he says, sight favors Being over dynamic Becoming, as it is

intrinsically less temporal than sound and touch and involves a sense of simultaneity by enclosing a wide field at once. Second, sight is detached,

88 / Seeing the (In)visible disengaged, and objective. While sound “intrudes upon a passive subject” and touch “has to go out and seek the objects in bodily motion and through bodily contact,” Jonas writes, “with sight, all | have to do is open my eyes, and the world is there, as it was all the time” (139, 143). Thus, in merely looking at an object, “neither I nor the object has so far done anything to determine the mutual situation. It lets me be as | let it be” (145). In Jonas’s model, both seeing subject and seen object are neutral, unengaged, passive, and effortless. This unengagedness, he concludes, is one of the properties of sight that make it noble and link it to objectivity and theoretical truth.* Jonas’s essay represents a particular understanding of sight that stretches from Plato to Descartes and into the twenty-first century. It is an under-

standing that runs counter not only to other philosophical traditions (those, for instance, which do not favor being over becoming) but also to the concepts of many of my interlocutors. Already the widespread belief in an evil eye diverges from the notion that a gaze simply lets its object be. Further, contrary to Jacques Lacan’s remark that “it is striking, when one thinks of the universality of the function of the evil eye, that there is no trace anywhere of a good eye, of an eye that blesses” (1978, 115), Egyptians sometimes also described to me a blessing gaze. Sufis note that those who have reached a high spiritual state can guide others through their gaze and that they can project out baraka through it. The envious gaze, the blessing gaze, and what the Azharite shaykh called a “sincere gaze” all differ from the paradigmatic modern observing gaze that is praised by Jonas.

“Just as | See You Now” Other modes of sight can exist alongside and in tension with a hegemonic modern optical regime, complicating Karl Marx’s insight that “the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the worid down to the present” (1961, 108).5 When my interlocutors speak about their visionary experiences, they frequently alternate between different understandings

of sight, or they evoke different understandings simultaneously. Since they, too, live in a thoroughly ocularcentric world, they sometimes draw on an empiricist discourse, insisting that they “really saw” the Prophet, the saints, or the angels—‘just as I see you now.” Bernd Radtke (1999) has made the related observation that while older forms of Sufism believed in encountering the Prophet spiritually, the belief in an encounter in flesh and blood is characteristic of more recent forms. For those who are trapped in a web of material interests, Shaykh Qusi explained to me, the invisible has to materialize in order to become perceptible. Today, he said, people believe

only in material things; they want to witness everything for themselves:

Seeing the (In)visible / 89 “Tf they can’t touch it, it’s not real.” A number of priests similarly pointed out to me that the Virgin has been appearing so frequently because people these days require visible, concrete evidence.®

Yet when believers speak of having seen the Prophet, the angels, or the Virgin “with their own eyes,” they do not simply reinscribe the eye’s hegemony, they simultaneously subvert it. In insisting on “open eyes,” the Azharite shaykh referred to a mode of imagining, an inner sight— a sight that draws on yet also disrupts ocularcentric understandings of perception. A number of my interlocutors explicitly critiqued empiricist paradigms that equate the visible with the real. They pointed out that the devil or jinn might trick one’s senses, or they referred to the material world

as a “veil” that separates the human from the Divine. One dream interpreter described the reliance on the five senses as a rather mediocre path to knowledge: “The belief in material, tangible, perceptible, audible, visible,

observable things,” he said, “is the belief of materialists, existentialists, socialists, heretics, and unbelievers alike.” Dream-visions, waking visions, and other spiritual modes of sight such as firiisa and ilha@m reach beyond the observable.’ They rely on a sincere gaze that is more attuned to the ephemeral, the not fully visible, the imaginary. According to my interlocutors, it is through the faculty of the imagination that one can gain access to the space of the imagination, the barzakh, that which is located between presence and absence. A “sincere gaze” looks beyond the either/or. Distinctions between inner and outer, visible and invisible, dream and sense perception are then no longer rigid but at best lie on a continuum. The Prophet, his companions, the angels, and the saints are visible to some but not to others. They are fin)visible. Looking at One's Beloved Possible approaches to this different kind of gaze are suggested not only by my interlocutors’ narratives but also by historians critical of a modern ocularcentrism. Michel Foucault (1977a) and Donna Harraway (1997), for example, have argued against the privileging of a supposedly removed, objective observer and the related ontological order of presence. They point out that the modern optical regime erases other kinds of perceptions and imaginations, and that it has dangerous potentials. Taken to the extreme, the disengaged gaze that aims at setting forth the world before the observer becomes aligned with the panoptic gaze that Foucault identified as a specifi-

cally modern tool of power. However, an alternative kind of gaze is suggested by Foucault himself in his dream essay to which I referred earlier, as well as by Maurice Blanchot, who writes, “to live an event as an image

go / Seeing the (In)visible is not to remain uninvolved, to regard the event disinterestedly. ... It is to be taken” (1982, 261). Merieau-Ponty notes, “the relation between what I see and | who see is not one of immediate or frontal contradiction; the things attract my look, my gaze caresses the thing” (1968, xliii). A merging of subject and object is not possible for Merleau-Ponty, but neither are they unengaged or oppositional. A different kind of seeing is suggested here

that replaces looking aft with looking in--a vision that is attuned not to what is before our eyes but to that which withdraws from presence. It is a vision that pays attention to shadows and reflections.® Specifically in the dream, writes Walter Benjamin, quoting the French poet Valéry, subject and object are highly engaged: “To say, ‘Here I see such and such an object’ does not establish an equation between me and

the object... . In dreams, however, there is an equation. The things I see, see me just as much as I see them” {(1968a, 188f.). Looking at one’s beloved,

Benjamin notes elsewhere, is like being outside oneself. “If the theory is correct,” he writes, “that feeling is not located in the head, that we sentiently experience a window, a cloud, a tree not in our brains but, rather, in the place where we see it, then we are, in looking at our beloved, too, outside ourselves” (1978, 68).

Evoking a similar analogy, Shaykh Qusi once explained to me the difference between those who are (spiritually) blind and those who can see: “It’s like the difference between being in love and not being in love. If you're in love, the world is different. It all has a meaning, there are colors, it’s a different taste; you see the world differently. Without being in love, it’s plain, you're not interested, not motivated, you just live day by day. And now think about the difference between loving a person and loving God or the Prophet!” According to Shaykh Qusi, loving God and the Prophet opens up a different way of being (and seeing) in the world. Far from relying on an abstracted mode of observation, a loving gaze has to do with a certain kind of attunedness. Shaykh Qusi’s disciples readily accepted the possibility that the Azharite guest might be seeing what they failed to see. His vision was empowered by his spiritual state, as well as the spatial and temporal context. It was a Ramadan night, and Ramadan is a blessed month, and “there is baraka in the night for those who are awake, even if they are drunk (sakrén),” as one of Shaykh Qusi’s favorite sayings goes. While obscuring the sight of the observer, the night is a particularly likely time for glimpses of the invisible to spill over into visibility. Another such time is the morning prayer, when the angels of the night and those of the day are said to meet. The spatial setting mattered as well. The parking lot on which we were gathered, while ordinarily a plain

Seeing the (In)visible / gt and secular space, during Ramadan became a place of distribution, prayer, and Qur’anic recitation; it was a place of baraka. The spatial and temporal context, together with the Azharite shaykh’s attunedness, increased the likelihood for a waking vision to be seen. The kind of seeing that renders visible the invisible is not objective; only the right person, at the right place and time, looking the right way, can see.

Inner and Outer Vision When the Azharite shaykh invited us to open our eyes, he was alluding to an inner vision, which is distinguished from physical eyesight by only one letter in Arabic. The word ri’ya (which ends with the character ti? marbiita) reters to the visual faculty, sight, and seeing; it is related to the eye’s gaze (basar}. The word ru’yd (which ends with the letter alif) refers to a waking vision or dream, an inner vision (basira); it relies on the heart’s

eye (‘ayn al-galb) or the spirit (riih). Both terms for vision, ru’ya and ru’yd, are derived from the same root, which indicates seeing, looking, or perceiving. A small difference in letters thus distinguishes between bodily

vision and its spiritual counterpart. When the verb form is used fra’a/ ya’rii}, no distinction is made between inner and outer vision, and the same holds true for the Egyptian colloquial equivalent (shaf/yashif). While not always explicitly evoked, the Qur’an offers an implicit frame of reference for the distinction between spiritual and bodily sense experi-

ence. A number of Qur’anic verses begin with the phrase “Do you not see... ? (a-lam tara... ?)”? Suggesting an indexical relationship between the visible world and the Divine, these verses imply that by opening their eyes, believers will inevitably become aware of God's existence and his creative power. “I was a hidden treasure,” God says in an often-quoted hadith qudsi, “and | wanted to be known. Therefore I created the world so they would know Me through it.”'© While the universe offers audible and olfactory signs as well, vision plays a preeminent role among the senses in the Qur’an."! Although the fact that God Himself evades sight is evident

in verses such as “No human vision can encompass Him, whereas He encompasses all human vision” (6:103), nonetheless many of my interlocutors explained that divine signs (dal@il, G@yat) such as the sun, tlowers, or identical twins imply God just as a painting implies its painter.” Again, it seems that all we need to do is open our eyes. Yet again, it is

not that simple. In the Qur'an the verb that means “to see” is used much more extensively than for simple descriptions of optical vision. According to Shaykh ‘Ali Gum‘a, who is currently the state mufti of Egypt, in the Quranic context the verb can refer to any of four characteristics (2002,

92 / Seeing the (In)visible 15-16): seeing with one’s senses (hdssa); imagination and fantasy (khayal, wahm);* thinking or reflection (fafkir); and seeing with the mind (‘agl). A Qur’anic epistemology, one might say, considers sight the noblest of the senses too, but seeing implies a wide range of perceptions and is not limited to the organ of the eye. The “Junbelievers] whom [God] makes deaf, and whose eyes He blinds” (47:23), are not literally deprived of their hearing and eyesight, but “blind have become the hearts that are in their breasts” (22:46). As the heart is taken to be the individual’s metaphysical center, unbelievers’ hearts are described as sealed or filled with disease and

terror. In line with this Qur’anic epistemology, Shaykh Qusi holds that one’s inner vision generally does not depend on one’s eyesight. He told me that only very few people, maybe one in a million, can see waking visions without closing their eyes. In these rare cases, one’s inner vision floods one’s optical vision, and the eyes then see what normally only the heart perceives. In one of his books Shaykh Qusi explains that the saint “sees truth with his inner vision (basira) but the power of his inner vision pierces his optical vision (basar}) so that the optical vision tor him is the seeing tool. The power of the inner vision is concentrated in the power of his eyes’ gaze.

He sees with his pure optical vision but with the light of his inner vision, and when he closes his eyes in this state, he sees exactly the same that he sees with open eyes because his seeing does not originate in the two eyes but in the inner vision” (1997, 13f,). At times, Shaykh Qusi adds, the eyes might not be strong enough to bear such an altered vision, but if they are, then what such a person sees

differs entirely from what ordinary people are seeing. Shaykh Qusi’s account here resonates with older Neoplatonic descriptions of a transformed vision. Al-Farabi noted, for instance, that in people with a strong prophetic imagination, a ray is projected into the air that subsequently is perceived through natural perception (Walzer 1962). Similarly, for Ibn al-‘Arabi the active imagination is an organ that “permits the transmutation of internal spiritual states into external states, into vision-events” (Corbin 1997, 15), and according to al-Kindi, imagination, faith, and desire are effective through the rays they issue forth (Travaglia 1999). These traditions and Shaykh Qusi’s descriptions of saintly vision share the notion that spiritual experiences can be projected outward and that “reality” can become encompassed in the imagination. Flooded eyes, Sufis explained to me, are stronger than ordinary eyes. Those who see through them have left behind the stage of meditation (murdgqaba) in which one believes without seeing, and enter into the stage of seeing (mushdahada), which means

Seeing the (In)visible | 93 that they see what they believe. At a very high stage, a Sufi in Luxor told me, even one’s ears can see. Once Shaykh Qusi described to me what happens on the rare occasions when he himself sees a waking vision with open eyes. It is as if a diagonal line were running through his eyes, dividing them into two parts. Onehalf of each eye continues to perceive the material surroundings while the other half becomes the stage for the waking vision. At other times Shaykh Qusi spoke of waking visions differently, describing them more as a complete fading away of the material world, but the image of the diagonal line stayed with me for a long time. It evocatively points to the intertwining of different forms of seeing—even within the same eye.

Night Journeys If waking visions are perceived by way of a “sincere gaze” or through flooded or divided eyes, then what about divinely sent dreams? Most often,

when I asked how such dreams come into existence, I was told that they are perceived by the spirit (riih). According to the Qur’an, we know very little of the spirit, but according to my interlocutors, it is of divine origin, was passed on to humankind when God breathed His spirit into Adam, is eternal, and has no boundaries.’ Because the spirit’s senses become more attuned to the invisible when they are not distracted by the outer world, even ordinary believers can gain prophetic insights at night. Often my interlocutors would draw on a Quranic verse that states, “God gathers up the souls fanfus) of those who die, and of those who do not die, in their sleep; then He keeps those ordained for death, and sends the others back for an appointed term” (39:42).'’ While some interpreters insist on a difference between spirit (riih) and selt/soul (nafs, pl. anfus), this verse is generally understood to mean that God takes up the human spirit while the body is asleep, so that the strong link connecting body and spirit during one’s waking life is temporarily loosened.'* When the spirit roams at night, the dreamer is no longer tied to the physical senses, and another kind of tasting, seeing, and hearing becomes possibie. As the dreamer’s spirit needs to find its way back into the body, one should never startle someone out of sleep. The connection between spirit and body during sleep is maintained through an invisible cord. Someone told me that it is upheld only through the left ear. Since the spirit can roam freely at night, dream-stories sometimes take the form of short travel accounts, mirroring the paradigmatic Night Journey fisr@ wa mi‘raj} of the Prophet Muhammad, who supposedly traveled on the back of the winged mule-like animal Burag from Mecca

94 / Seeing the (In)visible to Jerusalem and then on through the heavens, where he met a number of prophets and came close to the inner presence of God.” Aithough some

scholars, among them Ibn Baz, the former state mufti of Saudi Arabia, have insisted that the Prophet’s Night Journey was not a physical journey, many Egyptians told me that the Prophet traveled with spirit and body, as otherwise the journey would not have been a miracle. Yet even though their own bodies stay behind, ordinary believers can travel during times of sleep or heightened spiritual states. One of Shaykh Qusi’s disciples, a woman in her early thirties, recalled the following dream or waking vision in which she was first visited (presumably by a saint or the Prophet) and then saw her spirit wandering oft: One night I was sitting in my room, and a person appeared. | didn’t see his face. He was wearing a white gallabiyya [a flowing robe]. | saw myself leaving myself; | saw myself with my hair and my body, just like me. I turned and waved bye-bye to myself (‘amait li-nafsi “bye-bye”). Then the person took me to the balcony, and then | was on the street. I don’t know how I got from the balcony to the street. | got into my car with him and drove. | don’t know where | went, but I found myselt in front of a sign saying “The Red Sea.” Then there were mountains and people sacrificing animals. There was a big shaykh. We went a few kilometers farther, and there was a smaller shaykh. Then we drove back home. | left the car, went back upstairs, and fell onto myself like a light blanket, not like a heavy woolen blanket (battaniyya}, but something very light. I told Sidi [Shaykh Qusi] this whole story. | didn’t know at all what it was. Never in my life had | known that there are shaykhs at the Red Sea, and I had never even been there.

As Shaykh Qusi explained to his followers, the woman’s spirit had gone to visit Abi Hasan al-Shadhili’s popular shrine in Egypt’s southern desert, as well as that of a less widely known saint buried on the Red Sea coast. Her body stayed behind, and only the spirit traveled. She speaks of two selves,

one waving good-bye to the other, and it seems that she was simultaneously in her bedroom and at the saints’ tombs. Shaykh Qusi noted that, unlike the body, the spirit is not bound by the laws of physicality. It has its own eyes to see and ears to hear, and its realm of experience is much wider

than that of its corporeal counterparts. As in the case of the Prophet’s Night Journey, ordinary believers’ perceptions can thus exceed the limitations of linear time, three-~dimensional space, and the physical body. This is even more likely to happen when their bodies are asleep.

Others reject the notion that the spirit roams freely at night, or that one can be visited by the spirits of the dead. Shaykh Hanafi insists that it

Seeing the (In)visible | 95 is wrong to speak of a separation of the spirit finfisal al-riih); one should rather refer to its extension (matt al-riih): “People have a wrong notion. They say, for example, ‘The Prophet came to me in my sleep (ed li al-rasiil fi-l-mandm).’ That’s wrong. The Prophet doesn’t come to anyone. What they should say is, ‘I saw the Prophet (shuft al-rasiil).’ The Prophet is in the world of the barzakh. He has a place there. Let me show you...” The shaykh grabbed my notebook and drew two circles, one on each side of the page. He placed a smaller circle inside the left one. The left circle, he explained, is the person, and the little circle in the middle is its center, its spirit. The circle on the right side represents the Prophet and his place in the barzakh. The shaykh drew a number of lines stretching from the left circle toward the right one, some that reached it and some that failed to, and he continued, “It’s not the spirit that leaves the body. That’s a wrong notion. We just say it like that. That’s an image. In reality it’s the light of the person. If you have a strong light, it reaches farther. And then farther. And farther. Until it reaches the Prophet. If a person reaches really far, he pierces through (yakhtarag fi) the barzakh. It’s like diving into deep water.”

The spirit, Shaykh Hanafi insisted, never leaves the person until the moment of death. Its lights can exceed the boundaries of the subject, but the spirit neither roams at night nor can it be visited. Shaykh Hanati places emphasis on the role of the seeing person and, implicitly, on continuous spiritual exercise. As his drawing indicates, and as the Indonesian man at the Ramadan gathering suggested (“I’m not at that stage yet”), one’s seeing capacities can be trained.

INVITING DREAM-VISIONS Numerous times during my fieldwork | was scolded for wanting to write

about dream-visions without ever having seen one myself. | was (and remain) blind. Many suggested that | would understand spiritual matters much more quickly and without asking so many questions if I had experienced them directly. After ail, as Sufis say, only those who have tasted, know (man dhdqa ‘arifa}. Rashid, a family friend from the town of al-Qusayr, never tired of reminding me of my blindness. “If you want to understand what a dream-vision is,” he would insist, “you need to have one first.” The easiest way to induce one, Rashid recommended, is praying istikhdra. Pick anything you're undecided about—-say you can’t decide between going to Germany and going to al-Qusayr—pray istikhdra, and go to sleep. Let’s assume you dream of al-Qusayr being in flames and

96 / Seeing the (In)visible Germany being full of lush, green fields. Then you'll know where to go. It’s that easy. You'll see.

If you don’t see, Rashid was telling me, then make yourself see. A puzzling suggestion, | found. If dream-visions are a gift from God, in what sense can one induce them? Do they not come from an Elsewhere, surprisingly, unexpectedly, or at least uncontrollably? How can one make oneself see what one is being shown? Like Rashid, many of my interlocutors told me that one can do much to invite dreams trom an Elsewhere, often adding that most people do too little. According to this view, the seeing of dream and waking visions is contingent upon the dreamer’s religiosity, her spiritual “receiver” (gihdz istiqbdal), her clairvoyance (shafafiyya}. Not surprisingly, then, my interlocutors use a number of bodily, recitational, and spiritual practices—technologies of the self-—that aim at paving the road for dream-visions or waking visions to be seen.*° In a sense, a circular movement (or ascending spiral) can be found here: one sees because one has reached a high spiritual state; and because one sees, one reaches a high spiritual state. Betore turning to the ways in which dream-visions push up against, and complicate, the very logic of selfcultivation, let me describe three of these practices in some more detail: the istikhdra prayer, dream-inducing “rules of conduct,” and the dhikr ritual.

Istikhdra Literally meaning “seeking the best,” istikhdra reters to a nonobligatory prayer through which guidance is sought when one is unable to decide between two permissible alternatives.*! Through the prayer one asks God to facilitate the matter if it is good and to turn it away if it is not. The supplication spoken after two prayer cycles is the following: © Allah, I seek Your help in finding out the best course of action (in this matter) by invoking Your knowledge; | ask You to empower me, and I beseech Your favor. You alone have the absolute power, while | have no power. You alone know it all, while I do not. You are the One who knows the hidden mysteries. O Allah, if You know this thing (1 am embarking on) [here one mentions specifics] is good tor me in my religion, worldly life, and my ultimate destiny, then facilitate it for me and bless me in my action. If, on the other hand, You know this thing is detrimental for me in my religion, worldly life, and ultimate destiny, then turn it away from me, and turn me away from it, and decree what is good for me, wherever it may be, and make me content with it.

After performing the prayer one should go to sleep, ideally facing Mecca.

Some perform istikhdra only once; others repeat the prayer three nights

Seeing the (In)visible / 97 in a row and put together the answers. Still others pray istikhdra eleven or thirteen times, and one shaykh told me that performing istikhdra over an entire month is also permissible. The response given to one’s question can come in various forms. One might see a dream or simply awaken with a feeling of certainty or a particular leaning (mayl). Seemingly random events or encounters during the following day can be read as signs, or God might remove obstacles and thereby reveal the right way. A medical student suggested to me that the closer you are to God, the more likely it is that the response will come in the form of a dream-vision, because this is the “clearest of all signs.” A dream that is sent from an Elsewhere is consciously invited through the prayer. In Rashid’s hypothetical example I should have used istikhdra for decid-

ing whether to visit al-Qusayr or Germany. Other matters the prayer is used for involve bigger decisions, such as which shaykh to follow or whether to accept a job one has been offered, or smaller decisions, such as whether to buy a specific pair of shoes. Most istikhdra stories | heard, from both men and women, had to do with the choice of a marriage partner. “1 didn’t know if he was right for me,” Nabila—a young woman in Mahalia, a town in the Nile Delta~told me while her family and I were sitting in their living room, drinking tea and eating cake. Nabila, who was described by her relatives as being close to God, as “fearing God,” reported that since she did not know whether the man was right for her, she prayed istikhdra about him. Everyone but I knew how the story would end, but all listened

intently nevertheless. The night following the istikhdra prayer, Nabila dreamed that she was walking down a street with her sister in their neighborhood in Mahalla. (Nabila pointed to her sister, who was sitting across

from her, and then pointed to where the street was on which they were walking in the dream.) Suddenly, she continued, the sky turned completely dark and, although the man who had proposed to her never appeared in the

dream, she read the darkening of the sky as a warning sign and rejected him. The dream was simple and clear, and——as she was to find out later that

the man was not honorable—it had also been right. When I asked people when and how one should use the prayer, they generally said that one should first and foremost exert one’s judgment and

that one should combine asking God through istikhara with istishdra, asking more experienced people. Many explained to me that istikhdra works only if one is completely undecided and not already favoring one alternative over the other. While the dreamer invokes the dream-vision, she is supposed to be a tabula rasa, undecided and neutral. Diverging from this ideal type, the self might at times get to play a more active role.

98 / Seeing the (In)visible “T didn’t know if he was right for me,” Taqwa told me as well. At the time of our conversation Taqwa was a graduate student in the Sociology Department at al-Azhar University. She had just invited me to her imminent wedding and the preceding women’s henna party, and she had had a lively discussion with another student about whether placing bride and groom figures on a wedding cake is un-Islamic. Taqwa was known in the department for her extraordinary piety, and she was often asked for advice concerning religious matters. | had not seen her in three years so, after her friend lett, she filled me in on all that had happened—-who her future husband was, how he proposed, and how she mace up her mind. The man had approached Taqwa’s parents first, but instead of praying istikhdra right away, she decided to wait until she had met him in person. She explained this strategic timing by saying that she wanted to fill herself with a certain impression first, yet she immediately interjected that God the All-Knowing would know either way and that her own first impressions, whether negative or positive, should in principle not matter. If the dream merely retlected what she wanted subconsciously, it would be a hadith nafsi and thereby meaningless. Egyptian psychologists frequently dismiss istikhdra dreams precisely for this reason, arguing that such dreams are never dream-visions but only show you what you want to see. Yet the line between a dream mirroring one’s desires and a dream-vision—or, one might say, using a different vocabulary, the line between the unconscious

and God’s willis sometimes blurry. Taqwa might want to take a good look at her potential future husband first, but the dream-vision that is seen after the prayer is nevertheless understood as a divine message.

Rules of Conduct for the Sleeper

Besides the widely known istikhdra prayer, there are numerous other things one can do in order to invite a dream-vision. As early as the eleventh

century, al-Dinawari explained in his dream manual “how the dreamer should behave to have true dreams” (quoted in Lamoreaux 2002, 61), and contemporary dream booklets include sections on “rules of conduct related to dream-visions (@dab al-ru’yd),” “manners of the dreamer (adab

al-r@i),” or “rules of conduct for the Muslim so that his dream-vision will be truthful (@dab tata‘allag bi-l-muslim hattaé tasdug ruy’ahu)” (e.g., ‘Alawish 2000; Farid 2002; Isma‘i! 2002).

Drawing on hadiths, these booklets advise the readers on practices that

can help them see dream-visions and avoid bad dreams. Strategies for seeing truthful dreams include performing one’s ablutions before going to sleep and sleeping on one’s right side while placing one’s right hand under

Seeing the (Invisible = / 99 the right cheek. Even though the dream-vision is seen by the spirit (rit) or the heart (galb), bodily practices can thus facilitate its coming. Dream interpreters frequently instruct their “clients” on how to improve the quality of their dreams. Shaykh Hanali suggests, tor instance, that the ability to see the Prophet depends on one’s efforts in acts of devotion (al-igtihdd fi-libdda), which for him include prayer, learning, eating permissible food, avoiding looking at forbidden things, and more broadly the cultivation of a moral self. Additionally, Shaykh Hanati advises women possessed

by an evil spirit to wear modest clothes at night that cover their arms and neck. As being covered will avert the jinn, and as the jinn can cause nightmares, even one’s clothing can thus affect the nature of one’s dreams. Many booklets recommend which Qur’anic verses or suras one should recite before going to sleep (typically dyat al-kursi, the last three verses of Siirat al-Bagara, Siirat al-Ikhlas, al-Falag, and al-Nds are recommended),

and through which invocations one can ask God for dream-visions.” Drawing on a hadith, Shaykh Hanafi suggests the following invocation: In the name of God, prayer and peace be upon the Prophet of God. © God we do not have knowledge except what You have taught us. You are the Knowing One, the Wise One. Praise be upon You. You know what is hidden from the gazes (absdr), what is concealed from the looks (anzar). You are the Kind One, the Knowing One.

O God, I seek refuge with You from bad dreams, and I seek protection with You from the devil’s games whether | am awake or asleep. © God, | ask you for a true, beneficial dream-vision, which is remembered and not forgotten. © God, show me in my sleep what I like.

© God, show me in my sleep good things. O God, make dear to us the good things and leave the forbidden things.

O God, Amen! And pray for Muhammad and his family and friends. Shaykh Hanafi teaches this invocation to visitors who come to his house, and they can take it home on a photocopied piece of paper. Reciting the invocation before going to sleep is suppased to keep away the devil and make the dreamer see truthful dream-visions. It implores God to show us “good things” and simultaneously to “make dear to us the good things.” Although human desires and divinely ordained good things do not always coincide, the dream can provide guidance and mold a pious self. The dreamer invites the dream; the dream reshapes the dreamer.

LOO / Seeing the (In)visible Yet in the view of many, one cannot simply evoke dream-visions by consulting religious self-help books, by sleeping on one’s right side, or by reciting invocations before going to sleep. As Shaykh Mustata put it, “Religion isn’t Pepsi; it’s not take-away.” Only a long-term commitment to spiritual practices might allow one to see truthful dreams and waking visions. One such long-term strategy that Shaykh Mustata considers etfective is the dhikr ritual.

Dhikr Dhikr literally refers to the invocation or remembrance of God. Its Qur’anic basis is the verse “O you who have attained to faith! Remember God with unceasing remembrance (udhkuru Allah dhikran kathiran)” (33:41). Dhikr encompasses a number of solitary and collective practices, and it is used

widely in Egypt, by Sufis and non-Sufis alike. During their gatherings Sufis collectively recite a particular hadra text (which in turn might be inspired by dream-visions). This text usually consists of Qur’anic verses, God’s Ninety~Nine names, and invocations. Generally the phrases, which are repeated a given number of times, get shorter and shorter, so that the recitation in the end focuses only on the word Allah before culminating in the syllable Hu (meaning “he”), which ultimately becomes an almost

soundiess breath. The body participates in the recitations, sometimes through a rhythmic swinging back and forth, sometimes through particular ways of breathing, and sometimes through accompanying certain formulas with precise body movements. According to booklets that are sold around saint shrines, reciting God’s Ninety-Nine names alone can transform one’s inner state.** The name al-Muhaymiin (the Protector), for instance, if recited a number of times after each evening prayer, makes the believer “witness what happens in the universe before it happens.” The name al-Fattdh (the Opener) “brings light to the heart by lifting the [metaphysical] veil so that Truth can be seen.” The name al-‘Alim (the Knowing One) can expose the believer to kashf, a state of divine illumination, and the repeated recitation of the name al-Niir (the Light) in a dark house and with closed eyes brings about the seeing of a “strange light that fills [one’s] heart” (Jawad n.d., 37, 64, 220). The repetition of formulas such as “I seek refuge with God (istaghfar Allah)” is said to clean one’s heart and to bring light to it. Those who explained these effects to me occasionally likened the idea of cleaning one’s heart or one’s spirit to the cleaning of a mirror. Shaykh Mustafa has led and attended numerous hadras, and he could spend hours talking about the “strange things” that might happen when

Seeing the (In)visible / 101 you perform a fadra correctly and with the necessary sincerity fikhlds). You might smell, hear, or see things that no one else can perceive. Incidentally, Shaykh Mustafa explained, during a hadra one does not need to worry about the devil inducing these experiences because the devil is never present at such gatherings. The experience, rather, is brought about by angels that are guardian angels for each of the letters recited and that crowd any place in which a adra is performed. Because of their presence, one should always stay a while if passing by a hadra, even if one is not able

to participate. Whoever is surrounded by that many angels, he said, can “see things others do not see.” Similarly, members of Shaykh Qusi’s community report that perform-

ing dhikr often results in dream or waking visions. One of the shaykh’s followers recalled the tollowing experience: “I saw in the dhikr, while I was

doing dhikr in a Qur'an [recitation] session on a Friday, and while | was addressing His Majesty, Allah, that you [Shaykh Qusi| come down the path with our Lord Muhammad (prayer and peace be upon him). And the path was thinner than a hair, and God said to the people: make room for them to pass by. And |God! keeps [the people] away until they come closer, and the Prophet takes your hand.” The image of a path thinner than a hair resem-

bles the description of the path that is walked in the hereafter. The hand that the Prophet takes belongs to Shaykh Qusi, who is addressed directly in the narration (“your hand,” yad hadritak). Significantly, the man seeing the waking vision is not attending a hadra performed by Shaykh Qusi’s group, he is in an unnamed mosque. Although Shaykh Qusi is not physically present, the man, whose spirit’s senses are strengthened through the dhikr, becomes attuned to the shaykh’s and the Prophet’s spiritual presence.

Even the solitary reading of a hadra can evoke Prophet-visions. One Ramadan night, Samira, another member of Shaykh Qusi’s group, told me of a life-changing experience she had undergone a few years earlier while reading the shaykh’s hadra text in her house in Riyadh: I was up late that night; it was maybe 2:30 or 3:00 A.M. I was reading

the hadra. | got to the part where we praise the Prophet. | put the book on my face. All of a sudden I didn’t see anything anymore. The page turned white. Then | saw fire, lots of fire, and devils in it. | saw a horse coming, and the man on it was so beautiful! I had never seen anyone so beautiful or imagined that beauty like that exists. His face ... the whole man was so beautiful. He took out his sword and killed the devils. A feeling told me that it was the Prophet Muhammad.

This waking vision was Samira’s first direct encounter with the Prophet, and it greatly affected on her. She emphasized the “unnatural state” that

1O2 / Seeing the {In)visible the experience put her in. For months she was unabie to take care of her household or do anything at all. During this time she cried a lot, especially while praying, and she was unable to get up from her prostrations. She told

me that she cried out of love and longing for God (ishgan wa shawgan li-llanj. When she spoke to her shaykh during that time, he reassured her that all of this was the vision’s impact {tathir al-ru’ydj. The stage for the overpowering vision had been the hadra book, which is used during the group’s biweekly gatherings in Cairo, as well as at meetings organized by subgroups in other parts of Egypt and abroad. The section of the book that Samira was reading consists of praise for the Prophet and is said to be its most powerful part. When the page suddenly turned white, the Prophet in his true presence replaced his textually evoked image. Many aspire to see the Prophet and actively seek such a vision by participating in dhikr sessions or by reciting specific invocations. Although it is the Prophet who visits the dreamer, the latter is not passive but can invite

the visit by filling herself with desire. To illustrate this point, Shaykh Mustafa told me the following: “There is a story. Aman comes toa shaykh and says he longs to see the Prophet. The shaykh tells him to drink a lot of salt water. The man does as he is told. Then he sleeps and dreams of a huge lake. He is drinking and drinking and drinking. The next day he goes back to the shaykh and complains, ‘I didn’t see the Prophet, I only saw myselt drinking a lot of water. The shaykh says, ‘If you want to see the Prophet, you have to fill yourself with the thought of him.’”

The point of this story is that just as one’s physical needs can influence the nature of one’s dreams, so too can one’s spiritual longing. The observation that one dreams of water when going to bed thirsty is reminiscent of Freud’s account of the impact of external sensory stimuli on the content of dreams (1965, 56-59). Yet in the context of Shaykh Mustafa’s story, the relationship between dreamer and dream exceeds the realm of bodily needs, and the dream exceeds that of hallucinatory wish fulfillment.

Although one might invite the Prophet's visit through thinking of him, it is still the Prophet who comes for a visit and not a hallucinatory projection. Dhikr, repetitive remembrance, is taken to be an ideal way of filling oneself with desire for God and the Prophet. The very act of remembering the Prophet actually makes him present.

THE UNPREDICTABILITY OF VISIONS

Dhikr, istikhdra, and various other bodily and recitational practices can evoke dream and waking visions. Yet, significantly, while the self can pre-

Seeing the (In}visible / 103 pare itself for a dream-vision, it is displaced at the moment the vision is received, In a hadith qudsi to which a number of my interlocutors referred, God says, “And My servant continues drawing nearer to Me through supererogatory acts until I love him; and when I love him, I become his ear with which he hears, his eye (basar) with which he sees, his hand with which he grasps, and his foot with which he walks.”*4 This hadith is generally taken

to mean that by strengthening her spirit and drawing closer to God, the believer can reach a stage where divine sight replaces her individual sight. Far from being an autonomous agent, the believer is then overcome by the Divine. In turning from the seeking of dream-visions to their suddenness, | accordingly do not want simply to outline two recognized ways that visions happen; rather, I hope to illustrate how dream-visions rupture the very system of self-discipline that aims at invoking them. They remain outside the realm of control and self-cultivation because dreams, as Stefania Pandolfo notes, “are never one’s own” (1997, 9). As my interlocutors in Egypt understand it, one can do much to prepare, but one can never demand. The ability

to seli-cultivate is always doomed to failure by its very premise, which places agency in the human rather than in the metaphysical realm. One concept that might help us think beyond the limits of self-cultivation

is that of preparedness. In his Mugaddimah Ibn Khaldtin makes mention of a book of magic ascribed to a tenth-century Spanish scientist containing “dream words (haliimiyya)” in a mysterious language that one should recite “so as to cause the dream vision to be about the things one desires” (1967, 83). Though generally opposed to divinatory and occult sciences, Ibn Khaldiin confides to his readers that he experimented with the dream words, and they triggered remarkable dream-visions through which he learned new things. While commending the dream words’ effectiveness, Ibn Khaldiin rejects the notion that dream-visions can be made. His argument is that the “dream words produce a preparedness (isti‘ddd} in the soul tor the dream-vision,” but that “the power to prepare for a thing is not the same as power over the thing itself.” Rather, “The sou! [nafs] occupies itself with a thing. As a result it obtains that glimpse (of the supernatural) while it is asleep, and it sees that thing. It does not plan it that way” (ibid.). According to this understanding, it is not mutually exclusive to seek

spiritual experiences and to be overcome by them nonetheless.”° Ibn Khaldiin notes that of the various types of human beings who have “super-

natural perception,” some have it through natural disposition and others through “exercise” (1967, 70). Yet most supernatural perception by way of

dream-visions, he writes, “occurs to human beings unintentionally and without them having power over it” (83). Other medieval Sufi writings

LOA / Seeing the (In)visible distinguish between states (ahwéil) that are bestowed upon believers without their participation and stations (magdmdat) that are reached through continuous practice. Similarly, some of my interlocutors described having

striven for an encounter with the Divine, while others emphasized that they were surprised, overcome, and overwhelmed by such an encounter. Both elements, the sought and the unsought, can also coalesce in one person’s account, and they can shift depending on the audience. Ultimately,

even those who instruct others on how to invite dream-visions might acknowledge the limits of human agency. Once as | was visiting Shaykh Hanafi, a woman called him to inquire about the meaning of a specific dream that she had seen after performing the istikhdra prayer. Instead of interpreting the dream, Shaykh Hanafi, the famous (and admittedly, moody) dream interpreter whose “invocation before sleep” I quoted earlier, scolded the woman for her use of the prayer: “A dream-vision can’t be demanded! It’s a gift from God. It comes to you. Someone might read [the Quranic sura] Ya Sin two hundred times and not see anything. Someone else might not even read [the short sura] Allahu Ahad and see a dreamvision. It’s not controllable.” Seemingly echoing the views of Salati refiorm-

ers, Shaykh Hanafi then urged the woman to use her mind instead of praying istikhdra. If a man proposes to you, he said, you should write down a list of pros and cons before making a decision. After all, what do you have a brain for? Although Shaykh Hanafi distributes an invocation that invites dream-visions, he reprimands the illusory belief that one can produce them. Unlike some rationalist reformers, Shaykh Hanafi does not categorically deny the possibility of dream-visions. His point is simply that the dreamer is never fully in control. The inability to “enter into communion with God” may well be a “function of untaught bodies” (Asad 1993, 77), yet according to my interlocutors, even taught bodies are never agents of such a communion. Many told me that dream-visions offer a highly egalitarian access to al-ghayb, the metaphysical realm of the Unknown, and historical dream manuals state that dream-visions are for everyone, men and women alike. Although a hadith holds that men’s dreams are more valid than women’s (Schimmel 1998, 131), according to some texts, even menstruating (and therefore impure) women can have divinely sent dreams (Lamoreaux 2002, 83). To underline that dream-visions are not even exclusively for believing or practicing Muslims, Egyptians occasionally referred me to the Qur’anic sura in which Yiisuf interprets the pharaoh’s dream. If even an “unbeliever” like the pharaoh can be the recipient of dream-visions, the inner state of the dreamer seems to be of little or no importance. Thus, having considered a number

Seeing the (In)visible / LOS of practices that invite dream-visions, let us now turn to the element of unsought suddenness by way of the stories of two unlikely dreamers. Sharifa’s Dreams Ma sh@ Allahl’® le was about 2:00 A.M., and | was in a car with a num-

ber of Shaykh Qusi’s followers. We were driving through the dark and empty streets of Medinat Nasser, one of Cairo’s upper-class neighborhoods. Everyone was tired, but the excitement of the gathering we had just left still lingered on. All in the car were expressing their admiration tor Sharifa’s exceptional spiritual experiences. She had been the center of attention all night long, and Shaykh Qusi had praised her extensively. The dream-visions that she had seen and told us about at the gathering were reiterated and discussed in detail. Sharita was clearly special. Ma sh@ Allah, the shaykh had said; “others have tried tor twenty years and don’t see anything.” Md sha’ Allah, echoed the people in the car, most of them long-standing members of the group. They acknowledged that no matter what they did and how hard they tried, in the end it might always be someone else who was blessed with a dream-vision. Sharifa was in her late twenties or early thirties when | met her. She had been a member of Shaykh Qusi’s group for about two years but had only recently begun to stand out. When I first saw her at the gatherings, [| was struck by all the privileges she was granted. She could sit with the shaykh

when he did not want anyone else around; she could interrupt him, joke with him, and tease older members of the group. Like many others, she used to call the shaykh her father (babd), and because of the way the two interacted, for a long time | took it literally. It seemed as though she was the only one who was able to say whatever she wanted to without angering the shaykh. As I learned over time, the two were not biologically related, but Sharifa was special because she regularly received dream-visions on behalf of the shaykh and the entire community. Every time she was about

to tell a dream at that night’s gathering, the shaykh would silence the crowd of about thirty, and all would look at Sharita in admiration and anticipation. One of her dream-visions involved a rope, at the end of which was the

Prophet Muhammad’s light. Three people were holding the rope’s other end. They were asked, “Who is dead and who alive?” The first one said, “The one whose spirit (rit) has left him is dead; the one who has his spirit is alive.” The answer was wrong. The second one said, “The one who has his spirit is dead.” This answer was wrong as well. The third one said, “The one whose heart is filled with the dhikr of God is alive: the one whose heart

106 / Seeing the (In)visible isn’t is dead.” He had given the right answer, and when Sharifa looked again, this third person had turned into Shaykh Qusi. Sharita finished her dream account and added, “I didn’t get it at all. I know it was about who the waisil (the link, the joining one) is, but I didn’t get it.” Yet even though she “didn’t get it,” dream-visions kept gushing out from Sharifa, and the details of her visions would continue to be discussed hours later in the car.

As the next chapter will show, admitting confusion is in fact a common rhetorical device when Shaykh Qusi’s followers tell of their dream or waking visions. One merely reports what one has seen without claiming own-

ership over the dream and without being expected to understand it. The dream does not stem from the dreamer and is often not intended for her. Yet still: why Sharita? The frequent exclamations of Ma sh@ Allah that

evening expressed surprise, admiration, and possibly envy. Who would have thought? No one seemed less likely than Sharifa to be functioning as a medium of communication with the Divine. She was probably the silliest, giddiest, and most provocative member of the entire group. She was young, flirtatious, and wore lots of makeup. She veiled, she prayed at the gatherings like everyone else, and she had performed the pilgrimage, but she rarely attended the hadras, she treated the shaykh with less reverence than most, and she did not seem particularly dedicated to spiritual practices. Maybe the worldliest of all, she had been chosen as the one who sees the most. Knowledge came to her from an Elsewhere—a knowledge that she had not called for. At times she jokingly complained, asking Shaykh Qusi what he had done to her. A young female colleague, who accompanied Sharifa to one of the gatherings, had a similar complaint: “What have you

done to Sharifa? Everything she says comes true. Sometimes she scares me, and then I don’t want anything to do with her anymore.” Members of the community suggested to me that Sharifa’s blessed state came entirely from the openings or gifts (futiihat) bestowed upon her by the shaykh. While according to this view the shaykh plays a central role in turning his disciples into channels, he himself expressed surprise at the “flooding (fayd)” that had overtaken Sharifa. He might have shaped the channel, but the source of spiritual and prophetic insight is always Elsewhere. Freud, who was slightly troubled by the idea of dreamers waking up at times and knowing something they did not know when going to sleep, would most probably have disagreed with this interpretation. Dreams that seem to have nothing to do with the dreamer were as extraordinary for him as it would be to “discover that your housemaid understood Sanskrit, though you know that she was born in a Bohemian village and never learnt it” (1963, 165). Freud decided that even seemingly new knowledge

Seeing the (In)visible / LO7 must have been buried somewhere deep inside the dreamer’s unconscious. The Islamic tradition contains a story that is similar to (yet radically different from) the one Freud told about the Bohemian, Sanskrit-speaking housemaid. A slave girl who speaks only Turkish wakes up one morning speaking Arabic. Her owner is at first enraged because he thinks the girl has been hiding her knowledge of Arabic from him. But then he learns that she saw the Prophet in a dream and he taught her parts of the Qur’an.””

