Dreaming across Boundaries

Abstract

Edited by Louise Marlow, this anthology consists of twelve articles on the history of dreams and their interpretation in an array of historical Muslim settings. A number of well-known hadiths support the idea of Prophet Muhammad communicating with Muslims through dreams, and earlier books and articles have established the existence of “a dominant, if not entirely uncontested, tradition of [dream] interpretation” common to much of the premodern Islamic world (p. 3). The articles address variations on this core discourse specific to the cultural, sectarian, and disciplinary orientations of the original actors. Beyond this goal of discursive specificity, Marlow notes two themes as having guided her selection: “the complex process of translation whereby a personal visionary experience assumes the form of a literary, narrative account accessible to, and subject to interpretation by, an audience” (p. 9); and the “ways in which the leveling and potentially subversive effects of dreams were countered by their integration into hierarchical or normative systems” (p. 8). While the articles are arranged in a roughly chronological order, they are considered here according to their sociohistorical, literary, and intellectual-historical orientations ...