While Sharifa was given an unexpected prophetic gift, her state of inspiration was only temporary. When I returned to Egypt the following summer and noticed her absence at the group’s gatherings, I asked the shaykh about her whereabouts. He told me that she had changed, that she was too focused on the worldly aspects of life, on al-dunyd, and that she had not come to the gatherings in a long time. He added that he wanted nothing to do with her anymore and that I should not contact her either. At first surprised and taken aback by this turn of events, | came to realize that it did not contradict Sharifa’s temporary function as a medium. She had passed on messages to the shaykh, but she remained an ordinary person and eventually turned her back on her spiritual career. The dream-visions had never been hers in the first place.

Mahmud’s Dream While Sharifa apparently had not understood the visions as a calling, for other unlikely dreamers, such as Mahmud, dream-visions have had lifealtering effects. Mahmud was in his seventies when | met him. He lived in a small village on the western shore of the Nile, not far from Luxor. Born in 1927, Mahmud had lived through two kings, a revolution, and three presidents. Untouched by these faraway rulers, for most of his life he simply tried to get by, stealing what he needed, a chicken here or there,

feeding his family, children, and himself. He stressed that he was not just a regular thief, but a very mischievous one (shagi’awi}. At the age of seventy Mahmud saw a dream-vision one night about midnight. He saw the Coptic pope Baba Shenouda and a group of people who were all dressed in white and looked like saints; they were performing dhikr at a small cemetery. There were so many of them that Mahmud was unable to count them all. The saints said to him, “Come with us, you crazy man,” and he joined them. At first they were reciting formulas like Allah al-Hay Allah al-Hay (God the Living, God the Living); in the end it became only Allah Allah Allah. (Mahmud closes his eyes while he is telling us the dream; he starts swinging back and forth, reciting Allah Allah Allah. The dream is revisiting him.) The people told Mahmud that from now on he would not

108 / Seeing the (In)visible have to worry about his livelihood, that all he needed to do was stay at the cemetery and guard a small saint’s tomb; that his livelihood would come to him. And that’s what he did. That’s where | met him. Mahmud’s dream-vision was a calling. He was transformed from a thiet

into the guardian of a saint’s tomb. He left his family, a wife and four girls. They live close by, but Mahmud does not share a daily routine with them anymore. He now lives at the cemetery that he saw in the dreamvision. Located on a small hill where the village meets the desert, the cemetery is secluded and feels lonely, but Mahmud does not seem to mind. He spends the nights inside the tomb and the days on a little bench under a tree, letting his prayer beads run through his fingers, performing dhikr. Sometimes people come by and give him money or food. Someone has set up a cooler to provide him with cold water. He receives a small monthly pension from the government for a job that he had a long time ago, and at

times he goes into the village to buy fil and ta‘miyya, beans and falafel. On Fridays the tomb is open to visitors; most other times he is alone at the cemetery. Having abandoned his tamily and his habit of stealing, Mahmud experienced a complete turnaround in his life the night he received the dreamvision. Nothing had prepared him for the transformative vision, nor had he prepared himself. According to how he tells the story, he had not attended

weekly /radras; he had not prayed istikhdra, asking for divine guidance; he had not spent his life performing spiritual exercises in order to lift his spirit; and he had not intentionally slept on his right side. Rather, his past as a mischievous thief is a central narrative element in his account of the dream-vision and its effects. The dream took him by surprise; it was unevoked, uncalled for—an uninvited but nonetheless welcome guest. Mahmud knew he had to obey the dream. He described the urgency of having to spend the rest of his life as the guardian of the tomb by calling the dream-vision a divine order {amr rabbind), an invitation (da‘wa). Invitations usually come by way of dream-visions, he explained, and you have to follow them. Six years ago, Mahmud also went to Mecca because the Prophet had invited him. When a dream-vision is called an order, an invitation, a gift (mawhiba, minha}, or a message (risdla}, the implied epistemology seems to come closer to the somewhat antiquated German expression mir hat vetrdumt (literally, “it dreamed me”) than to a subject-centered “I dreamed.” One might object that placing emphasis on the dream’s agency obscures the fact

that Mahmud’s dream account is already mediated by his narration, and that by speaking about his dream he justifies having left his family while

Seeing the (In)visible / 109 bestowing authority on himself. Admittedly, | could not help but wonder what Mahmud’s radically transformed lifestyle meant for his wife and four girls. Yet my point in recounting his story is not that all changes brought about by (or ascribed to) dream-visions are inherently good. What I want to highlight is that regardless of the question of whether his dream-story is “real” or “made up,” Mahmud is able to ascribe an ethical force to the dream precisely because of the widely acknowledged possibility that some dreams might not originate inside the dreamer. According to his story, the dream compelled or even coerced him. It was a gift that came to him froma realm beyond his control. It connected him to larger communities, including the Coptic pope and a group of saintlike people, all dressed in white. My mother and I had met Mahmud when we stopped at the cemetery to ask for directions. We ended up talking to Mahmud and never reaching our final destination. Our encounter was as (seemingly) random as the dreamvision that he had received. As we were about to leave, my mother handed Mahmud a few pounds, and when he tried to kiss her hand, she withdrew it quickly. Mahmud scolded her: “Don’t pull back your hand! Don’t you want the baraka trom the people in white?” CONCLUSION

“Just open your eyes” is the imperative with which I began this chapter. It was a piece of advice offered by an Azharite guest to Shaykh Qusi’s followers during one of their Ramadan gatherings. If we only opened our eyes, he suggested, we would be able to perceive the thousands surrounding us, including the Prophet, the saints, and the angels. I attempted in this chapter to unpack some of the ambiguity that is written into this imperative. My interlocutors live in an inherently ocularcentric world and frequently choose a language of optical sight, of “opened eyes,” or of “truly having

seen” when speaking of perceiving the (invisible. Although one could argue that utterances that insist on almost physical, or at least optical, encounters with (in)visible beings reflect the ultimate triumph of a modern ocularcentrism, I hope to have shown that through an insistence on “truly having seen” the Prophet, the angels, or the saints, this ocularcentrism is also intlected. The meaning of vision is decentered and widened. It is still all about seeing but no longer about seeing the visible. A different kind of gaze is implied, which perceives presences that withdraw from the eyes: shadows, the imaginary, the (in)visible, the barzakh. Related to the complicated relations between inner and optical vision are the no less complicated relations between dreamer and dream-vision. If it

110 / Seeing the (In)visible is not the eyes with which one sees, then who can truly see? According to many of my interlocutors, the kind of seeing that makes visible the invisible is not an unengaged, neutral, observing gaze. It is a sincere gaze that can be trained. Yet while many practices can potentially strengthen one’s inner vision, the paradigm of self-cultivation at the same time obscures the dream-vision’s dialogical and prophetic dimensions. For my interlocutors a dream-vision might be evoked, but it ultimately comes from an Elsewhere. It moves in two directions at once: from and fo the dreamer. The dreamvision is embedded in a double directionality. In Shaykh Hanati’s words, a dream-vision is the believer speaking to

God and God speaking to the believer. Ibn al-‘Arabi eased the tension between dream-visions being invited and simultaneously being unexpected

by describing them as both descending from God to the dreamer as a private revelation and ascending from the dreamer to God as a creative visual encounter with the Divine (Green 2003, 296). Another way out of the seeming contradiction is offered by Ibn Khaldtin’s concept of preparedness, according to which the soul can prepare itself, but it can never produce a dream-vision. This seemingly paradoxical and humbling insight is central to my interlocutors’ religious and spiritual practice, which is a striving-for yet is never causative of that which is striven for.** Ignoring this noncausative logic, accounts of incubation practices frequently portray the dreamer as producing the dream. As such, they easily come to coincide with skeptical voices claiming that dreamers see the Prophet only because they want to see him. I have outlined an alternative model according to which a dreamer invites the dream-vision but is also constituted—and erased—by it. To emphasize the noncausality inherent in my interlocutors’ technologies of the self, | closed the chapter with the stories of two unlikely dreamers who, according to their own accounts, saw dream-visions without having prepared for them. I referred to Sharifa and Mahmud not to make a case for exceptions but to highlight that, according to my interlocutors, dream-visions can be invited, but they can never be demanded. While the paradigm of self-cultivation still works to some extent in accommodating “preparedness” as a foundational technology for a leap into excess, Sharifa’s and Mahmud’s stories cannot be accommodated because they radically subvert all notions of moral preparation.” In the end, a beggar (or a wealthy businessman or housewife) might see in a vision what a shaykh fails to see. This seemingly egalitarian principle is ruptured, however, in the sense that one still needs to convince others of one’s dream-experiences. Furthermore, inasmuch as being chosen as the passive recipient of a dream-vision is part of a discursive landscape,

Seeing the (In)visible | Tit one could argue that the ability to perform this part is itself evidence of some sort of self-cultivation. Even though the dream-vision is understood to originate Elsewhere, at the moment it is told (or remembered, or maybe even experienced), it inserts itself into this-worldly social relationships and is shaped by them.

To illustrate how the prophetic comes into play within a particularly prolific community of dreamers, I devote the next chapter entirely to Shaykh Qusi’s group. Through a closer examination of the ways in which members of this community teil, write, and understand their imaginary experiences, we will see that dream-visions are not only embedded in a double directionality but, as a result, can also have contradictory effects: as Sharifa’s story shows, they can render the dreamer a mere medium, or, as in Shaykh Qusi’s case, they can affirm the dreamer’s authority. However, even when resulting in visible hierarchies, dream-visions at the same time enable modes of belonging that entirely exceed the visible.

4. Poetry and Prophecy Ifa man merely has the faculty of seeing perpetual vitality around him, of living continually surrounded by hosts of spirits, he will be a poet. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

God has given his creatures an approximation of the properties of prophecy by providing them with an exemplar, namely sleep. AL-GHAZALI

It is 16 July 2004, the opening night of the mawilid of al-Sayyida Nafisa, who was born 1,180 years ago. Located in Cairo’s City of the Dead, alSayyida Nafisa’s mosque today is full of life, as are the square adjoined to it and the streets and alleys spreading out from it. It is about to:30 P.M., and the night is just beginning. Maha is sitting on a sidewalk outside the mosque, drinking tea and declining offers from vendors who sell chickpeas, cotton candy, and plastic toys. She is watching streams of visitors who pass underneath the chains of colored lightbulbs and disappear through the mosque’s main gate. Inside the mosque’s spacious courtyard, Shaykh Qusi’s disciples have suspended a temporary ceiling made ot heavy cloth. They have covered the tloor underneath it with carpets and partitioned off the area with colorful fabrics imprinted with Islamic designs. Most places on the floor and all the chairs along the sides are taken, but two chairs in the front, placed on a small podium, are still empty: they are reserved for Shaykh Qusi and Dr. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. Besides the two chairs, a still camera and a video camera anticipate their presence, both facing the podium from tripods a few meters distant, as well as three microphones and a number of enormous loudspeakers. The courtyard is filled with expectation and with at least five hundred women, men, and children. Some of them are followers of the shaykh; some have been brought along by followers. Others had been strolling through the mosque, enjoying the festive atmosphere, and spontaneously decided to join the crowd in the courtyard in the hope of entertainment. Still others heard that free food will be given out later at night and are awaiting a warm meal. A middle-aged man, who has been assigned the task of making sure that things run smoothly tonight, makes a timid attempt at ushering the women from the courtyard into a space 112

Poetry and Prophecy / 113

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specifically designed for them behind one of the fabric drapes, but his attempt is immediately silenced. The women protest loudly and insist on staying where they are. They too want to see the shaykh. And here he is. Shaykh Qusi has arrived. Dressed in a white gallabiyya and followed by two of his devotees, he makes his way through the crowd, steps onto the podium, and sits down. He speaks a few words in classical Arabic into the microphones, declaring this to be a night of love and poetry, and then he invites the crowd to sing “I Truly Love [the Prophet]

Muhammad (innit uhibb Muhammadan),” a song based on one of the shaykh’s poems. Those who know the song from the group’s hadra and those who can read (copies with the lyrics have been distributed) join in. The night of poetry has officially begun. Shaykh Qusi, who from now on will be silent, turns the microphones over to Dr. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, a pediatrician who performs as the group’s munshid on festive occasions.! After

114 / Poetry and Prophecy praising God and the Prophet, he reads one of Shaykh Qusi’s poems, which honors al-Sayyida Nafisa as stemming from the Prophet’s pure light and which affectionately describes her as the shaykh’s loved one. Then follows the main program of the evening: the shaykh has selected about ten poems

from his most recent poetry book, Alfiyyat Muhammad, tor Dr. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz to recite. All of them express his love for the Prophet and describe his experiences on his way to (and in) the Prophetic Realm.

What makes the poetry in Alfyyat Muhammad special is that all of its one thousand verses end in the Prophet’s name. “Muhammad” will continue echoing through the courtyard until much later in the night, intermingling with the exclamations of those who are listening: Allah! Allah! and Madad ya Sidi madad! (Help, Sidi, help!).* The pace of the performance quickens; the munshid starts using a hand drum; the atmosphere grows thicker. A man who has been sitting on the floor close to the podium

suddenly jumps up. He seems to be overcome by joy, praises the poetry that has been read, and exclaims that the shaykh’s metaphysical veil has been lifted (kushifa ‘anhu al-higdb). Shaykh Qusi smiles and lets his gaze glide over the crowd. Other people in the audience begin to scream or cry while the munshid proceeds with his performance. One after another, a man in the middle of the courtyard, an elderly toothless woman, a middieaged woman with a little boy on her lap, and a younger woman who is a devoted follower of the shaykh all slip into a state of ecstasy, falling back and shaking. Even I, the anthropologist, have stopped being irritated by the

summer heat, the high volume setting on the loudspeakers, and the constantly increasing number of women squeezing in around me on all sides. [, too, begin to feel the excitement that is vibrating through the mosque’s courtyard. At the same time, images wander through my mind of much less ecstatic poetry readings I have attended in New York and Germany, of orderly rows of seats filled with politely nodding, composed, contemplative, serene listeners.* The poetry reading here is of a different kind. It engages entire bodies and spirits.

Maha, meanwhile, is still out on the sidewalk. Weeks later I will ask her about this particular night, and she will tell me that she came all the way to the mosque but at the last moment decided not to enter. She feared that she would not be able to bear the effects of listening to the shaykh’s poetry, which can be overwhelming at times. Many of the ecstatic audience members in the courtyard not only are listening, they are also seeing. At subsequent gatherings they will describe and record in writing what they have witnessed during the recitation. Later, others (myself among them) will retell their experiences.

Poetry and Prophecy / 115 Guided by Shaykh Qusi’s poetry and his disciples’ narratives, | turn in this chapter to the relations between imagination and authorship, between poetry and prophecy, and between dream-vision and tradition. In describing how divine inspiration is understood within Shaykh Qusi’s community, I propose two different yet overlapping tropes: the vision-as-encounter and the vision-as-prophecy. John Lamoreaux (2002, 4) has argued that dream interpretation was historically understood as “a form of access to God that was unmediated, thus circumventing the vaunted institutions of Koran and Sunnah.” My reading of Shaykh Qusi’s and his disciples’ narratives suggests that narrated dream-visions and waking visions can also mirror and reinscrive the models of the Qur'an and hadith. Although critics tend to place dream talk outside the textual tradition by labeling it superstitious, the shaykh and his disciples understand, teil, write, and interpret their dreams and visions not as an alternative to the tradition but as an integral part of it. The very act of putting their imaginary experiences into written form emulates the textualization of revelation in the form of the Qur’an and of the Prophet's sunna in the form otf hadiths. Yet also the way the vision narratives are articulated mirrors the two sacred genres. Some describe face-to-face encounters, similar to hadiths, while others describe eruptions of a timeless Truth trom an Elsewhere, similar to the Qur’an. The tropes of the Qur’an and the hadith figure into, and are reconfigured within, the realm of the imagination. Just as dreams are understood through the tradition, the tradition, by some, is understood through dreams.

OF SDFIS, POETS, AND DREAMERS Shaykh Qusi often stresses that his teachings are firmly anchored in the tradition and that his community is not a Sufi order (fariga)}, but that he teaches a path {tarig) that exclusively follows the Qur’an and the sunna. The shaykh’s rejection of an affiliation with Sufism partly has to do with prevalent derogatory stereotypes surrounding Sufis as well as with Egypt’s

political landscapes. Shaykh Qusi seems to evade the various forms of government control to which most Sufi orders are subject. ‘Umar, the shaykh’s assistant, explained to me what he takes to be the central difference between Sufism and Shaykh Qusi’s path: Sufis work on the self (nafs), whereas Shaykh Qusi skips that step and works directly on the spirit (riih). “In the past Sufis played an important role,” ‘Umar added, “but today we need a more powerful approach.”

Shaykh Qusi dissociates his group from Sufi orders not only when

116 / Poetry and Prophecy speaking to outside observers. I have also heard him explain to his followers that he does not want them going around and saying, “Sidi said this,” or “Sidi said that.” Instead of relying on him, they should use their own minds and find their own answers. To stress his orthodoxy, Shaykh Qusi occasionally aligns himself with al-Azhar by inviting Azharite officials to his group’s Ramadan gatherings or by reterring to the Azharite stamp of approval in his books, a stamp verifying that nothing in them contradicts the “Islamic creed {al-‘agida al-islamiyya}.” In one of his more didactic writings, Shaykh Qusi emphasizes that Islam is a “religion of knowledge, work, order, cleanliness, strength, etiquette, timidity, and good conduct” (2004), 10) and that it is the duty of every Muslim to learn, whether in the mosque or from the media, al-Azhar, or books (19). His writings, he says, are specitically intended for the fast-paced age we live in, and they provide believers with concrete rules and scientific evidence. In short, Shaykh Qusi

presents his path as reason-bound, scientifically sound, and sanctioned under existing orthodoxy. At times, however, Shaykh Qusi’s rejection of the label of Sutism is undermined by his own followers. At one large gathering Shaykh Qusi was handed a question that someone had written on a piece of paper, and he read it out loud to the crowd: “What should we call ourselves—siifi or mutasawwif?” (Both terms can be translated as Sufi, although the former is more closely associated with Sufi orders and the latter with a noninstitutionalized spiritual path.) The shaykh put aside the piece of paper, leaned toward the microphone, and, addressing his disciples, said emphatically, “Don’t you dare call yourself a Sufi! Never call yourselt siifi or mutasaw-

wif. We have nothing to do with Sufism or the orders. We simply are people who love God and the Prophet, and we pray and we fast... .” “And we love you, Sidi!” an elderly woman behind me called out right at that moment. Drawing attention to the shaykh’s central role within the group, the woman’s exclamation ironically subverted his assertion that the group simply consists of ordinary Muslims who pray and fast. Like her, many members of the group see the shaykh as a saintly guide, as someone who “pulls them along spiritually,” someone who has opened their eyes

and hearts to true love for the Prophet. At the gatherings, women and men often try to reach the shaykh to kiss his hand and receive his baraka. Generally, Sufi orders are structured around a shaykh who is believed to be endowed with miraculous powers, and so Shaykh Qusi’s central role within the group makes it resemble a Sufi order at least superticially. Besides the shaykh’s central role, the heightened attention to dreamvisions and waking visions within the group also aligns it with Sufi circles,

Poetry and Prophecy / LI7 which not only validate the kind of knowledge that can be learned in mosques, from the media, al-Azhar, or books but additionally give much credit to imaginary experiences—experiences that include encounters with the Prophet, his saintly descendants, and al-Khidr. (The latter is a legendary immortal figure—a prophet, angel, or human being—-who usually appears in green, is associated with a Qur’anic story, and is said to provide guidance to Sufis and travelers in particular.) While Shaykh Qusi stresses that his path is fully orthodox, he draws knowledge from these imaginary interlocutors, and this knowledge in turn is expressed in his poetry.

Poet at Work Poetry is a central form of expression for (or should I say through?) Shaykh

Qusi, who since 1992 has published more than twenty books of poetry. Alongside tapes, CDs, DVDs, and more didactic writings, the poetry books are neatly ordered in stacks on a large table at the group’s public gatherings, and they are given out free of charge to his disciples and visitors. At times, visitors ask the shaykh’s assistants for specific texts or tapes, but generally the shaykh decides which texts will be beneficial for each particular person he talks to. Occasionally he reads his most recent poems at the group’s private gatherings; at other times his more long-standing followers recite and explain his poems. On festive occasions, such as the mawlid described above, the munshia’s recitation makes the poetry available to a larger audience. In Shaykh Qusi’s eyes, poetry is the mode of expression most closely related to prophetic inspiration. Thus, while he dreams much of his poetry,

he should not be confused with the kind of poet that Freud, in his essay “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1959), calls a dreamer in broad daylight. Unconfined by the limitations of rational thought, dreams have long been considered to open a door to the depths of human creativity— perhaps most pointedly expressed in the sign “Poet at Work” on a sleeping poet’s door in Paris in the 1920s.5 In line with the idea that “writing is nothing more than a guided dream” (Borges 1972, 11), surrealist writers have repeatedly used dreams as a source of artistic inspiration. Some Egyptian authors, too, have exploited the dream’s creative potential, most notably the internationally renowned Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, who toward the end of his life began turning his dreams into short stories. In a newspaper column, Mahfouz identified his new style as one of magical realism—a style that combines truth with invention and fantasy with reality, or, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez might say, a style that shows reality itself to be at times so absurd that it appears almost magical.’

Although Mahtouz stated in another interview that “there may be a Sufi

118 / Poetry and Prophecy touch” to his dream narratives,’ his understanding of the creative power of dreams seems largely to follow a secular notion of literary inspiration— one that grounds creativity in the individual author. Just as the Surrealist movement used automatic writing not to allow the living to function as

a medium for the dead (as spiritualists in the late nineteenth century had done) but to give the unconscious free rein, Mahtouz’s dream-stories, while surreal, offer a window into childhood memories. Yet next to the corpus of internationally celebrated and translated Egyp-

tian literatures of which Naguib Mahfouz is probably the best-known example, other forms of writing (and other dreams) circulate in Cairo, among them those grounded in less individualistic understandings of the imagination. Tracing the relations among al-khaydil, the Islamic tradition, and such other forms of authorship, | draw on two sources in this chapter: Shaykh Qusi’s published poetry and his followers’ handwritten Book of Visions.

The Book of Visions

I remember how surprised I felt when, one Ramadan night, I learned that Shaykh Qusi’s disciples had been recording their imaginary experiences in a collective Book of Visions for many years. | had spent months talking to them about their dreams and visions, but no one had ever mentioned the book to me until, that night, Maha brought it up. A wealthy Sudanese woman, who lives in Australia and was visiting Cairo to spend the month of fasting close to Shaykh Qusi, was recounting the “strange things (hagét ghariba)” that she had seen both while awake and while asleep and that, as she said, seemed to concern Shaykh Qusi. She was telling dream-story after dream-story, and more and more women (and some men) gathered around her to listen. Maha interrupted her: “You'll have to write all that down. I’m collecting dream-visions. They’ll have to go into the book.” Curious about “the book,” I approached Maha that evening but was told that the book contains secrets and I would have to be patient until a divine order might instruct the shaykh or his disciples to make the collection public. I was disappointed but quickly became distracted by the commotion caused by the shaykh’s arrival at the gathering. He led the last daily prayer, as well as additional Ramadan prayers, and spoke to the group at length about how Ramadan was no longer what it used to be during his childhood in Upper Egypt. More tea was served; more cigarettes were smoked. Long past midnight, as | was just about to leave, ‘Umar suddenly told me that the shaykh had given me permission to take a look at the Book of Visions. An Ag-size bound notebook with a photograph of the shaykh on its cover

Poetry and Prophecy / 119 was handed to me, seemingly appearing out of nowhere. Besides the rever-

ence with which it was treated, what struck me as soon as Maha opened the book for me was its neatness and meticulousness. Its first two pages contained a list of the names and professions of the men and women whose visions were recorded in the book. Numbers behind the names indicated which narratives were ascribed to each person. All narratives, in turn, were divided into text and context. Framing remarks—such as the name of the

person who had seen the vision, the date, often in both hijri and milddi form (the former following the lunar calendar and the latter corresponding to the Common Era), and sometimes also the precise time or place where the dream or vision had been seen——were written with a red ballpoint pen, tollowed by the content of the vision, which was written in black. The table on the book’s first two pages with its ruler-straight lines, numbering of the narratives, and precise references to place and time all reminded me of the bureaucratic order characteristic of secular modernities. The content of the book, however, is extraordinary and highly unbureaucratic. The book comprises hundreds of accounts of vision-experiences. Some of the accounts are only two lines long; others go on for two pages or more. Some are vivid narratives; others consist of a single image. Maha, now delighted to talk to me about what had been a secret just three or four hours earlier, pulled up a chair beside me and told me that the oldest narrative in the book, added retrospectively, stemmed from 1973, but that it was in 1997 when a dream-vision instructed the shaykh that his disciples should record their own dreams and visions. Generally, the dreamer presents a handwritten version to Maha, which she then copies into the book. The original is kept as a form of evidence, Maha added. A chain is thereby established that reaches from the Book of Visions to a scrap of paper to

dream-experience to the Prophetic Realm. What is at work here is not simply a bureaucratic logic but also the logic of isnd@d, which in the hadith

literature grounds authority in chains of transmission. Besides being recorded in writing, the vision narratives are often told and retold, by men and women alike. Some of the stories in the book I had already heard during Ramadan nights, during mawlids, at private gatherings, on the phone, over tea, or during car rides. Once they have entered into circulation, the stories belong to the community as a whole and no longer just to the original narrator. At the same time, the stories are generally not shared with outsiders because their content is charged, powerful, and dangerous. Weeks passed between my first glance at the book and Shaykh Qusi’s decision to let me use some of its narratives for my research. On that night | was handed the book once again and told to sit down, look

120 / Poetry and Prophecy through the collection, and compose a list of the narratives that | wanted to have photocopied for me. Yet when ‘Umar checked on me roughly halt an hour later, he decided that | was choosing badly, and so instead he and the shaykh selected about ninety narratives that they considered to be particularly important or representative. The next time I saw ‘Umar, he handed me a folder with the copies. While my own choices had been guided

by an interest in dreams I had previously heard about, in particularly surreal narratives, in different narrative styles, and admittedly also by a certain degree of randomness, most of the entries that ‘Umar and the shaykh had chosen substantiate the latter’s high spiritual state and affirm his place within a larger spiritual order. Dreams and visions prove to the disciples the shaykh’s intimate relationship with the Prophet, the awliya’, and al-Khidr. This dreamed proof is presented to the individual dreamer, to the shaykh, and to the community as a whole; after some hesitation, it was being presented to me as weil. The followers, by seeing, telling, and writing their visions, as well as through reexperiencing them by way of the many retellings, actively participate in constructing and upholding the shaykh’s saintly status. One might be tempted to interpret the Book of Visions as an instrument for, and a product ot, the collective construction of sainthood. Yet such a functionalist reading too quickly reduces dream-visions to ordinary dreams, and the imagination to “mere tantasy.” Instead, | approach the Book of Visions as a cultural artifact that can illuminate how divine inspiration and spiritual guidance are understood and narrated within this particular community of believers. VISION-AS-ENCOUNTER Occasionally, dead authors make an appearance in contemporary theories of authorship. To give just two examples: both Roland Barthes in “Death of the Author” (1977) and Miche! Foucault in “What Is an Author?” (1977b) theorize the relationship between death and writing. Describing the hegemonic author-function in the modern West, Foucault states that an author’s work is expected to survive “as a kind of enigmatic supplement of the author beyond his own death, [which constitutes] the inevitable moment when everyone must fall silent” (ibid. 120, 117). While musing over the author’s death, both Foucault and Barthes seem oblivious to dead authors in a more literal sense. But does death always mark the beginning of silence and the end of creativity? Do pens necessarily dry up the moment their owners depart from this worid? Is poetry not, at times, written from beyond the grave?

Poetry and Prophecy / 121 Sudanese shaykh Muhammad al-Burhdni died on 4 April 1983. When a collection of his poems was published in 1993, one poem listed as the date of its composition 13 April 1983. This seeming incoherence is the starting point for an essay by ethnomusicologist Michael Frishkopf (2003), who argues that the ability of Sufis to deliver poetic verses posthumously by way of appearing to their disciples points to a strikingly postmodern understanding of authorship and should lead to a reexamination of the pervasive linear model that assumes a transition from tradition to modernism to postmodernism. The Sufi author, far from being an individual creative author, is decentered by being embedded in a network of spiritua!-social relations. Shaykh Qusi, like Shaykh al-Burhani, is an author in the sense that his name is attached to his writings and regulates the status of his work and its manner of reception. Although the source of his inspiration lies Elsewhere, the poetry is published under his name, and he is extensively praised for it. To a certain degree he seems to fit into the category of the “man and his work” characterized by Foucault through terms such as authenticity, attribution, and valorization. By contrast, the disciple through whom Shaykh alBurhani posthumously delivered his poetry received “no authorial credit,” as he was considered a “passive vehicle for a sacred text” (Frishkopf 2003, 2). Similarly, although Shaykh Qusi’s disciples sometimes participate in the writing of his poetry by delivering verses to him that were revealed to them in dreams or visions, they receive little authorial credit but are at best praised for their ability to see such visions. Their authorship is more akin to the model of the mediator, which, according to Barthes, is characteristic of many non-Western societies, and in which the responsibility for a narrative is assumed not by an author figure but by a “mediator, shaman or relator, whose ‘performance’—the mastery of the narrative code—may possibly be admired, but never his ‘genius’” (1977, 142). Shaykh Qusi’s followers are continually encouraged to speak or write about their visions, but they do not derive any stable authority from them. In Shaykh Qusi, by contrast, authorship and authority converge. At the same time, Shaykh Qusi’s writings, too, efface death in certain ways. While the immediate author, Shaykh Qusi, is still alive, much of his poetry draws on encounters with long-deceased interlocutors, such as the Prophet Muhammad, al-Bukhari, and al-Sayyid al-Badawi, to name just a few. The poetry is not rooted within an individual author but is instead the effect of dialogical encounters. Yet while the author here is an open and seemingly postmodern subject as well, the group’s understanding of the shaykh’s poetry is at the same time grounded in the Islamic tradition. In narrating and writing their visions, the shaykh and his disciples actively

122 / Poetry and Prophecy draw on, mirror, and stretch notions of face-to-face encounters that are central to the hadith genre. Conversations The textual corpus of the hadith continues to serve as a source for legal rules and ethical guidelines. It transmits the words of the Prophet and other important figures of early Islam by way of a chain of retellings (Hasan heard that ‘Amr heard that Aisha heard that the Prophet said... ). While relying on the transmitters’ trustworthiness, the hadith’s authority is ultimately tied to its original source: the Prophet and his companions. Similarly, many of Shaykh Qusi’s poetic writings are so highly valued because their words originate with the Prophet, the saints, and al-Khidr. When I first asked the shaykh about his poetry, his response was that none of it is “made up.” Rather, he said, it is all based on conversations. He explained, “If you concentrate and you keep trying and trying, at one point you start seeing. You start seeing the Prophet and ah! al-bayt. You don’t feel alone anymore. You never feel alone again.... 1 myself have experienced it many, many times. I have tasted it many times. | have seen events of past centuries. I see them and then I write about them... in my poetry. My poems are ali things I have seen. I don’t make up anything.” While talking to me, Shaykh Qusi was evoking a much larger network that he has access to; Others he talks to. He mostly spoke of seeing these Others, of feeling and tasting their presence; by referring to these sense impressions, he distinguished between immediate experience and the madeup. Its nonmade-upness is the ground for the authority inherent to Shaykh Qusi’s poetry. Far from being invented, his poetry draws on face-to-face encounters with the Prophet, his companions, and the awliyd’, who lived

many centuries ago but whose spirits are still present and accessible (to some}. The shaykh describes in a poem how he was first directed onto the path of visionary guidance. He writes, And the order came to me not to listen to Anything said except to Muhammad. The shaykhs of the teaching have turned away, And the teaching has been taken over by Muhammad. Whoever says: | am the shaykh—Leave him! They have been ignorant of the secrets of Muhammad. Don’t listen to [anyone|-—-living or dead

Except to the highest of the family of Muhammad. (Olisi 2004a, 268}

Poetry and Prophecy / 123 The range of sense experiences is widened here: Shaykh Qusi not only sees the Prophet, he also hears him. More precisely, he is instructed through a visionary order to listen only to the Prophet and ail al-bayt and not to tollow any other teachers. While the authority of other shaykhs is undermined, Shaykh Qusi’s authority is reconfirmed. Because of his advanced spiritual state, he is advised to learn directly from those close to the source. Shaykh Qusi followed the call, and in subsequent poems he describes being visited (in his sleep and later also while awake) not only by the Prophet but also by other prophets (David, Jacob, Jesus), descendants of the Prophet (Ali, Husayn), companions of the Prophet (Umar, Bildl, Hamza), hadith transmitters (al-Bukhari, al-Hasan al-Basri), al-Khidr, and great Sufi saints (al-Sayyid al-Badawi). Shaykh Qusi is continually in touch with more than just his group of followers or the people with whom he interacts on a dayto-day basis. He quotes from the Prophet, the saints, and al-Khidr, whose words become direct sources for his poetry (“And al-Khidr said tome...”). At other times the origin of the shaykh’s words is not specitied (“And it

was said tome...” or “There came to me someone who said...”). Even the initial impulse for writing the book Alfyyat Muhammad did not stem trom its author. In a poem, Shaykh Qusi describes receiving permission (presumably trom the Prophet or God) to write the book—-an event that “dissolved” his mind, sent him “almost flying,” and, out of thankfulness, made him dance in the realm of Muhammad (20042, 287). This ecstatic celebratory moment is the moment in which the book was born, the book from which Dr. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz would later recite at al-Sayyida Nafisa’s mawlid. Many of the poems in the book describe direct imaginary encounters, as for example the following: One day, awake I was, And it was said: Prepare yourself to meet Muhammad. In an instant, like a flash embraced me From behind my Lord Muhammad. His hands were holding my hands [But] I do not disclose a secret of Muhammad. (2004a, 289)

While an actual, almost sensual encounter with the Prophet is alluded to in this poem, the encounter allegedly remains outside the realm of language (although this assertion is paradoxically made in language). Poems that refer to seemingly physical encounters with the Prophet might end with the shaykh’s assertion that he will not disclose any of the Prophet’s secrets. In listening to the shaykh, I was often puzzled by how much he

124 / Poetry and Prophecy seemed to be disclosing and how little he said he was disclosing. The reason for this veiling is not simply distortion but rather the putative gap that separates mystical experience from its expression. The poetry can be only an approximation of the experiences it aims to describe. One of the shaykh’s

most recent books begins by noting that while many have written about Muhammad as a military leader, social reformer, or ideal husband, “few have made him known to us” (Qiisi 2006, 23). Biographical accounts of the Prophet’s life fail to convey to their readers the Prophet's true nature, which cannot be captured in words because he is the “locus of lights and secrets,” a “light that has been called Muhammad” (Qiisi 2004a, 33, 45). While the Prophet’s true nature and presence remain veiled, they are continually referred to in the shaykh’s poetry. Shaykh Qusi wants his writings to be evocative, and he seems to succeed. According to his followers, his poems have such a strong evocative power that they can induce visionary experiences in those reading them or listening to them. So imaginary encounters originally inspire the poetry and are next recorded in poems. The poems then pave the way for further encounters, many of which, in turn, confirm that the poet did not “make up” his poetry. Evidential Visions

Dream-visions are a tricky kind of evidence because they generally lack witnesses but nevertheless need to be recognized by others. An example of a “failed dreamer” who was unable to secure such recognition is Muhammad al-Zawawi, a tifteenth-century Algerian Sufi and jurist, who left a written account of his weekly—and later on, daily—-encounters with the Prophet,

but who was unable to convince others of his chosen status. By writing down his visions, al-Zawdwi took a certain risk. He let his narratives enter into circulation, where different audiences could interpret them in different ways. Jonathan Katz’s reading of al-Zawawi’s Prophet-dreams portrays

the Sufi as a “delusional,” “neurotically obsessive” “narcissist prone to flights of grandiose fantasy” (1996, 22, 23, xv). Lassume that Shaykh Qusi’s

and Maha’s initial hesitation to let me take a look at the Book of Visions had to do with their suspicion that I or the future readers of my book might similarly (mis)interpret their vision narratives as mere flights of fantasy. Shaykh Qusi’s followers are fully aware of the fact that many outside observers, as well as Egyptians, skeptical of the powerful intermediary role of Sufi shaykhs, are prone to discard their dreams as dangerous, arrogant, or even made up. Yet there is one central difference between al-Zawawi (a failed saint of the fifteenth century) and Shaykh Qusi (a successful spiritual guide

Poetry and Prophecy / 125 of the twenty-first century). Shaykh Qusi’s saintly status is confirmed not only by his own visions but also by those of his disciples, which, in turn, are frequently evoked through the musical performance or reading of the shaykh’s poetry. His authority is thus to a large extent established and maintained through his disciples’ dreams and visions.!° Many of his disciples have witnessed the Prophet giving presents to Shaykh Qusi or praising him. At other times, al-Khidr or the awliya convey messages or poetic verses to the shaykh by way of appearing to his disciples, who need not understand these messages but are merely obliged to pass them on, ideally not changing a single letter. During the time I spent with the group, two of the women, Maha and Sharita, stood out as transmitters of messages from al-Khidr to the shaykh.

Maha was married and about forty years old; Sharifa, whom we have already met in chapter 3, was unmarried and in her late twenties or early thirties. Encouraged by the shaykh, both women during the group’s gatherings spoke of their experiences, and he occasionally joked that al-Khidr must be mad at him because he does not come to him directly anymore. Maha generally did not see al-Khidr but merely heard him. He would give her poems for the shaykh, sometimes dictating the actual text to her and at other times describing the form or length of the next poem to be written. These auditory encounters with al-Khidr, she told me, were always announced to her by a noticeable acceleration of her heartbeat. At one gathering, an older incident was retold in detail (possibly specifically for me). Al-Khidr had dictated two lines of poetry to Sharifa during a dream in the early morning. In the evening she went to the shaykh to tell him of her dream, and he showed her a piece of paper on which he had written the exact same lines that very afternoon. “So, you saw it in the morning,” one man in the group repeated slowly, looking at Sharifa, and then he turned to the shaykh, “and you wrote it in the afternoon?” Sharita nodded; the shaykh smiled. Ma sha’ Allah, others exclaimed. This was not the first time they had heard the story, yet even its retelling evoked pronounced awe and admiration. On a different occasion a maie visitor from out of town and Sharifa were able to complete each other’s dream-stories because they had experienced overlapping dreams. Shaykh Qusi joked that they must have a “hot line (khatt sakhin),” but according to the followers’ understanding, this hot line is not the dreamers’ own accomplishment. Rather, it is the shaykh’s high spiritual state that enables his disciples to have such extraordinary experiences. During another gathering, the shaykh read his newest poem, which contained words that we had heard just a few minutes earlier, when

126 / Poetry and Prophecy Sharifa was recounting a vision she had seen. The shaykh interrupted his reading and turned to Sharifa with a smile: “Did | get that right?” By way of these highly performative dream-tellings and by deferring to his disciples, the shaykh ultimately affirms his relationship with a divine order. What all these incidents prove, according to the group’s understanding, is not only that Maha, Sharifa, al-Khidr, the saints, and the shaykh are spiritually connected, but also that the shaykh is divinely inspired. The shaykh is a medium for messages from an Elsewhere, and his disciples can be mediums for him. The fact that the shaykh is male and most dreamers in my examples

thus far female might call to mind stereotypical gender role divisions according to which women are more prone to emotions, intuitions, and dreams, or at least are more likely to be considered passive vehicles. Yet both men and women in Shaykh Qusi’s group are highly invested in the imagination, and more than two-thirds of the dreamers listed in the Book of Visions are men. The interlinking of individuals by way of the imagination cuts across gender divisions, spatial separations, and the linear temporalities characteristic of a secular modernity. Yet Shaykh Qusi and his tollowers do not live outside of such a secular temporality. Although their dream-visions are considered to be eruptions of a timeless truth and to enable encounters with people from the past, usually they carefully record the date and precise time when the visions were seen. Dream-visions are simultaneously timeless and datable. They allow for multiple temporalities to coincide, overlap, and at times blend into one another.

From Another Time

Many of the visionary experiences that inspire Shaykh Qusi’s poetry, as well as those inspired by it, make visible “events of past centuries,” as Shaykh Qusi himself explained. They enable contact with the spirits of those who have long been dead, and sometimes this link to the past is indexed in the Book of Visions by the “strange clothes” worn by people who seem “as though they came from another time.” Other dream-visions display historical figures in a distinctively modern guise: they show the shaykh talking on the phone with Jesus, or they feature the Prophet Muhammad arriving in a big, white, fancy car. While dream-visions often evoke the future, informing or warning the dreamer of what is about to happen, they can thus also let figures of the past enter the present. Unlike opening a book and reading something someone wrote a long time ago, dream-visions allow for more direct experiential access to the past. In this sense the narratives in the Book of Visions diverge from the

Poetry and Prophecy / 127 hadith genre in their implied temporality. Linear time is a central premise in the hadith sciences, which rely on “lm al-rijdal, literally, the “science of men,” through which the authenticity of hadiths is assessed. Besides judging hadith transmitters based on their moral character and linguistic abilities, another important criterion for the authenticity of hadiths rests on the continuity of the chain of transmitters fisndd). The soundness of this chain

hinges on the transmitters’ likelihood of truly having met face-to-face. Birth and death dates are therefore crucial factors in the hadith sciences. While Shaykh Qusi distinguishes between truth and falsehood as well, he believes that texts need not be datable within a particular historical sequence. The linear procession of time is ruptured by dreams and visions, which, like the events that are recorded in hadiths, involve sense experiences, witnessing, face-to-face-encounters, and immediacy. Ironically, while implying a very different temporality, dreams and visions at times have helped evaluate the reliability of hadith transmitters and the authenticity of their contents

(Kinberg 1993, 1999). Certain hadiths in turn underline the validity of dream-visions and particularly of dream-encounters with the Prophet. For Shaykh Qusi and some otf his disciples, not only the Prophet but also his companions, early hadith transmitters, and famous Sufi figures are rendered present as direct interlocutors who can teach, answer questions, and bestow blessings. What these interlocutors do or say is recorded meticulously and with detailed attention to every single letter, just as in the hadith literature. Imagined encounters with the Prophet and his descendants thus supplement the more conventional forms of transmission represented in haciths. Though overtlowing linear space and time, vision-narratives in some

ways mirror the hadith genre, and they are authorized through these similarities. The parallel nature of the two genres might explain why Ibn al-“Arabi referred to those who see and talk to the Prophet in visions as the Prophet’s companions (sahdba} (Meier 1985), a term usually reserved for those who lived at the Prophet’s time. In their form, too, the written narratives in the Book of Visions emulate the hadith genre. Hadiths are composed of two parts: the sanad (or isndd), which lists the uninterrupted

chain of transmitters, and the matn, the text that is transmitted. In the Book of Visions the framing remarks that identify the narrator and contextualize the narrative (parallel to the sanad) are separated from the actual vision-account (parallel to the matn). The former are written in red, and the latter in black. All narratives are introduced with the phrase “transmitted by (naglan ‘an},” which characterizes the narrators as eyewitnesses. The likelihood of someone truly having met the Prophet in this context hinges neither on her physical location nor on her birthdate but on

128 / Poetry and Prophecy her closeness to the shaykh and her spiritual advancement. The dialogical constitution of contemporary texts can thus exceed the practice of reading and instead take place by way of the imagination, but the resulting narratives might still be written in forms that mirror familiar genres. While seen in the present (and always meticulously dated), dream-visions and waking visions can be both from another time and from outside time. The dual temporality of being dated and yet timeless is paralle! to the way the Quranic revelation is understood as eternally valid while responding to concrete historical circumstances.

VISION-AS-PROPHECY Poetry and prophecy are dangerously similar, and for this reason the line between them is drawn with much care. The Our’an states, “as for the poets, [only] those who are lost in grievous error would follow them” (26:224), and alleged hadiths detine poetry as “Satan’s spittle (nafth alshaytin)” (Schimmel 1982, 11). The Prophet Muhammad had to fight off adversaries who tried to devalue the revelation by comparing it to dreams, inventions, and poetry. The Qur’an describes charges that were leveled against him: “’Nay,’ they say, ‘(Muhammad propounds]| the most involved and confusing of dreams (adghdth allim)!’/—‘Nay, but he has invented fall] this!’——‘Nay, but he is jonly| a poet!’” (21:5). In spite of the Quranic insistence on a distinction between poetry and prophecy, classical scholars disagreed on whether poetic inspiration was not in some ways comparable

to divine inspiration. While [bn al-‘Arabi allowed for the possibility of divinely inspired poets and considered the imagination a kind of messenger capable of communicating truths that lie outside reason, al-Kindi and al-Ghazali tended to disagree. The latter assumed that while mystics are able to receive divine inspiration, poets work only with their skills and knowledge. Ibn Khaldiin’s musings in the fourteenth century show, too,

that the solitary, creative author is not a modern invention: “The poet, then, needs solitude. The place he looks at should be a beautiful one with water and flowers. He likewise needs music. He must stir up his talent by refreshing it and stimulate it through pleasurable joy.... Every man is fond of his own poetry, since it is a product of his own mind and a creation of his talent” (1967, 448f.). As opposed to such models of solitary authorship, Sufi poets over the centuries have claimed to be drawing on divine or prophetic inspiration. By way of dream-visions, poets were dictated poetry, incited to write or publish, instructed what language to use, or retrospectively praised for something

Poetry and Prophecy / 129 already written. Indian poet Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), who during his youth wrote exclusively in Urdu, in 1913 was inspired by a dream-apparition of the great Sufi poet Rimi (d. 1273) to use Farsi as well (Schimmel 1998, 117). Ibn Abi al-Dunya’s ninth-century collection of dream-narratives

includes a section on “poetry that has been transmitted in sleep and was then memorized” (Kinberg 1994, 1331f.). Al-Busiri (d. 1295) had what might

be called writer’s block while composing the famous Qasidat al-Burda (Ode of the Mantle), and was able to complete it only when the Prophet appeared and dictated the missing verses to him. (This story was told to me by Madame Salwa while we were visiting al-Busiri’s shrine in Alexandria. Her account differs slightly from most secondary sources, which describe al-Busiri as suffering from partial paralysis and being miraculously cured

when, in a dream, the Prophet hears his poem and rewards him by placing a mantle over his shoulders.) Other narratives report that the Prophet inspired Ibn al-Farid (d. 1235), whose poetry has been called the “climax of classical Arabic mystical verse” (Schimmel 1982, 5). According to his grandson, Ibn al-Farid used to go into a trance and would upon recovery recite thirty verses (Homerin 2001, 39). Divinely inspired poetry streamed through him while other poets struggled to bring even one line to paper. Without explicitly evoking these historical predecessors, accounts of the origin of Shaykh Qusi’s poetry draw upon and contribute to a similar model of prophetic inspiration. According to Shaykh Qusi’s community, such inspiration is still at work in the twenty-first century. Ina manner that was strikingly reminiscent of what | had read about Ibn al-Farid, “Umar told me that Shaykh Qusi “can just sit down and poetry flows.” This is possible because, as is evidenced in a number of his disciples’ visions, Shaykh Qusi is the recipient of a form of prophecy or, as will be discussed shortly, even of revelation. While the previous section described the encounter as a trope for how the shaykh’s poetry comes about, | now turn to the notion that the shaykh’s visionary experiences are not so much a bridging of time as they are an “irruption of the infinite into the finite” (Graham 1977, 10). Although the two conceptualizations overlap, the prophecy model differs slightly from the model of the encounter in that it allows for more immediate prophetic messages.

Dictation A number of spiritually inclined Muslims in Egypt told me that while the gate of revelation is closed, forms of divine inspiration (il/ham) and prophecy (nubuwwa} are still accessible. Some define the difference between a messenger frasiil) and a prophet {nabi) by explaining that the former

130 / Poetry and Prophecy comes with a message, whereas the latter merely has the duty to refresh it.!'| Muhammad was the last messenger, they would say, but there are still many prophets around. Yet they are not easily recognizable and sometimes might not even be aware of their calling. Shaykh Qusi is regarded as a living saint or a prophetlike figure by his tollowers. His inspired state is expressed in poetic and oneiric images that

suggest that his poetry is a materialized copy of a timeless original. The way his poetry comes about is occasionally portrayed as the shaykh reading a text placed within him or set before him. He sees (or reads) and then writes. In one of his poems, Shaykh Qusi defines the process of writing quite explicitly as one of dictation and note-taking: And the order came: Write exactly What you will see in the realm of Muhammad. You will see wondrous things, so convince yourself Then record the words of Muhammad. Write what you will see in detail And understand through the signs of Muhammad. In all the signs you will see There is a meaning in the realm of Muhammad. (Qiisi 2004a, 260)

While the shaykh might have prepared himself through spiritual practices, his poetry and teachings do not originate in the wells of individual creativity. He is not so much a creative genius as he is a recipient, a medium.

According to the group’s understanding, the shaykh’s writings evoke a divine origin, making him a divinely inspired poet. It should come as no surprise that such claims to divine inspiration are highly controversial in Egypt. They stand against the verdict of Salafi reformers like Muhammad ‘Abduh, who rejected i/hdm (divine inspiration) and favored more verifiable forms of knowledge. Suspicion of those who

declare themselves to be intermediaries between ordinary believers and the Divine was given a new sense of urgency by the reformers and is still prevalent today. Friends with whom I shared some of my observations about Shaykh Qusi’s group or to whom | showed some of his poems often claimed that his and his disciples’ vision-narratives are narcissistic or made up. On the other hand, Shaykh Qusi’s followers, though they are keenly aware of these many critical voices, nevertheless adhere to the shaykh’s guidance—in part precisely because his inspired state is confirmed by their own visions.

More Evidential Visions

Some in Shaykh Qusi’s group argue that the beauty of his poetry alone proves that it is divinely inspired, like the argument that the beauty of

Poetry and Prophecy / 131 the Qur’an proves its divine origins. For others, dreams and visions provide a form of evidence that exceeds a mere aesthetic evaluation. Many disciples have learned through their dream-visions that the shaykh is the recipient of prophetic messages subsequently expressed in his poetry. His poems are always already written. A financial manager and member of the group reported in 1998, “I see in my sleep that poetry is put into Sidi’s heart {ulgiya fi galb Sidi) in a language other than Arabic (lugha ghayr al-‘arabiyya). Then Sidi begins and puts out what has been put into him in the form of poetry.” Followers of the shaykh explained to me that the “language other than Arabic” might be an angelic or Divine language, or else the cryptic language often used by al-Khidr. The placing of this language in the shaykh’s heart already evokes a parallel to revelation, since the term revelation (wahy) in the Qur’an refers to a “putting in the heart of,” “prompting,” or “inspiring” (Bell 1934). The notion that when Shaykh Qusi writes poetry he is really translating from this language into Arabic further mirrors the notion of an archetypical ur-Qur’an that is contained on the Preserved Tablet (al-lawh al-mahfiiz) and then materialized in the form of the revealed QOur’an. Another narrative in the Book of Visions speaks of a woman receiving a

spiritual message from the Prophet that is intended for the shaykh. When she tells him and he seems surprised, she asks, “Why are you surprised, Sidi? You mentioned this in your last poem.” She looks for the poem and points to a verse that contains the same words that she had just reported to the shaykh. The narrative does not specify whether the reference is to a poem that the shaykh has indeed written and published or the poem exists only within the vision; such a specification is not really necessary. What is conveyed through the narrative is the notion that the source of the shaykh’s poetry lies Elsewhere. The shaykh’s surprised reaction underlines not his lack of understanding but his role as a recipient of divine inspiration. A different account describes how the dreamer receives the shaykh’s newest poetry book directly from the Prophet immediately before it is published. The implication, again, seems to be that the shaykh’s written poems are a materialized copy of a preexisting original. The shaykh is praised not as a creative, original poet but as a spiritual translator. Still another vision narrative, told by an accountant and a long-standing follower of the shaykh, offers a slightly different explanation for how the shaykh comes to his poetry: “I was reading poetry, Sidi’s poetry. The same night | was honored by a vision of something like a frame (barwaz) coming down from heaven. Sidi was there with a pen in his hand, and he was writing with it in the frame, following the woven texture in the frame, like

132 / Poetry and Prophecy the writing on the cloth of the Kaaba. And our lord [Shaykh Qusi| said to me, ‘lam clarifying tor you the writing so you differentiate and read.’ Of course he meant the poetry.” Like a number of other experiences recorded in the Book of Visions, this one was evoked directly by the shaykh’s poetry, which in this case was not heard but read. As a result of reading the poetry,

the dreamer came to be “honored by a vision” proving that the shaykh’s writing is a rewriting, a tracing. While the shaykh is rewriting what is already written, he diverges from the modern author figure described by Barthes (1977, 146), who “can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.” Though also a rewriting, the shaykh’s text is understood not as a “tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture” (ibid.) but as a copy of a timeless original.

Another example, told by al-Sayyid Yahya, who is an army general and owns an interior design company, shows how the shaykh’s poetry can trigger spiritual memories. Al-Sayyid Yahya reported that in a vision between sleeping and waking, he had gone up into the Prophetic Presence fal-hadra al-Muhammadiyya) and witnessed a gathering of the awliya’.

The prophet John appeared and took the narrator along on a ride in a two-seater that resembled cars used in amusement parks. They traveled through a tube into “the exalted station fal-magdam al-sharif)” where the Prophet Muhammad, his companions, and other prophets were sitting and talking. The narrator stated that although “much was said,” he forgot it all; over the years he had tried to recall what he had heard, mostly without success, What finally spurred his memory was hearing a particular poem that Shaykh Qusi had written, as the content of the poem echoed directly what he had heard in the Prophetic Realm. Again, two conclusions seem possible within this context: either Shaykh Qusi has been to that same realm or his poetry is a direct manifestation of truths from there. Either way, the vision was written down (and shown to me) because it was considered proof of the prophetic quality inherent in the shaykh’s poetry. Other visions take the claim to prophecy even further. They hail the shaykh not only as a divinely inspired poet but as the recipient of a form of revelation.

Revelation Al-Sayyid Yahya steps outside the mosque. He has been watching Shaykh Qusi read from something green that is coming down and going back up, and he wants to know what this something is. Once outside, he learns of its nature: on a sign in the sky he reads that it is revelation from the Prophetic Realm (wahy min hadrat

Poetry and Prophecy / 133 al-nabij. He reenters the mosque. The shaykh asks him what he has seen, and he answers, “That it is revelation (walty) and not divine inspiration (ilham). You cannot play with it.” A few years later, one Ramadan night, | will find myself sitting with some of the shaykh’s disciples, drinking tea and skimming through the Book of Visions for the first time. “That one,” Maha will say while turning the page and pointing to the narrative about the descending and rising revelation, “that one was seen by a man who has reached a very high spiritual state. Do you know what it means?” She will look at me, pause for a moment, and then continue: “It means that the shaykh does not compose his poems. They are a

form of revelation.” Freud once noted that an “intensive curiosity” hovers around the question “from what source that strange being, the creative writer, draws his material” (1959, 149). Maybe it was a similarly intense curiosity that impelled al-Sayyid Yahya to leave the mosque and take a closer look at the source of the green something from which the shaykh had been reading. If it was, then his curiosity must certainly have been satisfied. His realization that the shaykh receives a form of revelation was of great significance not only to him but also to the shaykh’s community as a whole. Al-Sayyid Yahya emphasizes that based on the vision’s content, he knew it was not from him and therefore also not for him. The written account of the vision closes with the words “I swear by God that I truly saw this vision and that it is not from me because it does not concern me.” Al-Sayyid Yahya immediately (possibly within the vision itself) informed the shaykh of what he had learned and, a while later, one night during al-Sayyida Zaynab’s mawlid, told the shaykh’s disciples. They, in turn, recorded his account in writing. When, again later, the written narrative was interpreted for me, a rather vague image of the shaykh receiving a form of revelation was narrowed down to a specific form of expression: the shaykh’s poetry. Al-Sayyid Yahya’s vision expands and transforms the claim that the shaykh is divinely inspired. According to his account, the shaykh’s poetry does not merely draw on prophetic inspiration but is itself a form ot revelation. The author of one of the earliest dream manuals stated that “among the types of knowledge and the varieties of wisdom with which humans occupy themselves, there is none more obscure, none more refined, exalted,

and noble, none more difficult... than the dream, for it is one of the parts of revelation (wahy) and one of the modes of prophecy (nubiiwah)” (quoted in Lamoreaux 2002, 28). Similarly, many contemporary authors relate the dream-vision to both revelation and prophecy, but generally, in

134 / Poetry and Prophecy doing so, they refer only to the fact that some of Muhammad’s revelation

experiences occurred in the form of dreams and not to the possibility that revelation might be accessible to ordinary believers by way of their own dreams. Significantly, even if (in the eyes of some) the prophetic is still at work, visions that contradict the revealed shari‘a are rejected by almost everyone I spoke to. Shaykh Qusi, too, emphasizes that following a spiritual path can never be an excuse for disregarding the shari‘a (2006, 254f.), and I never heard or read any visions stemming from Shaykh Qusi or his followers that ran counter to the Qur’an or sunna. Nevertheless, the equation of Shaykh Qusi’s inspiration with revelation is highly significant and unsettling, and in the eyes of some such an equation alone is a violation of the shari‘a. The term walry, like all central words in visions, is not randomly chosen but carefully reported. It is a dense signifier and a highly charged term that raises the shaykh’s authority to a level that comes dangerously close to that of the Prophet, for whom the term is generally reserved. Already a shaykh’s claim to divine inspiration is viewed critically by many, and even fewer Muslims with whom I spoke outside of Shaykh Qusi’s group would accept the analogy drawn between the shaykh’s visions and revelation. If not the gate of prophecy, at least the gate of revelation is supposedly closed.

But other narratives in the Book of Visions similarly seem to imply that Shaykh Qusi not only encounters the Prophet on a regular basis, but can also almost take his place. During a Ramadan gathering, one of the shaykh’s disciples saw a waking vision that was later written down in the following form: In the middle of the month of Ramadan in the year 1422 a.H., December 2001, | had the honor to attend the celebration that our shaykh, Shaykh Qusi, held... ina large tent at the m@idat ai-raliman, which was located at the time on the grounds of the Cairo stadium. Dr. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz was in the celebration, reciting some poems of the poetry book Al-Afig, written by our shaykh, Shaykh Qusi.... During the inshdd | saw, while awake, our lord al-Khidr. He was standing behind the rows at the beginning of the poem “Al-Shuhiid.” He had a belt around his waist, and after every verse he said, “I attest [that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is His Prophet] (as/had).” And before “The Seal,” which is part of the poem “Al-Shuhiid,” he points with his hand to our shaykh, Shaykh Qusi, and says, “Whoever wants to see the face of the Prophet of God, should look at his face. And whoever wants to touch the body of the Prophet of God, should touch his body.” And by this he means our lord Shaykh Qusi. At the end of “The Seal” he says, “This is a decisive word and no trifle.”

Poetry and Prophecy = / 135 As in other vision narratives, al-Khidr here becomes visible and audible during (and through) the inshdd, and he affirms the shaykh’s special rank. The vision informs the narrator, and by extension those hearing or reading it, that whoever longs to see the Prophet can look at the shaykh instead.

Al-Khidr’s final remark, a quote that is originally from and about the Quran” but here refers to the shaykh’s poetry, again suggests a parallel between prophet and poet. The promise that the Prophet can be seen and heard through the shaykh is highly appealing to those who long for nothing more than a glimpse of the Prophet Muhammad. Yet al-Khidr’s promise is dangerous. Shaykhs are supposed to lead to the Prophet; but can they substitute for him?

The Boundaries of Revelation

On a hot and frustrating day in July 2003 it was brought home to me how sensitive questions can be that concern the boundaries of revelation. Having been told by a number of people that “true shaykhs” are to be found only in Upper Egypt, | had gone on a trip to a small town next to Qena, accompanied by my mother and a family friend. We had asked around and learned that the best person to talk to was Shaykh ‘Abdullah. Besides being an administrative employee in a primary school, Shaykh ‘Abdullah, so we were told, was also a member of a local Sufi order; he was well versed in the spiritual worlds, and he had undergone a “divine opening.” We went to see the shaykh early in the morning, but before I even asked him a single question, he began to quiz me on my name, my father’s name, my family name, and my dissertation adviser’s name. Becoming irritated by my last name, which Shaykh ‘Abdullah took to nullify any potential Muslimness, he turned more and more suspicious and finally exclaimed that my topic was too closely related to the very core of Islam and the Qur’an. “There is a ditference between dream-vision (ru’yd} and revelation (waly),” he said scornfully. “It’s obvious that you want to damage Islam. You want to say that the Prophet didn’t receive revelation but only dream-visions.” I telt distinctly unwelcome, and after our friend’s unsuccessful attempts to calm Shaykh ‘Abdullah’s worries, we left his house shortly after we had arrived. | was never to see Shaykh ‘Abdullah again, and all I wanted to do that morning was return to Cairo (or even better, New York). It was one of those fieldwork encounters that I hoped to forget as soon as possible but that I could not stop thinking about. Shaykh ‘Abdullah’s reaction touches on a central issue—one that makes dream-visions highly problematic to

some and highly significant to others. It points to the precarious lines between different forms of divine illumination. The fuzzier the lines are

136 / Poetry and Prophecy between revelation fwahy), divine inspiration (ilhdm), prophecy (nubuwwa}, and dream-vision (ru’yd), the more dangerous and offensive crossing them becomes. Shaykh ‘Abdullah was worried that I might claim that the Prophet received only dream-visions. As he implied, dream-visions did

indeed constitute part of the revelation. According to the Prophet’s wite ‘Aisha, the revelation began with dream-visions and, according to a hadith,

“the dreams of the Prophets were revelation.” After initially receiving dream-visions, the field of the Prophet’s revelation experiences broadened.

The archangel Gabriel appeared, pressed upon Muhammad’s chest, and ordered him to recite from a cloth fqul). Other parts of the revelation are described as auditory experiences: “Sometimes it comes as the ringing of a bell; this kind is the most painful. When it ceases I retain what was said. Sometimes it is an angel who speaks to me as a man, and I retain what he says.” >

Many hadiths depict the revelation as taking place in a state of trance: “Zaid b. Thabit said: 1 was at Muhammad’s side when the sakina [immanence of God] came upon him. His thigh fell upon mine so heavily, that | feared it would break. When he recovered, he said to me: Write down, and I wrote down Siira iv.g5” (quoted in Wensinck 2001, 623). Shaykh ‘Abdullah’s

alarmed reaction to my research topic seems to have been related to the close resemblance between such revelation accounts and narratives of mystical trances. Paralleling the Prophet’s experience, [bn al-Farid in the thirteenth century and Shaykh Qusi in the twenty-first century recited prophetic words upon their recovery from trance-like states. As has been argued in studies of other forms of “extra-Qur’anic” or “extra-scriptural” revelation (such as the hadith qudsi or the shatahdt, ecstatic utterances ot Sufis), the question of how to define the boundaries of revelation has long troubled Muslim scholars (Ernst 1985; Graham 1977}, and it has become even more pronounced in the age of reformist reason. In his introduction to an English translation of Rashid Rida’s The Muhamimadan Revelation, the president of the Virginia-based International Institute of Islamic Thought warns, “The concept of revelation is one that non-Muslims have allowed to expand to include meanings acquired while in the dream-state, spiritual!

experiences, a variety of inspirational experiences, and, under some circumstances, even the sort of fleeting insight that seems to come from the unknown” (Alwani 1996, v). According to such reformist views, it is dangerous to believe that revelation might still be at work in dreams, intuition, and spiritual experiences. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, reform-

ist reason insists that prophetic insight is out of reach for contemporary Muslims, who should make use of their rational minds instead. Along with

Poetry and Prophecy / 137 a turn toward a this-worldly ethics (and away trom the afterlife), reformers prescribe a turn toward rationality (and away from divine inspiration). Besides expressing a heightened anxiety about the question of whether the gate of revelation is closed or open, Shaykh ‘Abdullah, possibly unknowingly, was also responding to Orientalist claims concerning the nature of revelation. Discarding earlier suggestions that Muhammad might have been an ingenious political leader or, alternatively, crazy, epileptic, or schizophrenic, scholars like Maxime Rodinson and Montgomery Watt agreed that Muhammad must have sincerely believed that he was the recipient of a message from an Elsewhere, adding that this does not mean he was right. Deferring to the authority of “modern advances in psychology and psychiatry,” Rodinson argues that the concept of the unconscious has enabled scholars to understand the true nature of the so-called revelation (1980, 77), and Watt states that the “modern Westerner” realizes that what seems to the Prophet to come from “outside himself” can really come from the unconscious (1974, 17). Muhammad might have simply been a man with a strong “creative imagination.” In saying that the Prophet drew on dreams—so Shaykh ‘Abdullah’s line

of thinking might continue—I would reconfirm the Orientalist notion that it all happened inside his head. At the same time I would implicitly be claiming that anybody could misinterpret dream images actually conjured up by the unconscious as a divine message. Any dreamer could then potentially claim to be not only a “poet at work” but also a “prophet at work.” It is the wide range of meanings associated with both dream and imagina-

tion that allows for such an easy slippage between ordinary dream and dream-vision, between the creative imagination in Orientalist writings and the prophetic imagination in Sufi texts. Shaykh Qusi would concede that laypersons are often incapable of distinguishing between divinely inspired dream-visions and ordinary dreams. Yet in his view, this does not mean that all dreamlike experiences are inherently unreliable. Those who are spiritually advanced enough and skilled enough to be able to discern different kinds of dreams might have access to a form of revelation even in the twenty-first century. CONCLUSION

Admittedly, during the late-night gatherings with Shaykh Qusi’s community, | at times came up against the tenacity of my own preconceived notions about the nature of dreams and creativity. I was told that the shaykh receives prophetic messages; that he is a divinely inspired poet; that this is

138 / Poetry and Prophecy known because his disciples have seen it in their dreams. And the tempta-

tion of readily available explanations always lingered right around the corner. The seemingly circular logic, which uses a prophetic medium (the dream-vision) to prove the authenticity of prophecy (the shaykh’s poetry), does not stand up to the rules of rationalism. The shaykh could easily be seen as a narcissist who fantasizes about and conjures up encounters with the Prophet and the awliy@. Along the same lines, one could argue that his disciples see and tell their own visions because they subconsciously want to confirm the shaykh’s authority (which in turn authorizes their own experiences). Orientalists like Montgomery Watt might generously add that the shaykh and his followers have a strong “creative imagination.” I suspect that Shaykh Qusi knew about my struggies with these readily available explanations. He often called upon specific disciples and asked them to share their dreams and visions with me, and, together with ‘Umar, he chose narratives from the Book of Visions to challenge my assumptions and, by extension, those of a vaguely (and not necessarily geographically) defined “American audience” that would eventually read my book. Even without first crossing the Atlantic, the shaykh’s and his disciples’ visionstories are often met with disbelief. Many Egyptian psychologists, reformists, and rationalists would be skeptical of Shaykh Qusi’s teachings. For

Shaykh ‘Abdullah, with whom I had a rather short exchange in a town in Upper Egypt, my interest in dream-visions was already problematic because, in his view, it came too close to negating the Prophet’s revelation experience. For Shaykh Qusi and his followers, by contrast, dreamvisions do not undermine but expand the possibility of prophecy. While the shaykh and his disciples are fully aware of the multiple ways in which claims to divine inspiration are contested both within Egypt and beyond its borders, they are also aware of the evocative and evidential potential of their own vision-narratives. Perhaps merely a vehicle after all, I have subjected their evocative visions to yet another retelling. Dreams and visions provide Shaykh Qusi’s disciples with insight into the origins of the shaykh’s poetry. Through them they have learned that he comes to his poetry by way of al-khaydl, a prophetic form of the imagination, which is understood within this community in conjunction with notions of prophecy and even revelation. I suggest that the shaykh’s and his followers’ understanding of inspiration situates them not outside the

Islamic tradition but right at the heart of it. Some of their dreams and visions are understood as face-to-face encounters, parallel to the hadith, while others describe the shaykh’s writings as resulting from a form of dictation that parallels the Qur’anic revelation. In this sense, dream-visions

Poetry and Prophecy = / 139 here provide a link both to the Prophet and to prophecy. Significantly, my suggestion that the tropes of the hadith and the Qur’an inform the imagi-

nation of dreams and poetry is not meant to imply that the shaykh and his followers “make” their dreams and visions. While the actual dreamexperience is always out of reach, | have referred to the ways in which such

experiences are narrated and written, paying particular attention to how these narrations follow familiar idioms. Not only is the Islamic tradition read, studied, taught, talked about, argued over, and enacted in visible everyday contexts, but it is also experienced and resignified in invisible, imaginary realms. It both structures the imagination and is exceeded by it. Although many of Shaykh Qusi’s followers see dream-visions, only the shaykh derives stable authority from them. The prophetic, while coming from an Elsewhere, can therefore result in visible hierarchies. The next chapter continues the exploration of the dream’s social afterlives, returning from organized and hierarchized engagement to more everyday engage-

ment, in which dream-experiences often result in distributive practices. As one dream interpreter put it, “The waking state gives to the dream, and the dream gives, in return, to the awakened state.” A pious dreamer, in other words, is both the cause and the outcome of the dream-vision. What transformative effects, then, do dream-visions have upon ordinary dreamers’ waking lives? What are their material traces, ethical implications, and social afterlives? How do they guide—and coerce——those who dream them?

5. The Ethics of the Visitational Dream The dream experience cannot be isolated from its ethical content. MICHEL FOUCAULT

Dreams do, and like all that does, they can heal, harm, or even kill.

) STEFANIA PANDOLFO

As every aspiring anthropologist there knows, days are never long enough

in Cairo. Not only are there fieldwork to be done and fieldnotes to be written, but there are also numerous daily social obligations. Although neighbors in high-rise buildings might not always know one another, and although hours of traffic often separate friends and relatives, nonetheless Cairenes are often out to visit or return visits. As elsewhere, practices

of hospitality in Cairo are not just entertainment but also “manifestly political and deeply moral” (Meneley 1996, 4). One aspect of this endless

cycie of reciprocal hospitality is easily overlooked: not only the living must visit and be visited. So too must the dead. Their visits might be unobservable, but they can be just as awaited, engaging, and obliging as those of their visible counterparts. The living and the dead relate to one another in a number of dialogical ways that are enacted in dreams, their telling, and their interpretation. Through dreams the dead guide, warn, and direct the living. Invisible threads in the webs spun by hospitality, visitational dreams illustrate particularly well the dream-vision’s morally binding power. Besides shedding light on Egypt’s imaginary landscapes, stories of visitational dreams might therefore also be able to contribute to a rethinking of ethics more broadly.

Philosophers and anthropologists have described the ways that an Aristotelian virtue ethics has been partially displaced by a Kantian duty ethics in the modern West {Asad 2003; MacIntyre 1984; Mahmood 2005).

In the former model, ethics is intimately connected to embodied practices and ways of life whereas, in the latter model, ethics is a matter of reason and duty. The visitational dream deserves our attention because it exceeds and ruptures both of these models. Neither embodied practice nor abstract reasoning can sufficiently capture its ethical force. Rather, 140

The Ethics of the Visitational Dream —/ LAT the visitational dream is ethically compelling precisely because of its dialogical nature. Such dreams call for a response; they address the dreamer, and they simultaneously constitute her as an ethically responsible being. According to my interlocutors’ understanding, the ethics underlying the dream does not arise from the dreamer’s moral convictions or from her superego. It does not follow a Kantian categorical imperative, and it does not need to be instilled through the dreamer’s habitus. As we have seen, the dream-vision can be invited through certain communal practices and technologies of the self, but the source of its ethical imperative is held to be a locus outside the individual and the visible social realm. By way of the dream, an Other addresses the dreamer. Far from being the dreamer’s

unconscious, this Other is the imaginary interlocutor that the dreamer encounters in the dream-vision. The dream-vision is essentially a medium, and the underlying dream ethics is infused with the believer’s relationship with an Elsewhere. It is an ethics that arises during and through interlocution; an ethics that evolves from the imaginary; an ethics that evades the logic of the state, the Muslim reformers, Kant, and even Aristotle. In Western history, too, dreams have at times been given ethical significance. The Greek dream expert Artemidorus held that moral people are unable to have meaningless dreams. Schopenhauer insisted centuries later

that our moral dispositions determine how we act in dreams, and other German nineteenth-century thinkers claimed that the Kantian categorical! imperative is effective in dreams as well.' Freud disagreed and categorically brushed aside all attempts at uncovering a dream ethics. Dreams, tor him, are devoid of any ethical content, or at best show how immoral we really

are. In response to the question of “whether and to which extent moral disposition and feelings extend into dream-life,” Freud posited that ethical considerations are suspended in the dream-world; that “dictates of morality have no place in dreams” (1965, 98). According to Freud, dreams often “disregard knowledge which carries great weight with us in the day-time, they reveal us as ethical and moral imbeciles” (87). The dream, in the Freudian model, might disclose a more honest self, but it will certainly not disclose a more moral one. While Freud denied that the dreamer’s moral dispositions might extend into her dream-life, other questions cannot even be raised from within his model. It makes little sense to ask, for instance, whether a moral imperative might not be able to come to the dreamer by way of the dream instead of extending out from her. If the dream originates inside the dreamer, then the only source of such an imperative can be the dreamer’s superego. When the superego is sound asleep, the dream is rendered ethically worthless.’

142 / The Ethics of the Visitational Dream Later interpreters of Freud have complicated the trope of hallucinatory wish fulfillment and, with it, the dream’s ethical worthlessness. In the writings of Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Karen Horney, for instance, the possibility arises that certain dreams might be of ethical and political relevance because they not only reter to personal pasts but also allow us to envision different futures. Thus, writes Marcuse, “In its refusal to forget what can be, lies the critical function of phantasy” (1966, 149). According to these rereadings, the dream—or the imagination more broadly—has a utopian potential: it directs and opens the dreamer toward what might be. Such rereadings of Freud resonate with my interlocutors’ dream-stories in that they draw attention to the possibilities dreams enable as opposed to interpreting dreams as compensatory hallucinations. They allow us to see dreams not as an escape from but as an engagement with the world. In many places, particular kinds of dreams are taken to have very real effects. The belief is widespread that dreams can cause illnesses (Devereux 1966), and according to Waud Kracke (1999), Parintintin shamans in Brazil dream of certain things on purpose so as to make them happen. It is said that through intentional dreaming songs have been learned, children conceived, ailments cured, and clairvoyance or shamanic powers achieved (Kilborne 1981). According to W.E. H. Stanner, certain Australian aboriginals hold that a man fathers a child not through sexual intercourse but by the act of dreaming about a spirit-child (1979, 27). Based on her fieldwork in Morocco, Stefania Pandolfo notes that being “a parole coming trom an elsewhere!,| dreams can resolve conflicts, deliver a person from illness, and determine decisions that change the direction of one’s life.” Far from being ineffective, dreams “embroil the dreamer in a web of obligations and exchanges” (1997, 1841).

Besides their evocative power (they make the dreamer do things), dreams can have a performative power (they themselves do things). As Vincent Crapanzano remarks, whereas we tend to ignore the dream’s per-

formative nature, in many societies the dream is taken to bring about that which is dreamed (2001, 32). Frequently, the line between prescience and effectuation-through is not entirely clear because it cannot always be determined whether an antecedent dream is considered the efticient cause

or the prophetic imitation of a subsequent event. The relation between dream and future event can be ambiguous; a dream might be evocative and performative at the same time. It can tell the dreamer what is going to happen and simultaneously incite her to act in a certain way so that it will happen. Whether a dream is taken to be a prophetic sign or a cause that directs one’s future actions, in both cases dreams matter—quite literally.

The Ethics of the Visitational Dream —/ 143 Likewise, according to Islamic traditions, dream-visions allow the future to fold into the present; they can address and compel the dreamer. Probably

the best-known Qur’anic example of a moral imperative as conveyed through a dream-vision is the story of Abraham and Ismail.o Abraham learns through a dream that he is to sacrifice his son, and although both tather and son are willing to follow the divine order, Ismail is ultimately saved through God’s merciful intervention. While sacrificing one’s son is a radical act-—-one that in Derrida’s words would under normal! circumstances be considered “monstrous, outrageous, barely conceivable” (1995, 67)-—many less radical actions also have been inspired by dream-visions throughout history. Because of dreams, Sufi orders were founded, and people joined them; dreamers embraced Islam; schools of legal methodology and theology came into existence; battles were fought; and anticolonial revolts were staged. Today, too, Egyptians of various social backgrounds adhere to the morally binding nature of dream-visions. In their eyes, the threefold categorization of dreams etfectively delimits which kinds of dreams are allowed (and expected} to move the dreamer. Most would concede that a dream that incites the dreamer to pray less or to steal is a devilish dream and should not be followed. Some would say that it is not even to be told.’ Scary, confusing, or incestuous dreams all fall into this category, as do so-called wet dreams (fistinlam), which make necessary the washing of the entire body betore prayer instead of just the regular ablution.* Dreams of fame and fortune are generally considered to be a form of hallucinatory wish fulfillment. A dream-vision, by contrast, which is usually clear and short, is a divine message that guides the dreamer, reminding her of her religious duties and social obligations. Whereas in the case of Abraham’s dream the divine imperative seemingly ran counter to social norms and familial

ties, at the moment when they categorize their dreams, contemporary Egyptians tend to harmonize between social expectations and the possibility of divine guidance. Yet although a dream with disruptive or subversive implications can easily be dismissed as devilish, dream talk in Egypt is not

inherently conservative. After all, many of my interlocutors are bound not only to their families and society but also to the saints, the Prophet, and ultimately to God. As Derrida notes, no ethical position can ever be fully justified because one inevitably has to oscillate between demands of various others—in Abraham’s case, the demands of God and those of the community. Consequently, “Abraham is at the same time the most moral

and most immoral, the most responsible and the most irresponsible of men” (1995, 72).

LAA / The Ethics of the Visitational Dream While it is not always obvious which acts are “subversive” and which “conservative,” time and again, when Egyptians told me about important changes in their life trajectories, dreams had triggered these changes. A young, recently married woman in Cairo told me that she was considering putting on a full-face veil {nigib) because of a dream in which she was being chased and escaped into a house where a woman offered her a niqdb. When she left the house, now fully covered, she felt entirely safe. She interpreted the dream as a sign that she should contemplate a new dress code, and soon thereafter she started wearing the nigdb. While her dream was certainly not the sole cause for this life change, it is significant that the woman placed emphasis not on theological arguments, her husband's wishes, societal pressure, or her desire to cultivate a state of piety, but ona transformative dream-experience. A middle-aged policeman told me that because of a dream he decided to donate twelve thousand pounds for a particular mosque’s new loudspeakers, even though he had never even been to that mosque before. A housewife reported that her teenage daughter used to be a “good Muslim” but at some point quit praying. Soon thereafter the daughter dreamed that a Saudi Arabian shaykh came to her, became upset (za‘ldn), and lett. When she realized that he was upset because she did not pray anymore, the young woman started praying again regularly. As visitational dreams reveal particularly well the ethics at work in, and arising from, ordinary Egyptians’ dreams, in what follows we take a closer look at three kinds of nightly visitors: the dead, the saints, and the Prophet. THE RETURN OF THE DEAD

One could never tell if my aunt’s old Fiat was going to come back to life when she turned the key. You might hope or pray, but you would never know for sure. That February morning, however, everything went smoothly. The car was moving, gliding along the Nile, leaving the city behind to head north into the Nile Delta, toward Talkha. As the gray and brown sea of houses began to thin out, I leaned back to watch the fields pass

by while resting my hand on the purse that my aunt had placed between our seats. Aside from her reading glasses, a small Qur’an, a pack of tissues, and a cell phone, the purse contained one hundred neatly bundled twenty-

five-piaster bills that my aunt had picked up from a bank the previous day. She knew what to expect at the cemetery: a number of children and elderly men would come running toward the car and ask for money while offering to recite Quranic verses at the tomb. My aunt would silence them, go straight to the tomb in which my grandmother lies buried, and herself

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program was broadcast on a channel based in Saudi Arabia, made such a bluntly negative answer impossible.”° Dr. Hakim diplomatically responds by quoting the well-known hadith affirming that whoever sees the Prophet

has truly seen him. Then he refers to another prophetic tradition that defines the dream-vision as a part of prophecy. While not a Muslim dream interpreter, the psychoanalyst seems to be caught within an authoritative discourse that, as Bakhtin notes, “demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it” (1981, 342f.). While most probably not persuaded internally, Dr. Hakim gives a religious response to what has been presented as a series of religious dreams. He needs to adopt a religious discursive rationale to make himself heard and to authorize his discourse. While Foucault famously argued that science in modernity is rendered into a “power that forces you to say certain things, if you are not to be disqualified not only as being wrong, but, more seriously than that, as being a charlatan” (1988a, 106f.), depending on the context, not only modern science but also the Islamic tradition can force people to say certain things if they do not want to be disqualified. Which discourse is hegemonic or compelling in which particular context is not always predictable. “Lived hegemony,” as Raymond Williams puts it, “is always a process. . . . It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also

198 / The Royal Road into the Unknown continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own” (1977, 112). A dream interpreter cannot always decide freely what to make of a dream, because the interpretive context and the dream itself might impose certain restrictions and place demands on the interpreter. These demands, in turn, are not always the demands of needing to sound enlightened and scientific, they can also be the demands of a hadith or even of the Prophet’s appearance in a dream. Dr. Hakim seems caught in a religious language that he generally rejects. Oniy subsequently his colleague, another psychoanalyst, jumps in to suggest that the dreams of the deceased father are clearly related to the woman’s longing. This allows Dr. Hakim also to switch his interpretive mode and emphasize that the woman’s dreams are a form of wish fulfillment. Before moving on to the next caller, the colleague adds a final word of psychological wisdom: “Hungry people dream of bread.” One could read this example as an instance of a brief flirtation with, or benevolent gesture toward, religious idioms—a gesture that is subsequently erased by the reaftirmation of the psychological model’s authority. Instead, | want to highlight the ambiguities this encounter brings into play and the openness that it enacts and creates. The woman’s own framing of her dreams as religiously significant, as well as the psychoanalyst’s initial reference to the prophetic tradition, ultimately destabilize the universalistic explanatory power of the psychological idiom. Even introducing the concept of desire does not unambiguously close this opening, since desire is itself an overdetermined term that is at home in multiple interpretive traditions and can index very different conceptions of the real. In the eyes of many believers, the fact that desire can play a role in evoking dream encounters with the Prophet or the dead does not mean that such encounters are hallucinatory. The wide range of meanings that are indexed by the term desire complicates and undermines the psychoanalysts’ final verdict. Whereas a hungry dreamer fantasizes about bread in her dreams but will still wake up hungry, the religious dreamer might use her longing to invite a real visit from the Prophet or the dead. CONCLUSION

When Freudian dream theories were first imported into Egypt, they did not eradicate or marginalize the alternative dream theories that were already in place. The universalistic claims of the psychoanalytic model made themselves felt not in the sense of pervading all that is held to be true

about dreams (or even determining all that is dreamed), but in the sense

The Royal Road into the Unknown / 199 that “Freud” now serves as a relational point through which the Muslim dream model has come to be partly (re)defined. The process of making meaning of dreams today generally occurs not outside the Freudian episteme but in dialogue with it. A close look at Egypt’s landscapes of dream discourse shows that simplistic accounts of Western psychology displacing the Muslim dream episteme-——-or of the latter puristically defying and rebutfing the former-——can-

not do justice to the complexities of their interplay. Instead of insisting on narratives of “resistance” or “acceptance,” I therefore considered how particular knowledges are evoked and rendered meaningful in concrete social contexts by attending to the subtle interplays, the processes of resignification, and the barzakh that lies between different ways of making sense of the world. In my last example, the disciplinary power of the Islamic tradition trapped the skeptical psychoanalyst Dr. Hakim; in another example, Shaykh Nabil playfully engaged with psychoanalytic vocabularies. My juxtaposition of these two cases is not intended to imply that only Islamic traditions are disciplinary, whereas the adoption of Western psychological models is voluntaristic. Rather, | used these examples to complicate the

notion that the secular sciences are necessarily hegemonic at all times. Like the Freudian dream model, Islamic dream discourses claim a textually based legitimacy, and they draw on their own body of power and knowledge. Foucauldian accounts of the hegemonic power of modern sciences

accordingly need to be nuanced through close ethnographic attention to the shifting terrains of hegemony. Far from being static, the relationship between Freudian and Islamic idioms can fluctuate even within the view of single individuals, depending on the context in which they speak. What Dr. Hakim said on television is very different from what he told me in his living room. In the end, determining what is projection and what divine inspiration remains an ambiguous process in many instances of interpretation. The origin of Huda’s dream is suspended between the unconscious and an Elsewhere, and whether the woman from Qatar truly saw the Prophet or only wanted to see him is left an open question in the psychoanalysts’ dream show. Attention to these ambiguities challenges us to move beyond our tendency to focus on that what is as opposed to that what lies between. Not only are Islamic and Freudian epistemes intertwined and engaged, but new meanings might also arise precisely through their interplay. If, as historian Peter Gay has argued, concepts such as “neurosis,” “Oedipus complex,” and “Freudian slip” have become so commonplace that “we all speak Freud now, correctly or not” (1961, ix), and if contemporary

200 / The Royal Road into the Unknown Egyptians speak Freud too, though sometimes differently, then precisely

this act of speaking Freud differently might contribute to a rethinking and opening up of Freud. A rethinking of this sort could fall in line with Lacan’s suggestion that psychoanalysis centers on the unmasterable experience of alterity,*! or it might resonate with James DiCenso’s observation (1999) that, besides the more widely known tendency toward closure in Freud’s system of thought, one can detect contlicting qualities that resist totalization. According to this view, “dream interpretation can be seen as both a vehicle and a paradigm for an opening to alterity that has profound ethical implications” (2001, 293). As shown in earlier chapters, dream talk in Egypt similarly highlights the imagination’s ethical and interrelational dimensions. My interlocutors understand the dream-vision as a message, an invitation, or even an order coming from an Elsewhere. This dimension of alterity frequently gets written out of Freud’s model, particularly in the renderings of his theory that | encountered in Egypt. At the same time, ironically, an openness and excess in Freud might be more tangible in places like Egypt where his theory is subverted, resignified, and opened up-—not through a conscious act of resistance on the part of traditionalists, but rather through an ongoing reimagining ot what dreams are and where they come from. Much of this reimagining today takes piace in the public sphere, and particularly its mass-mediated realms. This trend is significant not only because it changes the setting for dream-tellings and dream interpretations, but also because it has altered the content and form of these practices. While the dream account itself is already a translation and interpretation, it is further transformed by the space in which it is told, by its interlocutory context, and by the media and materials through which it is communicated. A dream differs depending on whether it is told toa Muslim dream interpreter, a psychologist, relatives, friends, or no one at all. It also differs depending on whether it is written in a journal, recounted on television, told on the phone, or typed on a computer keyboard and sent to a Web site. In this light, the next and final chapter considers the various effects of the mass mediation of dreams, dream-tellings, and dream interpretations. Like Western psychology and Muslim reformist discourses, the mass media have contradictory and unanticipated effects on Egypt’s dream landscapes, problematizing, reviving, and transforming the imaginary repertoires of the Islamic tradition all at once.

7. Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities I saw Sidi Salah [Shaykh Qusi] flying in the air, wearing his regular clothes. In front of him was a screen, like a computer, very big. They were writing chemical symbols on it, and Sidi Salah asked them, “Is this the latest you received?” And they answer yes. AL-SAYYIDA AMAL, Book of Visions, 1998

What happens to reality when our traditional access to it— sense-perception—is no longer restricted to the individual body? SAMUEL WEBER

Al-qarya: the village. You have to see the village, he insists. | would like to agree, but | have no idea what village he is talking about. ‘Umar promises that he will give me a tour of the village; that he will call me in the morning to arrange a time to meet so he can take me there. I try to ask what village he means but receive no answer. As so often, ‘Umar has only a minute to spare at the gathering before he directs all his attention back to Shaykh Qusi. It is late, and I decide to head home. The next day I get up early and over coffee try once more to figure out what village it is that I so urgently need to be shown. Did ‘Umar mean the town in Upper Egypt where Shaykh Qusi’s group had recently built a mosque? I recall the shaykh telling “Umar

that they should have taken me along when the group traveled south to celebrate the mosque’s official opening. Was ‘Umar trying to make up for not having invited me that day? That would be a long trip, hardly doable in a day, so the mosque was probably not our destination. Or was ‘Umar talking about the tombs that the group had started building a little way outside of Cairo? The shaykh and his disciples had spoken to me at length about the collective burial site, and they had posted pictures of it on the group’s Web site. Was that where we were heading? | would have liked to see the tombs but did not think of Cairo’s outskirts as a village. Calling them a garya would have been a strange word choice on ‘Umar’s part. I was getting annoyed by my cluelessness but tried to remind myself that being involved with a Sufi (or Sufi-like) group means to a large extent surrendering one’s will to its shaykh. If the shaykh decides that a gathering should last until the early morning hours, then one stays up, regardless of 201

202 / Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities how tired one might be. If he tells you to close your eyes while reciting particular verses of the hadra, you close them even if you would prefer to observe your surroundings. So when the shaykh decided that it was time for me to see “the village,” then I must simply accept the invitation without

asking too many questions. Granted, | was an anthropologist and not a regular follower of the shaykh, but the line between these two identities sometimes became blurry, especially in the eyes of someone as committed to the shaykh’s path as ‘Umar—someone who was just as curious to find out if | had finally dreamed of Shaykh Qusi as I was to hear about his dreams. The phone rang and interrupted my musings. It was ‘Umar, who cheerfully told me that he would meet me at a particular street corner close to my house in exactly one hour. | debated with myself about what to wear because I had no idea how conservative the village might be that we were about to visit, and | was uncertain about whether we would return to Cairo on the same day or I should be prepared to spend the night somewhere. On top of that, whenever I spent time with the group | covered my head because we usually met inside a mosque, and when we went to someone’s

apartment after the hadra or gathered at the group’s Ramadan tent, | continued to wear the scarf out of respect for the shaykh and his followers and because they (and I) had simply gotten used to it. | assumed that everyone in the group knew that I do not ordinarily veil, but the thought of meeting ‘Umar alone for the first time with an uncovered head made me uncomfortable. Yet so did wearing a scarf, since we were meeting in the middle of my neighborhood and were not going to see the shaykh that day. I didn’t have much time left and decided to take the risk. | wore jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, stuffed a scarf into my bag, and left the house. ‘Umar arrived on time in his Beetle. He was in a good mood, was himself wearing jeans and sunglasses, and seemed to have no problem with my outfit. We started driving, and as we left the city | made one last attempt to find out where we were going. ‘Umar said that | should let myself be surprised but he could promise me that | would be very impressed. After heading in the direction of Alexandria for about half an hour, ‘Umar left the highway and drove through a gateway onto a parking lot that was surrounded by a number of large company buildings. Welcome to al-garya al-zakiyya, the Smart Village, he said with a big smile on his face. We parked the car and entered a high-tech building. I was utterly confused. Whenever I had seen ‘Umar in the past, it had been at a mosque, at saint shrines, at the group’s Ramadan tent, or at private gatherings with the shaykh. He had mentioned to me that he often raced to the gatherings from his workplace, but we had never found sufficient time to talk about

Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities / 203 what he actually did for a living. ‘Umar showed me around the building and explained that the Smart Village is devoted to developing a virtualreality view of Egypt. The project is called Eternal Egypt and, according to its Web site, aims to “bring to light over five thousand years of Egyptian civilization.” It does so through creating maps, three-dimensional copies of objects that can be viewed online, archives, timelines, and virtual environ-

ments. Different sections cover ancient Egypt, Islamic architecture, arts and craits, folklore, and what is called “society and culture.” The project combines a variety of media, including high-resolution panoramas that are captured by five remote-controlled cameras located at Cairo’s Citadel, the Karnak Temple in Luxor, and the site of the Pharos Lighthouse in Alexandria. Eternal Egypt is cosponsored by the Egyptian Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage and by IBM, which contributed a $2.5-million grant. IBM’s Web site marvels, “Visitors to the new Eternal Egypt Web site at www.eternalegypt.org can enter a virtual reconstruction of Tutankhamun’s tomb as it looked the day Howard Carter discovered the chamber in 1922, or view the Lighthouse of Alexandria as it appeared before it was destroyed in the 14th century. Viewers can even examine the face of the Sphinx as it looked 2,c00 years ago.”! In short, Eternal Egypt makes present the past. A screening room inside the Smart Village features an interactive screen

that is too large for one person’s field of vision, on which one can dive into a virtual representation of Egypt’s history. A young woman gave me a private presentation in English while ‘Umar sat in the row behind me. We had to hurry because a group of Japanese visitors was about to arrive. Afterward ‘Umar took me to the cafeteria. “And? What do you think?” I told “Umar that I found the project impressive while trying to hide my disappointment. I had gone on the trip in the hope of learning more about the shaykh’s community, to see their new mosque, their tombs, or another relevant site, not to admire an IBM-sponsored virtual-reality project. As I realize now, my vision of visions was simply too limited at the time. | failed to see that ‘Umar’s work is intimately connected to his involvement with Shaykh Qusi’s group. Having previously dwelt on intertextual relations between the Islamic tradition and contemporary vision-narratives, as well as on interplays between psychological and religious dream vocabularies, | turn here to yet another set of in-between spaces and intersections. The space central to this chapter is that between mass media and the dream medium, between the virtual and the visionary. Although I had not gone to Egypt with a strong interest in media technologies, | repeatedly stumbled across them during

204 / Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities my fieldwork. Next to the dream medium itself, various other media and technologies have figured already in previous chapters: shaykhs and psychologists have appeared on and disappeared from Egyptian national television; Shaykh Nabil has commented on interpreting dreams via phone; and voices were projected throughout al-Sayyida Nafisa’s mosque by way of microphones, amplifiers, and loudspeakers. In what follows, I take a closer look at the impact of mass mediations by way of four additional excursions. | discuss junctures between the technological and the spiritual within Shaykh Qusi’s group, Shaykh Nabil’s cyber-interpretations, the semiotics of recycled images, and the metaphorical implications of modern technologies. Together, | hope, these four excursions will offer the reader a sense of the dream-vision’s ambiguous fate in the media age.’ Some hold that because we live in an era in which our senses are continually flooded, the average believer’s chances of ever seeing a dream-vision have drastically decreased. According to this view, the overstimulation by external sense impressions has reduced our ability to perceive the (in)visible presences surrounding us. Assertions of this kind resonate with the pessimism of thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School who warned that “as their telescopes and microscopes, their tapes and radios become more sensitive, individuals become blinder, more hard of hearing, less responsive” (Horkheimer 1978, 162), or who argued that mass culture and technology have dulled the masses (Adorno and Horkheimer 1998). Others would contend that dreams, visions, and imaginations have been newly empowered in the media age. As part of a widened public sphere that is itself the result of mass education and new technologies, dream talk has gained a much broader audience. Although some of my friends associate the

recent boom of dream interpretation programs on satellite television with a Saudification and commercialization of Islam, or alternatively consider it a plot to keep the masses distracted, in the eyes of others such programs are neither numbing nor apolitical. As you might recall from chapter 1, Shaykh Hanafi argues that dream interpretation programs awaken the masses. In his eyes, bringing visions and Muslim dream interpretation into televised focus is itself a political exercise. In what follows I consider both disenchanting and reenchanting effects of the mass media. Ultimately, I suggest that what might be most significant about the impact of new media forms is neither the standardization nor the broadened availability of dream practices but the very reconfiguration of the “real” in the age of “virtual realities.” This remaking of the real opens up new possibilities for talking about dreams and visions—both for my interlocutors and for me, the anthropologist.

Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities / 205 TUNCTURES

As we were sitting in the cafeteria inside the Smart Village, ‘Umar told me that IBM was highly impressed with the progress the local team had made on the Eternal Egypt project. | nodded absentmindedly while trying to think of a way to direct the conversation back to Shaykh Qusi. It was a rare opportunity to get to sit with one of the shaykh’s closest followers in such a quiet environment, and | didn’t want to waste it. As if he had read my mind, ‘Umar suddenly began talking about how his work for the Eternal Egypt project and his involvement with the shaykh’s community were in fact closely related. To start with, he said, his work was not just a way of making a living; he was trying to learn as many computer skills as possible because the group wanted to create an archive of the shaykh’s teachings. That the group was working on such an archive had long been obvious to me. It would be nearly impossible to overlook the many video cameras, digital cameras, and recorders that were part of almost every gathering with the shaykh. A few times, as I sat with the shaykh asking him questions, ‘Umar would come running and attach a microphone to the shaykh’s collar to record his responses. When I am not in Egypt, I keep track of the group’s activities through their Web site, which has links to the shaykh’s poetry and his didactic writings and which contains pictures of the group’s gatherings, video clips of the shaykh’s appearances on television, pdf files of Arabic newspaper articles about the community, and sound files of the shaykh’s poetry. Months after | had returned to New York from my tieldwork, ‘Umar sent me, as an e-mail attachment, a song that had been recorded at the group’s hadra, and which, he suggested, | should use as a ring tone for my cell phone. The fadra is within reach of not only those who are physically present inside the mosque where the group meets. It is also available in the form of printed texts, on tapes, and in digital recordings, and it is broadcast live over the square in front of the mosque, so that pedestrians and those idling in surrounding cotfee shops partake in it as well, willingly or unwillingly. Some members of the group, when unable to come to the mosque, will call other members and listen to the hadra by phone. Through various media, the force of the hadra—and the realm of angelic presence that it makes more tangible—is extended beyond its previous temporal and spatial boundaries. The adra’s impact spills out past the mosque’s walls and at times-—~as in the case of the e-mail attachment | received while in New York-—even beyond the borders of the nation-state. Others participate in the 2adra by way of their spiritual connectedness.

206 / Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities According to Islamic textual traditions, saints can physically be in two places at once, and contemporary dream- and vision-narratives claim that ordinary believers can have similar experiences by way of their dreams and waking visions.* You might remember the young woman from Shaykh

Qusi’s group who saw her spirit wandering off one night and who was simultaneously at al-Shadhili’s shrine in Egypt’s southern desert and in her bedroom in Cairo. Seen this way, cell phones, sound recordings, and the imagination all perform the same work. Thus, within Shaykh Qusi’s community, the act of employing spiritual and technological tools alongside each other does not amount to a contradiction. But, ‘Umar added as we were chatting in the cafeteria, it is important to remember that not only does the technological assist the spiritual, but the spiritual also helps the technological. According to ‘Umar, his work in the Smart Village is entirely dependent on Shaykh Qusi’s support. One time, he told me, Suzanne Mubarak, Egypt's first lady, was due to visit the Smart Village. ‘Umar was in charge of preparing the screening room, and suddenly one of the projectors broke. Normally it would have taken days to fix it because it is almost impossible to find the spare parts in Cairo. ‘Umar knew he had only halt an hour left before he needed to leave his workplace in order to attend a gathering with the shaykh, and he was at a complete loss. Then, through the shaykh’s miraculous intervention, the projector started working again, and ‘Umar made it to the gathering on time. Like many of the shaykh’s followers, ‘Umar ascribes his success at his workplace to the shaykh’s interventions and blessings. Often the shaykh helps with exams, personal crises, or illnesses, and in this instance, he fixed a technical problem. According to ‘Umar’s account, spiritual worlds affect, and are affected by, technological means. Shaykh Qusi’s followers use media technologies to preserve the shaykh’s work and teachings, augment their own visionary experiences, and make similar experiences available to a broader public. They publish, record,

broadcast, and even e-mail their spiritual texts. Nevertheless, they are also wary of the potential dangers that accompany technologies of mass mediation, production, and consumption. One evening I witnessed a fierce argument between Shaykh Qusi’s followers and some newcomers who had managed to get permission to take home the hadra book, which is generally distributed to visitors at the beginning of the recitation and collected at its end. The newcomers mentioned in passing that they wanted to make copies for friends and relatives, and they were told that photocopying the

hadra is strictly forbidden. After going back and forth about why this should be the case, since it is even allowable to photocopy the Qur'an, the

Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities — / 207 visitors had to resign themselves to the group’s rules. Considering the power of the hadra, the book should not be put into just anybody’s hands. Not everyone is strong enough to bear a widened vision. A similar risk of overdosing is at times also discussed with regard to doing dhikr alone and without any guidance. A Suti described to me how people can get “drunk” by doing dhikr. “It’s like getting an injection,” he said, an “anesthetizing shot of [experiential] knowledge (bing al-ma‘rifa).” The more dhikr you do, the more you see. Yet, he added, it’s a blessing from God that our vision is limited. Imagine you could hear all the noises

of the entire world and you could see everything at once! Getting an overdose, seeing too much, means going crazy. It means seeing nothing at all. Shaykh Mustata described the danger of such an overexposure in the following way: “Say you're doing dihikr, reciting one of God’s names, one hundred times, nothing happens, two hundred times, three hundred times, more, more, more, until it’s too much, and you get hit! Boom! It’s like this cell phone. Say this cell phone takes six volts. And say you put it into an outlet with twelve volts. What happens? It explodes. The same with the dervish. He goes crazy, leaves behind his life, lives on the street, he doesn’t greet his friends anymore, he just says ‘hooo,’ he acts crazy.”

Shaykh Mustafa took me to the door that connects his office to the mosque’s main space, and he pointed to two or three people on the floor whom most Egyptians would refer to as darawish, as dervishes. Typically, dervishes are men and women who have abandoned their material belongings and live in the vicinity of saints’ tombs. They sleep in mosques or on the street, live from food that is distributed in mosques or beg, and often

travel from mawlid to mawlid. Those sympathetic to their calling say that the dervishes have completely given themselves over to God. Others

warned me not to talk to “people like that.” Shaykh Mustafa believes that dervishes have overdone their spiritual training; they have gotten an overdose. Too much dhikr is like too much electricity. It is blinding. From a similar fear of overdosing, Shaykh Qusi sometimes restrains access to his poetry and spiritual texts. One woman repeatedly asked for a particular card of prayers that the shaykh and his assistants refused to give to her because she was “not ready” for it. | was never able fully to make sense of the seeming contradiction between the shaykh’s texts, prayers, and poems being so carefully guarded while at the same time being so readily available to anyone who knows their Web site, has access to a computer, and reads Arabic (parts of the Web site have also been translated into English).

Although Shaykh Qusi seems to share the fears of medieval Sufi thinkers such as al-Ghazali, who believed that the “masses” are unable to grasp

208 / Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities the deepest religious truths, he appears less concerned about unknown Internet users and more about individual members of the group who have not yet achieved a heightened spiritual state. In spite of the problem that not everybody might be equally prepared, he and his disciples take full advantage of media forms that can potentially reach very wide audiences. The accessibility of dream interpretation, like the hadra and other spiritual exercises, has drastically been expanded in recent years. Dream experts are no longer only reachable through face-to-face encounters, they can be called, e-mailed, or watched on television. Turning to some of the more flattening effects of mass mediations, | next revisit Shaykh Nabil’s interpretive work.

CYBER INTERPRETATIONS

One afternoon toward the end of my fieldwork, I arrived at Ibn Sirin’s shrine just as Shaykh Nabil was about to say good-bye to two middle-aged women who seemed to be from the countryside. As they were stepping over the shrine’s threshold, Shaykh Nabil rose from his stool and casually pulled out a business card from his shirt’s front pocket. “In case you have any inquiries fistifsardt) about dream-visions (ru’a),” he said formally, handing the card to the women. “Dream-visions?” “Dreams (alilam),” said the shaykh to simplify matters. “What do you mean?” the second woman asked, now also confused.

“Tf you have any dreams that you want to get interpreted,” Shaykh Nabil said, getting slightly impatient, “call me. The shrine’s phone number is on here, and so is my cell phone number.”

After yet another moment of uncertainty about what to do with the shaykh’s business card, one of the women slipped it into her purse and gave Shaykh Nabil a fifty-piaster bill. The two women left. Shaykh Nabil turned to me and handed me a card as well. Introducing him as the “Hagg Shaykh Nabil Muhammad Ibn Sirin, the successor (kialifa) ot Ibn Sirin,” the card

listed two phone numbers and the Web site for which Shaykh Nabil had been interpreting dreams for about one year. The shaykh’s self-labeling and self-marketing by way of a business card might not have struck me as odd had I not previously spent so much time listening to him talk about the insignificance of material possessions and the virtue of simplicity. Yet who was | to say that [bn Sirin can’t use business cards or the Internet? The little rectangular cards, which disappeared as quickly from the shrine as they had been produced out of the shaykh’s pocket that day, were

Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities / 209 a rather fleeting flirtation with markers of professional identity usually reserved for Egypt’s upper classes. But like Shaykh Qusi and his followers, Shaykh Nabil also takes full advantage of various possibilities opened up by modern technologies. For a while he participated in a radio program; he has published at least three booklets; he interprets dreams online; and during my Heldwork he became a character in a Swedish low-budget film about a woman’s search for the Divine. He has no problem with mass mediations. After all, as you will recall, Shaykh Nabil is a “modern [bn Sirin.”

The Democratization of Dream Interpretation It is frequently argued that as a growing “reading public” has begun to claim direct access to the textual tradition, modern technologies have undermined and fragmented religious authority in the Muslim world. Skills and discourses that once were the exclusive terrain of scholars lie today within the reach of laypersons. Housewives become experts on religious matters by watching their favorite shaykhs on television; Islamic Web sites are proliferating; and sermons circulate in the form of tapes and CDs. Along similar lines, a basic knowledge of dream symbols is today easily accessible to a wide reading, TV watching, or computer-savvy public. “Tpn Sirin” has become a readily evocable reference, a token if not a commodity of sorts. Who exactly Ibn Sirin was and which books are ascribed to him are less important than the simple fact that one knows his name. A number of times visitors to Ibn Sirin’s shrine asked whether he was one of the shaykhs depicted in the photographs on the wall, seemingly unaware that Ibn Sirin died in the eighth century. Although laypersons might not be able to place Ibn Sirin in his correct historical context, they can easily refer to their copy of his dream manual, or they recall from memory that

“Tbn Sirin said...” Next to al-Nabulusi’s and [bn Sirin’s hardcover dream manuals, countless small paperback booklets are sold on Cairo’s streets that sum up either one of these works or combine the two. These booklets tend to be about one hundred pages long and cost about four or five Egyptian pounds (less than one U.S. dollar). The colorful collages on their covers feature drawings of beds, sleeping persons, alarm clocks, landscapes, large eyes, or other dreamy symbols. These booklets are sold on sidewalks, in bookstalls and bookstores, at metro stations, and on microbuses. One finds them in the company of other booklets that explain the medical benefits of honey, Goa’s Ninety-Nine Names, the English alphabet, or methods to exorcise the jinn. Some of the dream booklets state explicitly that they aim at bringing [bn

Sirin up-to-date; others are marketed as “Ibn Sirin” while merging his

210 / Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities

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views with psychological paradigms or proclaiming Ibn Sirin to be the first “Muslim psychoanalyst.” Some name Ibn Sirin as the author; others state on the cover that Ibn Sirin’s text was “studied and examined” by the contemporary author, and still others specify that that the editor “reordered” Ibn Sirin’s and al-Nabulusi’s heritage for the contemporary reader. Even

those booklets that evoke Ibn Sirin neither as the author nor in the title frequently refer to him and his famous successors in the text. A paperback booklet titled Women in Dream Interpretation, for instance, draws on the “great tradition (al-turath al-‘azim),” which it defines as encompassing the writings of al-Nabulusi, Ibn Sirin, and Ibn Shahin (Hakim 1999, 5). The dream booklets, which are sometimes also labeled “dream diction-

Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities / 211 ary (qamiis al-ahlam),” present themselves as self-help manuals, and they

offer a readily consumable dream interpretation tradition. One author states in his conclusion that “every Muslim can interpret his dreams through what he has read [in this book]” (Khattaéb 1997, 79). Besides explaining the nature of nightmares, discussing whether animals dream, and laying out the meaning of particular symbols, another booklet titled Dream Interpretation, Girls! contains sections such as “How do you interpret dreams for yourself?” and “A word to the girl who wants to interpret her jown| dreams” (Satfti 1992, 13, 17). Next to three classical Arabic texts,

the author of this particular booklet lists two English books among his sources: Nerys Dee’s Your Dreams and What They Mean (1984) and Fred Gettings’s How to Interpret Dreams, Omens and Fortune Telling Signs (1940). The Arabic booklet seems to fit perfectly into the genre of self-help literatures represented by these two foreign texts. At the same time, the author warns his readers that the “dream-world differs greatly from the waking world” and that only “those to whom God has given knowledge, wisdom, and inner sight (basira) can interpret [dreams|” (43). Similarly,

a scholar who translated Ibn Sirin’s dream manual into English warns toward the end of his introduction, “It is necessary here to state that if people depend solely on books to explain their dream, they will certainly fail to understand all the meanings. Thus, it is of great importance to seek a knowledgeable dream interpreter, or a wise Shaikh who is familiar with

the fundamentals of dream interpretation, their inner and outer meanings” (Akili 1992, xl).

Even self-help booklets might thus ultimately direct their readers to dream experts; their resemblance to dictionaries is misleading. At times, furthermore, the sheer abundance of self-help resources ironically makes experts even more indispensable. A twenty-three-year-old housewife from Bahrain, who saw all of her front teeth fall out in a dream, wrote to Shaykh Nabil, “I’m now very confused about [this dream’s| interpretation based on what I have read about it on the Internet. | found a number of interpreta-

tions for it, and | don’t know which one is the correct interpretation for my dream.” After shopping around for an interpretation and becoming confused by the overabundance of interpretive voices, dreamers might be even more likely to seek expert advice. They can do so precisely because dream experts like Shaykh Nabil have made their skills available to a new generation of dreamers, who get their dreams interpreted via a mouse click or phone call. Like the many Muslim preachers whose tape-recorded sermons circulate in Cairo and beyond, Shaykh Nabil uses modern technologies to expand his interpretive realm beyond the walis of Ibn Sirin’s shrine,

212 / Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities stretching and ultimately undermining the imperative that dreams should be interpreted exclusively face-to-face. In the shrine, the phone rings on average every hour or so with someone on the line eager to describe a dream. While according to classical texts an interpreter should interpret no dream without knowing to whom it belongs, Shaykh Nabil argues that hearing people’s voices enables a form of firdsa, divinely inspired insight, and that the voice makes the dreamer at least partially present. Shaykh Sayyid (one of Shaykh Nabil’s colleagues, who made a brief appearance in chapter 2) agrees that interpreting dreams on the phone is legitimate because today it is often impossible for dreamer and interpreter to meet in person, even though seeing the dreamer is preferable. Even while talking on the phone, one can still take the dreamer’s personality into account based on what she says and how she says it. Written dreams are a different matter. Shaykh Sayyid holds that firdsa can be effective only if a dream is in the dreamer’s own handwriting, not if it is printed.© Shaykh Nabil’s work online, which involves replying to dreams that were posted on a Web site, would therefore be questionable in Shaykh Sayyid’s eyes. Typing a dream on a computer keyboard severs the immediate link between dream and dreamer.

Dreamers in Cyberspace In spite and because of the alienations that result from interpreting dreams online, Shaykh Nabil defended his work for the Web site during one of our

conversations: “Of course it’s best when the dreamer sits right in front of me, and I can read his personality. But when someone in Germany needs help, they can’t come to me, and so they ask me over the Internet. They give me many details. | can’t give them an interpretation that’s 100 percent [adequate or correct], but at least it’s something.” “Many details” might be a slight exaggeration, but the dreamers who post their dreams online indeed do not remain fully anonymous. Alongside their dreams, they are asked to provide on the Web site their name, age, profession, and address (usually only the country is mentioned). Of a sample of two hundred postings, forty-four were from Saudi Arabia, thirty-three from the United Arab Emirates, twenty-five from Egypt, and sixteen from Jordan. More singularly, dreams are sent from places such as Sweden or France, and the shaykh sometimes boasts that he interprets dreams “of the whole

world (ald mustawda al“Glam ka-kul).” Based on the information that the dreamers provide, it seems that more women than men send their dreams; and the age in my sample ranged from thirteen to sixty-nine, with the typical dreamers being students in their twenties. Other professions

Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities / 213 included engineer, teacher, employee, merchant, accountant, soccer trainer, pharmacist, soldier, owner of an Islamic bookstore, housewife, nurse, and computer programmer.

Besides filling in their name, age, profession, and country of origin, some dreamers include additional information within or immediately following the dream text. They might refer to their marital status or specify how many children they have, describe the circumstances under which the dream was seen (e.g., that it was an istikhdra dream or that it was seen during Ramadan), provide more personal background information that seems unrelated to the dream (“Please know that I’m currently going through a crisis in my studies”; “Please note that I’m both a student and an employee”), add information that diverges from the dream’s content (“I’m in reality neither married nor engaged”; “Please note that I don’t drive in reality”), or spell out the dream’s impact (“I felt calm when I woke up” “1 woke up scared”, “This dream bothers me very much”; “I’ve been depressed and afraid; please interpret the dream”). Generally, the dreamer’s interfer-

ence in the interpretive process is limited to the information that she puts forth within or alongside the dream. The dreamer then steps back and is subsequently confined to silence. In a few exceptional cases, dreamers attempt to make their way further into the interpretive process by saying what kind of interpretation is (not) desired. One posting on the Web site actively tried to preempt a potential! interpretation. A young university graduate from Kuwait had dreamed that her male cousin was combing her hair while her siblings were watching and laughing. Following her account of the dream she wrote, “Please know that my age is twenty-four, and his age is twenty, and his name is Ahmad. Don’t say [this dream means! marriage. I don’t expect this interpretation because this is something impossible for a number of reasons.” Indeed, Shaykh Nabil did not speak of marriage in his response but simply explained that combing symbolizes betterment (is/al) and an increase in beauty. One can only speculate whether the young woman, had she gone to see Shaykh Nabil in person, would have gotten involved in a longer conversation about marriage and about why this particular marriage was impossible in her eyes. Shaykh Nabil might then have offered advice that had less to do with the dream and more with the woman’s apparent preoccupation with Ahmad. Dream-tellings inside Ibn Sirin’s shrine often spill over into larger conversations, blurring the line between dream and waking states. In the cyber world, by contrast, the dreamer gets to say next to nothing besides the dream. When an ethical, guiding element figures in Shaykh Nabil’s cyber interpretations, it is more closely bound to the

214. +%/ Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities decontextualized dream than it is in the case of face-to-face encounters when he responds to both dream and dreamer. While the shaykh’s expertise remains indispensable, his cyber interpretations more closely resemble the process of looking up meanings in a dictionary of symbols. The dream is isolated, and the line between day and night is at least partially redrawn. The Interpreter in Cyberspace Shaykh Nabil is fully engaged in cyberspace, but he does not own a computer and he lives in a neighborhood that is not (yet) crowded with Internet catés. He does not directly access the dreamers’ information on the Web site. Instead, a journalist stops by the shrine on a weekly basis and drops

off about one hundred printouts of dream accounts. Shaykh Nabil then sits down on the floor inside the shrine, puts on his reading glasses, and writes responses on the lower halves of the pages, which later get picked up and posted online by the journalist. For a while Shaykh Nabil photocopied

his responses for me, and the more time I spent reading his cyber interpretations, the more | was left with the impression that they were rather standardized. Already the pages that the shaykh receives all look very similar: At the top of the page, they include as a heading the word fatawa in the Latin alphabet. Fatdwd is the plural of fatwa, which generally refers to a nonbinding legal ruling, but is better translated here as “inquiry” or “question.” Next on each page come the sender’s e-mail address, the Web site’s address, the date, and the subject, again in Latin letters, which reads ahiam (dreams). Then follows the dreamer’s age, profession, address, and finally her “question” (the word appears in English), followed by the dream account, written in Arabic letters and most often in a mix of classical anc colloquial Arabic. The lower half of the page leaves space for the shaykh’s handwritten response, which also always follows the same form. The first line reads, “Shaykh Nabil Muhammad Ibn Sirin the Egyptian says,” followed by a classification of the dream, and finally the interpretation. In the majority of cases, the interpretation is positive, and it is usually composed of two parts: a general interpretation (e.g., “this dream is a glad tiding of

a happy marriage”), and a more detailed decoding of key symbols (e.¢., “dress means marriage”). In the end Shaykh Nabil might close with a piece of advice, suggesting an increase in prayer or dhikr, or in the case of devil-induced dreams, encouraging the dreamer to seek refuge with God by reciting specific Qur’anic verses.

In cyberspace, the multilayered exchanges that occur in the shrine are reduced to standardized interpretations. Not only is the link between dream and dreamer severed, but that between interpretation and inter-

Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities / 215 preter is also. Both dream and interpretation are isolated from their places of origin. As Brinkley Messick notes with regard to Yemeni radio mutftis,

“whereas the old logocentric textual culture... sought the legitimating immediacy of a human presence to secure the authoritative transmission of knowledge, the new media intervene in a distancing and alienating manner.” Like the fatwas that are issued by radio muttis, Shaykh Nabil’s cyber interpretations are “removed from the nexus of immediate human contact” (1996, 320). This does not mean, however, that Shaykh Nabil’s cyber interpretations occur in a vacuum, in empty cyberspace. Although the written dreams might float across multiple national borders, their interpretation still takes place within the physical confines of the shrine. Shaykh Nabil’s inspiration, which is very much tied to the baraka of Ibn Sirin’s shrine, is extended into the cyber world. Yet for the dreamers who read the responses on the Web site, the shaykh is largely absent. He is configured as “Shaykh Nabil Muhammad Ibn Sirin the Egyptian” and simply addressed as “Dear honored shaykh (hadrat al-shaykh al-fadil; Sidi al-shaykh).” Paradoxically, Shaykh Nabil is simultaneously reduced and promoted to a prototypical dream interpreter. Shaykh Nabil’s everyday interpretive work in the shrine can hardly be replaced by recourse to a dictionary of dream symbols or an online exchange. As described in chapter 2, visitors to the shrine often enter into almost therapeutic conversations, and much happens in the shrine on a nonverbal communicative level as well. Shaykh Nabil might order tea for his guests, place his hand on someone’s shoulder, or roll up his eyes to heaven and call upon God (ya rabb!). A cat might stroll into the shrine, and someone might walk by the shrine’s entrance and call out a greeting. On his not so talkative days, the shaykh might cut short a conversation, turn to face the mihrab, the prayer niche, and pray, staying in prostration for an extended period of time. Often the visitors do most of the talking while the shaykh listens, nods, and gives short, standard responses. Other times, he will engage the visitors in long conversations and address them in informal, overly familiar ways: “Sweetheart, listen to what I’m telling you! (Habibti, isma‘t kalami!).” While interpreting, the shaykh might ask about the dreamer’s background or use the skill of firdsa to look into the dreamer. Dictionaries or cyber exchanges fail to respond to the dreamer’s concrete life circumstances, and they fail to inform the reader how to gain access to a place in a hospital or how to find a job. They do not share coffee and shisha with their readers, and they cannot provide material assistance. In turn, instead of receiving financial support, the shaykh in cyberspace at best receives good wishes and prayers.’

216 / Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities The Internet has expanded Shaykh Nabil’s interpretive work, but it has simultaneously narrowed it. Dream talk, dream interpretations, and dream enactments, as | argued in earlier chapters, are centrally about exchanges. These multilayered exchanges are reduced to a simple questionand-answer format in cyberspace. Whereas dream interpretation inside Ibn

Sirin’s shrine is primarily an ethical practice, it is turned into a professionalized identity on the Web. This does not mean that mass mediations always and unambiguously disenchant Egypt’s dream-worlds, or that they erase the dream’s social and ethical dimensions. As I suggested above, in Shaykh Qusi’s community, the mediatic and the visionary coexist rather smoothly and in many ways enhance each other. The difference between Shaykh Qusi’s and Shaykh Nabil’s media employments might have less to do with the media forms themselves and more with the ways that access to different media and proficiency in them are distributed along the lines of class and education status. The Internet is not inherently disenchanting, and one could easily imagine an Internet chat room in which Shaykh Nabil could interact with dreamers in ways that resemble more closely the ethical interchanges in the shrine and less the bureaucratic question-andanswer format of the Web site. Furthermore, as I suggest next, while cyber interpretations are in many ways standardized, the dream-image itself is not unambiguously flattened in the age of mass mediation. RECYCLED IMAGES “Tf you have a TV,” Shaykh Hanati once said to me, “then the world is open to you. You see the news and so on. Ail of that affects your dreams.” Images

from the news and from movies find their way into dreams. Dreams, in turn, are told on television programs and represented in movies.® Besides widening the space for dream-tellings and dream interpretations, the new media sometimes also allow for the reproduction of dreams. You might recall Marwa from chapter 1, who used to watch Shaykh Hanafi’s dream program and told me that she has redreamed dreams that he interpreted on the show. Dreams circulate from, into, and through media worlds. To highlight what is particular about the circulation of dream-images that are understood, narrated, and interpreted from within a Muslim episteme, it is helpful to sketch some differences between the semiotic modalities at work in Coptic and Muslim dream and vision accounts.

Consider the case of Nada, an unmarried Coptic woman in her midthirties who works at Saint Mark’s Cathedral in ‘Abbassiya, the patriarchal seat in Cairo. A family friend had introduced us, and I spent a few

Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities —/ 217 afternoons with Nada, chatting, drinking tea, and strolling through the church grounds. Nada told me that she feels very close to the Virgin and the Christian saints, and during one of my visits, she asked me whether | had ever seen the Virgin. No, and you?

“One time I saw her,” Nada responded and proceeded to tell me her dream of the Virgin: I saw her in my dream (/ilm). | have a diploma in commerce. My second year in college we had a very hard exam, a theoretical exam. I didn’t feel prepared and | was worried. | was studying at a desk where Thad put a picture of the Virgin under the glass. I was very tired, and I put my head down on the desk and fell asleep. I saw the Virgin sitting in the first row in a church, in all her beauty. She looked like in the pictures of the apparition. Do you know them? She ignored me, but then I turned to her and | asked her, “Will I pass?” And she did this [Nada nods]. And indeed, I passed.

Nada has seen the Virgin only once, yet, as is obvious from her dream account, she has seen numerous representations of the Virgin, and she was seeing her image almost every day at the time the dream came to her. Her daily encounter with the Virgin relied not on an inner, spiritual gaze but on her optical perception of the picture that she had stuck under the glass protecting her desk. Before Nada spotted the Virgin in her dream, she literally put her head down on the desk. Maybe it came to rest right on top of the image, allowing for an almost immediate physical contact—a contact that then metamorphosed into an imaginary encounter.

[ never visited Nada in her home and never saw the picture on her desk. Yet most probably it resembles the images representing the Marian apparitions that circulate around Egypt. In Nada’s account, the picture on her desk, the Virgin’s appearance in the dream, and the apparition pictures merge rather effortlessly into a stream of circulating representations. When the Virgin appeared in Zaytoun in the late 1960s and in Shubra in the late 1980s, she was seen as a white figure of light, sometimes holding Jesus in her arms, sometimes accompanied by white pigeons circling over the church? Newspaper reports following the Zaytoun apparition often included photographs and noted that there was orange or pale blue light and a smell of incense. When I asked a Coptic priest about the nature of the apparition (tagalli}, he said that the Virgin appeared “as a spirit, as a hazy picture, a spiritual being.” This hazy image was translated into more concrete images in paintings, which generally depict the Virgin in a form that is adapted from the Medallion of the Miraculous Mary. The latter came

218 / Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities to Egypt from France, where it goes back to a vision that Sister Catherine Labouré saw in Paris in 1830, in which the Virgin appeared without the Christ child, instead offering the grace of God with her hands. A billion medals with the image were distributed when Labouré died, and according to Otto Meinardus (2002, 9), some of them undoubtedly reached Egypt, where they dislodged popular traditional images created by eighteenthand nineteenth-century Coptic iconographers. Copies of the image on the medallion can be tound in almost all Coptic churches. As Nada’s account reminds us, the Virgin is represented not only on

icons and medallions but also travels in the form of mass-reproduced images in various sizes that can be carried around in wallets, hung on the wall, or, in Nada’s case, stuck under the glass on a desk. Mass-reproduced

images make the Virgin omnipresent in churches, homes, stores, and books, on clocks and other commodities, and sometimes even on bodies in the form of tattoos. Unlike Walter Benjamin’s scenario (1968c), the image’s aura here does not seem to fade in its mass reproduction—precisely because images of saints and the Virgin are understood not as works of art but as living images.!° Such icons or images have a certain power, or baraka, in their material form. As such they are touched and kissed just like relics,

and sometimes a healing oil drops from them. In neighborhoods with large Coptic populations, apparition-images can also be seen on walls and suspended between buildings in alleys. They are a substitute, a token that reminds of the real apparition. The classical apparition-image, following a circular logic, is furthermore used to represent other visions and apparitions, such as those seen by Christian saints who are said to have been in regular visionary contact with the Virgin. The same image travels into the world of dreams. “She looked like in the pictures of the apparition,” said Nada while describing her dream-encounter. The Virgin’s image thus circulates from public apparitions to more individual visionary encounters, to commodities, to mass-reproduced images, and back into dreams. It weaves together ethereal, imaginary, and material, even commodified, realms. Dreams of the Prophet Muhammad and the Muslim saints can be redreamed endlessly as well, and occasionally dream images wander out of Muslim dream shows on television and into individual dream-worlds. Yet Muslim imaginaries ditfer from their Coptic counterparts both in terms of the power structures in which they are embedded and in terms of their semiotic logic. Public apparitions of the Virgin are officially confirmed or denounced by the Coptic Church authorities, who draw on reports of eyewitnesses (shuhad@ al~‘ayn) and rely on committees sent to apparition sites. In the case of Zaytoun, the police searched a radius of twenty-four

Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities / 219 kilometers around the church to investigate whether the supposed apparition was the result of a laser projection. Muslim scholars, by contrast, might ridicule ordinary believers who claim to have seen the Prophet, yet dreams and visions are ultimately more effective in bypassing the authority of religious scholars than are public apparitions. There is no official institution that gets to decide which dream or vision was real or fake, which divinely inspired and which devilish. Additionally, the Virgin’s and the Christian saints’ visual omnipresence contrasts with the absence of visual representations of the Prophet Muhammad and his saintly descendants. In recent years, and especially since the Danish cartoon controversy in 2005, renewed attention has been devoted to the question of whether the Prophet can be visually represented.

A number of critics argued that what was repulsive about the Danish cartoons was not only their content but that the very act of representing the Prophet runs counter to Muslim sensibilities.’ Other scholars pointed out that Islam is not inherently iconoclastic: Shi‘ite Muslims have

been quite tolerant of pictorial representations throughout history, and there are also numerous examples of Sunni representations of the Prophet, which sometimes show him with his face covered and other times depict it uncovered. Despite these important objections, one would be hard pressed to find a visual representation of the Prophet in contemporary Egypt, let alone one that depicts his face. Whereas a dream of the Virgin has a visual

referent, the Prophet’s presence generally remains deferred, in dreams and in language. The place of images is filled by textual descriptions of the Prophet that are based on his companions’ reports. Whereas Nada placed

her head on an image of the Virgin and then dreamed of her, Samira, whose vision account | retold in chapter 3, was up late one night reading Shaykh Qusi’s hadra book. When she came to a section that praises the Prophet Muhammad, she placed the book on her face, and all of the sudden the page turned white and she saw a vision of the Prophet. In Nada’s case, an image merged into a visionary experience; in Samira’s case a fext did the same. Although my Muslim interlocutors have no pictorial representations of the Prophet or his companions on their walls or desks, for them, too, technologies of mass reproduction have transformed the relation between the visible and the invisible. Photographs of contemporary Muslim saints circulate in the form of small images that are sold at mawlids and exchanged as presents. These also travel in believers’ cars and wallets and on their cell phone screens. Besides expanding the presence of the saintly—just as audio recordings expand the presence of the hadra and its baraka-—photographs

220 / Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities can furthermore help produce visible signs of the invisible. A dervish once explained to me the art of istiiddr, of making present the absent. He asked if I had ever been to Abii al-Hasan al-Shadhili’s shrine, which is located

in Upper Egypt and which, at that point, | had not yet visited. “Do you want me to bring al-Shadhili here?” the dervish continued. “How much would you pay?” He got out his wallet and took out a smal! photograph of al-Shadhili’s shrine. Implied in the dervish’s half-joking performance of istihddr is the notion that the saint, the shrine, and the photograph are linked through a chain of signifiers that not only represent but also partake in what they represent. While only the mosque is visible in the photograph, its image evokes the baraka that emanates from the saintly presence inside the shrine. By way of bringing al-Shadhili to where I was,

to Cairo, to the coffee shop in which we were sitting, the dervish’s act of istihddr performed a work similar to what a dream-vision could have done. Although he was not ail that serious about his performance, it hints at something that the art of istiiddr, dream-visions, and photographs all have in common-—all three of them complicate conventional notions of presence.

Miraculous Photographs In nineteenth-century Europe, photography quickly became associated with spiritual and occult phenomena, as early daguerreotypes occasionally portrayed figures next to the person sitting for a portrait and this was generally interpreted as the spirit of a deceased person. The resulting “spirit photographs” played an important role in European spiritualism and indirectly also came to offer a justification for Muslim authors who drew on spiritualists’ writings to counter Salati criticisms raised against their beliefs concerning the afterlife (Smith and Haddad 2002, 101). By making present the absent and making visible the invisible, photographs can serve as evidence. Thanks to their ability to capture fleeting moments, to zoom in on specitic signs, to circulate (and also, of course, with the help of computer programs such as Photoshop), they enable the believer to see, share, or even create what is otherwise invisible, be it ghosts, spirits, or divine signs. Photographs are particularly effective as evidence because of their indexical promise. They seem to prove that something was in front

of the camera lens at the moment the shutter was released, even if the photographer’s eye was unable to perceive it. One instance of such photographic evidence of the Divine can be found in the mosque of the Prophet’s companion ‘Ugba Ibn ‘Amir in Cairo’s City

of the Dead. When I visited the mosque, a poster caught my eye; it fea-

Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities / 221 tures a somewhat blurry photograph of trees in a German forest that seem

to form letters, partly through the shape of their branches and partly through the reflection of the light. The letters read la land illa Allah Muhammadun rastil Allah (There is no god but God, and Muhammad is God’s Prophet). The trees pronounce the shaldida, the Muslim proclamation of faith. The caption underneath the photograph explains that Europe is a place of infidelity (kufr) but that a number of people, after seeing the writing on the trees, immediately “returned to the religion of their natural predisposition (din al-fitra},” to Islam. The caption adds that the German

government fenced in the trees, so the writing can no longer be seen. Thus, presumably, the invisible miraculously became visible on the trees, subsequently was obscured from view by the German government, and finally became visible again when displayed on a mosque’s wall in Cairo in the form of a poster. The photograph of the pious German trees had an afterlife outside this particular mosque as well. | came across it again in at least two different contexts. One was an academic article on religious signposts by Gregory

Starrett (1995), in which he describes seeing a similar poster at one of Cairo’s many juice stands. Starrett provocatively suggests that the literal omnipresence of religious signs in Cairo might be creating a need for more

signs, which in turn transform Egypt’s public sphere by functioning as a continual “advertisement for God.” “Practically, if not ontologically,” writes Starrett, “God is omnipresent in Egypt” (12). The other context was an article about “divine signs” in the Egyptian weekly magazine Riiz alYiisuf, an article that exposes the image as digitally tabricated. The author of the article complains, “Islam urges us to science, thought, and respect for the mind, but we busy ourselves with the presence of the name of God on an egg or a watermelon!” He criticizes those who come to the editorial office with supposedly miraculous signs, calling the belief in such signs superstitious and backward. At the same time, the article is accompanied by a photograph of a piece of bread with letters that form the Arabic word

Allah, and the subheading reads, “A natural picture of a piece of bread on which the name of God is written without any human interference.” Ironically, in spite of the article’s critical intention, the unrepresentable enters into mass circulation by way of the reprinted photograph. While Muslim miracles are generally comprised of letters and words instead of images, the phenomenon of the Divine revealing itself on not necessarily sacred surfaces is something that contemporary Muslim miracles share with their Catholic counterparts. Paolo Apolito observes that the Virgin these days does not necessarily appear inside churches or in the

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sky; rather, the places where people see her are “windows, doors, chimneys, sidewalks, floors, walls, pieces of furniture, plates, glasses, bathrooms, par-

lors, bedrooms, hospitals, shops, garages, soccer fields, streetlights, car dashboards, puddles, or even, still quite untraditional, plates of spaghetti, tortillas, buns, cakes, pastries, pizzas, pieces of fruit, and quite frequently, rose petals, BandAids, and finally television screens, videotapes, and an

Virtual Realities, Vistonary Realities / 223 indescribable array of photographs, obtained in every imaginable manner” (2005, 5of.).

Unlike the Virgin, the Prophet is rarely collectively sighted. The exceptions comprise a few rare historical moments, for instance in 1973 when Egyptian soldiers were crossing the Suez Canal and saw the Prophet and angels in the sky above them (Hoffman 1997), as well as incidents reported by spiritual communities such as Shaykh Qusi’s group.” Apart from such exceptions, when the Prophet appears to a larger audience, it is generally in the form of his name, written in Arabic letters. Yet the list of surfaces on which his name appears resembles those enumerated by Apolito. One only has to type “Muslim miracles” into an Internet search engine to be swamped with stories and images of God’s or Muhammad’s name becoming visible in the sky, in ice, clouds, fields, the sea, plants, melons, tomatoes, a fish’s belly, a honeycomb, quartz rocks, or trees. Again, just as text takes the place of an image in triggering Muslim dream or vision experiences, collective visions tend to take the form of images in Coptic contexts and of text in Muslim ones. In both cases the resulting apparition can be captured and circulated by way of photographs. At times, photographs not only preserve and circulate the miraculous,

the camera might also see more than the person taking the picture—a phenomenon that Walter Benjamin referred to as the camera’s “optical unconscious” (1999b, 512). At a Marian apparition site at the Flushing Meadows—Corona Park in Queens, New York, thousands of Catholic pilgrims

have taken pictures of the sky because they know that their “Polaroids from heaven” will reveal what their eyes are unable to see (Wojcik 1996). Whereas rationalists explain the streaks and swirls of light on the pilgrims’ pictures as resulting from double and long handheld exposures, publications distributed by the organization that maintains the site explain how to decipher the allegorical and apocalyptic symbols on the miracle photos. The idea is that since the eye is not necessarily the most reliable organ, the camera’s gaze might be more attuned to the (in)visible than is that of the photographer.

Even | once took a picture of a divine sign without seeing it. It was Ramadan, and I was breaking fast with Shaykh Qusi’s group when one of the younger women pulled out her camera-equipped cell phone and took

a picture of the sky right after sunset. Turning up my gaze and finding immense beauty in the colors of the sky, I grabbed my camera and followed

suit. Later, | overheard her telling the shaykh that she had seen the word Allah written in the sky and had taken a picture of it. So had I, too, taken a picture of God’s name? When I looked at my photograph later on, I was

224 / Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities somewnat disappointed to discover that I did not see anything but the sky and the clouds. Just like the pilgrims in Queens who need to be instructed in how to read their photographs, maybe I, too, would need to learn how to read my picture in a particular way for its divine signs to come to the fore. Because | remain hard-of-sight and because many Egyptians are so as well, the media have become crucial tor those who can see divine signs— those whose inner gaze is more attuned to (in)visible presences. Besides capturing divine signs in spite of the photographer’s blindness, the media also offer a new language tor narrating dream-visions or waking visions to those who, like me, are blind. METAPHORS

Friday sermons in Egypt (especially the particularily loud ones) tend to bother the sensibilities of modern, liberal listeners. They are associated with Islamism and marked as backward and antimodern. Yet as Charles Hirschkind shows, contemporary sermons are not antimodern or left over from premodern times; in many ways, they rely on modern technologies. Not only are they broadcast over enormous loudspeakers and on television or circulated on tapes, but media technologies have also affected the content of sermons. Hirschkind beautifully describes how an Egyptian preacher, Shaykh Kishk, draws on cinematic visualizing techniques within his sermons; how he uses the narrative voice of a television news reporter; how he employs the sensory experiences of suspense and horror that are usually associated with cinematic entertainment; and how he zooms in and out of the narrative (2006, 153~72).!* Shaykh Kishk borrows heavily from cinematic aesthetics.

While sermon narratives are reshaped in the wake of the experience of television and cinema, such a shift might be less noticeable in the case of dream-stories. After all, one might suspect that, both in Egypt and elsewhere, already before the new media age dream-stories trequently involved rapid cuts, zooming, and the interlacing of elements of surprise and horror. But while the dream-telling itself might not noticeably be altered, talk about dreams and visions certainly is. In describing the nature of dream-visions and waking visions, how they come into being, and how they are perceived and remembered, my interlocutors frequently drew on media analogies. For example, when I first met ‘Umar, he told me, “Shaykh Qusi| is an expert in visions. We all see visions. The shaykh has pushed

us to a point where we all see. | know people here who have to see the Prophet twice a day.... We see things; we see all al-bayt [the Prophet’s

Virtual Realities, Vistonary Realities / 225 family] and the Prophet. It’s like a virtual reality. It’s a second reality, but it’s real.” “Umar not only works on a project that constructs a virtual reality of Egypt, but in his eyes seeing the Prophet and his companions is itself “like a virtual reality.” Similar to al-khay4l, which in Sufi literatures

refers to both a mode of perception and a metaphysical space, virtualreality technologies enable a new mode of perception and at the same time constitute the spaces that are being perceived. Both virtual realities and dream-visions expand human perception and the scope of “reality.” Cyber realities and other new technologies thus not only have transformed structures of authority and modes of access to the sacred, they also provide novel tools for imagining, conceptualizing, narrating, and speaking about the imagination.

Among the technologies that my interlocutors evoke to explain the nature of non-optical sight are photographs, microscopes, telescopes, and X-rays. What these devices have in common is that they make visible what the eye cannot perceive on its own. Cameras arrest fleeting moments and

at times reveal what the photographer herself failed to see; microscopes expose organisms and objects too small for the human eye; telescopes reveal stars too distant to fall within the scope of vision; X-rays allow us to see otherwise concealed bones. Like dreams and visions, all these tools expand human sight and show us what we cannot ordinarily see. Film similarly offers possibilities for dream talk because dream-visions and movies have a number of things in common: they rupture time and space; they are predominantly conceptualized as visual experiences; they portray a reality different from the collectively shared, visible reality in which we live; and they can be recorded and replayed. A young woman who studies computer engineering in Cairo described her memory of a particular Prophet-dream by saying, “It’s like a film. It’s recorded.” The dream-vision’s filmlike quality explained, in this woman’s eyes, why she still remembers details even though years have passed since she was visited

by the Prophet. A member of Shaykh Qusi’s group who frequently sees al-Khidr in her visions told me that she sometimes wakes up feeling that al-Khidr has visited her, whereas other times she remembers the dreamvisions as if she had seen them “on a screen in the cinema.” A young artist explained the nature of dream-visions that later come true by saying, “It’s like having seen it before in a film.” Even fate itself was compared by a young Sufi to the rerun of a movie. Particular movies can serve as reference points as well. ‘Umar explained to me that Shaykh Qusi can see his followers regardless of their physical location and that he can see the future. He added in English, “It’s like that

226 / Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities movie in which a guy receives a newspaper a day in advance and knows everything that will happen.” At another time, ‘Umar commented on the great number of U.S. television serials that deal with spirits, ghosts, and the supernatural. He noted that while the “Americans” are clearly searching tor something, “We have all this; it’s not a film, it’s reality.”

A Qur’anic healer likened the spirits of the dead to TV images. He explained, “The spirits (arwdh, sing. rii/t) can travel, for example, from America to Germany. They are like TV images: they travel from sender to receiver, and we see them in front of us but they're not something you can touch.” Like TV images, spirits are present for this healer; they are real although they are not of a concrete material nature. The same healer revamped a traditional account according to which God permits two dream-angels to read from the Eternal Tablet in heaven; the angels then present the dreamer with a scroll on which the dream-vision is recorded and from which the dreamer’s inner eye can read. He explained to me how the angels bring down the dream-visions from heaven: “They don’t carry them down but they see them in heaven. The dream is like a movie. They

see it just like you see a film. Then they come down and tell you what they’ve seen.” Whether it be a scroll or a movie retold, in both accounts it is the angels who see and not the dreamer. Besides the angeis’ mediating role, the healer’s account evokes an additional element of mediation: the dream itself is “like a movie.” It is perhaps this likeness that has most drastically transformed dream discourses in the media age.

Affinities In addition to enriching our fields of perception and imagination, as Gilles Deleuze (1989) has argued, cinema and other technologies provide a wealth of metaphors for describing, imagining, and communicating various kinds of experiences.'° The affinity between mass media and religious experiences may not be surprising because the latter themselves quite often involve practices of mediation, which attempt to render present the transcendental. Modern technologies might not be concerned with the transcendental but they, too, mediate and close distances by reconfiguring space and time. They allow for a seemingly unprecedented engagement with alterity by bringing the strange, the foreign, the Other into one’s living room, and they rupture the empiricist bias according to which one is to believe only what one has seen. As Jenny Slatman puts it, “as a visual medium, television asks us to believe in something that we have not seen with our own eyes. Thus, it obscures the apparently clear-cut distinction between faith and seeing, a distinction that has thoroughly dominated our tradition” (2001, 216).

Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities / 227 One reason my interlocutors frequently resort to media analogies is that the texture of dream-visions is hard to grasp for people who have never experienced seeing the Prophet or the saints. By contrast, probably everyone in Egypt today knows what it is like to watch a movie or use a cell phone. This explains in part why my interlocutors talk about television, movies, phones, and screens when talking about their dreamvisions. Yet significantly, the affinity between technology and visions is not merely related to a similarity in texture and effect. Often a metaphysical argument underlies these analogies as well, as, for instance, in Shaykh

Mustata’s account of the miracle (kardma) story of Sariya and Caliph ‘Umar Ibn al-Khattab—a story frequently told by my interlocutors when explaining the nature of spiritual sight. As the story goes, Sariya was sent out to Persia as the head of a military campaign. ‘Umar Ibn al-Khattab was giving a Friday sermon in Mecca and suddenly, completely out of context, exclaimed, “O Sariya, the mountain!” before completing his sermon. The people were confused and asked ‘Umar for an explanation. He said that he suddenly saw the battlefield and realized that Sdriya’s enemies were going to attack from behind the mountain. Because Sariya heard ‘Umar, he was able to defeat his enemies. ‘Umar did not by nature have eyes strong enough or a voice powerful enough to bridge the distance between Mecca and Persia, nor was Sariya’s hearing normally this refined. Rather, Shaykh Mustata explained, it was God who temporarily empowered ‘Umar’s vision and voice, as well as Sariya’s hearing. He continued, “We should not find this story strange. Why should it be strange? Think about the Internet and the [satellite] dish. Now you can

know in one second what is happening in a different part of the world. Why should we be able to do this with our inventions, and not God?” What

technology is capable of, Shaykh Mustata implies, God can do as well. Put differently, even our technological inventions are ultimately nothing but God’s will. “Look,” Shaykh Mustafa suggested on another occasion, “Today in the age of Internet, dish, and airplanes we can know in one second what is happening in different parts of the world, and we can travel quickly from Mecca to Jerusalem. Do you reaily think God wouldn’t be able to do what technology has enabled us to do?” Using similar examples, Martin Heidegger pointed out in a lecture in 1939 that airplanes annihilate great distances and that a “random flick of the hand” ona radio can set before us “foreign and remote worlds in their everydayness” (1977, 135). Figuring as quintessentially modern and inherently nonmetaphysical in Heidegger’s lecture, technological inventions in Shaykh Mustafa’s view can enhance our understanding of God’s workings

228 / Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities in the world. Because we are intimately familiar with the ways in which phones, Web cams, and airplanes enable us to cross great distances in the blink of a moment, we should not be surprised if God grants believers knowledge of things occurring miles away, or if saints transport themselves, with God's help, from Cairo to Mecca in a matter of seconds. As de Vries would put it, there is a “structural resemblance between .. . special

effects and the miraculous” (2001, 33). All that modern technology has enabled and much more, Shaykh Mustafa insists, lies within the realm of possibility for those who have reached a high spiritual state, those favored by God. The era of the mass media—an era of higher clairvoyance (shafdfiyya), as an upper-middle-class relative of mine described it—has made possible a reimagining of the imagination. This does not mean that the mass media will always necessarily lead to a better understanding of what dream-visions are all about. Modern technologies do not magically free Egyptians’ imaginations and reveal to them what a vision “really” is. Rather, the metaphors that are used might also place new limitations on the ways in which visions are conceptualized.'° For instance, while there is a certain affinity between tele-vision and dream-vision, one difference lies precisely in the tele, which means “distant” in Greek. Television seemingly brings the world into your living room, just as dream-visions or waking visions bring the Prophet into the believer’s home. Yet the prefabricated television image always remains distant, as the viewer knows that what she is seeing on the screen really occurs (or rather: occurred) elsewhere. It seems possible that in the long run, conceptualizations of the dream-vision as analogous to television might alter understandings of what kind of presence the dream-vision enables.

The same holds true for the relationship that is often suggested between dream-visions and screens, be they computer screens, screens in the movie theater, or television screens. A prolific yet somewhat eccentric dreamer announced to me that one day in the future we will all be walking around

with screens (shdshdt) in front of our eyes, and that on these screens we will see the Real (al-laqq) instead of our material surroundings. The notion of always looking at a screen is troubling, to me at least, in part because it recalls George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Additionally, as Samuel Weber points out, a screen does not produce simple, straighttorward presence; instead, it always enables three effects: “First, it serves as a screen which allows distant vision to be watched. Second, it screens, in the sense of selecting or filtering, the vision that is watched. And finally, it serves as a screen in the sense of standing between the viewer and the

Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities / 229 viewed” (1996, 1221.). The screen makes present, but it also separates. It creates both closeness and distance. Thinking of dreams and visions as movielike or as occurring on a screen might then ultimately render these states something to be looked at, to be watched, an object more than an immediate experience. While media analogies and metaphors can conceal as much as they reveal, |am here more interested in openings than in closings. For many of my interlocutors, televised, cellular, and virtual realities share striking characteristics with dream and waking visions. They problematize the scope of reality, and they enable the imagining of broader and more diffuse forms of belonging. Because my interlocutors are invested in communities that are not limited to physical encounters but that also encompass the dead and (in)visible beings, it is not surprising that they are also interested in media forms that in some ways exceed the limitations of ordinary space and time. Both the Internet and the dream-vision gesture toward broader imagined communities—ones that exceed the borders of the nation-state, the limits of the visible, and the lines between the living and the dead. CONCLUSION

In his study of Catholic visions and the Internet, Paolo Apolito (2005) provocatively argues that the Web might be bringing about a radical transformation of visionary culture and, with it, of Catholicism itself. While previously only charismatics, saints, or particularly worshipful or humble

individuals were blessed with glimpses of the Divine, today all that is needed is a camera or the Internet. The technologization of the visionary and the wondrous, in Apolito’s view, shifts the focus from the gift of a direct relationship with the Divine to that of technical structures and tools. Could the same be said for Muslim dreams and visions?

One central difference between the Catholic contexts described by Apolito and contemporary Muslim dreams and visions is related to the status of the image. The Virgin is represented on paintings, cups, stickers, and tattoos, and as such she might be more likely to appear on a computer screen or on the wall of a hospital than would the Prophet Muhammad, who tends to retreat into unrepresentability and who appears in dreamvisions more frequently than he does in public spaces. The Prophet can

be dreamed of, but his image cannot as easily be mass-reproduced. At the same time, in Muslim contexts, too, the spaces for dream-tellings, structures of authority, modes of interpretation, and understandings of reality have been transformed through the mass media. Although the art

230 / Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities of dream interpretation has partially been standardized through its mass mediations, the charismatic, visionary, and miraculous have by no means been erased by the technological. By destabilizing the very concept of reality, modern technologies have transformed imaginings of the imagination itself. Like dreams, media technologies can raise questions about the trustworthiness of the senses, potentially calling for a new valuation of the imaginary. I recall entering a small grocery store in Cairo on the day Saddam Hussein was captured in December 2003. There he was on the TV screen, with his unruly beard, being examined by doctors who were pointing a flashlight into his mouth. The people in the store were staring at the screen in disbelief. The following day | went to see Shaykh Nabil, and a woman entered the shrine and began talking about Saddam Hussein’s arrest. She reported, “They got him and they showed his image on TV from before and trom now. It’s him!” Shaykh Nabil interrupted her: “Do you believe every-

thing? The films are simply going to increase (wa hataktar al-aflém).” Although Shaykh Nabil is most probably not familiar with postmodern theory or with Baudrillard’s suggestion (1995, 13) that Disneyland’s main

function is to make us believe that the rest of America is real and not merely of the order of simulation, he suggests that it’s all just a show that is being put up. It’s all just a film. Those who trust the visible, al-zahir, are easily misled. It is the invisible where truth is to be found. What we commonty call reality, he explained to me once, is really no more “real” than our dream-visions, and it is just as much in need of interpretation (tafsir). Seen this way, the media, like dream-visions, have the potential to turn upside down taken-for-granted orders of reality. Virtual realities such as the Eternal Egypt project are not unreal, yet they are not material either as it is traditionally understood within empiricist paradigms. Like cyber worlds, the dream-worlds that my interlocutors inhabit allow for ways of connecting to others that exceed the possibilities of physical, immediate contact. The intersections between media technologies and dream-visions thus call for a broadened understanding of the imagination and, with it, a broadened understanding of imagined communities. Just as talking to someone on the phone who lives on a different continent or chatting with someone online—-a person whom one has never met face-to-face before— can explode pretechnological notions of human communities, so dreams expand the realms of meaningful relationships.

I think ‘Umar understood from the beginning that media technologies have much in common with the barzakh, dream-visions, and the imagination. | didn’t understand it at first, which is why | was disappointed

Virtual Realities, Visionary Realities / 231 when, instead of taking me to a mosque, saint shrine, or some other more markedly religious place, ‘Umar took me to a high-tech screening room. It was my own narrow view that prevented me from considering how media technologies might not only standardize dream-tellings, but also expand visions and other religious experiences. They do so not simply in the sense that a large part of dream talk and dream interpretation today takes place in the cyber world, over the phone, on TV, or in magazines, but also, and more tellingly, because media technologies can allow my interlocutors (and us) to think and speak differently about dreams and visions. What arises at the intersection between dream-medium and mass media might then ultimately be a better understanding of the ethics of the imagination that I have been tracing throughout this book—an ethics that is not just about visible Others but encompasses much broader imaginary communities, which include the dead, the saints, the Prophet, and the Divine.

Afterword On the Politics of Dreaming The history of the dream remains to be written, and opening up a perspective on this subject would mean decisively overcoming the superstitious belief in natural necessity by means of historical illumination. Dreaming has a share in history. The statistics on dreaming would stretch beyond the pleasures of the anecdotal landscape into the barrenness of a battlefield. Dreams have started wars, and wars, from the very earliest times, have determined the propriety and impropriety—indeed, the range—of dreams. WALTER BENTAMIN

It was March 2003 and my third month of fieldwork when an article from The Independent reached me via e-mail one morning. Its title: “Baghdad Is a City Sleepwalking to War.” Its first sentence: “For Baghdad, it is night number 1,001, the very last few hours of fantasy.” Its author: no less than Robert Fisk, a well-known journalist often praised for his balanced and informative reports on the Middle East. It was no secret that Baghdad was about to be bombed heavily, although it was less predictable that it would fall under U.S. control less than one month later. Yet there was something else that preoccupied me after reading the article. It was the article’s title

that left me wondering, once again, about the political predicaments of my project. Apparently the imagery could still effectively be evoked that the “Orient” is stuck in a realm of fantasy, dreaming, sleepwalking— and waiting to be awakened?—-an imagery directly related to a colonial rhetoric that posits day against night, (en)light(enment) against darkness, us against them. Was my project unintentionally reconfirming the stereotypical divide between a rational West and an irrational East? Wasn’t this a particularly bad time for writing about “Muslim imaginations”? When I began my fieldwork, European and North American media channels had busily been constructing and recycling images of fanatical, screaming, flag-burning, and quintessentially irrational Muslims, images that draw on or that echo Orientalist tropes of the “Arab mind”—a mind incapable of abstract, analytical thought; a mind easily swayed by emotions; a mind virtually stuck in the world of dreams and fantasies. In light of these images, would it not 232

On the Politics of Dreaming = / 233 be better, as a countermeasure, to give the stage entirely to thinkers who emphasize the enlightened and enlightening aspects of Islam? Troubled by the image of a sleepwalking Baghdad, I had to also think back to those who had asked me soon after my arrival in Cairo how | expected Egyptians to talk to me about dreams while they were worried about the immanent attack on Iraq and about how to get food on the table. The prospect, unfolding, and aftermath of the Iraq War weighed heavily on my fieldwork from beginning to end and often made me wonder whether war does not erase the dreaminess of dreams. Why should the imagination matter in an age when even bombs are “smart”—-an age when drones reconfigure space and time just as much as dream-visions or the Internet do? I began my journey into Egypt’s dream landscapes with similar questions and, with my ethnographic material as a backdrop, I want to address once more both the concern that my project might be politically irrelevant and the flip side, that it is politically suspect. In response to these two concerns, | propose that a reimagining of the imagination—an engagement with other concepts and practices of the imagination—is not only relevant but also necessary. This assertion grew out of my fieldwork and out of my conversations with many dreamers and with tour shaykhs in particular: Shaykh Nabil, the guardian of Ibn Sirin’s shrine; Shaykh Qusi, a charismatic spiritual leader; Shaykh Mustafa, the imam of a Sufi mosque; and Shaykh Hanati, an Azharite dream interpreter whose dream program was banned from Egyptian national television. Drawing on what these shaykhs and dreamers shared with me, I traced the dream’s multiple roles, effects, and contestations in Egyptians’ everyday lives. Dreams certainly do not erase the gravity of war, poverty, violence, and political oppression. But reading them through universalizing paradigms that equate all imaginations with false consciousness or hallucinatory projections is itself a violent act that overlooks the dream-vision’s ethical and political dimensions. These dimensions arise from the dream-vision’s interrelationality— that is to say, its ability to create and affirm communities encompassing not only living human beings, but also the spirits of the dead, the saints, the Prophet, and the Divine. The imagination in this context is not simply a sphere of human fantasies; rather, it is an actual realm that connects dreamers to multiple Others, as well as the faculty through which these Others are perceived. Highlighting the dreamer’s embeddedness in larger realities and larger communities, al-khaydl enables a form of being in the world that is foreclosed by rational, abstract thought. Instead of aiming for autonomy, al-khaydl embraces in-betweenness. Instead of prioritizing the visible here-and-now, it ties believers to multiple pasts and futures.

234 / Afterword The dream-stories that I have retold offer insight into a politics and ethics of everyday life that easily elude empiricist observers and disenchanted Egyptians, including those who are both. WHERE DREAMS MATTER

Although my ethnographic materials deal primarily with Egypt, the line between a supposedly rational West and a supposedly irrational or viscerally driven Muslim world can easily be problematized. We could think here of Barack Obama's campaign of hope, or George W. Bush's claims to having been called upon by God to run for president and to strike al-Qaida, or of the thousands of North Americans who have claimed to be hearing God’s

voice or to be seeing the Virgin.’ Moreover, far from naively embracing all dreams, Egyptians continually debate the dream’s status, nature, and promise. The dreamers and dream interpreters in this ethnography do not speak about dreams outside of a secular, rationalist, modernist paradigm but in dialogue with it. Dreams in Egypt are not a remnant from the past; they are modern, contested, prophetic, and political all at once. While Muslim reformers generally concede the prophetic potential of dream-visions, they have long been suspicious of the notion that dreams can offer insight into the future or provide a channe! of communication. Foreclosing the barzakh, the in-between space in which the living and the dead can meet, reformers espouse a shift to a this-worldly ethics. They are joined in their skepticism by state officials, liberal journalists, and psychologists, who all call into question the religious, prophetic, and dialogical potential of dreaming—the extent to which dreams do (and should) matter. Even those who believe in the possibility of gaining metaphysical insights by way of dreams are often skeptical of others’ dreams. You might

recall Shaykh Qusi ridiculing those who, without having reached a high spiritual state, insist that the Prophet visited them in their sleep and patted their knee. Dream talk is highly orthodox and highly contested, both at once. Coun-

tering certain aspects of reformist Islam and perpetuating others, since the 1970s the Islamic Revival has shifted the attention (back) to the space of death and the presence of the Divine. Although death and the afterlife can play very different roles—instilling fear in the context of sermons and allowing for often joyful reunions in the context of dreams—one might say that, together with the space of death, dream talk has reentered the public sphere and everyday discourses in Egypt. While in the 1950s supposedly no one spoke of the istiki@ra prayer through which believers seek a direct

On the Politics of Dreaming / 235 line of communication with God, today almost everyone I talked to had an istikhdara story to tell. The Islamic Revival has brought about an increase,

if not in religiously significant dreams, then at least in the talk of such dreams. Supposedly also no other period of Coptic history has been filled

with as many reports of extraordinary events as the second half of the twentieth century, so that we are today “flooded with” reports of private visions and apparitions, which once used to be quite rare (Meinardus 2002, 93, 96).

While this broad religious revival in Egypt is often understood as an effect of economic and political instability, I have repeatediy cautioned against such reductionist readings. Not only do some of the most prolific dreamers in this ethnography (Shaykh Qusi and his disciples) come from upper-class backgrounds, but a materialist paradigm also tends to obscure—or treat as merely reactionary—the dream ethics that are at work in Egyptians’ stories and their everyday lives. Instead of imposing readymade paradigms, my objective was to trace the implications of the dream’s return as it is understood, narrated, and enacted by my interlocutors.

HOW DREAMS MATTER “For years | wondered why dreams are often so dull when related,” William Burroughs once noted, “and this morning I find the answer, which is very

simple—like most answers, you have always known it: No context.... Like a stuffed animal set on the floor of a bank” (1995, 2). Ifa dream is just like a stuffed animal left behind without an explanation or a story, if it has nothing to say to anyone but the dreamer, if it is a completely asocial men-

tal product that “remains unintelligible to the subject himself and is for that reason totally uninteresting to other people” (Freud 1955, 179), then dreams can indeed be boring—and highly apolitical. By psychologizing the dream, we tend to disregard its material contexts, its potential as political

commentary, its ethical implications, its narrative and performative renderings, its evocative power, its multiple interpretations and effects, and its religious and epistemological significance. Yet once dreams are freed from the shackles that bind them to the dreamers’ unconscious, we are able to ask not only how politics are reshaping particular dream landscapes, but also how dreams might be shaping political landscapes.

Within secularized epistemes, dreams tend to be separated from the material world, the realm of matter and of mattering. When dreams traftic exclusively in the world of human desires, wishes, and worries, they have little ethical or political relevance. They are sealed off from, and do not

236 / Afterword affect, material conditions. Diverging from this verdict of irrelevance and from a Cartesian mind-body split, Walter Benjamin proposes that “dreaming has a share in history” (1996, 5). Dreams can matter; they can even start wars. Benjamin shatters the dream’s supposed innocence. The dream, he says, “waits secretly for the awakening” (1999a, 390).

Similarly concerned with the relation between dreams and history, Reinhart Koselleck (1989) has argued that historians should pay attention to dreams. Dreams are more akin to poetry than to history; they are what seems to be (Schein), not what is (Sein); they are res fictae and not res factae. So why should historians care? Countering the notion that the dream is by definition unreal and that it at best reveals the dreamer’s personal past, Koselleck argues that dreams can be outstanding historical sources as they move beyond the empirical to encompass the possible. While referring specifically to histories of the Holocaust, Koselleck’s essay raises larger

questions about the dream’s relation to time and reality. Dreams—or rather, dreamers’ accounts of dreams—can shift our attention from the present, the given, the observable, and redirect it to the ephemeral, the emerging, the possible. Dreams in the context of this ethnography furthermore implode the very distinction between res fictae and res factae, between poetry and history. They are not only what might be but also what is, albeit in a nontactual, nonobservable realm. Koselleck’s concept of the might be, Benjamin’s notion of awakening, and my interlocutors’ attention to prophetic dreams all suggest the dream’s entry into the present as a foreshadowing, a future anterior, a something that will have been. Considered through Benjamin’s or Koselleck’s dialogical model, the dream-vision counters—or ruptures—a secular temporality marked by the “steady onward clocking of homogeneous, empty time”

(Anderson 1991, 23). In insisting on a dialogical relationship between dreaming and material-political conditions, Benjamin, Koselleck, and my

interlocutors allow for prophetic temporalities to reconfigure the very notion of the real. Once more, | do not mean to imply that all Egyptians derive metaphysical insights or ethical guidance from their dreams. Yet I suggest that the kinds of dream-stories I have retold gesture beyond linear temporalities, self-contained subjectivities, and visible communities, and that ultimately

a different view of politics and ethics might arise from such stories. A number of dreams that | heard in Egypt had explicitly political content (most often concerning Iraq or Palestine). Other vision-stories described how invisible forces actively partake in wars. | was told, for instance, that angels and saints were collectively sighted among the Egyptians fighting in

On the Politics of Dreaming = / 237 Port Said in 1956, above the Egyptian soldiers crossing the Suez Canal in 1973, and alongside the Iraqis fighting in 2003. Similarly, many say that the Virgin appeared in Zaytoun in 1968 because the Egyptians could no longer go to Jerusalem after Egypt lost the war against Israel in 1967, so the Virgin visited them instead.? Collective visions are rare in Muslim contexts, but individual dreams can have direct political implications as well, for instance by inciting the dreamer to become politically involved. One dream-inspired

Muslim politician is Shaykh Ahmad al-Sabahi, who founded the small Egyptian party Hizb al-Umma because of a dream-vision he had seen.° While the party is not taken too seriously by most Egyptians I know, Shaykh Sabahi told me that he sends a message to President Mubarak every time he sees a dream of political significance. Others have run for a seat in parliament because a dream-vision inspired them to do so.* While the dreams and visions in these examples are political in the sense

that they concern the state, war, elections, and international relations, politics are not just about what governments say or states do. According to Hannah Arendt’s understanding, politics are also about the everyday activities, rituals, and beliefs of individuals, the condition of being with and toward Others. Many dreams that my interlocutors dream and narrate are political in this broader sense because, far from enclosing subjects within their innermost lite-world, they direct them toward the world and embed them in larger webs of reciprocity. They might result in particular actions, such as visits to cemeteries, pilgrimages, the giving of alms, or even conversions and the building of shrines. Whether the dreamer’s spirit leaves the body and mingles with the spirits of the dead, or the dreamer

is visited by the Prophet or the awliya, or a dream is taken to a dream interpreter, or the dream triggers actions in the dreamer’s waking life, many dream-stories in this ethnography exceed the autonomous subject in a number of ways. Dream-visions, then, carry ethical and political weight because they draw attention to the very conditions of interrelatedness, the in-between, and alterity. The prophetic potential of dream-visions is tied to this ethical quality. Exceeding both rationally acquired and passed-down forms of knowledge, dream-visions and waking visions are valued so highly because they come from an Elsewhere and offer insight into al-chayb, the metaphysical realm

of the Unknown. While some Egyptian psychologists argue that terms such as al-ghayb, “Elsewhere,” or the “unconscious” are only idioms or placeholders for the same unknown, different dream epistemes have different ethical implications and enable (or foreclose) different ways of being in the world. Since dream-visions are believed to originate outside

238 / Afterword the dreamer, such dreams can be compelling; they call for a response. Why people do what they do might therefore not always be explainable through recourse to the observable, the rational, or even the unconscious. The answer, rather, might lie in the imagination. Bypassing the laws of a linear temporality and causality, dream-visions are divine messages that can foreshadow or preenact the tuture. They are not only predictive but also evocative. Besides revealing emergent possibilities, dream-visions contribute to their actualization.

WHY THIS MATTERS My interlocutors’ dream-stories problematize taken-for-granted assumptions about the possible range and nature of sense experience, reality, personhood, and community. Through retelling some of their stories, I have aimed at unsettling and opening up what we take the imagination to be by placing it in dialogue with alternative models, particularly with models centered less on the autonomous subject. Instead of reducing experiences of invisible, imaginary realms to internal psychological processes and projections, | have argued that we should take seriously other understandings of the imagination, which might entail not only other ways of dreaming but also other ways of being in the world and of relating to others. My call for taking seriously my interiocutors’ dream discourses does not mean that | believe in the necessity (or even possibility) of representing Egyptian dream-stories from an exclusively emic point of view, that is, solely from within the underlying worldview. The heteroglossias that | have highlighted caution against the notion of a pure “dream culture,” as my interlocutors’ dream-stories are always already engaged with secular, rationalist, empiricist, and psychoanalytic concepts. Furthermore, instead of presenting my interlocutors’ stories as self-contained entities, | repeatedly made them speak to theoretical discussions that at first sight seem far removed. Examples are Judith Butler’s attempts to find an ethics that is not centered on the autonomous subject, Hannah Arendt’s understanding of politics as referring to everyday practices, Lacanian theories concerning the dialogical dimensions of subjectivity, or explorations of the imagination by the early Foucault. Instead of separating field data and theoretical paradigms, | have tried to highlight in what ways my interlocutors’ dreamstories speak within, speak to, resonate with, or complicate our theoretical and analytical horizons. A more nuanced understanding of other imaginations and their underlying ethics not only is relevant for appreciating unfamiliar dream-stories,

On the Politics of Dreaming / 239 but also has implications for the ways in which we see the world while awake. Drawing on a hadith, Sufis say that life is nothing but a long dream

from which one awakens at the moment of death. And does not “reality” itself need to be interpreted just like a dream, as Shaykh Nabil once said to me? What he was getting at, in my opinion, is a move away from the dichotomy that keeps the dream sealed off from waking life. A widened vision, one attuned to (in)visible realities, might then also invite us to reconsider our broader epistemological, political, and anthropological outlooks. Dream-visions tend to embrace ambiguities. When the Prophet appears in a dream, he can be both real and imagined, symbo! and symbol-

ized. A dream-vision can both originate in the dreamer and come from an Elsewhere. Saints and angels are (in)visible as opposed to being either visible or invisible. Diverging from objectivist modes of observation, my interlocutors’ stories imply an imagination that is not enclosed within an individual author-figure but instead creates a dialogical in-between space in which the visible and the invisible are intertwined. This in-betweenness

is related to the nature and origin of dream-visions, as well as to methods of interpretation, but I have also attempted to use it as an analytical mode through which to approach my material—not as something that is either real or imagined, either “traditional” or “modern,” either prophetic or wishful thinking, but frequently all at once. In line with the dreamvision’s relation to the barzakh, I emphasized ambiguity, in-betweenness, and openness.

At this particular historical juncture, I believe, thinking—or rather, imagining—one’s way beyond dichotomous distinctions between us/them,

real/imagined, subjective/objective, and either/or is not only an ethical and epistemological but also a political exercise. And an urgent one at that.

POSTSCRIPT

On 24 October 2008, while preparing a lecture on contemporary Sufism for an undergraduate class at the University of Toronto, I decided to show some pictures from Shaykh Qusi’s Web site. After clicking on the bookmark on my computer, | was confronted by the unexpected announcement that “Shaykh Qusi has passed into the realm of the Prophet.” Sidi had died during Ramadan. A feeling of regret: Why didn’t | go to Egypt last summer? Why hadn’t I been in touch during the past few weeks? Followed by a feeling of disappointment: The last time I had seen the shaykh, he had whispered into my ear that he had been seeing “very powerful things” and that he was going

240 / Afterword to tell me about them someday. “Secrets,” he added, and smiled. Not only was | never going to hear those secrets, but | was also never going to be able to give a copy of this book to Shaykh Qusi. Placing my book in his hands as a material token of my gratitude was a moment | had often fantasized about; it was also a moment | was often nervous about. What would he say? Had I misrepresented his group? Had I misread their dreams? Would the shaykh recognize himself? Would he be mad at me tor keeping “dreams” in the title? At some point he had asked me what the title of my book was going to be, and when I told him, he laughed and said, half in English, half in Arabic: “Dreams bardu?” Still “dreams”? Had I still not understood that what they see are not dreams but dream-visions?

I have missed my chance to give this book to Shaykh Qusi. Instead, I will be able to give a copy only to the shaykh’s followers, and maybe | will leave a copy in the mosque where the shaykh was buried.? I have also missed my chance to ask the shaykh all the questions that I never thought or dared to ask. Or have I? After learning of the shaykh’s passing, | tried calling some of his followers, and when | reached none, I e-mailed my condolences instead. One of them, Khaled, wrote back immediately, saying that they had not wanted to tell me the news until I was next in Egypt, that the shaykh’s passing was a disaster for all of them, but that they nevertheless hoped to “complete his mission.” Through their dream-visions, they have learned that the shaykh is not really dead, that he is still with them in many ways, and that he is closer than ever. God willing, Khaled concluded, | would see the shaykh in my own dreams after reading al-Fatiha betore going to sleep. | could then ask him anything I wanted. I still regret that I will never again be able to see the shaykh physically, to sit with him, talk with him, drink tea with him. At the same time I find Khaled’s e-mail both comforting and evocative. It reminded me that community, communication, and responsibility can exceed the line between the dead and the living. Minutes later, Khaled sent me a second e-mail, inviting me to sign up for a new Web site the group has launched, a site that contains entire folders with narratives of dream-visions that were seen after the shaykh’s passing. The Webmasters urge everyone to share their visions of the shaykh while warning that such experiences should not be recounted in the spirit of pride but in the spirit of sharing. Messages from the dead shaykh are intended for the entire community, which is connected both through these dream-visions and through the Web site. In the end, | am glad to know that in this way, regardless of my own dreams, | too will be able to stay in touch with the shaykh.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. In the Egyptian context, shisha (shisha) refers to water pipe. Generally, Egyptians smoke a mild-tasting tobacco, prepared with molasses and blended with flavors of fruits (mu‘assal). 2. The emergency laws have been in effect since the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in October 1981. Among other things, they grant the authorities the power to impose restrictions on the freedom of assembly anc to arrest and detain suspects indefinitely and without charge. 3. L use the term real neither in a theological nor in the Lacanian sense of “the Real” as referring to a prelinguistic state from which we are forever severed by our acquisition of language. | approach it rather from a Foucauldian point of view as that which epistemes construct as having the status of reality, as mattering. In some of my interlocutors’ utterances, “the Real (al-Hagg)” refers to God. 4. By “critical” I mean both crucial and of analytical value. For attempts to think through and beyond the question of whether critique can emerge only from the secular, see Is Critique Secular? with essays by Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood (2009). 5. In this book I contrast an open, interrelational understanding of the self with the liberal but also Cartesian notion of the autonomous, self-contained subject. I see the autonomous self as primarily a telos, an aspiration that figures in a particular axis of Western thought. Neither Freud’s nor Heidegger’s subject functions in this way, though even Freud evoked a similar telos when he insisted that “where id was, there ego shall be” (1933, 80). By calling the autonomous self an illusion I do not mean to imply that it is unreal; rather, | intend to highlight its social constructedness. 6. In the Qur’an the term awliyd@ appears in the verse “Oh, verily, they who are close to God (awliya@ Allah)—no fear need they have, and neither shall they grieve” (10:62). In Egypt the term most often refers to the Prophet's 2414

242 / Notes to Pages 3-6 descendants. Although translating awliyd as “saints” is problematic because of the latter term’s Christian connotations, I use the words interchangeably for the sake of readability. One central ditference between Christian and Muslim saints is that there is no formal process of canonization for the latter. 7. [thank Stefania Pandolfo for helping me articulate this point. 8. In contrasting a wider meaning of the imagination with “fantasy,” I do not mean to denigrate the latter. Marcuse (1966), Breton (1969), and Jameson (2004) have all highlighted the political dimensions of fantasy. Moreover, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, fantasy originally referred to the mental apprehension of objects of perception and only over time came to be associated with delusion, hallucination, caprice, and whim. I use the term in the latter sense, as do my interlocutors when employing the Arabic term wahm. g. Literally, the Persian and Arabic term barzakh means “obstacle,” “hindrance,” or “separation.” See “barzakh” in the Encyclopedia of Islam (henceforth El). On the barzakh as an in-between space that is closely related to the imagination, particularly in Ibn al-‘Arabi and al-Ghazali, see Bashier (2004), Chittick (1989, 1998), Corbin (1997), Hughes (2002), and Moosa (2005). Although my interlocutors generally used the term in a narrower sense—-namely, to refer

to the space in which the dead and the living meet—I believe that anthropologists drawing on paradigms from the Islamic tradition need not limit themselves to concepts or texts directly cited by their interlocutors. Sufi thinkers like Ibn al-‘Arabi have implicitly shaped the vocabulary and religious imaginaries of contemporary Egyptians in spite of, or perhaps also encouraged by, the fact that their works are sporadically banned (Hoftfman-Ladd 1992; Knysh 1999). Furthermore, borrowing conceptual frameworks from Ibn al-‘Arabi or al-Ghazali, even if my interlocutors have not read their work, in my view is no different from drawing on Derrida or Foucault.

10. As such, my interlocutors’ dream-stories resonate with critiques of ratiocentrism such as those by Connolly (1999), Foucault (1970), Latour (1993), and Tambiah (1990). ii. On the return of the space of death in Muslim discourses more broadly, see Deeb (2006), Hirschkind (2006), Khosrokhavar (1995), Pandolfo (2007), and Varzi (2006).

12. Although Saba Mahmood is interested in the ways in which outward practices shape interior states, and Charles Hirschkind considers how sound coming from tapes constitutes the ethical listener, in both ethnographies the believer's self still figures as a central locus, or repository, of agency. In speaking of the dream’s agency instead, | follow Talal Asad’s argument that agency should be decoupled from subjectivity, with the former being a principle of effectivity, and the latter one of consciousness (1993, 16). Yet while dreamvisions are agentive in the sense that they affect actions, my interlocutors simultaneously understand them as mediums because, for them, agency ultimately belongs to God. 13. The canonical hadith works all contain sections specifically devoted to

Notes to Pages 6-10 —/ 243 dreams and their interpretation, such as Bab al-Ta‘bir (The Chapter of Interpretation) in Sahih al-Bukhdri and Kitab al-Ru’ya (The Book of Dream-Visions) in Sahih Muslim. Historians and Islamicists who have studied Muslim dreams or dream interpretation practices include Fahd (1966), Gouda (1991), Green (2003), von Grunebaum (1966), Hermansen (2001), Katz (1996), Kinberg (1985, 1986, 1993, 1994, 1999), Lamoreaux (2002), Malti-Douglas (1980), Schimmel

(1998), and Sviri (1999). See also Marlow’s recent edited volume on Arabic, Persian, and Turkish sources (2008). Anthropologists who have written on Muslim dreams include Crapanzano (1975), Ewing (1990, 1997), Gilsenan (2000), Kilborne (1978), Pandolfo (1997), and Siegel (1978).

14. According to the Quran, spirits (juniin; sing. jinn) are composed of vapor. They are imperceptible but can become visible under different forms. Spirits can deceive the senses or appear in dreams, and healers sometimes use dreams as diagnostic tools. The jinn should not be confused with the rith, which is often translated as soul or spirit. For more details on the ri, see chapter 3. 15. The word ru’yd appears six times in the Quran, and the word hulm twice. The latter appears in its plural form both times and has negative connotations, implying “confused dreams fadghath ahlim),” literally meaning bunches or muddies of dreams. A hadith affirms the negative connotation of the hulm: “The dream-vision (al-ru’ya) is from God, and the dream (al-hulm) from the Devil” (Bukhari 1979, no. 6567). According to E. W. Lane (1978, 632) most lexicologists viewed the terms hulm and ruw’yd as synonyms. 16. E.g., Bukhari (1979, no. 6990). Another hadith holds that the dreamvision is part of forty-six parts of prophecy (no. 6986).

17. By contrast, when Coptic Christians use the term ru’yd, they often stress that they were not asleep when seeing the vision. In Coptic visionnarratives, when saints or the Virgin appear, they often leave behind material objects, which is taken to prove that it was not “just a dream.” My Muslim interlocutors frequently did not specify whether they were awake or asleep when speaking of similar encounters. A less ambiguous term that refers to all kinds of dreams is mandm (literally, “sleep”). 18. In Bakhtin’s writings, the concept of heteroglossia refers to the incorporation of various traces and languages. While the heteroglossic mode is privileged in the novel, Bakhtin argues that language as a whole unites within it a plurality of socio-ideological contradictions, so that “every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear” (1981, 292). Forces work toward ideological unitication but “each word [also] tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (293). While Bakhtin is attentive to the nature of “authoritative discourses” and thus to asymmetrical power relations, his concept of heteroglossia directs our attention to spaces of ambiguity that do not insist on exclusive, stable meanings. 19. On recent Marian apparitions worldwide, see Apolito (2005), Christian (1996), Claverie (1991, 2003), and Scheer (2006). In Egypt, besides the famous apparitions in Zaytoun in 1968 and in Shubra in 1986, the Virgin was sighted

244 / Notes to Pages 10-14 in Edfu in 1982, Manufiyya in 1997, Minya in 1999, and Assiut in 2000. Studies on religious life in Egypt frequently exclude Copts, even though they constitute between 6.3 percent (according to the official census) and 20 percent (according to Coptic authorities) of the population. I too largely bracket Coptic vision and apparition stories in this book. On the miraculous and the visionary in Coptic communities, see Meinardus (2002), as well as the forthcoming work by Angie Heo and Anthony Shenoda. 20. For a history of the dream in the West that similarly traces openings and closings, see Pick and Roper (2004), who argue against the teleological

notion that the origin of dreams was gradually interiorized. Petra Gehring (2008), too, opposes straightforward histories of the dream’s gradual marginalization that ignore the Romantic period and the obsession of modern science with the dark and unthinkable. 21. Whereas Charles Sanders Peirce dismissed Descartes’s doubt as mere “nyaper doubt,” lan Hacking (2001) suggests that Descartes’s dream skepticism was a genuine form of doubt, triggered by his own significant dreams. For a comprehensive study of the shifting understandings of the relation between dream and reality in Western thought since antiquity, see Gehring (2008). While Plato already raised the question of how one can distinguish between dream and waking states, Gehring points out that there was no word for “real” in ancient Greek and that for Aristotle the difference between dream and waking experience was not one of heterogeneity but rather was heterotopical (39).

22. Herbert Spencer made the related claim that only those who lack a theory of mind believe in the reality of dreams (cf. Stewart 2004). 23. Ina footnote Freud subsumed “cream-interpretation among the Arabs” under the category of “pre-scientific dream-beliefs” (1965, 38n). 24. What Malinowski failed to ask was whether the Melanesians maybe simply did not want to relate their dreams to him, or whether his own assump-

tions about the nature of dreams might have prevented him from recognizing their dream-representations. Another example of early Freudian-inspired anthropological dream research is C.G. Seligman’s work in the early 19203 (cf. Tedlock 1987).

25. Some scholars have claimed that al-Ghazali’s writings directly influenced Descartes’s reflections on dream-doubt (e.g., Ramadan 2009, 356n6). For my argument the question of influence is irrelevant. 26. According to Aristotle, dreams are results of perceptual remnants, like an afterimage (Gallop 1996). Aristotle’s view that dreams are natural and not metaphysical phenomena was taken up by Muslim philosophers like al-Farabi (d. 950). On Arabic translations of Aristotle’s writings that turned him into a believer in divinely inspired dreams, see Hansberger (2008).

27. Science and spiritualism were (and are) intertwined in a variety of ways. On a growing interest in modern miracles and telepathy within the very context of a scientific rationalism, see Luckhurst (2002) and Mullin (1996), and on North American religious liberals’ employment of scientific psychologies, see White (2009) and Klassen (forthcoming).

Notes to Pages 14-23 / 245 28. lam not interested in judging the truth of different dream theories, but instead in what possibilities for “truth-talk” different dream models open up or foreclose. Of course, one could argue that “Freud” is irrelevant today since in many ways the field of psychology has moved on. Neuroscientists, sleep labs, and REM have taken the place of psychoanalysts, the Freudian couch, and the unconscious. Nevertheless, Freud looms large in the humanities and everyday dream talk, in Egypt, North America, and Europe alike. 29. On the history of the “unconscious,” see Ellenberger (1970), Tallis (2002), and Whyte (1962). All three authors trace pre-Freudian genealogies of the “unconscious,” beginning with mesmerism, Saint Augustine, and Plotinus, respectively. For a critical look at the psychoanalytic aim of uncovering the “true self,” see Foucault (29ggo) and Hacking (1995). On the policing of dreams in the Victorian era by way of psychological explanations, see Hayward (2000).

30. The metaphorical power of the “dream” is evident, for instance, in Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in 1963, or the title of Barack Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006). The dream’s continuous metaphorical appeal is particularly noteworthy in light of Susan Buck-Morss’s argument that both the socialist and the capitalist dream have passed without ever being realized (2000). 31. The following simplified genealogy of the imagination in the “West” draws primarily on Engell (1981) and Kearney (1998). See also Cocking (1991), Gose (1972), McFarland (1985), and White (1990).

32. Engell (14981) argues that key to the endowment of the imagination with new creative powers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the decreasing importance of the concept of “soul,” and the separation of fancy and imagination. Mimetic activities were allotted to fancy, whereas faculties earlier associated with the soul were allotted to the imagination. 33. Foucault wrote this essay in 1954 at a time when he was still influenced by phenomenology. The essay was an introduction to Dream and Existence by Ludwig Binswanger, a Swiss psychiatrist who studied with C.G Jung but then turned to Husserl and Heidegger and developed the psychiatric approach of existential analysis (Daseinsanalyse}. While Foucault later was to refute phenomenology tor failing to attend to questions of power, he revisited dream interpretation towards the end of his life as an ethical practice (1986b, 4-36). 34. Merleau-Ponty similarly criticizes Sartre for holding on to a distinction between imagination and reality instead of acknowledging that the imaginary always already permeates the “real.” For Merleau-Ponty, the imagination is a fundamental expression of Being, and the invisible and the visible (or the imaginary and the real) are not mutually exclusive (cf. Kearney 1998, 120-41). 35. Shaykh Qusi offered this account in English. In most conversations we alternated between English and Arabic. 36. The fact that all my key interlocutors were male shaykhs does not mean that I privilege the clerical over the everyday. Working with shaykhs offered me something akin to a bounded fieldsite and a way to read texts of the tradi-

246 / Notes to Pages 27-35 tion dialogically. Through the shaykhs | met many members of their communities, both male and female, of various educational and social backgrounds. 37. I retell some of my interlocutors’ dreams in my own words because, as explained above, | was not always able to record their dream-tellings or to write them down as I was hearing them. In my fieldnotes I attempted to capture the actual wording, intonations, silences, volume (which trames the dream-telling as private or semipublic), language used (including alternations between classical and colloquial Arabic), body language, setting, and presence ot other listeners. CHAPTER TI

1. Literally, mahdi means “rightly guided one.” Neither the Qur’an nor all canonical hadith works make mention of the mahdi, but the figure looms large in Sunni religious imaginations and is an essential part of Shiite creed (albeit with different connotations). In Egypt the term generally refers to an eschatological figure. According to popular Sunni literatures, among the signs that announce the impending end of the world are the spread of violence, lies,

immorality, wars, and anarchy. Amid this chaos, the mahdi is expected to appear.

2. | borrow the concept of “incitement to discourse” from the first volume of The History of Sexuality, in which Foucault (1990) describes the great chase

after the truth of sex that was occurring in the Victorian period. Tracing a multiplicity of rationalizing and disciplining discourses that came out of the church, psychiatry, demographic studies, education, and civil law, Foucault links this multiplication of discourse to an intensification of the interventions of power. 3. On the Egyptian state’s attitude to Sufism, see Johansen (1996). For his-

torical perspectives on “anti-Suli” voices, see de Jong and Radtke (1999) and Sirriyeh (1999).

4. Al-Azhar is by no means a monolithic institution. Whereas the official Azharite position denounced Rua, Shaykh Hanahi is himself an employee at alAzhar. On the relation between al-Azhar and the Egyptian state more broadly, see Eccel (1984) and Moustafa (2000). 5. Al-Gumhiiriyya, 27 February 2003, p. 7; Al-Khamis, 20 March 2003, p. 10.

6. Akhbar al-Yawm, 1 March 2003, p. 23.

7. Al-Gumhiiriyya, 27 February 2003, p. 7; Sawt al-Azhar, 7 March 2003, Pp. 3.

8. For instance, medieval Muslim scholars were responding to a Greek rationalism that was theologically expressed by the Mu‘tazilites. See Rosenthal (2007), Arberry (1957), and Martin and Woodward (1997) for a historical perspective on the relation between revelation and reason in Islam. g. There are four classical Sunni schools of law (madhhab, pl. madhahib): the Hanafi school, founded by Abii Hanifa (d. 767); the Maliki school, founded

Notes to Pages 35-39 —/ 247 by Malik ibn Anas (d. 795); the Shatitt school, founded by al-Shatii (d. 820); and the Hanbali school, founded by Ahmad bin Hanbal (d. 855). The official madhhab of the Ottoman Empire (of which Egypt was nominally a part from 1517 to 1914) was the Hanafi school. Today, in northern Egypt the Hanafi and Shafii schools are dominant, whereas Upper Egypt is predominantly Maliki. 10. Egyptian sociologist Sayyid ‘“Uways (1965) studied letters that had been sent to al-lmam al-ShaiiN’s shrine in the 1960s. He wanted to prove that the practice of writing to the dead was not Islamic but a remnant from ancient Egyptian times. Aymé Lebon (1997) translated and analyzed a more recent set of letters. it. The term barzakh appears in two other places in the Quran: “And He it is who has given freedom of movement to the two great bodies of water—

the one sweet and thirst-allaying, the other salty and bitter--and yet has wrought between them a barrier [barzakh] and a forbidding ban” (2:53). “He has given freedom to the two great bodies of water, so that they might meet:

[yet] between them is a barrier [barzakh] which they may not transgress” (55:19f.). In the Qur’an barzakh thus refers to the dividing line between fresh water and salt water, and to the thin path that lies between paradise and hell. 12. A more violent form of state intervention was the arrest of Shaykha Mandal Wahid in 2000. A housewife and member of the Bayyiimi Sufi order, Shaykha Mandl claimed that she had been receiving dream-visions from the former leading shaykh of the order since his death in 1993. Other followers would ask her questions, in both oral and written form, and she would deliver the shaykh’s response one week later, based on what he had told her in her dreamvisions. State officials, religious scholars, and journalists were particularly troubled by the claim that the dead shaykh had given Mandl permission to lift central religious obligations, decreeing for instance that some of the followers who had reached a high spiritual state no longer needed to pray, and that those who were

untit for the pilgrimage to Mecca could perform an “inner pilgrimage (hijja bdtiniyya}” instead. Shaykha Mandal was sentenced to five years in prison with hard labor for inciting fitna, social unrest. For details on this case, see al-Ahram, 19 July 2000, p. 27; al-Madina ai-Munawwara, 2 June 2000, p. 11; ‘Agidati, 9 May 2000, p. 3; “State vs. Sheikha,” Cairo Times 4 (21), 27 July-9 August 2000; and “Cairo Court Sends Sufi Sheikha to Jail,” Middle East Times 37, 2000. 13. ‘Agidati, 4 June 2002, p. 12.

14. Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (1976). 15. Zar rituals are held for people possessed by spirits and are mostly attended by women. The ceremony involves music and dance, and is usually led by a woman, a kodia. The ritual is frequently denounced as un-Islamic, but there has been a revival of interest in the zar among upper-class Egyptians. Whereas in the zr ritual one enters into a conversation with the spirits and tries to appease them, Qur’anic healers try to exorcise the spirit(s). The practice of Qur’anic healing goes back to early Islam but has become increasingly popular in Egypt in recent years. In Cairo alone there are more than three hundred healers who practice in mosques, clinics, or at home (Sengers 2003).

248 / Notes to Pages 39-45 46. For commentaries on the report, see ‘Agidati, 22 July 2003, p. 9; Hadith alMadina, 29 October 2002, p. 2; al-Bayydn al-lmdardtiyya, 28 March 2003, p. 6.

17. As of May 2009, the equivalent of 10 pounds in U.S. dollars is about $1.80, and of 10,000 pounds is about $1,800. 48. Jaridat al-Watn ai-Arabi, 25 March 2003, p. 6. 19. Al-Ahram, 10 February 2003, p. 10. 20. Hadith al-Madina, 29 October 2002, p. 2. a1. Al-Baydn al-Imadrdtiyya, 28 March 2003, p. 6.

22. On discursive dichotomies between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims,” see Mamdani (2004), Mahmood (2006), and Abu-Lughod (2005).

23. The Prophet Muhammad himself denounced the pre-Islamic institution of the kdhin, the diviner priest, and Muslim scholars have long insisted ona difference between the legitimate work of the astronomer and the more dubious preoccupations of the astrologer. In the tenth century some scholars condemned astrologers as atheists (ah! al-ilhdd), and the philosopher Ibn Sina devoted an entire treatise to the refutation of astrology, in which he argued against the astrologers’ ability to foretell the future (Saliba 1994). 24. Raphael Patai received his doctorate in Near East studies at the University of Budapest in 1933, lived in British mandated Palestine for fifteen years, and during this time obtained a second doctoral degree in Arabic language and culture from the Hebrew University. The Arab Mind, which is written in the tradition of national character studies, was republished in November 2001 with an introduction by the director of Middle East Studies at the JFK Special Wartare Center and School at Fort Bragg, who praises the usefulness of the book for the “cultural instruction” of military teams. 25. For the full text of Pope Benedict XVI's lecture see www.vatican.va/ holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi _spe_20060912_university-regensburg_en. html. For official Muslim responses to the speech, see “Open Letter to His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI” (2006) at

http://ammanmessage.com/media/openLetter/english.pdf and “A Common Word Between Us and You” (2008) at http://www.acommonword.com/index php?lang = en&page = optiont. 26. For the related notion of an indigenous emergence of an Islamic modernity, see Gran (1979) and Schulze (1990, 1996). The latter’s provocative thesis of an “Islamic enlightenment” has been discussed by Peters (1990), Radtke (1994, 1996), and Wild (1996). 27. See Sirriyeh (2000) for an insightful discussion of Rida’s text as a whole and this reference in particular. 28. Sedgwick (2003, 102) notes that Salafi thought spread through Egypt’s

religious institutions from the 1870s to the 1930s, and Skovgaard-Petersen (1997, 14) argues that it marked its final triumph at al-Azhar in the early 1960s.

29. Many scholars share this view, among them the current state mufti of Egypt, Dr. ‘Ali Gum‘a, who argues that legal rules cannot be overthrown by visionary verdicts. In a book titled The Extent of the Evidential Nature of Dream-Visions among the Traditionalists (2002), Gum‘a offers three rea-

Notes to Pages 46-54 / 249 sons why visions and dreams should never figure in a legal ruling: () the sleeper is not legally competent (mukallaf); (2) the dreamer cannot distinguish

whether her dreams come from God or the devil; and (3) a dream or vision often includes symbols that may elude the dreamer. 30. ‘Agidati, 3 March 2003, p. 9. 31. The mufti’s opinion circulated by way of newspapers in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and beyond, e.g., al-Yawm, 12 October 2002, p. 13; al-Riydd, 14 August 2002, p. 2; and al-Bayydan al-lmdratiyya, 23 August 2002, p. 7. Al-Azhar’s official magazine published the Saudi shaykh’s opinion as well: Al-Azhar, 15 September 2002, p. 160. 32. Al-Bayéin al-Imdrdtiyya, 29 August 2003, p. 7.

33. The dream interpreter referred explicitly to the hadith works by alBukhari, al-Muslim, al-Tirmidhi, al-Bayhaqgi, and Abii Dawitid: dream show Ahlam on channel al-Mihwar, 5 June 2003. 34. Al-Sharg al-Awsat, 18 March 2003, p. 14. 35. ‘Amman, 20 June 2002, p. 23. 36. Al-Sharg al-Awsat, 18 March 2003, p. 14. 37. Ibid. 38. On 20 November 1979 a group of insurgents took over the Mosque of Mecca, denouncing the Saudi regime over the loudspeakers and announcing the arrival of the mahdi. Hundreds of pilgrims were taken hostage. After some hesitation, Saudi religious scholars sanctioned state intervention, and a few days later a five-man French “antiterrorist” squad arrived on the scene. During

the two weeks of fighting that ensued, more than one hundred people from both sides were killed. The leader of the insurgents, Juhaiman al-Utaibi, and sixty-three insurgents were publicly executed. See Paul (1980) and Hegghammer and Lacroix (2007). 39. On dream discourses of Taliban and al-Qaida leaders, see Edgar (2006, 2007).

CHAPTER 2

1. Shaykh Nabil gives a slightly different account of Muhammad Ibn Sirin’s family background. According to him, Ibn Sirin’s father was Hassan Ibn Thabit (d. 674), a poet famous for his eulogies for the Prophet, and his mother

was one of the two Coptic slaves that the Egyptian ruler gave to the Prophet Muhammad as a gift. The second sister, Maria al-Qibtiyya, was one of the Prophet's wives. Shaykh Nabil is from her village in Upper Egypt. 2. See EI, “Ibn Sirin.” 3. Ibn Sirin was transformed into the founder of the Muslim tradition of dream interpretation from the tenth century on (Fahd 1966, 313~15) or even earlier (Lamoreaux 2002, 20). Famous works ascribed to Ibn Sirin include Ta‘bir al-Rwyd and Muntakhab al-Kalam fi Ta‘bir al-Ahlam, a compilation made at

the beginning of the fifteenth century and reprinted in the margins of ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi’s widely used dream manual Ta‘tir al-Andm fi Ta‘bir

250 / Notes to Pages 55-66 al-Mandm. Other works ascribed to Ibn Sirin are Tafsir al-Ahlam, al-Lwiw fi Ta‘bir ai-Mandm, al-Tanwir fi Ru’yat al-Ta‘bir, and al-Jawami'‘. bn Sirin’s name is also evoked as the author of treatises on dreams written in Turkish, Persian, Greek, and Latin. See El, “Tbn Sirin.” 4. Annemarie Schimmel refers to the shrine and its guardian in Die Traume des Kalifen (1998, 21).

5. Adifterent, though complementary, call for attention to the in-between is formulated by William E. Connolly (1999, 2005), who argues for a “politics of becoming.” Connolly points out that paradigms of pluralism are often limited to an acceptance of what is, as opposed to allowing spaces for what is arising. 6. See also Gaffney (4994) and Hirschkind (2006) on preachers and sermons in Egypt, Eickelman (1979) on the g@di, Gilsenan (1973, 1983) on Sufi shaykhs, Cornell (14998) and Ewing (4997) on saints, and Keddie (1972) and Siegel (2000) on the ‘ulama@’.

7. Tafsir historically also referred to commentaries on other texts, such as Aristotle’s writings or the Bible. Within the Islamic curriculum, Qur’anic tafsir developed into a central part of Islamic education, along with the hadith and figh sciences. See El, “tafsir.”

8. According to a hadith, the Prophet dreamed of people wearing shirts and of “Umar ibn al-Khattab’s shirt dragging on the ground behind him. The Prophet interpreted the shirt to symbolize religion (Bukhari 1979, no. 7008). g. Arabic words derive from a root that usually consists of three consonants. Ishtigdag refers to the process through which words are reduced to these roots. Each word is connected, albeit in not always predictable ways, to all the other words derived from the same root.

10. The City of the Dead (alariifa in Egyptian Arabic) is a large cemetery area in Cairo that dates back to Mamluk times and that stretches across some five square miles. Because of Cairo’s rapidly growing population and the resulting housing crisis, the City of the Dead has become a sprawling squatter settlement where supposedly about half a million people live in and around tombs. 11. Al-Sayyida Sukayna was al-Imam al-Husayn’s daughter, and her mosque was built over an apocryphal tomb by Muhammad ‘Ali’s family in the late nineteenth century. Al-Sayyida Rugayya was the daughter of ‘Ali, the fourth caliph and the husband of the Prophet’s daughter Fatima. She is buried in Damascus, but a shrine was built for her in Cairo under the Fatimid caliph al-Amir in 1133. Along with al-Sayyida Nafisa and al-Sayyida Zaynab, she is considered a central patron saint of the city. The monuments for al-Sayyida ‘Atiqga and Muhammad al-Ja‘fari stem from the Fatimid period as well. The former was supposedly an aunt of the Prophet, and the latter was his greatgreat-great-grandson and the son of Ja‘tar al-Sadiq, the sixth ShVite imam.

12. | thank Alejandra Gonzalez Jimenez for helping me articulate this difference. 13. This division is not absolute. Sometimes men also sit inside the shrine,

Notes to Pages 68-87 | 251 and (less frequently) women on the street. Since | was generally inside the shrine, | came to know more female than male dreamers, but my overall impression is that Egyptian men tell their dreams just as frequently as women. This contrasts with James Siegel’s observation (1978) that in Sumatra while men draw authority from the Qur’an and prayer, women draw authority from dreams and curing rites.

14. At least one person told me that the shrine had already been in use before Shaykh Nabil became its guardian. 15. Interview with Shaykh Nabil in ‘Agidati, 4 June 2002, p. 12. 16. This is the version of the hadith that | was told in Egypt. According to other versions, a dream happens when it is interpreted, or it sits on the bird’s wing and not its foot. 17. As such, dream talk fulfills a function similar to speaking to a psychotherapist and to poetry-tellings among the Awlad ‘Ali (Abu-Lughod 1986). 18. In a newspaper interview Shaykh Nabil stated, “I’ve been performing this work [dream interpretation| for thirty years for the sake of God {li-wijh Allah), and 1 don’t take money for it because I request the recompense fal-ajr) from God alone”; ‘Agidati, 4 June 2002, p. 12. CHAPTER 3

1. Conventional idioms of agency (particularly those that make agency dependent on consciousness) easily obscure the ways in which subjects are often not only acting but also acted upon. For anthropological theorizations of patients (ie., acted-upon subjects) as a counterpart to agents, see Asad (2003), Faubion (2003), and Lambek (2000). Mary Keller (2002) tries to theorize the agency of possessed women in ways that revalue receptivity and permeability beyond associations of openness with passivity and weakness, and Kevin

Groark (2009) offers a careful analysis of how pragmatic moves in Tzotzil Maya dream narratives allow the narrators to disclaim agency. Two classical anthropological accounts of passions as a counterpart to actions can be found in Evans-Pritchard (1971) and Lienhardt (1961). 2. On modernity’s ocularcentrism, see Foucault (1970, 1977a), Rajchman (1988), and Levin (1993). Berger describes the introduction of perspective in

European art in the early Renaissance through which “everything converges on to the eye as the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God. According to the convention of perspective, there is no visual reciprocity” (1972, 16). On the link between positivism and ocularcentrism, see also Hacking (1983). Martin Jay (1993) argues against the notion that a modern ocularcentrism supplanted the relatively antivisual Middle Ages. He contrasts a vision-centered Christianity with a more sound-centered Hebraic culture. 3. The ethnographic desire to see is evident, for instance, in Claude LéviStrauss’s confessional account of the visual frustrations he experienced during his travels in Brazil in the 1930s. In Tristes tropiques he laments that long gone

252 / Notes to Pages 88-91 are the times of “real journeys when it was still possible to see the full splendour of a spectacle that had not yet been blighted, polluted and spoiled” (1973, 43; emphasis in original). Simultaneously he wonders whether his limited vision might not also be his own shortcoming. He conjures up an imaginary future traveler who someday will “mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.” The anthropologist, in short, reproaches himself for never “seeing as much as [he] should” (ibid).

4. A similar take on vision figures in Louis Althusser's autobiography, where he writes, “The eye is passive at a distance from its objects, it receives the image without having to work, without engaging the body in any process of approach, contact, manipulation” (quoted in Meltzer 2001, 25). Unlike Jonas, however, Althusser is skeptical of the detached gaze and disengaged reason. 5. | borrow the term optical regime from Jonathan Crary’s study of vision in nineteenth-century Europe (1992, 6). 6. In suggesting that the need for material signs is a modern phenomenon, Muslim scholars and Coptic priests imply that people were more spiritual in the past. At least the priests, however, seem to overlook a long history of using images in Christian practice. Consider the following defense of iconographic

images from the eighth century: “Our inability immediately to direct our thoughts to contemplation of higher things makes it necessary that familiar everyday media be utilized to give suitable form to what is formless, and make visible what cannot be depicted” (John of Damascus 1980, 20). I thank Anthony Shenoda for directing me to this quote.

7. In the textual tradition firisa reters to the skill of physiognomy, the unraveling of hidden inner states through outer signs. According to a hadith, the Prophet warns of the “firisa of the believer because he sees with God's light.” Shaykh Mustata described firdsa as an almost prophetic knowledge, a sudden flash of certainty that erupts in one’s heart concerning another’s inner state. Whereas firdisa involves a looking at that is simultaneously an X-ray-like looking through, ilhdm is divinely inspired insight that is entirely divorced from the gaze. 8. Some of the titles of Nietzsche’s works, such as Morgenréte (Daybreak) and Gétzen-Diaimmerung (Twilight of the Idols), imply a similar shift of attention to a vision that embraces the “flickering” quality of images when “outlines waver, objects are in shadow, and the full presence sought by philosophers since Plato is not to be found” (Shapiro 1993, 131). Cf. Houlgate (1993).

g. Translated by Muhammad Asad as “Art thou not aware.. .”—e.g,, Ouran 14:24, 13:31, 24:43. 10. A hadith qudsi is believed to be God’s word as revealed to the Prophet

Muhammad but not included in the Qur’an. This particular hadith is frequently cited in Sufi sources. [bn al-‘Arabi claimed that its authenticity has been proved not by transmission (nagl) but by unveiling (kashf) (Chittick 1989, 250).

11. Charles Hirschkind (2006) suggests that vision might not be the preeminent sense in Egypt’s moral landscapes, and some of my interlocutors

Notes to Pages g1-93—/ 253 argued as well that sound is more important than sight, as hearing (sam‘) is usually placed before seeing (basar) when both are mentioned in the Qur’an (e.g., 10:67). An imam explained to me, quite bluntly, “There are many shaykhs who are blind. You might be blind and still exceed in all sciences. But if you

are deaf you become retarded (mutakhallif}.... Hearing is stronger (aqwi) than seeing.” Generally, however, sight—especially in the broad sense outlined

in this chapter—is a key sense, if not the only key sense, for my interlocutors. Tellingly, in everyday conversations in Arabic, as in English, seeing can broadly mean “perceiving.” Accordingly, spiritual experiences of merely hearing the Prophet’s voice, or of smelling the presence of a saint, are sometimes subsumed under the Arabic term for visions. They are referred to, for instance, as “a smell vision (rivyd shammiyya).” 12. Scholars disagree on the question of whether God can be seen on Judgment Day, and dream manuals note that God can be seen indirectly in dreams

in the symbol of a king or ruler. | came across only one dream account in which the dreamer, a Muslim undergraduate student at the American University in Cairo, reported to have seen God. She said he looked strange, not fully human, and that he had very white skin, almost like plaster. 13. Shaykh ‘Ali Gum‘a does not simply equate fantasy and imagination. He devotes several pages of his book to a discussion of the concept of al-khay4l in Sufi writings, referring explicitly to [bn al-‘Arabi and noting that according to Sufi literatures, the revelation began in form of al-khayal. 14. E.g., Quran 2:10, 3:151, 7:101, 8:12, 30:59. Sufis especially have drawn on this heart imagery. Spiritual communication between a shaykh and his disciples is communication that goes “from heart to heart.” A dervish explained to me that he sees with the “imagination of his heart (khaydl’albij.” According to Shaykh Qusi, it is not the heart (galb) that sees but fu’dd, an organ within the heart. 15. According to Sufi metaphysics, as it was explained to me in Egypt, there are (at least) three stages on the mystical path: (1)‘i/m al-yagin or the stage of murdgaba, which involves serving God as if one were able to see Him; (2) ‘ayn al-yagin, the stage of mushdhada, which involves seeing God with the heart’s eye and seeing Him in the whole universe; and (3) agg al-yagin, which refers to full immersion. 16. The Quran (17:85) states (in Ahmed Ali’s translation): “They ask you about [the riih]. Say, [the rith] is by the command of your Lord and that you have been given but little knowledge.” Muhammad Asad and Ahmed Ali, in their translations, take the verse to refer not to the spirit but to the revelation of the Our’an. 17. Ahmed Ali’s translation. 18. Ibn al-Qayyim states in his fourteenth-century Kitdb al-Riih (Book of the Spirit) that nafs and riih are different only in characteristics {sifat), not in essence {dhdt). By contrast, one Quranic healer suggested to me that the nafs (self) is on the right side of the body, parallel to the heart, while the riih (spirit) is with the mind. Many Sutfis say that the spirit is divine whereas

254 / Notes to Pages 94-107 the self is earthly and material (turdbiyya wa maddiyya). Dream-visions are often associated with the riii and meaningless dreams with the nafs. In Sufi literatures the nafs is sometimes described as the evil self, the seat of passion and lust (Nicholson 1989, 39).

19. The story of the Prophet’s Night Journey appears in the Quran (47:1, 60) and is described in more detail in a hadith. Booklets with the hadith are sold around popular mosques and saint shrines in Cairo. 20. In considering how particular experiences are inculcated through bodily practices, anthropologists frequently turn to the Foucauldian concept of technologies of the self (1988b), Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (1977), or Marcel Mauss’s essay on “techniques of the body” (1973). While drawing on a similar framework, | also highlight its limitations in this chapter. 21. The practice of istikhdra persists in various forms (across lines of class, age, and gender) despite the attempts on the part of some religious scholars to discount its more popular forms as un-Islamic. Shaykh ‘Ali Gum‘a holds that istikhdra by way of sleep, prayer beads, coffee cups, cards, sand, palmistry, or randomly opening the Qur’an are all illegitimate; they are innovations (bid‘a) (2002, 137-49).

22. Whereas the obligatory prayer in Islam is generally not understood as a petition, invocations respond to the Qur’anic promise, “If my servants ask thee about Me——behold, Iam near; I respond to the call of him who calls, whenever he calls unto Me” (2:186). 23. The Qur'an reters to God's “Beautiful Names” (e.g., 17:110; 20:8; 59:24).

Classical scholars who have written on these names include al-Ghazali, alQushayri, and al-Bayhaqi. The names that are included on the list vary. 24. Quotedin Graham (1977, 173). In Ibn al-‘Arabi’s words, “there are those

of us in whom the Reality has become their hearing, sight, and all their faculties and limbs.... Such a servant is more closely attached to the being of Reality than others” (1980, 125). 25. The seeming paradox of personally evoked yet divinely inspired dreams is not unique to Muslim dream cultures. Historians’ and anthropologists’ studies are full of accounts of dream incubations and vision quests (e.g., MacDermot 1971; Noll 1985; Patton 2004). Questions about who is equipped to see the

invisible arise also with regard to Marian apparitions, such as in Zaytoun in 1968. Was seeing the Virgin contingent on the person’s inner state? Or was anyone who was walking by the church during those months able to see the Virgin? Most people I spoke to leaned toward the latter option and emphasized that the first to notice the Virgin in Zaytoun were not Christians but Muslims. Others insisted that not everyone can see {mish ay hradd biyshiif); only those with strong faith (?mén) are able to perceive the Virgin, whereas those who have closed (afl) their heart cannot see. 26. Literally, “What God has intended!” It is an exclamation of surprise and admiration, meant to reiterate that God is the one who bestows blessings. 27. No explanation is given for how the girl went from knowing a few Quranic verses to actually speaking Arabic. The story is transmitted by al-

Notes to Pages 110-117. / 255 Husayn Ibn Mahrda and retold by Shaykh Mahmiid al-Hanafi in his article “Tafsir al-Ru’a” (The Interpretation of Dream-Visions), ai-Yagaza 1811 (12-18 November 2003):113.

28. A historical precedent to such a problematization of causality can be found in al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of Philosophers. He uses the following example: Every time a piece of cotton is brought near a flame, the cotton burns. Although there appears to be a necessary causal link, in reality we are merely observing a quick succession of events and not causation. It is God who makes the cotton burn. This theory, of course, does not represent Islamic theology as a whole. It was refuted by Ibn Rushd in The Incoherence of Incoherencee, which argues that the denial of causality implies a denial of the knowability of the world. 29. I thank Srilata Raman for helping me articulate this point. CHAPTER 4

1. Munshids are religious singers who often perform at mawlids. For ethnographic descriptions of their work, see Waugh (1989) and Frishkopf (2007).

2. Madad is a call for help, often heard when believers address saints and ask for their intercession. 3. By recollecting my drifting thoughts at this particular event, I do not mean to imply a simple East-West divide. Not only have I attended highly emotional poetry slams in New York City as well, but I have also been to very disciplined performances in Cairo where Shaykh Qusi’s poetry is recited by a munshid who is accompanied by an orchestra. The upper-class listeners who attend these performances have bought tickets for numbered seats in orderly rows. [never witnessed trance-like experiences or heard of waking visions that were seen on those occasions. 4. Although al-Khidr is not mentioned by name in the Qur'an, he is widely believed to have been the servant accompanying Moses in the sura The Cave (18.60~82)}. Elsewhere, al-Khidr is called Khadir or Khezr (cf. Franke 2000). Hanbalis like Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya have opposed the notion that al-Khidr is immortal. 5. Walter Benjamin tells the anecdote of the dreaming Parisian poet in his short essay “Dream Kitsch” (1996, 4). On belief in the creative potential of dreams more generally, see Cocking (1991), Engell (1981), and Gose (1972).

6. At first, Naguib Mahfouz’s dream-stories were published in the magazine Nisf al-Dunyd. Subsequently they appeared in book form in Arabic, French, and English (2005). In 1982 Mahtouz had already published a collection of short stories titled Ra’aytu fimd yard al-nd’im (1 Saw as the Sleeper Sees), one of which includes a series of seventeen numbered dreams. | was told that in 2001 or 2002 a Ramadan TV series was based on Mahtouz’s dreams. 7. In his 1982 Nobel Prize lecture, Gabriel Garcia Marquez listed examples

for the magical quality of an “unbridled reality” in Latin America, including plans for building railroads not of iron but of gold, funerals held for legs lost

256 / Notes to Pages 118-136 in wars, and secondhand sculptures being purchased in Paris and erected at public squares in Honduras. See http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/1982/marquez-lecture-e.html, accessed 15 May 2009. 8. See Mahfouz, “Recuperation Dreams” in Al-Ahram Weekly Online 570, 24-30 January 2002, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/570/op6.htm. g. The Qur’anic verse “Now there has come unto you from Goda light, and a clear divine writ” (5:15) has been interpreted by classical exegetes, such as al-Suytiti and al-Tabari, to refer to the Prophet Muhammad and the Qur'an. The trope of Muhammadan light plays a particularly important role in Sufi circles (cf. Hoffman 1999).

to. Shaykh Qusi’s case also differs from that of a shaykh who was inspired by a vision to found a Shadhiliyya order in Egypt during the 1920s, but whose

authority was established through miracles and not through confirmatory visions (Gilsenan 1973, 20-35). ii. This definition resembles those found in classical sources. Rasiil (mes-

senger) refers to those sent as the head of an umma, a community, whereas nabi (prophet) refers to someone who is sent to warn the believers. Both terms are used in the Our’an to refer to Muhammad. The term rasiil in the Qur’an also refers to Niih (the biblical Noah), Lit (Lot), Isma‘il (Ishmael), Misa (Moses), Shu‘ayb, Hiid, Salih, and ‘Isa (Jesus). The term nabi is used more widely, encompassing the majority of the apostles as well as biblical or quasibiblical characters like Ibrahim (Abraham), Ishaq (Isaac), Yaqib (Jacob), Hariin, Dawiid (David), Sulayman (Solomon), Ayyiib (Job), and Dhu al-Niin. See El,

“Rast.” 12. | wrote this excerpt shortly after my return from the field. It combines a section from the Book of Visions with a narration of my own encounter with

the text. I let the two parts merge into one narrative to remind the reader that within other imaginations the line between dream and waking life can be fluid. The second part breaks with the ethnographic present (or past) to rupture the assumption of linearity and to open up a space for considering the ways in which an ethnographic future can glimmer into, and recontigure, the present—just like a prophetic dream. 13. Quran 86:13-14, Ahmed Ali’s translation. Muhammad Asaca’s translation of the same verse reads, “Behold, this [divine writ] is indeed a word that cuts between truth and talsehood/and is no idle talk.” Asad explains that the “word that cuts” refers to a word that distinguishes between true and false, and more precisely between the belief in the continuation of life after death and its denial. 14. This hadith is found in all canonical hadith works (e.g., Bukhari 1979, no. 140). Many traditional and contemporary dream books emphasize that

dream-visions seen by prophets are distinct from those seen by ordinary people. One frequently emphasized difference is that a prophet’s vision has to be carried out. Accordingly, when Abraham was instructed through a dreamvision to sacrifice his son, he without hesitation wanted to execute what he had seen. That in the end his son was replaced with a sheep is understood not only

Notes to Pages 136-150 / 257 to prove God’s mercy but also to affirm that the dream-vision itself in a way had already been an enactment of the sacrifice. 15. A Prophetic hadith (Wensinck 2001, 623). See also Quran 75:46ff. CHAPTER 5

1. See Schopenhauer’s essay on spirit seeing (1974), originally published in 1851. Among the nineteenth-century thinkers who discussed the Kantian categorical imperative in relation to dreams are Friedrich Wilhelm Hildebrandt, Paul Radestock, and Johannes Volkelt. 2. Even in the Freudian model, a partial moral effect might occur through masking, as the superego at times only relaxes during sleep but does not shut off completely. 3. Qur’an 37:102~11. The equivalent story in the Bible is about Abraham and Isaac. 4. The effects of dreams are described in various genres of the Islamic tradition and have been discussed by anthropologists, historians, and Islamicists. Gilsenan (1973), Ewing (1990), and Hoftman (1997) have written about the dream-inspired founding and joining of Sufi orders. Fisher (1979) discusses dream-inspired conversions to Islam in Africa, and Reynolds (2005, 272~74) in texts of the tradition. Von Grunebaum (1966) refers to dream-inspired battles, and Kinberg (1985, 150-55; 1993) and McCarthy (1953) make note of the founding of schools of legal methodology and theology as a result of dreams. 5. A hadith states, “The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: ‘If anyone of you

sees a dream that he likes, then it is from Allah, and he should thank Allah for it and narrate it to others; but if he sees something else, i.e., a dream that he dislikes, then it is from Satan, and he should seek retuge with Allah trom its evil, and he should not mention it to anybody, for it will not harm him” (Bukhari 1979, no. 6985).

6. To regain the state of purity for prayer, Muslims pertorm either a simple procedure of ablution (wudii’} or a full ablution (ghusl}. The latter becomes obligatory, for instance, after sexual intercourse or after a woman has completed her menstrual cycle. 7. According to Ibn Sirin, death in a dream is not always positive; it can also signify religious failure or corruption. The entry on death is one of the longest in the dream manual. 8. This interpretation was offered by the dreamer herself, a woman in her forties who lives in the countryside in the Nile Delta. In the two most widely used dream manuals, by contrast, grilled fish signifies traveling for the sake of studying (safar fi talab al-‘ilm). 9. One of my relatives, a self-taught imam in the Nile Delta, told me about my grandfather's dream and its meaning. His interpretation diverges somewhat from classical dream literatures. According to [bn Sirin, performing the call to prayer against a wall means calling someone to reconciliation or peace, whereas calling to prayer on top of a house signifies that someone will die (1999, 77).

258 / Notes to Pages 152-166 10. According to Islamic eschatological beliefs, the dead exist in the barzakh and will enter hell or paradise only on Judgment Day. Yet two angels, Munkar and Nakir, come to the grave after one’s death, ask questions, and then show the dead their place in paradise or hell. Those with an exceptionally high spiritual state can at times see their future place while still alive. While the Qur'an is largely silent on the question of what happens to the spirits between death and Judgment Day, Smith and Haddad (2002) describe a range of Sunni eschatological imaginaries, both classical and contemporary. Cf. Smith (1979) and Malti-Douglas (1980). it. Leah Kinberg (2000, 48) offers this interpretation in an article that dis-

cusses six such narratives, mostly taken from Kitaéb al-Mandm by [bn Abi al-Dunya (d. 894). CE. Kinberg (1986).

12. Copts frequently note that they suffer from discrimination in the realms of education, government, law, media, and urban planning. And in recent years violent clashes between Copts and Muslims have increased in number.

13. Others who dream of the Virgin visit her at the famous apparition sites in Zaytoun and Shubra. Looking back, | would have liked also to ask the woman what mace her sure that she had not dreamed of a Muslim saint. 14. The belief that God forbade the soil to consume the bodies of prophets or saints is usually extended to martyrs and, according to Goldziher (1971, 286), over time also came to apply to theologians and muezzins. The belief in incorruptible bodies figures in many other religious traditions as well, including those of the Coptic community. 15. Lam grateful to Samuli Schielke for pointing out to me that a conflicting dream-story circulates with regards to Shaykh Mutawalli al-Sha‘rawi’s shrine. Supposedly, the deceased shaykh appeared in a dream to his son Hage ‘Abd al-Rahim, who oversaw the construction of the shrine, telling him that he had done wrong by building a shrine and organizing a mawlid. For an account of how Shaykh al-Sha‘rawi was turned into a saint, see Iskander (2001).

16. Egypt today is primarily Sunni, and Shiites are a minority (though their numbers have been rising thanks to the influx of lraqi refugees). Between gog and 1171, Egypt was ruled by the Fatimids, a Shitite dynasty. Al-Azhar (originally built as a Shiite educational center but today the key representative of Sunni Islam) recognizes Shi‘ism as a legitimate branch of Islam, yet “Islamist” thinkers like Yiisuf al-Qardawi have recently claimed that Egypt is being “infiltrated” by Shi‘ites who are using Sufism to further this purpose. Because of the Shi‘ite belief that certain descendants of the Prophet have special spiritual powers and should rule the community, critics of saint veneration in Egypt often blame this practice on the period of Fatimid rule. 17. These hadiths can be found in all standard collections; see, e.g., Bukhari (1979, nos. 104~06). The future tense in the second hadith is usually understood to refer to the afterlife, meaning that the dreamer will go to paradise.

18. It is difficult to determine what the Prophet might have looked like, considering that visual representations are generally not allowed in Islam. In

Notes to Pages 168-172 / 259 spite of this interdiction, the Prophet has been depicted throughout history, sometimes with his face covered or in the form of light and sometimes fully. Furthermore, there is a long tradition of hilya (Uterally, “ornament”), consisting of short descriptions of the Prophet’s external and internal qualities, in poetry or calligraphy. A contemporary token of this tradition is a little booklet

that I bought around the Imam Husayn mosque titled “Our Lord Muhammad (Peace and Prayers upon Him) as If You Were Seeing Him: A Complete True Description of His Physical Characteristics” (Halwani 2001). Drawing on accounts by the Prophet’s companions, the book describes in detail Muhammad’s face, eyes, hands, chest, and voice. Its goal, as it explains, is to make present the image of the Prophet in its readers’ hearts. 1g. Not only have Muslim scholars concerned themselves with Prophetvisions, but also Western historians, interested in what is sometimes called Neo-Sufism, have commented on a potential shift in the frequency of such

visions since the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth. According to Mark Sedgwick, a remarkable number of Sufi orders (of the tariqa Muhammadiyya) during that time were inspired by waking visions

of the Prophet (personal communication, 18 June 2003). He suggests that attention to the role of visions can correct the functionalist thesis that many new Sufi orders arose when Sutfis and Wahhabis were joining up against the colonizers. Some historians have furthermore argued that the new emphasis on Prophet-visions went hand in hand with a rising anthropocentrism, which manifested itself in a new focus on Muhammad in eighteenth-century Sutism (Radtke 1994, 1996; Schulze 1996). The union with the Prophet came almost to substitute for a union with God, or at least was considered a key preparatory stage for this final union. Valerie Hotfman-Ladd (1992) notes that the Prophet Muhammad forms a central presence in the lives of many Egyptian Muslims, and Jonathan Katz (1996) contends that the supposed increase of Prophet-visions at the beginning of the nineteenth century was related to a broadened availability of Islamic knowledges and to an increasing “democratization of sanctity.” While it can hardly be proved that Prophet-visions were less frequent before the end of the eighteenth century (partly because visions are not always written down or even recounted), it might well be possible that the emergence of a new Islamic reading public, as well as more recently the role of the mass media in spreading dream-stories, have left their mark on the frequency of Prophet-visions. 20. Muslim narratives that describe very personal, almost sensual encounters with the Prophet in some ways parallel the “new experiential emphasis” in evangelical forms of religiosity (Luhrmann 2005). Medievalist Caroline Bynum (1991) reminds us that desire for intimate contact with the Divine is not a modern phenomenon. She describes bodily and fleshly dimensions of medieval worship, including the kissing of images, mystical intercourse, and the drinking of blood from Jesus’s breast. 21. By episteme | mean the epistemological field that creates (and delimits) the conditions of the possibility of knowledge (Foucault 1970, xxii). Unlike

260 / Notes to Pages 173-183 Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm, which applies to scientific worldviews, Foucault's episteme refers to a wider range of discourses. CHAPTER 6

1. In the Qur'an, al-ghayb generally refers to Divine mystery, which is inaccessible to humans (e.g., 6:59, 10:20). More broadly, al-ghayb can refer to two things: the relative or the absolute unknown. The former is in principle knowable but might be unknown because it happened in the past, will happen

in the future, or is happening in a different place. The absolute unknown is that which only God knows (Sha‘rawi 1998).

2. In Arabic the titles are Al-Ahlam wa-l-Kawiaibis: Tafsir Ilmi wa Dini, Al-Ahlam bayna al-‘Ilm wa-l-‘Agida, and Usus wa Usiil fi Tafsir al-Ahlam bayna Friiyid wa Ulam@ al-Muslimin. 3. The Freud quote stems from Lacan (2004, 109). The account that follows of Ziwer’s and the other pioneers’ trajectories is based on interviews conducted during my fieldwork in 2003 and 2004 with Egyptian psychologists. For additional accounts of the history of psychology in Egypt, see Abd al-Gawad (1995), Soueif (2001), and the Egyptian Journal of Psychology. 4. C.G. Jung, in contrast to Freud, plays a very minor role in Egypt. 5. An analysis of these radio talks would provide valuable insight into how

psychoanalysis was first introduced to the Egyptian public. The talks have been published in a book titled Fi Tahlil al-Nafs (On Psychoanalysis). Unfortunately, | was unable to obtain a copy.

6. I spell the psychologists’ names according to how they appear in the literature. 7. On Satouan’s use of psychoanalysis as a tool for political critique, see Pandolfo (2009).

8. Imerely report here Dr. Okasha’s numbers and do not imply that psychology and psychiatry are closely related fields in Egypt. An analysis of psychiatry exceeds the scope of the study. For a historical overview, see Mayers (1982) and Okasha (2002, 2004).

g. According to a different source, Egypt has sixty psychology departments, and the Arab world as a whole has 108 (Martin and Ramadan 1998). Some contend that Morocco or Lebanon has surpassed Egypt in terms of engagement with, and institutionalization of, the field of psychoanalysis. 10. Psychologia, the precursor of modern psychology, used to refer to a branch of pneumatology, the science of spiritual beings and substances (Haque 1997, 98). Arab philosophers accordingly subordinated psychology to metaphysics in the official system of science (Maréth 1996). Today, however, the “science of the self” is largely if not exclusively understood as a secular science. 11. Not all Egyptian psychologists and psychiatrists are dismissive of popular religious methods of healing. Psychiatrist Dr. Ahmed Okasha (1966) studied the effectiveness of the physiological trance state induced by the music at zar rituals, and psychiatrist Yahya al-Rakhawi has allegedly developed an Egyptian

Notes to Pages 184-200 / 261 theory of psychiatry based on Islam, Sufism, and “folk traditions.” Acknowledging that healers often have better access to clients, some Arab psychiatrists and social workers actively promote cooperation with healers (Graham and alKrenawi 2000). 42. See EL “Tim.” 13. It was a psychologist at ‘Ain Shams University who claimed that Freud was one of the founders of the state of Israel. Such comments have to be under-

stood in the context of broader anti-Israeli sentiments that pervade Egypt’s political landscapes, and as a reaction to the Egyptian government's official recognition of and support for Israel, which is seen as a capitulation to U.S. interests. | found negative portrayals of Freud’s background as a Jewish thinker also in contemporary editions of Ibn Sirin’s work (e.g., Khattéb 1997, 14) and in newspaper articles with titles such as “Is Psychoanalysis a Jewish Science?” (Sh‘aldn 2003). See also Elmessiri’s entry “Psychologists (and Psychiatrists)

from Members of Jewish Communities” in his Encyclopedia on Zionism (1999). Of course, there were also many people | spoke to who did not make an issue of Freud's Judaism and expressed no openly discriminatory beliefs.

14. In the Qur’an, nafs refers to the soul or the human self. It moves through three stages: al-nafs al-amdra (the commanding self) is controlled by passion and impulses; it commands evil (e.g., 12:53); al-nafs al-lawaima (the reproaching self) is torn between good and evil (e.g., 75:2); and al-nafs al-mutma’inna (the trusting self), the highest stage, refers to the self at peace (e.g., 89:27).

15. Mustafa Mahmifid (1921-2009) was trained as a medical doctor and, after an initial attraction to Marxism, became a prominent religious figure in Egypt in the 1970s. He launched a popular TV series called Al-Ulm wa-l-lman (Science and Faith; cf. Salvatore 2000). 16. When the first book on psychology appeared in Egypt in 1895, the Ara-

bic term al-sarira (secret thought) was used to refer to the unconscious. In psychological literatures the term was then replaced by al-‘agi al-batin (inner mind) and subsequently by al-la shu‘iir (unfeeling). The latter term is used in Safouan’s translation of Traumdeutung. In everyday conversations Freud’s concept of the unconscious is most often referred to as al-la@ wa‘y (unconsciousness) or al-‘agi al-bdtin. 17. ‘Agidati, 4 June 2002, p. 12. 18. | borrowed video recordings of the program from Shaykh Hanafi. 19. Video-recording of Allahumma Aja‘lu Khayr, A.R-T., 1 May 1998. 20. As noted in chapter 1, Wahhabism, the official doctrine of Saudi Arabia, aims at purging Islam of all “superstitions.” At the same time Wahhabi scholars are often ambiguous with regard to dream interpretation, which partially explains why dreams and dream interpretations are not simply erased from Saudi-based TV programs. 21. For Lacan, the unconscious is centrally the “Other’s discourse” (2004,

163). In Freud’s writings, too, dreams are not exclusively about the individual subject. At times Freud seems intrigued by the prophetic qualities of

262 / Notes to Pages 203-217 dreams, and one could argue that he, too, ultimately allows for an otherness that pervades the dream in the form of other people who are present in our imaginations, CHAPTER 7

1. www.ibm.com/ibm/ibmgives/grant/arts/egyptian.shtml, last accessed 15 May 2009. 2. [use the term media age not because | subscribe to a technological deter-

minism but to highlight affinities between the mediatic and the oneiric. I do not mean thereby to erase the heterogeneity of the various media that figure in this chapter. For instance, whereas television and print newspapers to some extent remain under the control of the state in Egypt, electronic communication technologies, videos, cassettes, pamphlets, and Web sites are much more elusive (Eickelman and Anderson 1999). Furthermore, even a seemingly singular medium like “television” is by no means monolithic. As Samuel Weber puts it, television “also and above all difters from itself” (1996, 109). It contains three operations (production, transmission, and reception), and it differs depending on national, linguistic, and socioeconomic contexts. 3. The group’s main Web site is www.alabd.com. 4. See Gramlich (1987) on bilocation and other miracles ascribed to Muslim saints.

5. On widened social imaginaries and new public spheres in the Muslim world, see Bunt (2003), Eickelman (1992), Eickelman and Anderson (1999), Messick (1993), Meyer and Moors (2005), Schulze (1997), and Starrett (1995, 1998).

6. See Messick (1993) on the priority of the oral in Muslim legal contexts and the underlying notions of presence.

7. | assume the shaykh receives money from the Web site but am not certain. 8. An example is the Egyptian movie Ma‘ali al-Wazir (His Excellency the Minister), which came out during my fieldwork in 2003. It tells the story of a man who by mistake is appointed to a ministry and subsequently becomes

more and more powerful and corrupt. He then starts having nightmares in which his corruption is revealed. Dreams in this movie offer a space for political criticism.

g. Zaytoun and Shubra are two neighborhoods in Cairo with large Coptic populations. Numerous videos of Marian apparition in Zaytoun can be found on YouTube. More personal visionary encounters with the Virgin are often described as involving much light as well. One young Coptic man who recounted the first time he saw the Virgin in his family home spoke of an intense light--so intense that he could barely look in its direction——incense (bukhiir}, anda very pleasant smell. Similarly, the 2000 apparition of the Virgin in Assiut was mainly one of light; it was captured in many photographs and videos but was not represented pictorially as far as I know.

Notes to Pages 218-237. / 263 to. [thank Anthony Shenoda for this suggestion. On Protestant and Catholic images in the United States, cf. Morgan (1999) and McDannel (1995). On the role of images in late antiquity and pre-Reformation Europe, see Belting (1994),

and on “photo magic” in contemporary East Africa, see Behrend (2003). On images as animated beings that exert a certain force in the world, see Mitchell (2005).

41. Saba Mahmood (2009) draws attention to the economies of signification and modalities of attachment that have caused a sense of moral injury for Muslims confronted with the Danish cartoons. The underlying imaginary, she argues, has to do with their relation to the Prophet Muhammad, a relation based on similitude and cohabitation, one that lies outside the realms of law and politics. While I similarly suggest that dream-visions allow for nonsecularized modes of belonging and cohabitation, | think of these imaginaries as intertwined with law and politics, not outside them. 12. Riz al-Yiisuf, 3 June 2003, p. 13. 13. When talking about the (in)visible forces that partake in contemporary wars, Egyptians often also evoked the three thousand angels sent to support the Muslims in the Battle of Badr during the first Islamic century (Qur'an 3:123f,). 14. By way of comparison, for a beautiful analysis of how the logic of photography has transfigured the narration of violent events, see Allen Feldman’s work on Northern Ireland (2006). 15. For Deleuze, cinema does not simply represent an external reality, it also creates different ways of organizing movement and time. Film has the potential to tear real images from clichés by breaking our sensory-motor schemata. Seeing beyond the cliché means seeing the image without metaphor, which “brings out the thing in itself, literally in its excess of horror or beauty, in its radical or unjustifiable character” (1989, 20). For a rereading of Walter Benjamin and mass media along similar lines (and beyond the notion of a vanishing aura), see Buck-Morss (1992). 16. For an analysis of how media analogies can delimit the ways in which religious practices are imagined, see van de Port (2006) on the refashioning of Brazilian spirit possessions through video technologies. AFTERWORD

1. On the role of visceral experiences and affective attachments in the “West,” see Connolly (1999) and Gordon (1997). On the embrace of a new spirituality in North American Christian communities that seeks an intimate connection with God, see Griffith (1997) and Luhrmann (2004, 2005). 2. Many further understood the apparition as a fulfillment of a promise the Virgin had given when she appeared near the village of Fatima, Portugal, in 1917 and announced that Egypt would experience a great defeat and undergo much suffering but that the Virgin would protect the nation. The Zaytoun apparition was interpreted as a fulfillment of this prophecy (Finnestad 1994; Nelson 1973).

264 / Notes to Pages 237-240 3. Shaykh al-Sabahi had been trying to establish his party since 1980 and filed and won a lawsuit in an administrative court to do so in 1983. The party platform pushes for a socialist democracy along with an adoption of shari‘a law as the main source of legislation. In 2003, the party had fewer than two hundred members. 4. See, e.g., Ritz al-Yiisuf, 4 November 2005, pp. 466. 5. Following his wish, Shaykh Qusi was not buried in the tombs mentioned in chapter 5, but in the group’s mosque in his hometown in Upper Egypt.

ahl al-bayt “People of the household”; reters to the Prophet Muhammad's family and descendants, many of whom are buried and venerated in Cairo.

awliya’ Literally, the “friends of God,” those close to God, favored (sing. wali) by God, frequently translated as “saints.”

baraka Blessing, spiritual power, divine grace, or sanctity associated with individuals, places, or objects; can be transferred through contact or gaze.

barzakh An intermediary realm, an isthmus; in the Qur'an, the dividing line between fresh and salt water, as well as the thin path that lies between paradise and hell; in everyday language, generally the space in which the spirits of the dead dwell until Judgment Day; in Sufi

discourses the in-between of the imaginary world, the space in which encounters with the Prophet happen.

basar Optical gaze.

basira Inner vision, ability to perceive hidden truths. al-batin The hidden secret; inner realities; the opposite of al-zahir.

bid‘a Unwarranted innovations; beliefs or practices for which there is no precedent and which are theretore best avoided.

da‘wa “Call, invitation”; in present-day Egypt mostly refers to proselytizing activities that call Muslims back to their religion. 265

266 / Glossary dervish Someone living an ascetic lite, often close to the (darwish in Arabic) saint shrines.

dhikr The invocation of God; repetitive prayer with the objective of remembering (always being

mindful of) God; often involves rhythmic chanting but can also be carried out in silence;

a major Sufi ritual for inner purification and divine blessings.

al-Fatiha The opening sura of the Qur’an, recited during each prayer and when visiting saint shrines or cemeteries.

firdsa Intuition; can involve physiognomy or divinely inspired insight into other’s people’s inner states,

al-ghayb The unseen or unknown; Divine mystery that is inaccessible to humans but glimpses of which

might be known through dream- and waking VISIONS.

hadith Literally, “speech”; authoritative records of (hadith in Arabic) exemplary words or actions of the Prophet or his companions; besides the Qur’an, the second major source from which Islamic law and ethical guidelines are derived.

hadith nafsi A category of dreams; literally, “talk of the self,” a dream that reflects the dreamer’s wishes and worries.

hadith quasi God's words as told to the Prophet Muhammad but not included in the Our’an. Their authenticity is often questioned.

hadra Literally, “presence,” a Sufi congregation for performing dhikr.

hulm A category of dreams inspired by the devil (hilm in Egypt) or evil spirits; in everyday language some-

times refers to all kinds of dreams, including dream-visions.

ilham Divine inspiration.

imam In the Sunni context, prayer leader or leader of

(imam) a mosque and its community.

inshad A musical recitation of religious poetry, often performed at saint’s day celebrations.

istikhdra Literally, “seeking the best”; a nonobligatory prayer through which God’s help is requested

Glossary / = 267 when one is facing a difficult decision. The answer often comes in the form of a dreamvision.

jinn Spirits that are imperceptible to the senses but that can appear in different forms. Some are harmful, others helpful; some are believers, other unbelievers. According to the Qur'an,

the jinn are created of fire or vapor, while humans are mace of clay, and angels, of light.

al-khayal The imagination; in Sufi writings, an order of reality that lies between the spiritual and the material; simultaneously, a faculty that perceives this reality. In everyday discourse sometimes equated with fantasy (wahm).

mahdi “The rightly guided one.” Within a Sunni eschatological context, the mahdi is a savior who will restore true Islam at a time of decadence and decay immediately preceding Judgment Day.

al-mahkama al-batiniyya “Hidden court”; a court composed of saints (particularly Sayyida Zaynab, al-Imam alHusayn, and al-Imam al-Shafi'i) that decides

matters affecting the world of the living; it often makes its verdicts known by way of dream-visions.

ma@idat al-Raliman “Table of the All-Merciful”; spaces set up during Ramadan where food is distributed when it is time to break fast to those who are in need or away trom home.

mashhad ru’ya “Vision-site”; a shrine built because a dead saint requested it by way of a dream, but one that does not host the saint’s body.

mawlid “Saint’s day” commemorating the birth or death of a saint, usually celebrated at his or her shrine; the commemoration can last trom one night to two weeks.

nafs The ego, self. Sufi discipline in part aims at purifying the nafs.

nigab A full-face veil; generally not considered a religious obligation, but a choice to enact a more pious lifestyle. The Egyptian government has recently launched a campaign against this form of veil.

268 / Glossary ri “Spirit.” According to the Qur’an, we know very little about the riih, Many of my interlocutors said that the spirit is of divine origin, continues to exist beyond death, and was passed on to humankind when God breathed

His spirit into Adam. Through it dreamvisions are perceived.

rwya Optical sight.

riya A category of dreams; a truthful dream-vision or waking vision sent by God. According to a hadith, one of forty-six parts of prophecy.

Salafism An intellectual Sunni reform movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

that called for a return to the Islam of the “righteous ancestors {al-salaf al-salih)” while rejecting many aspects of “popular” religion.

sharia A system of thought concerning how a Muslim should live, it contains not only law but also principles of sunna; often translated as “Islamic law.”

shaykh Title of respect that can refer to an old man, a learned scholar, or (in Sufism) a spiritual guide who often is the head of an order.

Sidi Generally refers to a living saint or a particularly revered shaykh; usually a form of address.

sunna Traditions established by the words and actions of the Prophet; a mode! of behavior that pious Muslims seek to emulate.

Wahhabism A Sunni, literalist reform movement, named after Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792);

the dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia.

wahm Fantasy, fancy; as opposed to al-khaydi, which, according to some, is a metaphysical realm and faculty of the imagination.

al-zahtr The outward, external, visible reality.

zar A ritual held for people possessed by spirits; aims to appease the spirits through music and dance.

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Index

Italicized page numbers indicate illustrations. Abraham and Ismail story, 143, 257n2. ~— Aries, Philippe, 146, 149

Abii Bakr, 44, 59, 66 Aristotle, 7, 13, 16, 41, 144, 244n21, adghath ahlam (contused/false dreams), 244n26

166, 189, 243045 Artemidorus, 59, 144

afterlife, 4, 36, 148-53, 166, 220-21, Asad, Talal, 43, 104, 140, 183-84, 234, 258n17. See also barzakh; dead, 241N4, 242n12

the; death astrology, 41, 57, 248n23

agency, 4, 5, 99, 103-4, 108, 142, auditory experiences, 93, TO4, 123, 125,

242N12, 251n1 136, 227

Althusser, Louis, 252n4 authority of interpretation: apparitions angels: dream-, 190, 223, 226; dreams and, 218~19; disciples of Shaykh of, 60, 169; evocative power of, 169; Qusi and, 111, 121; dreamers and, hadra and, 101; gaining knowledge 1089, 111, 219; Egyptian psycholofrom, 258n10; as (in)visible, 84~—85, gists and, 192~95, 197~98; initiation 88~-go, 109, 236-37, 239; sightings of, story as support for, 7o~71; mass

223, 236-37, 263N73 mediation and, 225, 229-30; Shaykh anthropological dream studies, 10-13, Qusi as, 144, 120, 124, 123, 125-26,

163, 244nN22-24 128, 139, 256n10

anthropology of the imagination, 15, authorship: Book of Visions and, 27,

16-20, 29-30, 238-39 118-20, 124, 126-27, 131-34, 138; Apolito, Paolo, 221-23, 229 creativity and, 117; the dead and, ‘aqi (mind/reason). See mind/reason 121; dream texts and, 27, 209~10;

(Cagl) imagination and, 115, 118, 239; al-‘agi batin (inner mind), 45, 188-89, poetry and, 115, 118, 120-21, 128~ 261n16, 265 29. See also poetry

Arabic language, 41, 61, 250n9 autonomous self, 2-5, 14, 19, 103, 163, “Arab mind,” the, 22, 34, 40-41, 232, 237-38, 241N5

248N24 awakening, 35, 49-51, 204, 236, 239

Arendt, Hannah, 4, 171, 237, 238 awliy@ (saints). See saints (awliya) 259

290 / Index Azhar, al-: history of, 33, 43, 248n28, Benjamin, Walter, xiii, 51, 90, 218,

258n16; interpretation of dreams 223, 232, 236, 255n5 and, 25-26, 32-34, 51, 52-53, 58, 69, Blanchot, Maurice, 84, 89-90 194; mosque/university of, 65-66, body: beyond boundaries of, 84, 89, 72, 98, 162, 164; as official institu- 94-95; burial of saints and presertional voice of Sunni Islam, 25, 33, vation of, 160, 258n14; inviting 116, 246n4; Shaykh Hanafi and, 25, dreams and, 98—102, 254n20; 48, 78, 194-95, 233; Shaykh Mustafa invocation/remembrance of God and, 26; Shaykh Qusi and, 116—17. and, 100; spirit versus, 10-11, 13,

See also Salafism; Sunni Islam 88, 93-95, 236, 244N21, 244n25 Book of Visions, 27, 118-20, 124, 126—

Badr, Battle of, 263n13 27, 131-34, 138, 201, 256n12 Bakhtin, M.M., 8, 197, 243n18 (re)burial, and building of shrines,

Banna, Hasan al-, 44-45 160-61, 170, 237

baraka: in Coptic contexts, 158, 218- Burroughs, William, 31, 54, 235 20; description of, 265; gaze and, 88; Butler, Judith, 5, 171, 238, 241n4 of Ibn Sirin, 71, 215; mass mediation

and, 218-19; Ramadan and, 85, 90- calling), and dreams, 50-51, 67-71,

gt; of saints, 220; of shaykhs, 116; 107~9 of shrines, 71, 156, 215; transfer ot, call/invitation [to Islam] (da‘wa), 48,

109; vision-sites and, 161 50-51, 265

Barthes, Roland, 120~21, 132 causality paradox, 103~4, 110, 253n28, barzakh: afterlife and, 4, 36, 166, 220~ 254N25 24, 234, 258n17; conversations in, Certeau, Michel de, 86, 191 148-50, 157; description of, 3, 242n9, charlatans, discourses about, 38— 247N11, 265; either/or space versus, 40, 52, 181-84, 195-96, 248N23,

3, 239; erasures of, 35-41; imagina- 260-61NT1 tion and access to, 89; inner vision Christianity: Catholicism, 221-23, and, 85, 89, 90-91, 109; interpreta- 229-30; evangelical, 259n20; and tion of dreams in space of, 7o, 148- Greek philosophy, 41; medieval, 50, 199; mass media and, 230~31; 259n20. See also Coptic Christian-

the Prophet Muhammad in, 95; ity; Marian apparitions Quran on, 37, 247n11; reformist City of the Dead, 35, 64, 112, 154-55,

thinkers on, 7, 37; saints and, 157; 250n10 spirit and, 94-95; vision sites and, classification of dreams: Freucian ver161. See also afterlite: dead, the; sus Islamic, 184-86, 194; Qur’an on,

death; in-betweenness 6,77; Shaykh Nabil on, 76-77. See basar (optical gaze/vision). See optical also dreams that originate within

gaze/vision (basar) the self (aadith nafsi); dream-vision

basira (inner vision/sight). See inner (rwya); devil-sent dreams (/ulm)

vision/sight (basira) collective dreams and visions, 3, 84, batin (invisible/inner reality). See 125-26, 223, 236-37, 263n13 invisible/inner reality (bdtin} colonialism, 7, 40-41, 43, 50, 175, 232 being in the world, 3-4, 7, 171, 233, commodification of dreams, 8, 218

237-38 communal practices and responsibili-

being-with, 3, 5, 154, 171, 238-39 ties, 29, 100-102, 104, 141, 143, 159

Benedict XVI, 42 communities, imagined, 5, 16, 229-30

Index / 291 community, material support for and writing and relationship with, 120from, 80-82, 84, 158-59, 215, 262n7 21. See also barzakh; saints (awliyd’);

confirmation of divinely inspired visitational dreams; visitation cycles poetry, 111, 120-21, 123, 125-26, with saints (awliya) 128, 131-32, 138-39, 256n10 death: afterlife and, 4, 36, 166, 220confused/false dreams (adghath 21, 234, 258n17; awakening and, 35,

ahlam), 166, 189, 243n45 239; conversations beyond, 148-49; Connolly, William E., 242n10, 250n5, dreams foreshadowing, 150, 239,

263n1 257n9; space of, 4, 64-65, 148-50,

context, and temporality, 77, go~-91, 234, 242ni1; Freud on, 148; Shaykh

235~36 Qusi’s disciples, tombs and, 149, 201,

conversions, 156, 220-21, 237, 257n4 264n5; spirit and, 149—50, 151); writCoptic Christianity, 157-58, 243n17, ing and relationship with, 120-21. 243-44n19, 252n6, 258n12. See also See also afterlife: barzakh; dead, the

Marian apparitions Deleuze, Gilles, 226, 263n45

court of hidden saints (malikama democratization of dream interpreta-

batiniyya), 35, 67, 247n10, 267 tion, 209-12 Crapanzano, Vincent, 3-4, 12, 15, 76, Derrida, Jacques, 5, 143

142 dervishes (dardwish), 38, 67, 70, 167,

creativity, 17, 117-15, 128, 137, 207, 220, 253N14

255nn5—6, 255-56n7 Descartes, René, 10-11, 13, 88, 236, Cromer, Evelyn Baring, 40-41 244N21, 244N25 cyber interpretations: dreamers and, desire, 7, 12, 27, 87, 102, 103, 151-52, 212~14; as expanding and narrow- 161, 182, 186, 190, 195-98, 235 ing interpretation of dreams, 211- devil-sent dreams (ulm): as category 13, 216; interpreter of dreams and, ot dreams, 6; dream-vision versus,

214-16; professional identity of 6, 243n15; hadith literature on, 74, dream interpreter and, 208-9, 216; 76-77, 184-85, 214, 243N15, 257N5, Shaykh Nabil and, 27, 56, 187, 204, 266; performative power of, 143, 208-9, 211-12; sleep and wakeful- 162, 257n5; psychological explananess line in, 213. See also Internet tions for, 185; Rw and, 193; rules

Web sites of conduct for the sleeper and, 99, 143, 257n6

da‘wa (call/invitation [to Islam]), 48, dhikr Gnvocation/remembrance of

50-51, 108, 265 God), 21, 100-102, 207, 25423.

dead, the: authorship and, 121; City See also hadra of the Dead, 35, 64, 112, 154-55, DiCenso, James, 200 250n10; desires of, 151-52; dreams dihliz (threshold), 57-58, 59, 66, 79, 82 ot, 144-48, 151-53, 192-93, 257nN7—- disciples of Shaykh Qusi: authority of

g; feelings in presence of, 64-65; interpretation and, 111, 121; Book Freud on dreams of, 146-48; line of Visions, 27, 118-20, 124, 126-27, between living and, 64; spiritual- 131-34, 138, 201, 256n12; confirmasocial relations with, 3, 121; states tion of vision-as-encounter through, of, 152; tombs of, 145, 145, 149; 121, 125-26, 128, 138-39; hadra TV and spirits of, 226; vision-as- and, 24-25, 101, 206~7; Internet encounter with, 120~24; wish ful- Web site of, 117, 201, 206-8, 239, fillment and dreams of, 146~48; 262n3; mass mediation and, 117,

292 / Index disciples of Shaykh Qusi (continued) and, 108—9, 111, 219; cyber interpre-

206-8, 216; mawlids and, 24; tations and, 212-14; day-dreamers, Prophet-visions and, 127-28; in 117; gender of, 23, 66, 125, 126, 163, Saudi Arabia, 24; tomb for, 149, 250-51n13; interpreter of dreams, 201; virtual realities and, 201, 205 and interactions with, 61-63, 74-76, disciplining of dreams: arrest of 78, 79, 215-17; mediation and, 82—-

Shaykha Mandl and, 247n12; 83, 107, 111, 121; rules of conduct erasures of barzakh and, 35~41; for the sleeper and, 96, 98-100, by interpreter of dreams, 8, 53; 99, 143, 254n22, 257n6; vision-as-~ Muslim Brotherhood and, 44-46; prophecy and, 3, 8, 49, 96, 99, 108 Orientalism and, 40-41, 137-38, dreams: history, and role of, 232, 236; 232; overview, 31-35; political marginalization of, 7~8, 10, 314, 44,

dimensions and, 52. See also 235, 244n20; use of term, 6. See Egyptian state; reformist thinkers also classification of dreams; dream “discourse, incitement to,” 33, 246n2 effects; dream-vision (ru’ya); inter-

Divine, the. See God pretation of dreams; interpreter of divine inspiration (i]ham): Book of dreams

Visions as illumination of, 120; dreams that originate within the self description of, 89, 252n7, 266; dream- (hadith nafsi), 6, 76-77, 183-85,

vision and, 13, 135~36; imagination 188-89, 266 as, 49; initiation and, 67~71; inter- dream-vision (ru’yd): as category of pretation of dreams and, 58, 60, dreams, 6, 76; contradictory ettects 67-71, 69; intuition versus, 252n7; of, 111; court of hidden saints and poetry and, 128~33; Qur’an and, verdicts delivered in, 67, 267; descrip130-31; reformist thinkers on, 42- tion of, 6-7, 76-77, 143, 24315; 43, 45, 49, 130; saints as source of, divine inspiration and, 135-36; 70; Shaykh Qusi on, 19; learning ver- double directionality of, 109-10; sus, 70. See also vision-as-prophecy dreams versus, 82, 185; Elsewhere double directionality, 19, 78-79, 109-10 and, 29, 81, 96, 97, 103, T1011, 115; doubt, dream, 10, 13, 165-66, 244n21, ethical dimensions of, 77-78, 141-

244N25 43, 160-61, 171-72, 233-39, 234,

dream-angels, 190, 223, 226 257n2; etymology of rw’yd, 91;

dream effects: conversions and, 158, al-ghayb as accessed through, 104, 237, 257n4; creativity and, 117-18, 173, 237; hadith literature on, 115, 137, 255nn5-6, 255-56n7; descrip- 256-57ni4; [bn al“Arabi and, 7, 44; tion of, 142; evocative power and, imaginary and attunedness through, 107-9, 124, 138, 142, 146, 169-70, 89; inner vision/sight and, 189; 235, 238; food distribution and, 81, Internet Web sites and ettects on, 8, 151, 158-59, 170-72; healing and, 216, 227, 229, 233; as legal evidence, 142, 158, 182; knowledge gained 45-47, 248-49N29; prophecy and, 6, and, 144-46, 151-53, 168, 258n10; 109-10, 135-36; the Prophet Muhammashahid ru’yd (vision sites) and, mad on, 6, 128; Prophet-visions and, 161; {re)burial and building of 102, 122, 164~70, 258n17; psychoshrines and, 160-61, 170; visitation logical terms integrated in undercycles with saints and, 158-61, 170. standing ot, 77; revelation versus,

See also evocative power 34, 133-36, 256—57n14; Salati thinkdreamers: authority of interpretation ers on, 130; screens and, 228~29;

Index / 293 selt-cultivation for, 5, 86, 97, 102-3, Elmessiri, Abdelwahhab, 182

109-10; Shaykh Hanafi on, 76; Elsewhere: dream-vision and, 29, Shaykh Nabil on, 76-77, 82; sleep 81, 96, 97, 103, 110-11, 115; ethics and wakefulness line and, 6, 243n17; and, 3, 51, 141, 237; Freud model

spirit and, 93, 99, 189; visitation and tension with model of, 14, 237; cycles with saints and, 156-57. inviting dream-visions and, 97; See also imaginary; imagination; prophecy, and source in, 81, 106, imagination/khaydl, in-betweenness; 137; Qur’an and dream-vision as inner vision/sight (basira); inter- eruptions of knowledge from, 115; pretation of dreams; interpreter visitation cycles with saints and,

of dreams; inviting dream-visions; 163 narrated dream-vision; prepared- Enlightenment, 10-11, 13, 16, 88, ness versus production of dream- 140-41, 244N 24, 244N25 vision; visitational dreams; specific episteme, 172, 173-74, 191, 199, 216,

shaykhs 235, 237, 259-6on21

dual temporality, 126-28 Eternal Tablet (awh mahfiiz), 131, 189-90, 201-5, 226, 230

Egyptian psychologists: authority of ethical dimensions: as being-with, 154, interpretation and, 192~95, 197-98; 238-39; beyond self, 5, 231; commu-

discourses on charlatans among, nal practices/responsibilities and, 52, 181-84, 260~-61n11; frictions 29, 141, 143; dream-vision and, 77—

between, 179-81; genealogy of, 78, 144-43, 160-61, 171-72, 233-39, 175~77; hallucinatory wish fulfill- 234, 257n2; Elsewhere and, 3, 51, ment and, 172, 198; marginalization 141, 237; fatwa against, 46; Freud of, 180-82; publications and trans- on, 144-43, 257n2; of imaginary/ lations by, 176-79, 260n5; on Rw a, imagination, 3, 25, 56, 200, 234, 32, 33-34, 191-95; scientific dream 239; of in-betweenness, 53, 56-57, model and, 183; statistics, 260nn8—9; 200, 237, 250n5; interpretation of university departments of, 175-76, dreams and, 45-46, 77-79, 81-82,

180-81 171; Kantian versus Aristotelian,

Egyptian state: emergency laws and, 140-41; morality versus, 143, 171; 1, 241n2; Internet Web sites control openings and, 56, 200, 239; prophecy by, 262n2; interpretation of dreams and, 237; reformist thinkers on, 7, regulation by, 32~33, 37, 38, 53, 44; Shaykh Nabil on, 152~53; visi247N12; mass media regulation by, tational dreams and, 140~41, 152262n2; religion regulation by, 33, 53, 171-72, 258ni10; visitation cycles 37-38, 2463, 247N12; on searches with saints and, 163-64; in Western into al-ghayb, 32-33; socio-moral history, 141-42, 257n2 crisis and, 1-2; Sufism regulation evil spirit-inspired dreams (ulm). by, 33; television program regulation See devil-sent dreams (hulm) by, 32-33, 37; “true Islam” ideologi- evocative power: of Book of Visions, cal contest and, 28-29, 33, 38, 40, 52 138; devil-sent dreams and, 143, 162,

either/or space: barzakh versus, 3; 257n5; of dreams, 142, 146, 169~-70, Freud model in Egypt and, 185; 235; of poetry, 124; Prophet-visions imaginary versus, 18, 29, 52, 89, and, 166-67; visitational dreams 239; interpretation of dreams and, and, 7,142~44, 146-48, 151-52,

173-74, 182, 185-90, 261n13 257n4. See also dream effects

294 / Index face-to-face interpretation of dreams, vance of, 199-200, 245n28; Shaykh 56, 61-62, 71-74, 78, 98, 208, 211- Nabil on, 190-91; on sleep and

12, 244-15 wakefulness line, 11, 191; use of

fantasy (walm): Freud model and, 16, name, 14 179; imagination/khaydil versus, 8, Freud model in Egypt: Arabic transla19-20, 91-92, 179, 242n8, 253n13, tion of writings by Freud, 177-79, 268; political dimensions of, 142; 178; description of Freud model and, Our’an on, 92; use of term, 3, 242n8 13-14, 18; dream versus dream-

fatwa, 46, 214 vision, and, 185; either/or space

Hieldwork: description of, 20-28; and, 185; Elsewhere and tension dreams during, xv, 28, 75; dreams with, 14, 237; ethics and, 141-43, as invisible objects of, 21, 83, 86— 257n2; hallucinatory wish fultil87, 251-52n3; interlocutors in, 22—- ment and, 174, 179; history and 23, 38, 24535, 245-46n36; writing impact otf, 29, 173-74, 175-81, 184, dreams and, 21-22, 27-30, 132-33, 187-91; Lmagination versus, 1, 246n37; writing ethnography and, 179; responses to, 14, 146-48, 184,

27-28, 238, 256n12 245n28; as scientific, 183

films, 39, 209, 216, 224, 226-29, 230, Frishkopt, Michael, 121 262n8, 263n15

firdsa (intuition). See intuition (firdsa) Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 117,

tlooding of senses, 92-93, 204, 207 255-56n7 food distribution, 81, 84, 151, 15859, gaze. See optical gaze/vision (basar)

170-72 gaze, sincere. See inner vision/sight

foreshadowing, dreams as, 150, 168, (basira)

236, 257n9 gender: access to al-ghayb and, 82—-

Foucault, Michel, 17-19, 77, 89-90, 83, 104, 110; of dreamers, 23, 66, 120-21, 197, 238, 242N10, 245n33, 125, 126, 163, 250-5113; hadith

246n2 literature on dreams and, 103; of

Freud, Sigmund: anti-Israeli sentiments interpreter of dreams, 63, 66, 126, and, 185, 261n13; apolitical interpre- 245-46n36; intuition and, 126;

tation of dreams and, 235; Arabic preparedness versus production translation of writings by, 177-79, of dream-vision and, 104; public 178; against autonomous self, 14; sphere and, 162~—63; reformist

on creative writing, 133; on day- thinkers and, 162-63; rules of dreamers, 117; on the dead in conduct for the sleeper and, 99; dreams, 146~48; on death, 148; value of dreams and, 104; visitadreams that originate within the tional dreams and, 162-63; visitors self and, 185; Egyptian responses to [bn Sirin shrine and, 66, 71, 73, to, 14, 146-48, 245n28; on ethics, 250-51n13 141-42, 257n2; hallucinatory wish ghayb, al-: access to, 173; description

fulfillment and, 141-42, 172, 173, of, 260n1, 266; dream-vision as 185, 190-91; Ibn Sirin compared access to, 104, 173, 237; Egyptian with, 54; Interpretation of Dreams psychologists on, 187, 237; Egyp(Traumdeutung), 146-48, 177-79, tian state on searches into, 32~33; 178; on knowledge through dreams, gender and access to, 82~83, 104, 106~7; on Otherness, 200, 261-62n21; 110; as inaccessible, 47; the Prophet

redreamed dreams and, 147; rele- Muhammad and, 47; Qur’an on, 47,

Index / 295 187, 260n1; Salafi views on, 47; Haddad, Yvonne Yazbeck, 151-52,

statistics on searches into, 39; 156, 220, 258n10 unconscious as access to, 187; hadith literature: on acting versus

Wahhabi views on, 47 being acted upon, 103; authority Ghazali, al-: on causality paradox, of, 122, 165; Book of Visions and, 255n28; on Gad’s Ninety-Nine 126-27; description of, 122, 127, Names, 254n23; influences of, 24, 165; on devil-sent dreams, 74, 76— 44, 48, 183, 186, 244n25; on inter- 77, 184-85, 214, 243n15, 266; on pretation of dreams and Qur’an dream-visions, 115, 256-57n14; on exegesis, 58; on masses’ readiness gender and dreams, 103; interpre-

tor religious truths, 207~8; on tation of dreams and, 6, 48, 58-60, prophecy and sleep, 112; on sleep 242~43n13, 24316; interpreter of and wakefulness line, 13, 24426; dreams and, 48, 69; on the Prophet on states of the dead, 152; on thresh- Muhammad, 165-66; on Prophetold, 57; on vision-as-prophecy, 128 visions, 165-66, 258n17; on rules Gilsenan, Michael, 26, 27, 163, 256n10 of conduct for the sleeper, 98-99; God: double-directionality and, 78-79, symbols and, 60-61; telling of 233; dreams of, 253n12; dream-vision dreams and, 74, 251n16; temporaland transformational encounters ity and, 126~-27; as trope for underwith, 82-83, 104, 110; egalitarian standing dream-visions, 115, 122-23, communication with, 82~83, 104, 127~28, 134; vision-as-encounter 110; invocation/remembrance of, and, 115, 121-22, 126-27, 138; 21, 100-102, 207, 254n23; language vision-as-prophecy and, 6, 136, of, 131; material world and, 89, 91; 256—57N14. mediation between human knowl- hadith nafsi (dreams that originate

edge and, 57, 115; Ninety-Nine within the self}, 6, 76-77, 183-85, Names of, 100, 207, 209, 254n23; 188-89, 266 the Real, 228, 241n3; photographic hadra: accessibility of, 205-8; angels

evidence of, 220-24, 222, 229; and, 101; description of, 100-101, preparedness/unpreparedness and 202, 266; disciples of Shaykh Qusi encounters with, 103~4, 106, 110; and, 24~25, 101, 206~7; invocation/ as present in everyday life, 3, 5, 8, remembrance of God and, 100—102, 36; visionary realities and, 223-24. 254n23; mass mediation and, 113,

See also ghayb, al- 205, 21819; texts merging with

Greek philosophy/literature: Aristotle, visionary realities and, 101-2, 219;

7, 13, 16, 44, 144, 24421, 24426; waking vision and, 101 Artemidorus, 59, 141; Christianity hallucinatory wish fulfillment: the and harmony with, 41; interpreta- dead and, 146-48; desire and, 143, tion of dreams and, 59, 77, 141; 172, 198, 235; dreams and, 143; Plato, 16, 244n21; rationalism and, Egyptian psychologists on, 172, 198; 246n8; sleep and wakefulness line Freud model in Egypt and, 174, 179; and, 244; vision theories and, 87, Freud on, 141-42, 172, 173, 185, 190228; visitational dreams and, 170 91; interpretation of dreams and, 174, 179, 190-91, 199; Shaykh Nabil on,

habitus, 140-41, 254n20. See also 190-91; waking vision versus, 86-87,

technologies of the selt 191-98

Hacking, lan, 82, 244n21, 245n29 Haraway, Donna, 89

296 / Index healing: dream eftects and, 142, 158, Nabil’s relation with, 54-57, 249n1; 182; Quranic healers and, 39, 57, on symbols in interpretation of 165, 181, 184, 243n14, 247N15, 260- dreams, 36, 257nn7~-9. See also

61n11; Shaykh Nabil and, 79. See Ibn Sirin shrine

also zr rituals Ibn Sirin shrine: baraka of, 71, 2145;

Hermansen, Marcia, 277 caretaker of, 54-55, 65-66, 71-72; heteroglossia, 8, 186, 192, 195, 197-98, description of, 59, 64-66, 65; feel-

199, 243n18 ings in presence of the dead in, 64—-

hidden secrets. See invisible/inner 65; gender of visitors to, 66, 71, 73,

reality (bdtin) 250~51n13; history and location of,

hierarchy/hierarchies: dreams and, 82, 63-64, 68, 251n14; interpretation 111, 170; Egyptian psychologists on of dreams in, 74~76; material suplinguistic, 176, 177; Prophet-visions port for community and, 80-81, and, 167-68; of senses, 253n11; visi- 82; as social nexus, 73, 82; threshtational dreams and, 170. See also old of, 57-58, 59, 66, 79, 82; visitor

authority of interpretation types in, 66, 72-74, 250-51n13. See Hirschkind, Charles, 4, 50, 224, 242n12 also ton Sirin, Muhammad; Shaykh

Hobbes, Thomas, 16, 19 Nabil

hulm (devil-sent dream). See devil- Ibn Taymiyya, 43, 161

sent dreams (hulm) ilhdm (divine inspiration). See divine inspiration (/ham) {bn al-‘Arabi: on divinely inspired images: imagination versus, 17-19, 238; poetry, 128; on double directionality, miraculous photographs and, 220~ 19, 110; dream-vision and, 7, 44; on 24; power of, 197-99; recycled, 53, imagination, 19, 92, 128; on Prophet- T47, 216-24, 220-24

visions, 127, 166 imaginary: anthropology and, 15-16;

Ibn al-Farid, 129, 136, 166 dream-vision and attunedness to, Ibn Khaldiin, 58, 103, 110 89; either/or space versus, 18, 29, Ibn Shahin, 60, 69, 210 52, 89, 239; ethics of in-betweenness Ibn Sirin, Muhammad: baraka ot, 71; as open toward, 3, 56, 200, 239; burial location for, 64; democratiza- interpreter of dreams and assistance tion of interpretation of dreams, and from realm of, 68-69, 79, 82; politiname of, 209~10; dream manual by, cal dimensions of, 3, 28, 30, 239; 32, 35-36, 48, 60; on dreams ot the proot of, 44; the real versus, 7, 34-35, dead, 257n7, 257n9q; face-to-face 51, 52, 109; Rwda and remapping of interpretation of dreams and, 62; religious landscapes of the, 51-52; Freud compared with, 54; initiation use of term, 3. See also dead, the; into interpretation of dreams for, God; Prophet Muhammad, the;

68; as interpreter of dreams, 54, saints (awliya’) 185, 249n14; intuition (firdsa) of, 62; imagination: anthropology of the, 15, Islamic model of dreams and, 6—10, 16-20, 29-30; authorship and, 145,

76-77, 115, 183-85, 188-89, 190, 118, 239; being in the world and, 242-43N13, 243nN14-15, 266; legacy 233; as divine inspiration, 49; ethics

of, 23-24, 54, 60, 249-50n2; life and, 3, 231; Freud model and, 18, history ot, 54, 64, 249n1; prophecy 179; Ibn alArabi on, 19, 92, 128; and, 54; on Prophet-visions, 166; image versus, 17~19, 238; imagined as scientific model, 184; Shaykh communities and, 5, 16, 229-30;

Index / 297 mass mediation and, 230-31; politi- sight, 92-93; Qur’an on, 91-92, 252cal dimensions of, 3, 28, 237, 239; 53ni1, 253nn12~14; visible reality reimagining of, 233; in Romantic versus, 85, 87-89, 109, 252n4, 252n6; movement, 17, 187, 244n20; mahdi waking vision and, 89 in religious, 31, 33, 34, 38, 50, 246n1, inshdd (recitation), 112-14, 134-35, 266 249n38, 267; use of term, 3, 242n8; Internet Web sites: disciples of Shaykh Western genealogy of, 16—18. See Qusi and, 201, 206~—8, 239, 262n3;

also imagination/khayal dream-vision and effects of, 8, 216, imagination/khaydl: description of, 3, 227, 229, 233; Egyptian state control 18~19; ethics and, 28; fantasy and, over, 262n2; fatwa and, 46; Islam 8, 19-20, 91-92, 179, 242n8, 253713, and, 2, 46, 85, 169-70, 207-8, 209; 268; in-betweenness and, 233; mar- professional identity on, 208~9, ginalization of, 20; poetry and, 138, 216; Shaykh Nabil and, 208-16; 179; socio-political-ethical-religious Wahhabism and, 46. See also implications of, 28; as space, 18, 89, cyber interpretations 225; use of term, 3; virtual realities interpretation of dreams: awakening

compared with, 225; vision-as- and, 49-51, 204; al-Azhar and, prophecy and, 23, 117. See also 25-26, 32-34, 51-53, 58, 69, 194; barzakh; imagination; Sufism barzakh and, 70, 148—50, 199; cyber Imam al-Husayn, 24, 64, 66, 123, 154- interpretations as expanding and

55, 161, 250n11, 267 narrowing, 211-13, 216; democraImam al-Shafid, 20, 35-38, 247n10, 267 tization of, 209~12; description of, in-betweenness: ethics of, 53, 56—57, 77-79, 81-82; divine inspiration 200, 237, 239, 250n5; Imagination and, 58, 60, 67~71, 69; dreams

and, 233; interpretation of dreams happen/come true during, 74, 81, and, 173-74, 182-86, 190-91, 199; 251n16; Egyptian state regulation mass mediation and, 203; “taking/ of, 32-33, 37, 38, 53, 247n12; either/ making swim across” and, 54, 57, 69, or space and, 173-74, 182, 185-90, 243, 249-50n3; threshold and, 57-58, 261n13; Elsewhere as source for,

59, 66, 79, 82. See also barzakh; 51, 106; ethics and, 45-46, 77-79, Ibn Sirin shrine; interpretation of 81-82, 171; face-to-face, 56, 61-62, dreams; interpreter of dreams; 71-74, 78, 98, 208, 211-12, 214-15;

Shaykh Nabil Greek literature and, 59, 77, 141;

“incitement to discourse,” 33, 246n2 hadith literature and, 6, 48, 58-60, initiation into interpretation of dreams, 242~43N13, 243n16; hallucinatory

67-71 wish fultillment and, 174, 179, 190~

inner mind (al-‘aql batin), 45, 188-89, 91, 199; heteroglossias, and shaping

261n16, 265 of, 186, 192, 195, 197-98, 199; in Ibn

inner vision/sight (basira): barzakh Sirin shrine, 74-76; in-betweenness and, 109; description of, 89-93, and, 173-74, 182-86, 190-91, 199; 252n8, 265; dream-vision and, 189; initiation into, 67-71; intuition and, ecstatic poetry reading and, 114; 212; Islamic scholarship on, 33-34; interpreter of dreams and, 211; “Islam” (re})made and, 29, 173-74, intuition and, 89, 252n7; nonocular 184; as legitimate practice, 48—49; understandings of, 85-86, 89~—91, mahdi in, 31~32; mass mediation of, 109; optical gaze versus, 67, 85-86, 53; materialist paradigm and, 14, 19,

88, 89, 90-93; as flooding optical 45, 89, 182-83, 235; mediation and,

298 / Index interpretation of dreams {continued} mediation; Shaykh Nabil; specific 57, 84, 115; methods of, 60-62; mind/ shaykhs reason and, 78; Otherness in, 200; interrelational dimensions, 2-4, 171, political dimensions of, 47-51, 204; 233, 237, 241n5. See also communipower relations and, 186, 191-95, ties, imagined; ethical dimensions 199; prophecy and, 47, 58, 68-69; intimate relationships: in evangelical psychological guidance and, 82; and medieval Christianity, 259n20; Qur'an and, 6, 8, 47, 48, 58, 61, with Prophet, 123, 168, 170, 259n20; 249n33, 250n8; rationality and, 31, with saints, 155-56 49; reshaping of, 8~9, 53, 243n18; intuition (firdsa): description of, 89, Saudi Arabia and, 46-47, 195-98, 266; gender and, 126; [bn Sirin and, 197, 249N31, 261N21; socio-moral 62; inner vision and, 89, 2527; society, and role ot, 50-51; spiritual interpretation of dreams and, 212; science and, 182-86, 199; as supersti- Quran on, 252n7; reformist thinktion, 38, 52, 162, 183-84; symbols in, ers on, 136; Shaykh Nabil on, 212, 36, 78-79, 257nn7—-9; on telephone, 215; Shaykh Qusi on, 19, 149; 73, 78, 204, 212; textual tradition Shaykh Sayyid on, 69, 212; tele-

and importance in, 60-61, 68-70, phone interpretation of dreams 209-211; unconscious resignified and, 212; written dreams and, 212 through, 29, 173-74, 184, 187—91; (in)visible, 84~91, 109, 204, 239

Wahhabi scholars on, 195-98, invisible/inner reality (bdfin): court 261n20; Ytsuf as tather ot, 6, 58, ot hidden saints and, 35-38, 67, 61, 68-70, 74, 104, 177. See also 247n10, 267; description of, 85—86,

Egyptian psychologists; Freud 265; electricity analogy and, 24; model in Egypt; in-betweenness; fieldwork, and dreams as, 21, 83, mass mediation; television; waking 86-87, 251-52n3; visible versus, 84—-

vision (ru’ya) 85, 87, 265. See also court of hidden Interpretation of Dreams (Traum- saints (mahkama batiniyya) deutung; Freud), 146-48, 177-79, inviting dream-visions: Elsewhere and,

178 97; tacilitation of dream-vision and,

interpreter of dreams: discourses 95-96; invocation/remembrance

about charlatans and, 38-39; cyber of God and, t00~102, 104, 254n23; interpretations and, 214~—16; disci- istikhdra prayer and, 2, 95-98, 104, plining of dreams by, 8, 53; dream- 196, 220, 254n20, 254n21; reformist ers and interactions with, 61-63, thinkers on, 104; rules of conduct for 74-76, 79, 215~17; dream manuals the sleeper and, 96, 98-100, 254n22 by, 35-36, 48, 60, 209; gender ot, 63, invocation/remembrance of God 66, 126, 245~-46n36; genealogy of, (dhikr), 21, 100-102, 207, 254N23.

58-60, 68; hadith literature and, 48, See also hadra 69; [bn Sirin as, 54, 185; imaginary, lraq war, 1-2, 232, 233, 237 and assistance for, 68-69, 79, 82; Islam: democratization of knowledge

inner vision and, 211; professional and, 207-8, 209; Egyptian state and identity of, 69, 208-9, 216; psychol- regulation of, 33, 37-38, 247n12; ogy as modern versus, 7~8; public Freud model in Egypt and, 181—82, sphere and, 49-50; requirements 186; guidance from al-ghayb, and, for, 61-63, 81; as shaykhs, 63, 245— 173; images in, 166, 218~20, 258— 46n36; Sunni Islam and, 7o. See also 59n18; Internet Web sites and, 2, 46,

Index / 299 85, 169-70, 207-9; interpretation of lations of Freud’s writings, 177-79, dreams and (re}making of, 29, 173- 178; hierarchies of, 176, 177 74, 184; Islamic model of dreams, l@ wa‘y (anconscious), 45, 187-91,

6-10, 76-77, 115, 183-85, 188-90, 261n16 242-43n13, 243nn14—-15; legitimate lawh malfiz (Eternal Tablet), 131,

scholars and, 48-49; mind/reason 189-90, 201-5, 226, 230 versus dreams/revelation and, 41— legal dimensions, 47, 263n13 44; textual tradition and, 8, 60-61, Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 191, 251-52n3 68~70; “true Islam” contestations liminality, 57. See also in-betweenness and, 23, 28-29, 33, 38-40, 49, 52; linear temporality, laws of, 56, 223,

vision-as-encounter in tradition of, 236-38 115, 121-22. See also hadith litera- loudspeakers and microphones, 112—

ture; Islamic Revival: Quran; Sunni 14, 204

Islam lying about dreams, 38, 74, 124

Islamic Revival, 4, 5, 9, 45-46, 50, 181,

224, 234-35, 258n16 Madame Salwa, 71, 73, 81, 153-59, istikhdra prayer, 2, 95-98, 104, 196, 162-63, 169-70, 188

220, 254nn24 m@idat al-Rahmiin, 84-86, 134, 267 mahdi, 31, 33-34, 38, 50, 246n1,

jinn, 76, 78, 89, 99, 162, 209, 243N14, 249n38, 267

267 Mahtouz, Naguib, 117-18, 255n6

jinn-inspired dreams. See devil-sent Mahir, Su’ad Muhammad, 161

dreams (hulm) mahkama batiniyya (court of hidden Joan of Arc, 42 saints }, 35-38, 67, 247n10, 267 Jonas, Hans, 87-88, 252n4 Mahmood, Saba, 4, 50, 140, 2414, jung, C.G., 13, 44, 74, 174, 245033, 242N12, 263n11

260n4 Mahmiid, Mustafa, 186, 261n15 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 12, 244n24

Kant, Immanuel, 16, 140-41 manuals, dream, 2, 32, 35-36, 48, 60, khayal (imagination). See imagination/ 209-11, 210

khayal Maranhao, Tullio, 18

Khidr, al-, 117, 120, 122~23, 125~26, Marcuse, Herbert, 142, 242n8

131, 134-35, 225, 255n4 Marian apparitions: baraka ot, 158, khurdfdt (superstitions). See supersti- 218-20; causality paradox and,

tion(s) (Khurdfat) 254n25; crossvisitation and, 157~ Kindi, al-, 87, 92, 128 58, 258n23; in Egypt, 910, 235; knowledge: divinely revealed, 26, 57, mass mediation and, 217-18, 229, 115; gained through dreams, 13, 262n9g; as material sign, 89, 252n6; 144-46, 151-53, 168, 258n10; kinds miracles and, 221~23; optical gaze

of, 26. See also mind/reason and, 217; photographs of, 221-23;

Koselleck, Reinhart, 236 prophecy and, 217, 263n2; recycled images and, 217-18; in Shubra, 157,

Lacan, Jacques, 88, 148, 177, 181, 187, 243-44n19, 258n13, 262n9; In Zay-

200, 238, 244, 260n3, 261-62n21 foun, 9-10, 217-19, 237, 243-44n19,

Lamoreaux, John, 14, 57, 115 254n25, 258n13, 262n9, 263n2 language(s): angelic or divine, 131; Marx, Karl, 88, 261n45 Arabic, 41, 61, 250n9; Arabic trans- mashdahid ru’ya (vision sites), 164

300 / Index mass mediation: about, 29; authority Muhammad, 145; shrines and, 112of interpretation and, 225, 229-30; 44, 123, 258n15; Sunni Islam and, 7o baraka and, 218-19, 230-31; contra- mediation: dreamers and, 82-83, 107, dictory and unanticipated effects of, 411, 124; between God and human 29, 200, 206-8, 230-31; democrati- knowledge, 57, 115; interpretation zation of interpretation of dreams of dreams and, 57, 81, 115; Shaykh and, 209~12; disciples of Shaykh QOusi and, 126. See also interpreter

Qusi and, 205~7; Egyptian state of dreams; mass mediation; ta‘bir regulation of, 262n2; exchanges (“taking/making swim across”} between spiritual realms and, 206; Meier, Fritz, 43, 127 tilms and, 39, 209, 216, 224, 226- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 90, 24534 29, 230, 262n8, 263n15; hadra and, Messick, Brinkley, 57, 183, 215 113, 205, 218-19; handwritten ver- metaphors, 8, 9, 16, 224-29, 245n30,

sus typewritten dreams and, 200, 263N45 212; imagination and, 230-31; in- microphones and loudspeakers, 112betweenness and, 203; interpretation 14, 204 of dreams and, 53; the (injvisible mind/reason (agl): dreams/revelation and, 204; loudspeakers and micro- versus, 4-5, 34, 41, 136-37, 246n8; phones, 112~14, 204; Marian appa- interpretation of dreams and, 78; ritions and, 217-18, 229, 262ng; in knowledge derived trom, 26; Qur’an media age, 204, 262n2; as metaphor, on, 43, 91-92 227-29; photography and, 217-24; Mitchell, Timothy, 7 radio media and, 176, 260n5; Saudi modernity: dream discourses in, 8~9, critics on, 46~47, 249n31; Shaykh 10, 14, 53, 234; materialist paradigm Qusi and, 112, 117, 205, 207-8; tele- and, 14, 19, 45, 89, 91, 182-83, 235; phone interpretation of dreams, 73, material signs and, 88-89, 252n6; 78, 204, 212; temporality/spatiality material world and, 2, 7, 34-35, 51, and, 205-6; visionary realities and, 52, 89, 109, 235; as obsessed with 220-21, 263n12. See also mediation; the unthinkable, 244n20; science

television and, 37, 197, 261n15; spiritual sci-

materialist paradigm, 14, 19, 45, 89, ence and, 182-86, 199

QT, 182-83, 235 MOVIES, 39, 209, 216, 224, 226-29,

material signs, 88-89, 252n6 230, 262n8, 263n15

material support for and from com- munshids, 113-14, 117, 255n1, 2553 munity, 80-81, 82, 84, 158-59, 215, Muslim Brotherhood, 44-46 262n7

material world, 2, 7, 34-35, 51, 52, 89, Nabulusi, al-, 48, 58, 60, 146, 166, 209-

109, 172, 235 10, 249-50N3

mawlids: criticism of, 161-62; descrip- nafs (selt/soul), 93, 182-83, 253-54n78,

tion of, 22, 112-13, 255n4, 267; dis- 260n20, 261n14, 267 ciples of Shaykh Qusi participating narrated dream-vision: about, 27, 115, in, 24; material support for commu- 139, 216; authority of dreamer and, nity during, 81; inshdd at, 113-14, 108~9; in Book of Visions, 27, 118— 117, 255N1, 255n3; narrating dream- 20, 124, 126-27, 131-34, 138, 201, visions at, 119, 133; photographs of 256n12; Islamic tradition and, 115; saints distributed at, 219; poetry telling dreams and, 74~76, 167-68; readings at, 113-14; of the Prophet vision-as-prophecy and, 134-35

Index / 301 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11, 16, 19, 112, imagination and, 138, 179; inner

187, 252n8 vision/sight and, 114; posthumous,

Night Journey and night journeys, 121; the Prophet Muhammad on,

93-94, 254N19 128; Prophet-visions and, 122-23,

nubuwwa (prophecy). See prophecy 127, 134; Qur’an on, 128; recitation

(nubuwwa) of, 134-35, 266; revelation and, 13235; Shaykh Qusi and, 117-18; vision-

ocularcentrism, 45, 57-89, 109, 228, as-encounter and, 121-22, 122~-24,

251n2, 252n4, 252n6 138-39; vision-as~prophecy and, 115, openings versus closings, 2-3, 56, 200, 138~39

229, 239, 241n4 political dimensions: description of,

optical gaze/vision (basar): as Hooded 171, 237, 239; disciplining of dreams by spiritual gaze, 92~93; hierarchy and, 52; of dream interpretation pro-

of senses and, 253n11; image as grams on television, 33-34, 51, 204; different from imagination and, of dreams, 3, 4, 50, 52-53, 233-39, 17-18; inner vision versus, 67, 249n38, 263n13; of fantasy, 142; of &5~86, 88-93, 252N10, 252-53n11, imagination, 3, 28, 30, 239; of inter-

253nn12-14; Marian apparitions pretation of dreams, 47-51, 204; and, 217; as objective, 87~88, 251n2, reformist thinkers and, 47; visita251~52n3; QOur’an on, 91-92, 252n10, tional dreams and, 143-44, 162-63,

252-53n11, 253nn12—-14 171-72; of visitation cycles with optical sight (ru’ya), 91, 109, 268 saints, 163, 237 Orientalism, 40-41, 43, 137-38, 232 possession, spirit, 26, 39, 78. See also

Others/Otherness, 5, 122-24, 144, Ouranic healers, zdr rituals

200, 233, 237, 261-62n1 power: dreams as rupturing structures of, 13, 53, 104-5, 110-11, 162-64;

Pandolfo, Stetania, 3, 103, 140, 142, Foucault on, 197, 24533, 246n2;

242NT1, 242-43n13, 260n6 psychology, and hegemony and, 15,

Patai, Raphael, 41, 248n24 197-98; of images, 218-19; as part performative power, 142, 238. See also of dream landscapes, 20, 197-99;

dream effects; evocative power resistance and, 4, 50, 163, 199-200 photographs/photography: of God, preparedness versus production of 221, 222, 223-24; as miraculous, dream-vision, 102—10, 253n28, 220~24; of Prophet Muhammad’s 254nn25—26, 254—-55n27

name, 223; of saints, 219-20; of prophecy (nubuwwa): double direc-

spirits, 220; of Virgin, 217-18, tionality of dream-vision and,

221-23 109-10; dream-vision and, 109-10, poetry: authorship and, 115, 118, 135-36; Elsewhere as source for, 81, 120-21, 128-29; confirmation of 106, 137; ethical dimensions and, divinely inspired, 111, 120-21, 237; Ibn Sirin and, 54; interpre123, 125-26, 128, 131-32, 138-39, tation of dreams and, 47, 58, 68256n10; conversations with Others 69; Marian apparitions and, 217, and, 122~24; divine inspiration and, 263n2; preparedness versus produc128-33; dreams and, 236; ecstatic tion of dream-vision and, 107~10; readings of, 1143-14, 117, 255n3; the Prophet Muhammad on dreamevents of another time and, 122~23, vision and, 6; psychological con126-28; evocative power of, 124; cepts and, 77; rationality and, 49;

302 / Index prophecy (nubuwwa) (continued) realities and, 101-2, 218-19, 223; reformist thinkers on, 34, 44, 52, vision-as-encounter and, 101-2, 77, 136-37; sleep and, 112; tem- 219; visitation cycles and, 164-65; porality and, 236; unconscious Wahhabi scholars on, 167; waking in dreams and, 188-89. See also dreams and, 101-2

vision-as-prophecy psyche, human, 14-15, 18, 45, 190 Prophet Muhammad, the: in barzakh, psychology: apolitical interpretation 95; description of, 166, 256ng, 258— of dreams in, 235; dream-vision

59n18; as dream interpreter, 47, and integration of terms from, 77; 58-59; on dreams, 6, 128; al-ghayb in Egypt, 173-74, 179-82; Islam and, 47; hadith literature on life of, and, 14, 183, 186; Islamization of, 165-66; as (in)visible, 84-85, 88-89, 186; modernity and, 137; as modern 109, 167-68, 219, 223, 263n13; as versus interpreter of dreams, 7-8; light, 124, 167, 256n9; mawlid of, prophecy understood through, 77; 145; as messenger, 130; Night Jour- Prophet-visions and, 196-98. See ney of, 93-94, 254n19; on poetry, also Egyptian psychologists; Freud, 128; on prophecy in dream-vision, Sigmund; Freud model in Egypt 6: on revelation, 128; shrines of public sphere: gender and, 162-63; relatives of, 64, 155, 250n11; Sunni modernity, and widening of, 265n5; Islam on images of, 219; on sym- Rw and, 33-34, 51, 193; telling bols, 61, 250n8; virtual realities and, dreams and, 234-35; visionary real224~25; wives of, 158, 167. See also ities and, 3, 200, 204, 221 Prophet-visions

Prophet-visions: advice and comfort Oardawi, Yisut, 45-46, 258n16 from, 168-69; afterlife and, 166, Quran: on barzakh, 37, 247011; 258n17; description of the Prophet on classification of dreams, 6, 77; Muhammad and, 166, 258-s9n18; divine inspiration and, 130-31; disciples of Shaykh Qusi and, 127— dream discourses and, 6, 8, 27, 28; discourses about charlatanry 115; on al-ghayb, 47, 187, 260n1; and, 248n23; desire and, 102; dreams on God's nearness, 36; on God’s foreshadowing death and, 168; evoc- Ninety-Nine Names, 100, 207, 209, ative power of, 169~-70; frequency 254n23; on imagination/khayal, of, 167-68, 259n19; hadith literature gi~92, 253n14; on inner vision veron, 165-66, 258n17; hierarchies and, sus optical gaze, 91-92, 25210, 167-68; Ibn al-‘Arabi on, 127, 166; 252-53n11, 253nn12~14; interpre{bn Sirin on, 166; knowledge gained tation of dreams and, 6, 8, 47, 48, through, 168; intimate contact and, 58, 61, 249n33, 250n8; on intuition, 168, 259n20; legal evidence and, 252n7; inviting dream-visions by 45-46; longing for, 102, 135; poetry reciting verses from, 99, 254n22; and, 122-23, 127, 134; political Islamization of psychology and, 186; dimensions ot, 167; power of, 166- on mind/reason, 43, 91-92; mystical 7o; psychologist on, 196-98; revela- experiences and, 123-24; narrated tion and, 128, 133-36, 138, 165-67, dream-vision and, 74, 115; on poetry, 256—57n14; Salafism and, 167, 220; 128; revelation and, 135, 256n13; on

Shaykh Qusi and, 122-24; Sufism seeing, 91-92; on self/soul, 261n14; and, 166-68, 259n19; symbols and, on spirit, 93, 253n16; tafsir and, 6, 166; telling of, 167~68; visionary 58, 230, 250N7; as trope for under-

Index / 303 standing dream-visions, 115, 128- dreams, 47; on saints as truly dead, 35, 138-9; vision-as-prophecy and, 37; Saudi scholars and, 46-47; on 115, 134. See also hadith literature; socio-moral retorm of society, 7, 37;

Prophet Muhammad, the on superstitions, 52, 162, 183-84; on Quranic healers, 39, 57, 168, 181, 184, visitational dreams, 29, 161-63, 170.

24314, 247Nn15, 260-61n11 See also Islamic Revival; Salatism resistance, 4, 50, 163, 199-200

raghba (desire), 7, 12, 27, 87, 102, 103, revelation (walry): boundaries of, 135151—52, 161, 182, 186, 190, 195-98, 37; dream-vision and, 4-5, 34, 133-

235 36, 256-57n14; mind/reason versus,

Ramadan, 84-85, 90, 11819 4-5, 34, 41, 136-37, 246n8; Orienrationalism, 13, 31, 41-44, 45, 49, 130, talism on, 43, 137~38; poetry and,

246n8 132-35; the Prophet Muhammad on,

real, the: ethnographies, and the 128; Prophet-visions and, 128, 133invisible versus, 21, 27-28, 83, 86 36, 138, 165-67, 256-57n14; Quran 87, 251-52n3; imaginary versus, and, 135, 256n13; Salafism on, 34; 7, 19, 34-35, 51-52, 228; rethink- unconscious and, 137; vision-asing community and subjectivity by prophecy and, 132-37 rethinking parameters of, 5; surre- Rida, Muhammad Rashid, 42—44, 45,

alism and, 75, 117-18, 120; under- 50, 136 standings of, 2, 5, 241n3; use of Rodinson, Maxime, 137 term, 241n3; virtual realities and, Komantic movement, 17, 187, 244n20 204, 225-26, 228-29, 230; visible rin (spirit). See spirit (riih) reality and, 2, 85, 87~89, 88, 109, Rw (TV show), 32-34, 51-52, 191-95 252n4, 252n6. See also mind/reason ru’ya (optical sight), 91, 109, 268 (‘aql); virtual realities; visionary riya (dream- or waking vision). See

realities dream-vision (ru’yd@); waking vision

(re}burial, and building of shrines, (ru’y a)

160-61, £70, 237 rules of conduct for the sleeper, 96,

recycled images, 53, 147, 216-24, 98-100, 143, 254n22, 257n6 220-24

redreamed dreams, 53, 147, 218 Sabahi, Shaykh Ahmad al-, 185, 237,

reformist thinkers: on afterlife, 36; 264N3 on barzakh, 7, 37; on charlatanry, Satouan, Mustafa, 177-79, 260n7,

52; on divine inspiration, 42~43, 261n16 45, 49, 130; on dreams as outside saints (awliyd’): baraka ot, 220; bartradition, 115; on dream discourses, zakh and, 157; body as preserved 4-5; on ethics, 7, 44; gender and, after burial of, 160, 258n14; (re}burial

162-63; on imagination, 44; on and building of shrines for, 160-61, intuition, 136; on inviting dream- 170, 237; confirmation of vision-asvisions, 104; on legal dimension encounter and, 125; court of hidden, of dreams, 47; on mind/reason 35-38, 67, 247n10, 267; cycles of visversus dreams/revelation, 4~5, 34, itation with, 153~56; description of, 43, 136-37; Muslim Brotherhood 241~-42n6; divine inspiration from, and, 44~46; on political dimensions 70; electricity analogy and, 24; phoof dreams, 47; on prophecy, 34, 44, tographs of, 219; recycled images and, 52, 77, 136-37; on public sphere and 218; shrines of, 64, 154-55, 250N11;

304 / Index saints (awliyda’) {continued} gious, 190-91; ethics beyond, 5, 231; sightings of, 236-37; temporality Freud model in Egypt, and dreams and, 206, 233; as truly dead, 37; as that originate within, 184~85; imag(in}visible, 89, 109, 236-37, 239; ination and, 16; interrelational undervision sites and, 161. See also visita- standing of, 241n5; istikhdra and,

tion cycles with saints (awliya’} 97-98; reformist thinkers on reform Salatism: on afterlife, 220; description of, 47-52. See also selt/soul (nafs) and history of, 34, 248n28, 268; on selt/soul (nafs), 93, 182, 253-54n18,

divine inspiration, 130; on dream 260n20, 261n14, 267 discourses, 43-44, 130, 188-89; sexual dreams, 76, 143, 185, 196 on al-ghayb as inaccessible, 47; Shadhili, Abii al-Hasan, 23, 94, 160, on the (in}visible, 84~91; on mind/ 166, 206, 220, 256n10 reason versus dreams/revelation, Shatrawi, Mutawalli al-, 65-66, 160,

34; Muslim Brotherhood and, 44; 258nt5 on Prophet-visions, 167, 220; on Shaykh ‘Abdullah, 135-38 rational thought and defense of Shaykh ‘Ali Gum‘a, 91, 253n13, 254n21 Islam, 41-44, 45, 130; Rida and, 42- Shaykh Gharib, 160 45, 50, 136; spiritualism and, 220; Shaykh Hanafi: on awakening, 49-51, on Sufism, 43~44; Wahhabism, and 204; al-Azhar and, 25, 48, 78, 194influences on, 42-43, 46. See also 95, 233; causality paradox and, 104; Azhar, al-; Islamic Revival: reform- on dream-vision, 76; face-to-face

ist thinkers interpretation of dreams and, 78;

Sariya and ‘Umar Ibn al-Khattab story, on interpretation of dreams as sup-

227 ported in Qur’an, 48; as legitimate

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 17, 245n34 Muslim scholar, 48-49; life history Saudi Arabia: authority of interpreta- of, 25; on mahdi dream, 31-32; tion in, 196-98, 261n20; discourses mass mediation of dream interpreon charlatanry in, 39, 195-96; disci- tation and, 53; on preparedness/ ples of Shaykh Qusi in, 24; Internet unpreparedness, 99, 104, 110; on Web sites and, 46; influences of, 46; rationality in interpretation of

interpretation of dreams and, 46~—47, dreams, 31, 49; Ru’d and, 32-34, 51195-98, 197, 249n31, 261n21; Mecca 52, 53, 191-95; on rules of conduct

insurrection in, 50, 249n38; Night for the sleeper, 99; on self-reform Journey discourse in, 94; psycholo- through interpretation of dreams, gists on Prophet-visions and, 196~98. 47-52; On spirit, 94-95; telephone

See also Wahhabism interpretation of dreams, 78; TV

Sayyida Nafisa, 63-64, 71, 112, 114, satellite station broadcasts, 53, 195

123, 153-56, 163, 250n11 Shaykh Mustata (pseud.)}, 26, 100-102, Sayyida Rugayya, 64, 66-68, 7o~71, 188, 227-28, 252n7

161, 162, 250n11 Shaykh Mutawalli al-Sha‘rawi, 160,

Say yida Zaynab, 154-55, 159, 163, 255n10

250n11, 267 Shaykh Nabil: advice beyond interpre-

science, 37, 197, 261n15 tation of dreams and, 79~80, 82; on science, spiritual, 182-86, 199 burial location for Ibn Sirin, 64; as

screens, and dream-vision, 228-29 caretaker of [bn Sirin shrine, 54-55, self: agency versus, 5, 242n12; cultiva- 65-66, 71-72; on classification of tion of, 5, 102~5; Elsewhere and reli- dreams, 76~77; cyber-interpretations

Index / 305 and Internet Web site of, 27, 56, Others, and poetry of, 122-24; 187, 204, 208-9, 211-12; dervishes death and burial of, 149, 201, 239and, 67, 70; dream discourses and, 40, 264n5; divinely inspired poetry 76-77, 82, 189; on dreams of the and, 19, 129-32; ecstatic poetry dead, 150; on ethics, 152-53, 216, reading and, 113-14, 117, 25503; 258n10; face-to-face interpretation electricity analogy and, 24; events of dreams and, 56, 71-74, 211-12, of another time in poetry of, 122,

214-15; films and, 209, 230; on 126-28; on image as different from Freud, 190~91; on hallucinatory imagination, 18-19; on imagination wish fulfillment, 190~91; healing as different trom fantasy, 19; on and, 79~80; Ibn Sirin’s relation inner vision, 92-93; on intuition, 19, with, 54-57, 249n4; initiation of, 149; on Islamic orthodoxy, 116; al67-71; interpretation of dreams Khidr’s relationship with, 117, 120; and, 75-76, 77-79, 152-53, 187-88, mass mediation and, 112, 117, 205,

216; as interpreter of dreams in 207-8; on night journeys of spirit, bn Sirin shrine, 74-76, 215; on g4; photograph of, 123; as poet, 117intuition, 212, 215; life history of, 18; Prophet-visions and poetry of, 23-24, 66-71; material support tor 122-23, 127, 134; revelation and and from community, and role of, poetry of, 132~35; on the senses, 84; So-81, 82, 215, 262N7; mediation as Sidi, 94, 114, 116, 131, 201, 239, and, 81; photograph of, 59; protes- 268; on spirit, 115; Sufism versus sional identity on Internet Web site path taught by, 115-17; vision-asof, 208-9, 216; psychological terms encounter and poetry of, 121-24; on integrated into understanding of waking vision, 93. See also disciples

dream-vision by, 77, 187-91; self of Shaykh Qusi and dream theory of, 190-91; on shaykhs, 63, 116, 245-46n36. See also

sleep and wakefulness line, 191; specific shaykhs Sufism and, 70; on symbols in Shaykh Sabahi, 185, 237, 264n3 interpretation of dreams, 78-79; Shaykh Sayyid, 69-70, 78, 212 telephone interpretation of dreams Shite Islam, 161, 219, 246n1, 250n141,

and, 212; telling of dreams and, 258n16 74~76, 251n16; textual tradition, shrines: baraka ot, 71, 156, 245; and writings by, 7o; threshold of (re}burial, and building of, 160-61, {bn Sirin shrine and, 57-58, 59, 66, 170, 237; of relatives of the Prophet 79, 82; on unconscious, 187~—91; on Muhammad, 64, 155, 250n11; of visitational dreams, 152~53, 258n10; saints, 64, 154-55, 250M11; as vision

on waking vision, 82 sites, 161; visitation cycles and, 153—Shaykh Qusi: about, 24-25, 112-15; 56, 170. See also [bn Sirin shrine on access to religious knowledge, sight, inner. See inner vision/sight 116, 207-8; authority of interpreta- (basira) tion and, 111, 120, 121, 123, 125-26, sight, optical (ru’ya), 91, 109, 268 128, 139, 256n10; al-Azhar relation- silence about dreams, 23, 246n37 ship with, 116; barzakh and conver- sincere gaze. See inner vision/sight

sations with, 148~50; confirmation (basira) of divinely inspired poetry and, 111, sleep and wakefulness line: in anthro-

120~21, 123, 125-26, 128, 131-32, pological dream studies, 10-13, 138~39, 256n10; conversations with 244nn21~24; tor Coptic Christians,

306 / Index sleep and wakefulness line (continued) See also imagination/khayadi;

243n17; cyber interpretations and, specific shaykhs 213; dream discourses and, 6, 10- Sunni Islam: al-Azhar as official 11, 51, 243n17; Freud on, 11, 191; institutional voice of, 25, 33, 116, al-Ghazali on, 13, 244n26; Greek 246n4; images of the Prophet

philosophy and, 244 Muhammad and, 219; mahdi in

Smith, Jane, 151-52, 156, 220, 258n10 religious imaginations of, 31, 33, social relations, and shrines, 82, 153- 34, 38, 50, 246n1, 249n38, 267;

54, 155 mawlids and, 70; Salatism and,

socio-moral condition of society, 1~2, 34, 268; schools of law in, 35, 161,

7, 34, 377-38, 50-51 246~-47ng; visitation with saints soul/selt (nafs), 93, 182, 253-54n18, in, 161. See also Wahhabism

260n20, 261n14, 267 superstition(s) (khurdfdt): Egyptian space, 4, 70, 148-50, 225, 234. See also psychologists and, 52, 181-84, 260either/or space; imagination/khayal 61n11; Egyptian state on interpre-

spirit (rit): barzakh and, 94-95; body tation of dreams as, 38-39; reformversus, 10-11, 13, 88, 93-95, 236, ist thinkers on interpretation of 244n21, 244n25; death and, 149-50, dreams as, 52, 162, 183-84; statis151; dream-vision and, 93, 99, 189; tics on practices of, 39; “true Islam” inner vision and, 91; jinn versus, and, 38~40, 49, 52; Wahhabism on,

243n14; night journeys of, 93-95; 261 Ouran on, 93, 253n16; selt/soul surrealism, 75, 117-18, 120 and, 93, 182, 260n20; temporality symbols, 7, 36, 60-61, 78-79, 166,

and, 94 25on8, 257nn7—9 spirit possession, 26, 39, 78. See also

Ouranic healers: zar rituals ta‘bir (“taking/making swim across”), spiritual science, 182-86, 199 54, 57, 69, 243, 249-50N3

Starrett, Gregory, 221 tafsir (Quran interpretation), 6, 58, suddenness/unpredictability of dream- 230, 250n7

visions, 102-10, 253n28, 254nn25—-26, “taking/making swim across” (ta‘bir),

254-5527 54, 57 69, 243, 249-503

Sufism: awakening and, 239; causality technologies of the self, 96, 102~4,

paradox and, 103—4; criticisms ol, 254N20 43, 45; on death versus lite, 239; telephone interpretation ot dreams,

description of, 26; on divinely 73, 78, 204, 242 inspired poetry, 128-29; dream television: as awakening, 49-51, 204; discourses and, 239; Egyptian state al-Azhar on interpretation of dreams regulation of, 33; history of, 259n19; on, 52-53; Egyptian state regulation imaginary and, 23, 117; marginal- of dream interpretation programs ization of, 23; mystical path in, 92— on, 32-33, 37) interpretation of 93, 253n15; on the Prophet Muham- dreams and, 204, 208, 216, 218; mad, 256n9; Prophet-visions and, religious knowledge and, 209; Rw’, 166-68, 259n19; Salatism on, 43-44; 32-34, 51-52, 191~95; satellite station

self and, 115, 183, 253-54n18; broadcasts, 47, 53, 195, 196, 207, 227; Shaykh Qusi and, 115~17; spiritual- Saudi Arabia and interpretation of social relations with the dead and, dreams on, 195~98, 197, 26121; 121; vision-as~prophecy in, 23, 117. science and Islam series on, 261n15;

Index / 307 visionary realities and, 222, 224, 25an4, 252n6. See also real, the;

226-28, 230 virtual realities; visionary realities

telling dreams, 23, 74-76, 167-68, vision. See inner vision/sight (basira); 251nn16—-17. See also narrated optical gaze/vision (basar)

dream-vision visionary realities: disciples of Shaykh

temporality: context and, 77, 90-91, Qusi and, 206-7, 216; hadra text 235-36; dual, 126~28; ethnography merging with, 101~2, 219; Marian and, 256n12; hadith literature and, apparitions and, 221-23, 235; mass 126~27; invisible/inner reality mediation and, 206-7, 216, 220~21, versus, 87; laws of linear, 56, 223, 222, 263n12; Prophet-visions and, 236-38; mass mediation and, 205-6; 1o1~2, 218-19, 223; public sphere prophecy and, 236; saints and, 206; and, 3, 200, 204, 221; television and, spirit and, 94; waking vision and, 91 222, 224, 226-28, 230; texts merging

Theresa (saint), 157-58 with, 101-2, 219. See also real, the; threshold (dihliz), 57-58, 59, 66, 79, 82 virtual realities Traumdeutung (Interpretation of vision-as-encounter: conversations

Dreams; Freud), 146-48, 177-79, with Others and, 122-24; with

178 the dead, 120-24; description ot,

“true Islam” ideological contestation, 18, 129; disciples of Shaykh Qusi,

28-29, 33, 3840, 49, 52 and confirmation of, 121, 125~26, Tylor, E.B., 10-11, 16, 19 128, 138-39; events of another time and, 126-28; evidence and, 124-26;

unconscious (1d wa‘y), 45, 187-91, hadith literature and, 115, 121-22,

261n16 126~27, 138; poetry and, 121-24,

unconscious as Western concept, 13- 138-39; Prophet-visions and, 101—2,

20, 24529, 261-62n21 219; texts merging with visionary unpredictability/suddenness of dream- realities and, 101-2, 219 visions, 102-10, 253n2&, 254nn25- vision-as-prophecy: description of,

26, 254-55n27 129, 137-39; dictation and, 129-30, 256n11; dreamers and, 3, 8, 49, 96,

virtual realities: about, 229-31; 99, 108; evidential visions and, Catholicism and, 221-23, 229-30; 130~32; al-Ghazali on, 128; hadith disciples of Shaykh Qusi and, 205; literature and, 6, 136, 256-57n14; Eternal Egypt Web site and, 201~4; imagination/khaydl and, 23, 117; imagination/khaydi compared with, al-Khidr and, 134-35, 225; narrated 225; istikhdra prayer and, 220; dream-vision and, 134~35; poetry metaphors and, 224-29, 26315; and, 115, 138-39; Qur’an and, 115, miraculous photographs and, 220- 134; revelation and, 132-37. See also 24; the Prophet Muhammad and, divine inspiration (/hdm); prophecy

224-25; the real and, 204, 225-26, (nubuwwa) 228-29, 230; recycled images and, vision sites (mashdahid ru’ya), 161 53, 147, 216-24, 220-24; spiritual vision theories, Greek, 87, 228 practice and, 205~8. See also cyber visitational dreams: about, 170~72; interpretations; Marian apparitions; conversations in the barzakh and, mass mediation; real, the; visionary 148~—50; cycles of visitation with

realities saints and, 153-58; dreams fore-

visible reality (z@hir), 2, 85, 87-89, 109, shadowing death and, 150, 257ng;

308 / Index visitational dreams {continued} dreams of desire and, 195-98; dream ethics and, 140-41, 152-53, 171-72, versus, 82; hadra and, to1; halluci258n10; evocative power of, 7, 142- natory wish fulfillment versus, 86—44, 146-48, 151-52, 257n4; gender 87, 191-98; inner vision and, 89; the and, 162-63; Greek literature and, (in}visible and, 89, 91; invocation/ 170; hierarchies and, 170; knowledge remembrance of God and, 21, 101—

gained from, 144-46, 151-53, 168, 2; marginalization of, 43; temporal-

258n10; political dimensions of, ity and, 91 143-44; reformist thinkers on, 29, Watt, Montgomery, 137~38 161-63, 170; Wahhabism on, 161. Weber, Samuel, 228-29, 262n2 See also visitation cycles with saints Web sites. See Internet Web sites

(awliya’) Western discourses: ethical dimen-

visitation cycles with saints (awliyd’): sions In, 141-42, 257n2; imagination about, 17o~72; dream-vision and, genealogy in, 16-18; unconscious in, 156-57; Elsewhere and, 163; ethics 13-20, 245n29, 261~-62n21 and, 163-64; evocative power and, Williams, Raymond, 197-98 158-61, 170; intimate contact and, wish fultillment, hallucinatory. See 155-56, 155; mutuality and, 156-58; hallucinatory wish fultillment political dimensions of, 163, 237; writing, and relationship with the

(re)burial and building of shrines dead/death, 120-21 and, 160—61, 170; shrines and, 153- writing, creative, 133 56, 160-61, 170; visitational dreams writing as handwritten versus typeand, 153-58. See also saints (awliya’); written, 200, 212

visitational dreams writing dreams in fieldwork, 21-22, visitors to [bn Sirin shrine, 66, 71-74, 27-30, 132-33, 24637, 256n12

250-51n13 writing ethnography, 27-28, 238, Vries, Hent de, 5, 228 256n12 Wahhabism: description of, 46, 268; Ytisut (prophet), 6, 58, 61, 68-70, 74,

on dreams, 261; on al-ghayb as 104, 177 inaccessible, 47; Internet Web sites Yiisut story, 6, 58, 61, 68~70, 74, 104,

and, 46; on interpretation of dreams, 177 195-98, 261, 261n20; on Prophet-

visions, 167; Salatism and influences zahir (visible reality), 2, 85, 87-89, of, 42-43, 46; on superstitions, 261; 109, 252n4, 252n6. See also real,

on visitational dreams, 161; on visits the; virtual realities; visionary to saint shrines, 164. See also Saudi realities

Arabia zr rituals, 39, 247n15, 260-61n141,

waly (revelation). See revelation 268

(wahy) Zawawi, Muhammad al-, 124

waking vision (ru’yd): conditions for, Ziwer, Mustata, 174-81, 187

gi, 96; description of, 6, 91-93; fiwer, Nevine, 176, 180-82

Text: 1o/13 Aldus Display: Aldus Compositor: BookMatters, Berkeley Indexer: J. Naomi Linzer Indexing Services Printer and Binder: Sheridan Books, Inc.